To beat Forte in Kentucky Derby, this long shot’s trainer will need plenty of confidence

On Saturday, Keith Desormeaux, gave his regular exercise rider, Alex Cano, a leg up on a colt named Confidence Game and slowly walked with them to the track. It was 7:30 a.m., and the Kentucky Derby was just a week away. This would be his final work between then and the moment 150,000 semi-sober throats unleash a tone-and-a-half flat version of “My Old Kentucky Home” at the 149th Kentucky Derby on Saturday.

Confidence Game doesn’t rate anything like the 3-1 odds by which Forte is favored. After the draw for post positions on Monday, he was listed at 20-1. He is a long shot, but that means nothing in the view of Nick Zito who trained two Derby winners. As he once told me, “Don’t look at the tote board because, no matter what it says, they still have to run the race.”

Certainly, it hasn’t discouraged Desormeaux, who watched the colt do five furlongs in 59 seconds, which was the best time for distance of the morning.

“That beautiful breeze you saw was his last preparation,” Desormeaux said. “He was relaxed, cooling out. We just need to keep him happy and limber, school him in the paddock and we’re ready.”

That was the horseman in him speaking, and he certainly has the genetic and equine authority to express itself.

To put it in perspective, focus on a tiny dot on the map called Maurice, Louisiana — a speck just off Route 167 and home to 1,170 people. It’s Cajun country, and to make the connection, you have to go back 50 years to the time when there were more horses than cars in Bayou Country, back to a man named Harris Desormeaux.

”It was a tradition down here in the old days,” the late Harris Desormeaux, father of Keith, the trainer, and Kent, a Hall of Fame jockey, once told me. “Before we had cars, we were so involved with horses, they just naturally became our entertainment. Horses were all we had to play with. I can still hear the music at those race parties that went all day. It was all illegal, but the law left us alone. Hey, the law likes to drink and party, too.”

In the 1970′s, Harris created an illegal bush track he called Acadiana Downs. They had no license, paid no sales taxes. It was illegal to collect a fee at the door, which they did. It was illegal to bet horses, which they did. It was illegal to sell Calcuttas (a form of betting), which they did; it was illegal to sell liquor, which we did.

And the sheriff would come to the races and send security if they needed it.

It became the crossroads for a lot of rockin’ Sundays on the bayou.

From an early age, Kent, the jockey, fell in love with horses. He was an overnight sensation. For Keith, the trainer, the road was a lot more convoluted. It was, however, inevitable that just as horses impacted them from the start, horses would carry them both far from Cajun country.

But they never forgot a place down home where the aroma of jambalaya and crawfish and the local sausage cooking in cast-iron pots mingled with the sound of the French accordion they call the “chank-a-chank.”

It was a place when matches were made during the night, when the beer was cold and personal honor was challenged. And then you came with your horse and put up or shut up after church.

On those Sundays, they came from places with names like Abbeville and Tiktoe and Maurice and Acadiana. And in those days, the matches were made almost ritualistically. Kent, who began riding match races at 8, immediately became a star. Later, when he left, nobody was surprised. That was during the time when big-time thoroughbred racing was loaded with the graduates of Acadiana Sundays.

Every weekly race day was a party and a wonder ... a world never to be duplicated as the bush tracks disappeared and the Cajun kids gravitated to the rebuilt Evangeline Downs, where the betting was legal, and the jump to the Fair Grounds in New Orleans or Louisville, New York or California, where the big money was just an airplane ride away.

“That’s all gone now,” Cecil Borel, another Cajun-born trainer, said. “Kids don’t want to work hard, and the automobile is so common on the bayou that they just don’t stick around.”

Forte, the 2-year-old champion whose 190 points led the Derby qualifying trail, drew the No. 15 post at 3-1 odds on Monday for the $3 million Triple Crown race for 3-year-olds. He brings in a five-race winning streak and has won six of seven starts, including last month’s Florida Derby won by a length over Mage, who will start from the No. 8 post at 15-1 odds.

Stablemate Tapit Trice is the 5-1 second choice after drawing the No. 5 post, with Cox’s Angel of Empire (154 points) the 8-1 third choice after drawing the No. 14 post.

That’s what Keith Desormeaux and Confidence Game, in the No. 4 position, are up against. But don’t try to tell him that. Where he came from everyone was a potential horse whisperer.