HI HO SILVER CHARM

They have silver manes and golden noses in common. They are both, in the words of the one who can speak, "total couch potatoes." And though their backgrounds are those of long shots, they are now favored for posterity.

On June 7 at New York's Belmont Park, all eyes--as well as many bets and hopes--will be on Silver Charm, a 3-year-old gunmetal gray colt by Silver Buck out of Bonnie's Poker; and his trainer, Bob Baffert, a 44-year-old silver-haired charmer by an Arizona cattle rancher out of a schoolteacher. Together, along with jockey Gary Stevens and owners Bob and Beverly Lewis, they have won the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness, the first two jewels of the Triple Crown. This Saturday they will try to win the third, the Belmont, and if they do, Silver Charm will become the 12th horse, and the first gray, to win the Triple Crown--a feat last accomplished by Affirmed in 1978. "It hasn't sunk in yet," Baffert said the other day on the backstretch at Churchill Downs, where Silver Charm was relaxing before his 1 1/2-mile race with destiny. "Me, Bobby Baffert, going for the Triple Crown? Damn, the Triple Crown!"

With that, Baffert wiped at his watery eyes and blew his nose. Sentimental? No, actually he's allergic to hay and horses; always has been. That's just one of the anomalies on Baffert's past-performance chart. He grew up on the family ranch in Nogales, Ariz., rode quarter horses without much success, became something of a party animal while majoring in animal science at the University of Arizona, tried substitute teaching for a while, worked in a Tucson feed store for another while, then gravitated back to quarter horses as a trainer. He found his calling, or so he thought, putting together a successful string at Los Alamitos in Orange County, Calif., and training the 1986 world champion, Gold Coast Express. But, as Baffert recalls, "one day I came home to our little house with a tiny backyard, and my wife started telling me about a feature she had just seen on TV about Wayne Lukas, who went from training quarter horses to Thoroughbreds and had this magnificent spread. 'Why don't you do that?' she said."

Thoroughbred training and quarter-horse training are obviously a breed apart, but the latter requires a horse sense and work ethic that Baffert put to good use once he decided to run with the big boys. His first major success came with Thirty Slews, who won the Breeders' Cup Sprint in 1992. By 1995 he was the leading trainer at Santa Anita. At last year's Kentucky Derby, he saddled Cavonnier, who lost by a nose to Grindstone--trained by Lukas. "I actually thought we had the race won," says Baffert, "so when they posted the results, it felt like a death in the family. I kept it inside, but I really thought I would never get a chance like that again." Indeed, in any given year there are about 40,000 Thoroughbred foals, and only about eight of them have a good chance of winning the Derby three years later.