She’s not horsing around

NEW YORK – The real horse whisperer in Big Brown’s barn is in the mood to dish on the game’s latest leading man.

“He’s so vain,” Michelle Nevin laughed in the cool morning air, “and he’s getting more vain by the day. He thinks he’s a rock star.”

Some surprise.

Cameras clicked with every step the strapping bay colt took Friday along the backstretch at Belmont Park, a nonstop photo-op that began at the Kentucky Derby and kicked into high gear at the Preakness. The next time Big Brown shows his long face in public, a chorus of 120,000 or so fans will be roaring with every stride.

If Nevin knows her man – and no one, not even trainer Rick Dutrow Jr., spends more time walking, talking to and working out the horse than she does – he will give the paparazzi exactly what they want, then lap up and savor every last bit of that attention.

“He’s already, like, a step away from talking,” she said. “His facial expressions are so clear, you know exactly what he wants.”

No one spoils Big Brown more than the 30-something Irish exercise rider and assistant trainer.

Nevin has become so good at anticipating what Big Brown wants that it seems she’s practiced for the role all her life – which is only a slight exaggeration. The daughter and granddaughter of trainers, she grew up in the countryside of County Tipperary, Ireland, following father Michael on her pony as he tended to the family’s small racing operation. It was the first few steps on a journey that Nevin hopes will someday lead to a training stable of her own, preferably back on the auld sod.

She preferred reading about racing’s great champions to schoolwork and watched “every movie that ever had a horse in it,” most of them more than once. Nevin had her heart set on becoming a jockey until a growth spurt in her teen years put that goal out of reach.

“Once I realized you can’t eat that much, that plan went south,” she said. “I like my food too much.”

After exercising horses for her father at tracks here and back home, Nevin settled on these shores after taking a job with trainer Leo O’Brien. Then she worked for Kiaran McLaughlin and was freelancing when she hooked up with Dutrow a half-dozen years ago.

Nevin sensed her career was taking a turn for the better the moment she saw Big Brown step off the van at Dutrow’s barn in Florida. She climbed aboard him soon after and hasn’t yielded her seat to anyone but jockey Kent Desormeaux since. That’s because she knew from Big Brown’s first few strides that he was a special horse.

“Some horses you’ve got to tell them what to do, to show them. Some horses you’ve got to stop them from doing too much. Some horses just know what to do, so you leave them alone and stay out of their way. That’s Big Brown,” Nevin said. “Let him handle things and everything will go fine.

“Try and tell him what to do, and he gets mad. He thinks he already knows everything.”

Big Brown has the chance to prove it one final time, over the taxing 1 1/2-mile Belmont oval. What the superstar colt may not know, however, is that no one will be pulling for him to win more than the people he’ll leave behind when he begins the long walk to the starting gate.

“Everybody thinks about Big Brown and how good he could be for racing and the fans, but it’s not just that,” Nevin said. “There are so many people here working at this racetrack and others, seven days a week, all week long, and the money’s not good. But it’s their passion.

“For those people, this is what they come here, work for and wish for every day, to see this kind of horse.”