Jeff Seidel

Detroit Free Press Columnist

Nyquist — the horse, not the Detroit Red Wings forward — is the favorite to win the Kentucky Derby on Saturday afternoon.

No, this is a tale with all kinds of ties to the Motor City, each one remarkable in its own way.But this is more than a story about how a 3-year-old colt became named after a hockey player.

Nyquist, the horse, was discovered last year at an auction by Dennis O’Neill, who grew up in Dearborn and has an uncommon knack for spotting champions. O’Neill saw something special in Nyquist — a fast efficiency on the track and a quiet calm in the stable.

“Dennis is a savant that way; he’s not brilliant in any other way,” Nyquist’s owner Paul Reddam said, laughing. “I would say that to his face, teasing him. It’s kind of a weird thing. It’s intuition, really. It’s phenomenal.”

On O’Neill’s recommendation, Reddam bought Nyquist last spring for $400,000 at the Fasig-Tipton sale, which a combination of the NFL draft and free agency for horses.

Reddam grew up in Windsor and is a die-hard Detroit Red Wings fan. He was in the locker room in Joe Louis Arena after the Wings won the 2002 Stanley Cup, acting like he belonged there, even though he didn’t really, celebrating with the players and drinking out of the Cup, right next to Sergei Ferdorov, who was still wearing a sweat-soaked T-shirt.

And Nyquist is trained by Doug O’Neill, Dennis’ brother, who also grew up in Dearborn and attended Divine Child Elementary School through the fifth grade.

“Both myself and Dennis, Doug and the crew, we are really riding on the horse’s coattails,” said Reddam, your average, everyday 60-year-old guy, who has a doctorate in philosophy and became a gazillionaire in the world of home mortgages. “It’s all about the horse, really. We are kind of a side show. He is really a magnificent animal. We are extraordinarily lucky that he is in our care. And that’s just kind of a random thing in the end. I would like to take some credit for Nyquist, but I really can take none. He’s a very special, special creature.”

This is not the first time that Reddam has owned a horse in the Kentucky Derby. I’ll Have Another — a horse that was spotted by Dennis and trained by Doug and owned by Reddam — won the 2012 Kentucky Derby and Preakness before suffering a career-ending injury just one day before the Belmont Sakes

And this is not the first time he has named a horse after one of his beloved Red Wings.

“I’ve had some bums that were named after Wings,” Reddam said. “In 2004, I named a horse Datsyuk, and he was a bum. We’ve had a Zetterberg, a Lidstrom, a Mrazek, a Tatar. We sold Kronwall; he was a bum.”

But Nyquist? He is something special.

He is undefeated and has won $3.3 million.

“I’m hoping he runs a good run and wins it,” said Gustav Nyquist, the Red Wing. “He runs fast, I guess. He wins races. That’s a good thing for a horse.”

Nyquist, the player, admits he doesn’t have much knowledge about horse racing. He has never been to a race.

“Have you ever had a mint julep?” a reporter asked Nyquist. “The drink of choice down there?”

“No, I haven’t even heard of it,” Nyquist said. “A mint julep?”

“Mint julep, yes.”

“Never heard of it.”

So horse racing and hockey are not a natural mix.

Except when it comes to Reddam.

Wings fan for life

Reddam grew up in Windsor, the only Wings fan on his street, as he remembers. His mother, Grace, worked as a legal secretary for John Ziegler, who was the Wings general counsel in the 1960s before becoming the president of the NHL.

“Because of that, she would occasionally bring home some Red Wings paraphernalia,” Reddam said.

By the time he was 5, the future was clear: Reddam would be a Wings fan for life.

His family had season tickets. To this day, one of his biggest childhood disappointments happened on May 5, 1966, when the Red Wings lost Game 6 of the Stanley Cup Finals to the Montreal Canadiens.

“My dad took my mother, instead of me,” he said. “I was absolutely beside myself, that he wasn’t taking me to a playoff game, the Stanley Cup Finals. I had to listen on the radio.”

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Reddam now lives in Sunset Beach, Calif., and he watched about 75 Wings games on TV last season. “I did a lot of couch coaching,” he said.

As far as the horses, he became intrigued when he was in high school in Windsor. A friend used to sit behind him in English class, bugging him to skip school while pleading: “Come on. We can get over to Hazel Park and make the eighth race.”

Those were the words that changed a life.

“That’s how I got started,” he said, laughing. “Because of English class.”

Now, he owns 40 race horses.

He is drawn to horse racing for the intellectual challenge.

But there are no participation trophies in big-money, high-stakes horse racing.

“For us, in the position that we are in, there are only two possible outcomes,” Reddam said. “That’s winning or losing.”

What happens if Nyquist takes second?

“For us, that would be like a loss,” Reddam said. “We need to win. We have really high expectations of him. We all know we could crash very hard come Saturday. That’s a little nerve-racking, but more exciting than anything.”

That magic moment

Doug O’Neill came to horse racing through his father, Patrick, a Michigan Bell employee, who went to the Detroit Race Course and Hazel Park Raceway religiously.

“I think you had to be 14 to get in,” Doug O’Neill said. “I remember hearing all about it, but I never went as a kid, or at least, he told me that so he didn’t have to take me. Then, we moved to Santa Monica, Calif., when I was 10. The first weekend, you would think we would go to Disneyland or Magic Mountain, but we went to Santa Anita Park. There had to be 40,000-plus there.”

O’Neill was blown away and his life changed at that moment.

​After high school, he started working at the track, taking a job on the lowest rung of the ladder.“It was so eye-opening to me,” he said. “It’s hard to explain.”

“And I’ve been doing it ever since,” he said. “As my friends were going to Santa Monica Junior College and UCLA and other colleges, I always joke, ‘I went to the University of Del Mar.’

“I was just in awe. Here I was, hot-walking these horses, cooling them out 45 minutes to an hour after they trained. These were the same horses that I had just watched live. To me, it was like being in the locker room of any great sport. Here I was, in the locker room of a barn like that, I haven’t looked back. I love it.”

A perfect pair

Reddam and Doug O’Neill have worked together for about eight years. There have been several controversies surrounding O’Neill, who served a suspension for giving a horse excessive carbon dioxide in 2010 (he denied guilt) and he has received more than a dozen violations for giving his horses improper drugs in several states, according to the New York Times. The controversies followed O’Neill through the chase for the 2012 Triple Crown. But Reddam has stuck behind O’Neill.

“Paul Reddam is one of a kind,” Doug O’Neill said. “He is the most loyal human beings you could ever find.”

After Reddam bought Nyquist, it was obvious that this was a special, super-competitive horse that thrives on attention.

“When he came off the van, he flew,” Doug O’Neill said. “I was like, ‘Wow. He looks like a first-round draft choice.’ As soon as we started working him, you could tell he was special. But you never know. Some are like morning glories. Some work like first-round draft choices and you get Ryan Leaf, a horse that just can’t handle the pressure and doesn’t show up.”

O’Neill is training Nyquist differently from how he trained I’ll Have Another, not working him as hard, trying to keep Nyquist fresh, while openly saying they are shooting for the Triple Crown.

“Odds are, we are going to lose,” Reddam said. “Favorites lose two out of three times.”

But this horse is special.

This horse is unique.

It’s like he’s out there, racing on skates.

Contact Jeff Seidel: jseidel@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @seideljeff. To read his recent columns, go to freep.com/sports/jeff-seidel/.

142nd Kentucky Derby

Where: Churchill Downs, Louisville, Ky.

When: Saturday.

TV: 4 p.m., NBC (Channel 4 in Detroit). Post time is 6:34 p.m.

The favorite: Nyquist (3-1 odds).