ELMONT, N.Y. -- The last time we saw New Jersey's horse, he was making a left turn, looking for a street that didn't exist at the start of the Kentucky Derby.

Quicker than you can shout, "Typical Jersey driver!" the inevitable happened. The Jersey horse slammed into Tapwrit, who hit McCraken, who bumped Classic Empire, who jostled J Boys Echo. It was a mess worthy of rush hour on the New Jersey Turnpike. Just like that, five colts' chances to hit the board, much less win the Derby, were stone, cold dead in the water.

The Jersey horse is named Irish War Cry. He was coming out of post 17, the only spot from which no Derby horse in the race's 143-year history has ever won. As a result, he did not run in the Preakness and he was not scheduled to run in Saturday's Belmont Stakes.

The trainer who made the decision is Graham Motion

But nobody asked the horse.

Big mistake.

Motion took him back to his training facility at the Fair Hill Traning Center in Maryland. The battle plan was then to get him ready for the Haskell Invitational at Monmouth Park this summer. Isabelle de Tomaso, the owner just happens to be the daughter of Amory Haskell, who built Monmouth Race Track. A Jersey-bred pointed toward New Jersey's prime race and owned by a lineal descendent of the guy for whom the race is named.

It was a scenario so dramatic you couldn't make it up.

But again, nobody told the horse.

So there they were -- a trainer with a plan to win the race the horse's owner most wanted and a horse with a mind of his own.

Last Saturday, he turned in the kind of morning work that made Motion change his mind and then Isabelle de Tomaso changed hers. Nobody asked Irish War Cry because he ran in that decisive morning work as though he already knew.

This is a colt who has won four of his six starts. He recovered enough after his "traffic violation" at the start of Derby to run reasonably well. Motion is not about to punish him for one lousy left turn.

Meanwhile, a funny thing happened to Irish War Cry on his way to Belmont Park. Classic Empire the 2-year-old champion last year and the hottest 3-year-old at the start of this season came up with an abscess on his right front foot. The unanimous favorite was out of the Belmont.

Irish War Cry, the colt that almost wasn't there, became the new top choice. Graham Motion, in the opinion of the track handicapper, suddenly had the new hot horse.

If you know Motion, you know that not only was he born to train horses but also knows how to keep the world in general, his business and his personal life in perspective. He was born and raised in England, and shaped by the fact that his dad was a bloodstock agent there and his mom a female jockey. Admittedly, that's romantic, but it ain't even close to all you need to know about who he is.

He came here at age 16, and settled in Maryland. He, therefore, except for a slight accent, is as much a product of England as Maryland crab cakes and Chesapeake Bay oysters. He's not Bob Baffert, the king of California horse racing glitz. He's not Todd Pletcher, who can send enough horses to the post in any given month to create the world's largest cavalry charge.

He is the kind of guy who, when he stunned the industry by winning the 2011 Kentucky Derby told a gaggle of TV cameras and reporter's notebooks:

"If I was clever, I probably would've had a bet on Animal Kingdom. But I'm not a particularly shrewd gambler."

This is a man who crusades, in his own way, to reduce the amount of drugs that are legal to use on thoroughbreds. In the more than 8,000 starts in his career, he has never been cited for a medication infraction. You could say that this makes him an army of one soldier.

He is all of the above and more. In Maryland -- where he is extremely successful, whether it's the trainers, the grooms or the hot walkers at Laurel and Pimlico -- they have known for more than a decade or two who he really is. So do the bettors. They should. The man finished in the top 10 of Maryland winning trainers nine times.

The fact that he changed his mind about this horse could mean more than a casual choice. Motion's record clearly indicates he wouldn't run him in a mile and a half race if he didn't think he was ready. He changed his mind with more than passing conviction. Or as he said:

"I don't know how I can sit here with a horse who's in good form and not run him in a classic."

Jerry Izenberg is Columnist Emeritus for The Star-Ledger. He can be reached at jizenberg@starledger.com.