The legend of Smarty Jones

Off a road in Pennsylvania that winds and hooks and kind of twists back around, past the corn silos and soybean fields and round bales of hay, on a farm where the morning mist rises above the rippling green hills, that is where you will find the old chestnut horse people still cry at the sight of.

"He's doing great and he looks great," said Rodney Eckenrode, owner of Equistar Farms in Anntown, Pa. "He's very youthful and still acts like a 3-year-old. He's got quite the personality."

Has it really been 15 years since Smarty Jones went from a playful young colt eating paint off pickup trucks to a devastating head injury to nearly winning the Triple Crown and galloping across the history pages alongside the ghost of Secretariat?

Since Roy and Pat Chapman, who lived in Boca Grande, went on the ride of a lifetime, with Roy watching each spellbinding Smarty performance from a wheelchair while hooked to an oxygen tube, the little horse keeping him alive at age 77?

Since Smarty Jones won the 2004 Kentucky Derby, sending shivers down even the Twin Spires at Churchill Downs, dominated the Preakness by running right out of television screens, and turned New York's Belmont Park into the Beatles at Shea Stadium?

Since 120,139 of the loudest fans imaginable chanted his name at the Belmont, everyone there to see the first horse in a quarter century win the Triple Crown, only to fall silent when he was upset at the finish by a 36-1 longshot on the same June afternoon Ronald Reagan died?

Since Marylou Whitney, a wealthy philanthropist and socialite who lived part-time on Longboat Key, actually apologized because the horse she owned, Birdstone, was the one who caught Smarty Jones at the end, a loss some people still can’t quite get over?

Has it really been 15 years?

"I was on my honeymoon in Antigua and ran from the beach to our little hut and saw him lose at the Belmont," a person recently tweeted. "I was so upset. I love that horse."

"Easily in the top 3 losses for me," another sports fan tweeted.

"I remember standing in the rain in front of the Art Museum (in Philadelphia) with thousands of people to watch him run," tweeted another. "How does that happen?"

Here's how it happened. How one of the greatest underdog stories in horse racing history happened.

Roy Chapman made a fortune in the automobile business, and in 1998 purchased a farm in Chester County, Pa., with his wife Pat. On Feb. 28, 2001, Smarty Jones was born. Only that wasn't his original name.

Pat Chapman originally named him Get Along until she noticed the horse shared a birthday with her late mother Mildred Jones, who had been nicknamed "Smarty" as a child. Pat put the names together and loved how it sounded: Smarty Jones. She paid $100 to have it officially changed.

There was something special about the horse from the start, Roy Chapman recalled in a 2004 interview with the Herald-Tribune, but the legend of Smarty Jones, American folk hero, almost never came to be.

In July 2003, the horse was seriously injured after smashing into a starting-gate bar during a training session, fracturing numerous bones in his head. The swelling was so bad the doctors called him Quasimodo. He nearly died.

Then more tragedy: Bob Camac, the horse’s trainer, was murdered by his stepson, who also killed Camac’s wife. Roy and Pat Chapman were so devastated they sold their farm and most of their horses, keeping just two.

One of them was Smarty Jones.

Soon the horse was not only winning races, but dominating them, and people really began to take notice when he won the Rebel Stakes in Hot Springs, Ark. on March 20, 2004.

Roy Chapman, who had emphysema, was at Bon Secours Hospital in Venice during that race, batting pneumonia. His son Michael gave him play-by-play over the phone, and as Smarty Jones ran to another win Chapman yelled so loud nurses could hear him down the hall.

In April 2004, just before the Kentucky Derby, both Pat and Roy Chapman spoke to the Herald-Tribune from their Boca Grande home about how much the horse meant to them.

"This is my last hurrah," said Roy Chapman, who was hooked to an oxygen tank. "I don't know how much longer I will be around."

After Smarty Jones won the Kentucky Derby — with Roy Chapman watching from a wheelchair and Pat Chapman wearing a fancy derby hat made in Sarasota — his fame broke hard from the gate and never subsided until the finish line at the Belmont Stakes in June.

He was the first horse to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated in 21 years. An estimated 9,000 people in Philadelphia gathered just to watch him gallop during a 1 ½ mile workout, sons perched atop the shoulders of their dads along the fence. A marriage proposal came in. Hundreds of people wrote songs about him. Children had Smarty Jones coloring contests in grade school. He was the modern day Seabiscuit.

When he was taken by van from Philadelphia to New York for the Belmont in June 2004, passing Smarty Jones billboards along the way of course, three television helicopters followed him up I-95 and did live updates of the trip.

One of the most touching moments happened when an 11-year-old boy with a rare muscular disease wrote trainer John Servis a letter that said: "You have inspired me to run like a racehorse while walking with my physical therapist, and when I walk in the pool my nurse times me and I pretend to race.

"I even whinny like a horse."

The 2004 Belmont Stakes was Smarty Jones' last race. Had the non-contenders not gone out so fast during the grueling 1 ½ mile race, begging him to follow, perhaps the horse would have become only the second undefeated Triple Crown winner in history and would have received a parade through downtown Philadelphia on a flatbed truck, just as the governor of Pennsylvania had promised.

But it didn’t happen.

As for Roy Chapman, he died from emphysema on Feb. 18, 2006, at age 79.

Pat Chapman still spends her winters in Boca Grande, just south of Englewood, and is quite active in the community.

Smarty Jones, meanwhile, became a stallion in 2005, and even though he produced 1,500 winners he was never able to breed another horse to run as he did, with the heart he did.

He has stood at farms in Kentucky, Pennsylvania and even Uruguay. His original fee was $100,000. It is now down to $3,500. Everyone gets old, even champions.

Smarty Jones is somehow 18 years old today but people have not forgotten him. He still gets Christmas cards and has 10,000 likes on his Facebook page. According to Eckenrode, a lady from Washington stopped by recently, stood before him and cried.

When Smarty Jones returned to Pennsylvania from Uruguay last December, members of the public were invited, and when he walked out of his stall Pat Chapman said that seeing him again was like "reading an old love letter."

Off a road in Pennsylvania that winds and hooks and kind of twists back around, past the corn silos and soybean fields and round bales of hay, on a farm where the morning mist rises above the rippling green hills, that is where you can find the greatest racehorse in history never to have won the Triple Crown.

And you know what? Looking back after all these years, maybe he never had to.