Texans' owner McNair has more riding on Derby than bed of roses

Houston Texans patriarch Bob McNair is everything an owner of a professional sports team should be: involved without being meddlesome, supportive without being overbearing. He is self-made, smart and enlightened. The next time he is overcome by ego will be the first.

His willingness to think of others before himself was reaffirmed this week when McNair and wife Janice, just a few days from running their 3-year-old homebred Cowboy Cal in Saturday's Kentucky Derby , committed any race earnings to Houston 's M.D. Anderson Cancer Center -- in memory of John Long , the 3-year-old son of family friends who died of liver cancer 34 years ago.

The name Cowboy Cal was the creation of John. He attached it to Cal McNair, the youngest of the McNair's four children, because the then-13-year-old liked to wear cowboy boots and hats. Bob and Janice never forgot it. When they purchased Stonerside Stable in Kentucky decades later, they decided that a special horse would need a special name.

Cowboy Cal it was.

Tomorrow, John's parents, David and Mellie Long, will be the McNairs' guests at the Run for the Roses. It already has been an emotional and surreal experience for them.

"They've just been floored by all of this," McNair said.

McNair got into horse racing in 1994 after unsuccessful attempts to purchase an NFL franchise. Former commissioner Paul Tagliabue asked him to look into the Dolphins situation after owner Joe Robbie died in '90, but McNair, who makes his home in Houston , did not want to be an absentee owner. He also looked into the St. Louis market a few years later when the league was seeking to expand, but he had no interest in boarding a plane to watch home games.

So in '94 he and his wife decided to try their hands at horse racing. Janice McNair had been around horses most of her life and rode them competitively as a youngster. Their foray into the racing business seemed a natural when their first purchase, Southern Truce, won a graded stakes in California , and their second purchase, Strodes Creek, finished second in the '94 Kentucky Derby .

They began breeding horses after purchasing a farm from late Redskins owner Jack Kent Cooke . McNair says he sees a lot of parallels between rearing horses and constructing a football team.

"Building your racing stable with homebreds is kind of like building your football team with draft picks as opposed to free agents," he says. "That's what we've elected to do and it's working out very well for us."