What’s the Gamecock logo doing at the Kentucky Derby? This is how it came together
When South Carolina fans tune in for the Kentucky Derby this Saturday, they may notice a familiar logo on the blanket wrapped around one of the horses.
Hot Rod Charlie, an 8/1 contender to win the biggest even in horse racing, has been sporting the block C and Gamecock logo on his wrap, usually put on horses after a workout. The horse’s owners, a group of five friends, did play college football, but at Brown, not USC. The trainer, Doug O’Neill, has spent most of his life in California, and the jockey, Flavien Prat, is French.
So how did the Garnet and Black wind up in Churchill Downs?
The answer starts with Stephen Panus’ South Carolina fandom. The USC grad passed that love of the Gamecocks onto his sons, Jake and Liam. Jake in particularly dreamed of going to South Carolina and playing football.
Then in Augusut 2020, 16-year-old Jake was killed in a DUI accident in Rhode Island. In the aftermath of the tragedy, Stephen, an executive with Jockey Club Media Ventures, made a connection in the college football world.
Ivan Maisel, a longtime college football reporter for ESPN, knew the pain Stephen and his family were going through — he himself had lost a young son. Stephen and Ivan’s wives knew each other through a yoga class, but after Jake’s passing, the two men bonded.
“I had not had the pleasure of meeting Ivan, even though I read his articles for years, and he reached out and he came over shortly thereafter,” Panus told The State. “And we just talked and that began a friendship. We walk once a month or have lunch and take a walk on the beach and just talk. Sometimes we don’t even have to say anything, and we totally understand each other.”
Maisel, knowing Panus’ love of South Carolina, reached out to newly-hired Gamecock football coach Shane Beamer. Two days before Christmas, in the midst of filling out his first staff at USC, Beamer called Panus — but he didn’t pick up. He was on a walk with his wife and didn’t have his phone. When he got home and listened to Beamer’s message, he was “just blown away” and immediately tried to call Beamer back.
“It went to voicemail, and he texts, ‘I’m on the phone interviewing a coach, I’ll call you right after,’ ” Panus said. “And he called right back a couple hours later on FaceTime, spoke to Liam. And he was just awesome, so compassionate and caring and supportive.”
That led to a few more exchanges, as well as a conversation between Stephen and his wife, Kellie. They had already established one scholarship in Jake’s name and had been thinking about starting a second, but they also knew they were struggling.
“We just didn’t know. Our heads weren’t right, we had brain fog and couldn’t think straight or remember anything. So, OK, we weren’t going to rush into anything,” Panus said. “But this just felt right. And Jake dreamed of going to South Carolina, it was his dream school. We knew we were going to do something at South Carolina, and this kind of put it all together with the door open to coach Beamer.”
And thus the Jake Panus Walk-On Football Endowed Scholarship was born. Panus reached out to Beamer, who supported the idea, and they worked with USC’s compliance and development offices, including Jeff Whitehead and Wayne Hiott.
With that established, Stephen’s friends in the horse racing world then stepped in to help. Doug O’Neill and Stephen had known each other through mutual circles for years, and the trainer had reached out after Jake’s death to offer any help he could.
When the scholarship was started at South Carolina, he approached with another offer of help.
“That’s when he said, ‘I got this horse, Hot Rod Charlie, pointing towards the Derby.’ And in our sport, we know how hard it is to just to qualify for the Derby, let alone win it,” Stephen said. “You need your horse to stay healthy once you’ve accumulated the requisite points. So there was a lot of ifs along the way. And then I reached out to the university after we’d set up a scholarship, and I told them about the opportunity and the athletic department blessed the use of the logo on the blanket. Doug had the the blanket created and threw it on the horse and had some pictures taken, and it’s kind of taken off.”
Seeing the response from the college football, horse racing and South Carolina communities, Stephen said, has been “overwhelming.”
“It just gives you hope when you don’t have a lot of hope some days. It motivates you to get up. It motivates you to put pants on one leg at a time and get up and get going and have hope that there’s better days ahead and hope in humanity, that people really do care about one another,” Panus said. “Because I think that’s important, because that’s what Jake was about. Jake was about being authentic and helping and serving others, and he did it all 16 years of his life, and did more in 16 years than I’ve certainly done in 52.”
About the scholarship
According to its official page on the University of South Carolina website, “The Jake Panus Walk-on Football Endowed Scholarship was recently established to provide a walk-on football player who, through hard work and perseverance, earns an athletic scholarship and contributes toward the success of the Gamecock football team, the University of South Carolina and the community at large. The student-athlete will share Jake’s leadership attributes while demonstrating a motivated work ethic, fierce determination, team-first mentality, and grit on the football field.”
Watch the Kentucky Derby
When: 6:57 p.m. Saturday
Where: Churchill Downs in Louisville, Kentucky
TV: NBC
Purse: $3 million
Distance: 1.25 miles
For: 3-year-old Thoroughbreds
Favorite: Essential Quality (2-1)
