Three bug boys at twenty bucks an hour boded big.

"But he's definitely going in the right direction and he's the best bug boy I've seen come through here in a long time.

But the protagonist of "Bug Boy Blues" is not Spider-Man.

"It's not easy to bring a bug boy here with an out-of-town agent," said the trainer Robert Barbara, who has utilized Arroyo often.

Hot "bug boys," as apprentice jockeys are called, are as ubiquitous in racing as promising 2-year-old colts.

Kafka is not usually thought of as children's literature, but Lisa Railsback, who wrote "Bug Boy Blues," has performed another metamorphosis.

"Bug Boy Blues," likely to appeal most to children 8 and older, has a more hopeful ending than Kafka's and gives Gregor what seems like a new life.

The 29-year-old, who starred as George Best in the BBC film Best: His Mother's Son, plays Bug Boy, an apprentice jockey.

'BUG BOY BLUES' (Tomorrow and Sunday) Kafka for kids?

Bug Boy is a popular term in the USA for an apprentice rider, so named because the asterisk in the racing program after an apprentice jockey's name resembles a bug.

In 2005, he starred in the independent movie Bug Boy, in which he played Danny, an aspiring jockey who has to cope with his mother's alcohol addiction while caring for his little brother.

A young jockey, sometimes called a "Bug Boy" who is still in training who is required to ride a certain number of winners in a specified period of time before completing his or her apprenticeship.

The fictional character has also inspired a number of deratives such as a manga version of Spider-Man drawn by Japanese artist Ryoichi Ikegami as well as Hideshi Hino's The Bug Boy, which has been cited as inspired by Spider-Man.

That may not mean much to McKee, who was born five years after Cauthen tore apart the 1976-77 winter meet at Aqueduct as an apprentice, landed on covers of magazines like Sports Illustrated and Time and raised the bar unapproachably high for every eager and talented bug boy to come after him.