There is an adage about how to make a million in the horse business that’s more true today than ever before.
“Start with a billion dollars … and stay in.”
Racing has turned billionaires into millionaires and millionaires into working men but it’s still a fun way to lose money. Sort of like owning your own auto racing team but being such a bad driver you put on your turn signal heading into each turn.
My first exposure to the emerald green grass of tail-swishing oat eaters came came in Ocala, Florida in the summer of 1979. I had just started with Xerox and my first territory included some of the area’s horse farms. My favorite was Tartan Farms, owned by Frances Genter, overseen by John Nerud, with Brian Howlett the farm manager. Everyone was very nice to me, especially the horses when I arrived bearing orange cylindrical gifts. I was the carrot delivery man for top stallions like In Reality, My Dad George, and Fappiano. Codex shipped in too, having become a local hero but national villain after defeating the Kentucky Derby winning filly Genuine Risk in the 1980 Preakness.
After four fun years I left Ocala and moved to Tampa in search of a better career opportunity but doing so came at a price: I traded the serenity and magic of the horse farms for the acidic belching from phosphate plant smokestacks. It was a dumb trade I never should have made. But life is full of choices and the road most traveled often ends up being simply a road to somewhere else. That one was.
I circled back into the horse business in 1998 when I took a phone call from my brother Mark. He and Steve Cauthen (who won the Triple Crown in 1978 on Affirmed) had bred a mare to that great stallion and had just foaled a weanling filly. Did I want in?
Sure. Why not? It must be easy, right?
Wrong. Sweet Affirmation was our darling girl and she grew to be big and strong. The day she entered her first race at Churchill Downs was very exciting. We had watched her grow from a baby with tinkertoy legs into a beautiful chestnut filly. And here she was in Churchill Downs, loading in the gate to race, excited and ready to go, the impeccibly bred daughter of a Triple Crown legend. And I owned a third.
And they’re off!
Well, most of them took off. She stayed in the gate until the field was eight lengths ahead. Then she reared in the air, pawing like a cartoon animal, before finally returning to earth to get some traction and go.
The starting gate was on the track’s far side and all I could tell was the race had just begun but one of the horse was way behind.
I turned to Cauthen and asked, “Who got left in the box?”
“We did.”
“Oh.”
History will record a fifth place finish that day, Sweet Affirmation showing good speed late to reel in and pass eight others. But fifth will not pay the feed bill. Especially in Kentucky.
Sweet Affirmation never raced again. She broke her leg training for her second start, which presented us with a phone call from the vet with a scruples question: “Do you want to put her down and collect the hundred grand in insurance money or save her?”
“Save her,” we said.
Several months later she was sound enough to sell as a broodmare prospect for thirty thousand.
And that’s the way the game is played. Where’s your soul: your bank account or standing in a stall?
Yesterday I flew to Oklahoma City to inspect six stallions as a possible mate for my Notebook mare Novel. Novel I claimed out of a race here in Denver four years ago. She is well bred and has delivered two beautiful foals in three years. The third year she aborted on Thanksgiving Day. Things go wrong in this business, a lot more often than they go right. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong and just because it’s never happened before does not mean it will not happen to you.
But every baby is a miracle nearly a year in the incubator. About 30,000 or so aspiring future race horses are born each spring throughout the country, a third of them in Kentucky. Few will earn their oats but dreamers will dream and it was that relentless optimism that took me to Oklahoma, 500 miles away but the closest place for me to find a well bred stallion whose pedigree is strong enough to match with the mare.
My friend Donald Wells has been around baby horses his entire life and says to visualize what the resulting foal of a stallion and mare might look like. I kept this in mind yesterday as I studied my six options. Stallions are all different, so the decison process is always imprecise.
I ended up selecting a little known stallion named Diamond. He’s 15 and stands at Oklahoma Equine, a half-hour south of Oklahoma City. His daddy is one of modern racing’s greatest sires, Mr. Prospector. Diamond has produced a Maryland bred filly that won a million dollars and two others that have done really well. His lifetime book of mares is small and modest compared to the big boys in Lexington, but looking at him made me smile. He can get you a runner. And he is handsome. A tall and fiery lad who will begat us a beautiful son or daughter.
I signed the papers, drove back to the airport, and flew home. It was a fourteen-hour day that now necessitates a ten-hour van ride for Novel and her newborn son in order to meet her new boyfriend. For that she will have one minute of fun.
With luck, from the liason will come another leggy miracle. One that hopefully won’t get left in the gate.