The Name Game
Geez. We opened a real can of worms with this nickname thing. Last week, Irana (the Acidhead) said she needed her own nickname to ascend to the same level of blog familiarity as my sister, Alice (the Republican). So we kindly pranced about like Johnny Appleseed, dispersing nicknames hither and yon to many of our readers, not all of whom were thoroughly enchanted by their new titles. Worse yet were the legions of readers who felt left out by their lack of inclusion in all this foolishness. So we have a solution. Anyone who did not like his or her nickname is officially permitted to dispense it to any of the people who were not mentioned last week. There now—does that take care of everything? What? No, you will not be getting new names if you shed your old ones. Do you think we have nothing better to do around here than assign silly nicknames? Come to think of it, you’re probably right.
Oh, and by the way, Katherine—you are ABSOLUTELY FORBIDDEN to return to your previous mate after garnering the title of Runaway Bride. There has to be some semblance of order around here. Don’t make us get out our big sticks.
Daytrip
We celebrated Martin Luther King Day by shuffling off to Orlando for the annual North American Veterinary Conference at the Gaylord Palms hotel. If you’ve ever been to this place, you probably know it used to be an enormous airport and one day they just came in and put a big glass roof over the top, built some rooms, added about fifty restaurants and a convention center and voila!—the Gaylord Palms (valet parking, $20 + tip).
This sordid affair, which allows vets from around the country to bring their kids to town for a mini-vacation while at the same time getting to listen to distinguished speakers ruminate on the ocular threats to the Chihuahua, gives commercial suppliers to veterinarians—“vendors,” in NAVC parlance—an opportunity to meet and greet their meal tickets, not to mention dispense scads of tote bags, pens, informative literature and other planet-defiling garbage to eager grasping customers who seem to have no limit to their acquisition space. On the other hand, some of them did have chocolate chip cookies and you know how we feel about that. I had to forcibly remove myself from the booth after three.
Anyway, this giant conclave gave Siobhan an opportunity to mingle with the masses at the booth of Franck’s Compounding Lab, manufacturer of her Oroquin-10 drug, which is selling like, um, hotcakes, by the way. She got to wear her new boots and her new leggings and her new little skirt, so it was worth all the trouble. When you live in Florida, there’s a small window for boot-wearing so no opportunity should be wasted.
We’d like to go back to that “selling like hotcakes” business for a minute, though. Are hotcakes selling all that well? How do we really know? Have you bought any hotcakes lately? I didn’t think so. So maybe it’s time for a change. How about “selling like I-Pads” or “selling like Oxycodone?” No, I agree—it doesn’t have the same panache. We’d better stick with hotcakes until we come up with something more colorful. Let’s see….”selling like Starbuck’s”….”selling like crack”….”selling like baby rabbits at Easter”….selling like….
Recess Is Over
It’s all well and good to be having these frivolous columns about nicknames and other tomfoolery but there comes a time when we must return to the classroom so that Professor Bill can disseminate knowledge to his host of avid readers. Yeah, we know you’d rather have the nicknames but it’s almost breeding season in the thoroughbred horse business and we’ve got to get cracking on selecting stallions for our two mares, Dot and Wanda. How is this done? We thought you’d never ask.
The Fine Art Of Stallion Selection
We went over to a very nice thoroughbred operation in nearby Summerfield the other day called The Vinery. They were having their annual stallion show and hog roast and even though Siobhan is sympathetic with the poor roastee, she has been known to eat her share of barbecue.
We went over there to look at a new stallion just off the track and probably sign a contract to breed him to Dot. Just to show you how tricky these affairs can be, we ended up signing a contract to breed a different stallion to Wanda….and no, we do not have Attention Deficit Disorder. There are just a ton of considerations, that’s all. Things like race records, pedigree, conformation, whether the stallion preferred sprinting or distance races when he ran—IF he ran—and his record as a sire if he has anything running yet. It’s tough to say which aspect is most important. A great race horse with a deficient pedigree might be less likely to pass on his talents. A horse who never ran may have a valid excuse for not making it to the racetrack. The temperament of the stallion might be a consideration—particularly if breeding to a flighty or otherwise difficult mare. Let’s take it one thing at a time.
Pedigree
Unarguably, the top pedigreed stallions in the country are in Lexington, Kentucky or the environs thereof and unaffordable anyway to breeders at our level. There are, however, young unproved stallions which start out in Florida before striking gold with prominent performers their first few years here and moving to Kentucky. If you do your homework—and you are lucky—this provides an opportunity to get in on the ground floor before the elevator rises to the penthouse. Siobhan bred her mare, Orange Orchid, to a stallion named Successful Appeal when he was standing in Ocala for $5000 and got a nice colt named Hurricane Zip. The progeny of Successful Appeal came out running and he was promptly moved to Kentucky, where he stood for $40,000 his first season. There are many similar stories. There are even more stories of well-bred new stallions which produced nothing much.
If you are breeding to race rather than to sell and don’t require a fancy name stallion to carry you at the sales, you might prefer a proven, if unspectacular, stud who dependably gets runners year after year, even if they are not top echelon stakes horses. We did well for years with the offspring of Halo’s Image, paying stud fees of five thousand to seventy-five hundred dollars.
Some people demean pedigree as being too large a consideration but they are kidding themselves. All you have to do is look at the sires of horses running at Belmont or Del Mar or Keeneland, the better racetracks with higher purses, and compare them to the sires of horses running at the lesser tracks and it will become obvious that pedigrees matter.
It takes quite a while to learn pedigrees but it is well worth the effort. First and foremost, you will discover which horses were better sprinters (preferring distances under a mile) and which did better at longer distances. Everybody would like a nice Kentucky Derby (a-mile-and-a-quarter) horse, of course, but if you live and race in Florida you’d better have something with a little speed. The early races—until September—for two-year-olds are all sprints. If you are wealthy and can wait, fine, but the majority of horse owners—believe it or not—aren’t all that rich.
Okay, you say—how about finding a horse like Seattle Slew who had great speed and could run all day? Nice work if you can get it. But there are not many horses like Seattle Slew. Probably the best thing to do is to look for a good miler—a horse who excelled sprinting but could get a little more distance than the average sprinter. Bred to a mare with some distance in her pedigree, you might get a horse who could sprint and also carry his speed. That’s part of the enjoyment in the thoroughbred game—you get to play God and create your own entities. If your creations don’t work out, guess who’s to blame?
Conformation
To many people, the horse’s conformation—the way he is put together—is more important than anything else. My friend, Bill Mauk, a thoroughbred agent in Lexington, used to go around the sales and look at the horses without first examining the pedigrees so as not to prejudice his assessment. If he liked something, he would inspect the pedigree later. If a horse had poor conformation, Bill didn’t care if it was by Nijinsky II, he wasn’t interested. This is a great plan if you have a ton of time to check out every horse (which Bill did). For me, there are certain sires whose offspring I would not take if they were given to me. If a horse has no stakes-winners from 100 runners, what chance do I have? Eliminating these horses from consideration saves me a ton of time. Truth be known, it is much easier eliminating candidates in Florida than in Kentucky due to the great disparity in the quality of stallions in the two states.
Different objectives again bring different decisions in horse buyers. A person buying a horse which he will later sell at an older age (usually called a “pinhooker") can not afford much in the way of conformation defects. Buyers have a lot of horses to select from at sales and they would prefer to start with no strikes against them—thus buying a well-conformed horse. People looking to race their purchases are often more forgiving, tolerating relatively minor defects in conformation that will not hamper the horse’s racing career.
There are few perfect horses. Those closest to perfection—with the added bonus of an excellent pedigree—sell for very nice prices. Imperfections most often disqualifying a horse from consideration are found in the legs, principally the front legs. The cardinal sin is a defect called “back in the knees.” Taking a weighted string and holding it at the top front of the horse’s leg and letting it fall to the ground, the ideal leg would touch the string all the way down. A “back in the knee” horse would have a leg shaped more like the letter “c” with the knee further to the rear. Horses which are back in the knee have a tendency to get bone chips in the knee joints earlier and more often than horses which do not and generally have short careers.
Not as bad but less than ideal is a horse who is “over at the knee.” (Gee, you say—there’s no pleasing some people when it comes to knees.) This condition, usually the result of a contracted tendon, finds its victims’ knees too far forward, often bent a little (or a lot). Horses over at the knee have fewer problems than back in the knee horses but they are not held in high esteem. Neither are horses “offset” in the knees, which means the knees are higher on one side than the other or not directly in front. And there can be absolutely no compromises with tendons (behind the canon bone, knee to ankle) deficient to any degree. Once a tendon is compromised, the horse’s career is over or at least unpromising.
The list goes on. The rear legs can have deficiencies of their own, as can the rump, the hip, the shoulder. Some tire-kickers want their horses wide-eyed, some measure their throats with clenched fists, looking for adequate width. Some want them big, some fret if they are too big, but amazingly a lot of them actually do get sold. And, as you might have guessed, some of the worst-looking ones turn out great and some of the best are bums. The Green Monkey, a 16 million dollar two-year-old sale purchase, never won a race.
Kantharos
So why did we go to the stallion show with one horse in mind and end up with another? Well, the horse under consideration (who shall go unnamed) was significantly over at the knees. He ran just fine with the condition and was a very nice horse but we were considering breeding him to Dot, offset in her knees, one of which she broke in her maiden win. All of Dot’s foals have great conformation but she has been bred to Juggernaut, Concerto and Hear No Evil, good-legged horses. We were reluctant to take a chance breeding one horse with bad knees to another. She will probably go back to Hear No Evil, Puck’s sire.
We weren’t thinking much about Kantharos, a very well-conformed horse, who we eventually decided to breed to Wanda. He raced only three times, not inclined to inspire one, but he did win those three races by a combined 28 ½ lengths. Two of these were stakes, one of them the Grade 2 Saratoga Special, which he won by 9 1/2, an impressive accomplishment. Also despite the sprinter speed, he is by a Northern Dancer (stamina) line horse named Lion Heart, winner of $1,390,800, including the Grade 1 Haskell Invitational, which suggests that Kantharos would not have been limited to sprinting success. His career was terminated by a lower leg fracture suffered in a morning gallop, which you don’t like to see but which could have been a fluke. Wanda has good bone, just in case. Kantharos is also a very fertile horse and Wanda has not been the easiest mare to get in foal.
So there is an example of the thinking in one instance of matching a sire and a mare. When the offspring of Kantharos and Wanda—whose real name, unaccountably (don’t look at us) is Fortyninejules—wins the Florida Derby a few years from now, you can say you were in on the beginning of the story. And if he or she turns out to be an absolute dud, well, you can say you were in on the beginning of that story as well.
Except, of course, in that case nobody will care, will they?
That’s all, folks….
