Page 98 - January 2018

Andy Golden Reflects on Roots
As any good horseman knows, a solid foundation is crucial to the future success of a racehorse. Same can be said for magazine publishing. Andy Golden and his late mother,
Connie, who bought Speedhorse magazine in 1978, were, for three-plus decades, the stewards of the lauded industry trade publication that has served the American Quarter Horse industry for the last half-century.
Andy became executive editor of Speedhorse after his mother, Connie, acquired the magazine in 1978. Originally launched
by Walt Wiggins in New Mexico in 1969 under the banner of Quarter Racing World, the magazine was first published with The Speedhorse nameplate in 1978. Andy was 22 years of age when he assumed the editorial and advertising reins of Speedhorse. His era at the helm lasted through a passing of the torch to the Bachelors in 2010, and he officially stepped away from the magazine when he announced his retirement in 2011.
“The future of the magazine was set in place by my mother’s hard work,” Andy noted recently. “Everything that is coming to fruition
by Michael Compton
now is based on the 35-year foundation that my mother and I started.
“Most businesses fail within three or
four years,” he continued. “For a business that’s gone on for 50 years that is quite an achievement. Mother was not a nine-to-five person. She was a 24-7 type of person. It was quite an accomplishment.”
Stepping away from the regular deadlines that come with publishing an industry trade magazine has allowed Andy sufficient time
to reflect on what his life’s work and that of his mother has meant to the Quarter Horse industry. They utilized their platform as publisher and editor to be a strong voice for an industry they grew to love and appreciate.
“I’m proud,” he said. “It’s taken me six or seven years of being away. It was like a baby for so long, and now it’s with the Bachelors, and they are doing wonderful things and making
it an even better publication. It had a good foundation from the start, and we fought a lot of battles to help make it what it is today.”
Some of those early challenges included learning the horse industry from the ground up.
“I just didn’t want to make a fool of myself (in those early days),” Golden related. “And I had to learn the business. I didn’t even know what a gelding was when I started. I was always competitive and so was my mother.
“Our motto was always ‘What is good for the industry will be good for Speedhorse,’ in
the long run,” he added. “So, we never took the easy road and we never sold ourselves out for any reason.”
Andy admits that in the early days, the challenge of succeeding in this business proposition was as enticing as the horse business itself.
“Mother was a leading real estate professional in Albuquerque before she got into publishing,” Andy said. “We didn’t come from a horse background, but we ended up loving it.
“We worked tirelessly to try to better
the horse industry,” he added. “We covered everybody the same, by doing stories that
some people took offense to or didn’t like. We fought through it, though, and Speedhorse has been the leading publication in its field. As entrepreneurs and businesspeople first, we were always inventing new features and things to do, like an eight-part series on blood-typing. I think that’s what made the difference with the horsemen. We were always inventing.”
Sensing a void in recognizing the importance of broodmares to the breeding industry, Connie introduced the Speedhorse Broodmare of the Year Award just four years after joining the magazine. Speedhorse honored mares in that way until the American Quarter Horse Association began its Broodmare of the Year program.
“The AQHA didn’t have a category for that, so we came up with one,” Andy said.
96 SPEEDHORSE, January 2018