Page 66 - May 2017

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© Linda Earley, Speedhorse
care if he could get an embryo for himself out of Wampitas Scat Cat. Two flushes and numer- ous veterinary fees later, Donegan could not get an embryo and quit. The stallion owner tried one more time, however, and got one. Donegan later tried to buy the foal from the embryo, but he refused to sell.
Two years later, Donegan recognized the bloodlines in an advertisement for the BFA Sale in Oklahoma City. There, she was able to pur- chase Streakin Scat Cat for $4,000. The mare ended up being Harmon’s very first futurity horse.
“I ran her at three or four futurities,” said Harmon. “She’d always try, but she’d never really clock. Her hocks were fusing and she just couldn’t stay sound enough to run, so we started breeding her when she was five.”
All three of her performance age foals are barrel racing money earners and, having had luck with adding extreme racehorse speed to get Lucky, she thought she’d try it again with another line.
“Everything we’ve crossed her with has just worked,” said Donegan, who just bred the mare to Champion Kiss My Hocks, a son of Tempt- ing Dash out of the Tres Seis mare Romancing Mary. “I’d been obsessed with it for the past two years. I asked Lacey if she thought I should do it, and Donegan said, ‘Every time you’re obsessed with something, it seems to work out, so yeah.”
The irony is, outside of following Alvarez’s racehorses and occasionally looking through a racing publication, Donegan doesn’t keep up with track happenings.
“I’ve thought sometimes that I want to have a racehorse, but my heart’s just not in it,” she said. “It’s not my passion. I know the barrel horses more and they are my passion.”
“There is no passion to be found in playing small,” it was once said by South African President Nelson Mandela. Kathy Donegan and Norma Alvarez have combined their two passions, and they are definitely playing big.
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In 2013, First Moonflash’s first crop of foals made their debut on the track. That Labor Day weekend, Donegan joined Alvarez in Ruidoso to see Handsome Jack Flash win the All Ameri- can Futurity-G1.
In 2016, Alvarez repaid Donegan’s support by traveling to Oklahoma City to watch Lucky make her competitive debut in the Barrel Futu- rities of America (BFA) Super Stakes.
“I told her when that baby was born that I wanted to be there at her first barrel race,” said Alvarez. “It was so exciting. She was wondering what it would be like to put all that speed on a barrel horse. I’m so glad it worked out for her.”
No Flash In The Pan
Donegan is banking on the future success of First Moonflash offspring in the arena, plus she’s not done with her racehorse/barrel horse breeding experiment.
Currently, she has two First Moonflash offspring; a three year old that daughter Lacey is training, and a yearling filly that is the stallion’s only known buckskin. Both are out of Streakin Scat Cat, who produced the 2017 $100,000
LG Pro Classic Invitational Champion Just The Way You Are.
Like Lucy, Streakin Scat Cat is the daughter of Wampitas Scat Cat, aka Bill, whom Donegan pur- chased from Jack and Peggy Dube. The daughter of Tiger’s Music had won just about everything there was in South Texas with a young Jackie (Dube) Jatzlau before going to the Donegans.
Streakin Scat Cat was the result of a last minute pairing between Bill and the Streakin Six son Bop Trot. Donegan had originally planned on breeding the mare to AR Star. Yet, after seeing how petite the son of Shawne Bug was, she thought she needed a more substantial stallion for the petite mare if the foal was to have any size to it at all.
A deal was made with Bop Trot’s owner that Donegan would get a free stud fee and mare
Alvarez’s farm in La Union, New Mexico, was the perfect place for the Donegans to stop on their annual trips to Buckeye, Arizona, for the Classic Equine and Greg Olson Memorial Futurities each January.
In 2012, Alvarez took Donegan and barrel futurity trainers Sharin Hall and Tasha Welsh out to see the race babies. Among the group was a special yearling, bred by Laney, named Hand- some Jack Flash.
“The first group of horses were a great group of individuals,” said Alvarez. “They lit the board everywhere. They were straight, correct and balanced.”
Donegan thought it might be time to listen to her friend and take a chance on her bloodlines.
“Every time we’d go by there, she’d say, ‘My mare line...they can do this! You need to try it!’ She told me this for years. After First Moon- flash came along, I was like, ‘Okay, I think
I’ve got the perfect mare for this to work on.’ I remember telling people in Arizona what I was going to do, and they were looking at me like I was crazy and telling me they weren’t sure it was going to work.”
Donegan paired her Fire Water Flit daughter Miss Firewater Ryon, known as Lucy, with the lightning fast stallion First Moonflash. When Flashin Flitter was born in 2013, she was nick- named Lucky because she was lucky to be alive after her mother suffered a rectal-vaginal tear during foaling.
“She had one foot and her nose out of
the rectum and one leg out normally,” said Donegan. “We literally had to stuff her back in. Since our regular vet wasn’t available, we asked another one to come out. On her way out, she got lost and was also recovering from surgery,
so she couldn’t do much but talk my husband, Mike, through the process. I thought, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me! This is supposed to be my dream horse!’”
64 SPEEDHORSE, May 2017
2017 $100,000
LG Pro Classic Invitational Champion Just The Way You Are, who is out of Streakin Scat Cat, who has two additional offspring by First Moonflash.
Handsome Jack Flash wins the 2013 All American Futurity for Norma Alvarez, who co-owned the horse with sister-in-law Brenda Alvarez and friend Debra Laney, who bred the gelding.
© Springer