Page 51 - July_2023

Three Bars, the sire of Sugar Bars.
SPEEDLINES
SPEEDHORSE July 2023 49
“when i saw this horse, he just struck me as such a beautifuL conformation staLLion. as good a Lookin’ horse as i had ever Looked at “
horse” bloodlines. He bought Little Joe from George Clegg, a noted breeder who was an avid roper and short horseman. Clegg owned Hickory Bill by Peter McCue.
Warren apparently decided that a good way to breed a good runner was to buy one of the two mares that had defeated Leo in his days racing at Pawhuska. He bought Randle’s Lady, a Cajun-Bred runner sired by Doc Horn, an Army Remount Thoroughbred stallion. Randle’s Lady was out of a daughter of a son of Old D J, the sire of Della
Moore, the dam of Joe Reed P-3. Randle’s Lady produced seven starters with five
ROM including three sired by Leo in Rosa Leo, winner of the 1955 Oklahoma QH Exhibitors Association Futurity; Croton Oil, a stakes finalist in the Los Alamitos Inaugural Handicap; and Little Doc Horn. Croton Oil became Leo’s replacement.
Connie was a Thoroughbred mare that ended up in the Warren broodmare band by accident. As the story goes, a man brought Connie to be bred to Leo and he never came back, and she stayed there the rest of her life. She was out of Fair Lawn by Infinite
by Ultimus. Connie produced four foals for Warren and two of them were Connie Leo and Tiger Leo, both ROM runners.
Sugar Bars
The success of Leo as a sire carried Bud Warren to the next step in his breeding program. He needed a sire to cross on his Leo daughters and this introduces us to Sugar Bars. His finding Sugar Bars starts with the first time he saw Three Bars, the sire of Sugar Bars. “Well, there isn’t any question about it, the first time I saw Three Bars was at Albuquerque,” he said. “We had heard about him. He had a few colts out. I was a straight-out Quarter Horse man 100%. When I saw this horse, he just struck me as such a beautiful conformation stallion. As good a lookin’ horse as I had ever looked at and I saw him run that day. They put him in the gate, and he lost a rider and that is all there was to it, and he ran down the track by himself.
“Actually in Thoroughbred records, he
was a thousand-dollar plater and not a very good one and the reason was he couldn’t run
a distance, but he had blinding speed, he was
a beautiful horse and he just crossed with damn near any chunky Quarter Horse that we thought were racehorses at shorter distances,” he continued about Three Bars. “He was just sensational. He sired beautiful horses and they started commanding a better price. Everybody was hunting them. That is how he got started.”
© Speedhorse archives
Warren continued, “Well, I had ole Leo and was doing alright with his colts. So,
I was looking for another sire to cross on my Leo mares. Of course, Three Bars had gotten famous as a Thoroughbred sire of running Quarter Horses. He was a good looking, good headed horse, beautiful horse for a Quarter Horse type Thoroughbred. Not a little chunky horse by any means, but he had all the qualities you would
like from any horse. He was getting some great runners and a few show horses. But he wasn’t quite bulldog enough for me
to present to the public unless I could
find him with the right Quarter Horse conformation that I thought acceptable.”
Sugar Bars then entered the picture.
“I saw this colt (Sugar Bars) once out in California at Ken Fratis’ house. He was
on a layover from the track. He had done pretty well but nothing great. He was
a triple A rated horse and that was the greatest thing in that day. When I first saw
him, he was the best looking Three Bars’ conformation horse I had ever seen. He looked like what the Quarter Horses of today were supposed to look like at that time. I knew he could halter at the halter show, and I proved that later a couple of times. But he had the head and muscling and thickness, short legs-typical Quarter Horse type.
“So I tried to buy him, and he couldn’t be bought, so I left word with a couple of my friends, Bob Weimer and Van Smelker, that if he came up for sale, I wanted to buy him. They went ahead and ran him, and Bob Weimer called me that they had run a match race in Tucson, and they lost and so they offered to sell him.
“Well, my old trainer John Hazelwood called me that night and said, ‘This Sugar Bars horse you have been talking about got outrun today by about a nose, but these guys would sell him.’ I said, ‘What do they want for him?’ and he said, ‘$2,500.’ I said, ‘It’s Saturday