Page 144 - Speedhorse October 2018

Mel Hatley, Willie Showmaker and D. Wayne Lukas.
in general. These are his views:
“From a business standpoint, and horses are
a business, I feel like it’s best to hedge the bet, take as much gamble as you can out of a high- risk business. It’s important to look at long-term potentials of horses, but I lean toward selling horses along the way if profit’s reasonable. If you’re offered $100,000 for a horse, have $50,000 in him and have him insured for $50,000, you’re gambling if you don’t sell. If you don’t sell and the horse dies, you’ve gambled and lost.
“I look at a foal from the standpoint
of marketability, which pedigree and fact determine, sell foals until my broodmare’s clear.
“It’s so important to deal in facts in the horse business and so easy to get emotionally involved and forget facts. Horses can become part of the family. But what Old Joe could have done if he hadn’t fallen down in the gate’s guessing, not dealing the fact.
“Emotion’s no partner to have in the horse business, but it gets to me when Judy and I race our fillies and they do good. It’s like one of your children doing good. Then you turn around and sell them.
“The stud business is a real high-risk area. I think anybody interested in standing stallions should look at competition in the location where they want to be and try to meet a market need that’s undeveloped in that location. It’s beginning to sound like I’m trying to be an expert. I’m not an
expert at anything. Whatever good has happened to me has happened because I have friends who are smarter than I am. My friends have put me where I am. But you’ve asked the questions, and I’m trying to answer them. That’s all.
“It’s obvious that when you stand a stud, no matter how good you think he is, if the public won’t accept him, you haven’t got much. The public can reject him if they think his fee’s too high, or they might not like his breeding. So when you go into the stud business, you have to buy a horse you feel like you can sell to the public, put the right fee on him, and then
keep farm operating expenses as low as possible without threatening the quality of the operation.
“There’s a lot of things you get into in a breeding farm, such as your medical practices, your teasing program, feeding program. You have all that to work out, along with making sure you have a stallion the public likes. When you’ve got everything together, you need an advertising program. It can be ads in trade magazines, or personal phone calls or personal visits. Whether it’s ads or just talking, you have to deal in facts.
“I don’t have the ability or inclination to promote something I don’t believe in. In order for me to sell my stallion to my friends, I’ve got to believe in him enough to breed my own mares to him. But there’s more to it than that. I think you have to have a relationship with
people who own good mares, and I think you have to have a certain amount of charisma or mystique or success in the business to attract people to come do business with you. I feel like the people have to be comfortable, know you’ll give their mares and foals the best care and services while they’re with you. Mare owners need to be aware that they’re dealing with a horseman of integrity and honesty who’ll be fair no matter what the stallion service contract reads.
“When we stand stallions, we’re offering
a service to the industry. We’re not doing somebody a favor. We’re there to serve. A stallion farm is no place to put on airs or showboat. Sometimes good stallions don’t get the chances they deserve because their owners have a few peculiarities, and people just don’t want to do business with them.
“I believe in family and nicks . . . like the one Miss Olene has with St. Bar. At the same time, I think you need to keep on trying. A
lot of people go stale or dead by breeding to their own stallions and nobody else. If I have a stallion, and it’s not the cross that works with my mares, then I’m going to spend the stud fee and go somewhere else.
“I feel like horse families are like people families. Once you get a horse family working for you, and one does something special, it reflects on the others. Say you have four sisters, and one produces a Champion. Then you breed the other sisters to the same stallion, hoping for the same nick. You won’t always get it, but it’s still common sense to try.
“I guess the most crucial thing to do when you’re starting out with a stallion is to try and get the best broodmares possible to his court,
as many stakes-producing and stakes-winning mares as you can. What I mean is that people who pay top prices for foals and yearlings are going to look at the facts in the pedigree of
the sire and the dam. If you’re standing a young stallion, his foals that go for the highest prices, in the beginning, at least, are going to come from mares with some black-type facts in their pedigrees.
“You asked about broodmare management
– there are many areas and directions to go
in discussing that. Basically, one of the things we try to do is to have a mare ready to breed when we send her to a stallion. If she’s had a problem, we have her cultured and cleared up. We don’t wait till breeding season to keep a close eye on mares. All year round we keep them
“It takes bighearted horses to win stakes races and bighearted owners to stay in the business . . .”
142 SPEEDHORSE, October 2018
LOOKING BACK - AN EXCERPT FROM JUNE 1980 ISSUE