Page 74 - Speedhorse October 2018

That’s what farriers do. They shape
the foundation of racehorses.
Butch Pridemore and his grandchildren
TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS
Pridemore found that there are different sides to the shoeing business. It’s the same with horses. Riding horses and racehorses are different animals.
“Yep, that’s for sure,” he agrees. “But it was more than that, too. There at Hot Springs,
we’d get $20 or $25 – don’t remember which it was – to shoe a riding horse, and $42 to shoe a racehorse. It was the money. That’s all I could see, how much more I could make. Been on the racetrack ever since.
“I’ve shod some nice horses,” he continues.
“I shod Streakin Flyer, Donnie Strickland’s horse that won the (1996) All American Futurity-G1. ‘Flyer’ was nice. I’ve shod SLM Big Daddy, Tailor Fit, Junos Request, Rare Form. But, me shoeing them didn’t make them win, let’s get that straight. All I did was, I didn’t slow them down.”
Some of the horses were easy to work with. Others weren’t.
“I’ve been kicked, but everybody gets kicked,” Pridemore says. “Sometimes it’s worse than others, but I’ve never had no bones broke or nothing like that.”
But bad horses?
“Oh, no,” Pridemore protests, with a laugh. “Hank got all them. Hank’s tougher than me.”
Morgan has had his share of horses, good and bad, and injuries, some more serious than others.
“Oh, little things: I’ve been stabbed by nails, stuff like that,” Morgan says. “Of course, I’ve been kicked a few times. I got kicked across my mouth shoeing one. I was shoeing a yearling, and I leaned over to pick the foot up, the boy wasn’t paying attention and the horse jumped
forward and cow-kicked me. Had to go get stitches. Didn’t lose any teeth – I thought he kicked my teeth out, but he didn’t.”
Morgan laughs about it now. There were other horses that were less than pleasant to work on.
“Chicks Call Me (winner of the 1999 Remington Park Futurity-G1) was one of the hardest horses to shoe that I ever shod in my 35 years of shoeing,” Morgan recalls of the multiple Grade 1 winning gelding that Rodney Reed conditioned to earn $628,400. “He was an alligator to shoe. He wasn’t as bad on his back end as he was on his front. He’d pull his front feet from you and you couldn’t hold him, you couldn’t stop him. He’d resist you and then when you finally did get that front foot picked up, he’d jerk it from you. He was pretty good on the back end, but he was an alligator on the front. It’s usually the other way around, but that horse was different. But he could really, really run.
“So, Chicks Call Me was very difficult to shoe, but Louie Wartchow had a Thoroughbred horse named Will I Win, and he might have been the toughest horse I ever shod. You couldn’t draw him forward and finish him
on the stand. I had to finish him underneath
– underhook him. You had to crank him underneath. It wasn’t a real pretty job,” Morgan laughs. “But, we always got him done. You had no quit when you worked for Louie. He told me, when you become a good horseman you can become a good horseshoer.”
Wartchow was a leading trainer in Oklahoma, where he conditioned everything from Quarter Horses and Thoroughbreds to Appaloosas and Paints. One of the most famous horses that Morgan worked on at Wartchow’s stable was APHA World Champion Treasured Too, who was also a leading sire of Paint Horses.
Morgan also shod horses such as Spit Curl Jess when Jim Doolin sent the stallion out to score in the 2004 Heritage Place Derby-G1.
“That was a super-minded horse,” he says
of the stallion that has sired the earners of more than $5.6 million, including Champion Spit Curl Diva. “You could drop the lead rope in the alley and shoe him. Spit Curl Jess was so easy to get along with.”
Morgan had an especially close working relationship with Reed, who died in April at age 62. A member of the Oklahoma Horse Racing Hall of Fame, Reed won 10 Quarter Horse training titles at Remington Park, more than any other trainer, and scored a then meet-record 47 races in 2001, a mark that stood for 10 years until it was broken by Eddie Willis. Altogether in his career, Reed prepped the winners of 1,764 Quarter Horse races, with his starters earning more than $17.8 million. Morgan
shod all of Reed’s horses at Remington Park, where in Grade 1 races Reed won the Heritage
72 SPEEDHORSE, October 2018