Page 80 - March 2020

A PERFECT 78 SPEEDHORSE March 2020
by Diane Rice
FOUNDATION
Jeff Adams built his breeding operation from the bottom side.
Afull-page Appaloosa Journal ad provided HIS OWN FOUNDATION Before Jeff bought Whats Up Ghost, the
the push that Jeff Adams needed to
get back into Appaloosa racing in the early 2000s: Wagon Wheel Ranch in Utah was dispersing its herd.
“The ad got me thinking about how much fun I’d had with racing as a kid, so I called and told the ranch manager, Jeannie Hullinger, that I wanted one mare — the best mare she had,” says the Durant, Oklahoma breeder/owner of top-tier Appaloosa runners.
The ranch manager told Jeff that the
horse he wanted was Perfect Intention (Easily Smashed QH-Caesaduino, Beduino TB). “She’s the mother, grandmother or great-grandmother of everything I’ve raised,” Jeff says.
Although the mare that founded the bottom side of Jeff’s outstanding breeding program earned just $11,708 in her own race career, she made her mark as an outstanding dam. Her 13 foals included nine race starters that earned a total of $478,504.50, with three earning stakes-winning status, four stakes placed, and nine earning registers of merit. She died in the fall of 2019, leaving a legacy as the all-time leading producer of Appaloosa racehorses.
Jeff inherited his horse passion from his father, Phil, a blacksmith whose book included the Appaloosa World and National shows for years. Jeff was the oldest of seven children born to Phil and Connie Adams, and grew up about halfway between Decatur, Indiana, and Convoy, Ohio, just inside the Ohio state line, about 140 miles north of Cincinnati.
“We started out showing Appaloosa horses and I showed until I was about 13, then
sold Pepsi T, the horse I’d won so much on, and we got into racehorses,” he says. Along with running his own horses, he earned his gas money during high school by galloping racehorses for others.
His first racehorse was the Appaloosa Whats Up Ghost (Ghost Of Comanche–Dina Doolin, Bill Doolin), whom he bought when he was 17. “That was amazing!” Jeff says of his first stakes winner. “You’re a kid and you think you’re invincible anyways, and then you have a horse that’s hard for anybody
to outrun. He set the bar pretty high for everything after that.”
1968 Appaloosa gelding had earned the ApHC’s 1970 Champion 2-Year-Old Sprint Gelding title and the Champion 4-And-Older Gelding titles in 1972, ’74 and ’76. In 1988, he was inducted into the Appaloosa Horse Club (ApHC) Racing Hall of Fame.
Jeff continued in racing until he was 21, then got back into showing pleasure horses when he moved to California for about four years. His last show horse, Shes Good Looking, won the 2004 ApHC World Championship and a Bronze Medallion in Performance along with two Year-End Top Tens and a Superior Event title, all in Senior Western Pleasure.
By then he’d moved to Oklahoma (in 1984). “I met someone and moved here,” he says. “Thank goodness, because I love it here!”
It was around 2001 that he made that serendipitous call to Wagon Wheel Ranch that secured Perfect Intention and launched him back into the racing industry to become a four-time ApHC Leading Owner and seventh on the All-Time Leading Owners’ List by money earned.