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Lance and his wife Marla
Lance and Dr. Bailey attended pretty much every major Thoroughbred sale in the country for a number of years. It was during this time that he honed his ability to judge a horse by how its conformation related to its intended purpose. “That was a great education,” he says.
But that education had begun years before, when he started taking rodeo seriously. “Clark Brown in Nebraska trained rope horses and
he’s probably the first guy who helped me get interested in learning conformation,” Lance says.
It wasn’t just his passion for conformation that led Lance to success in the equine industry. “Lance works harder than anybody I know,” Keith says. “There’s nobody who gets as much out of 24 hours as he does. Lance will hop in the truck and haul our 15-horse trailer all the way to Oklahoma without stopping except at Albuquerque to get gas and water, then he’ll take six hours, load back up and drive home. He says he trained for this his whole life in rodeoing. He just has this ultimate can-do attitude.
“He’s also an eternal optimist,” Keith adds. “I think all great athletes have to be because they can’t dwell on the missed yesterday; they have to believe in the next time. And also, Lance married the perfect woman for him.”
Return to Utah
In his early 20s, after he’d returned home from his mission, Lance connected with Marla King, whom he’d known from high school. The couple married in 1980.
Although Marla’s dad had a horse that he used once a year for deer hunting, neither Marla nor any of her four brothers and sisters had any equine interest. But when she married Lance, she married horses as well. “It was a whole different life than what I was used to,” she says. “That was interesting to me, and the rodeo part was fun and exciting. I jumped in with both feet!
“Lance had a mare and a stud that he’d bought in Kentucky, and it started from there,” adds Marla, who works side by side with Lance in every facet of their business, from feeding
to foaling, breeding to bookwork, at their Fairholme Farms in Spanish Fork, Utah.
Although Marla’s dad had a horse that he used once a year for deer hunting, neither Marla nor any of her four brothers and sisters had any equine interest. But when she married Lance, she married horses as well. “It was a whole different life than what I was used to,” she says. “That was interesting to me, and the rodeo part was fun and exciting. I jumped in with both feet!”
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