Page 154 - February 2021

“To get the best, breed the best to the best. And hope for the best.”
PYC Paint Your Wagon, sire of Grade 1-winning Champion Curls Happy Wagon.
Smith describes Twin Lakes as a “family business” with his sister and
brother-in-law Dryce and Colleen Stoner, and Tony and Candace Brackens. Tony Brackens was a star defensive end
at the University of Texas and Pro Bowl starter for the Jacksonville Jaguars. The
Brackens live on their ranch at Fairfield, adja- cent to the property on which Tony was raised
by his parents.
Michael, Tony and Jason are avid team ropers. “I’m a big guy – 6’ 5”, 300 pounds – so I
have some pretty big horses,” says Smith, who heads. “So does Tony. Michael has some big ones, too, some real nice horses he’s acquired through Justin Davis, an NFR qualifier.”
Now they all are looking for faster horses. They started at Heritage Place in January.
“Michael bought the mare, paid the money,” Smith says. “He wasn’t at the sale. I was on the phone with him and Tony was rais- ing his hand and bidding.”
Smith stresses that he and Tony are working with Herd, rather than for him.
“Michael wants to make an impact through horse racing.”
Randy & Stacy Charette-Hill with Curls Happy Wagon at the 2021 Heritage Place Winter Mixed Sale.
“We are friends,” he says. “Michael wants to make an impact through horse racing. He’s like a brother to me, my best friend, and he entrusted us to help him when he heard our ideas and what we were doing with barrel
racing. He has barrel racing mares, too, but he wants to impact horse racing by going to higher-caliber mares.”
What they got in Curls Happy Wagon is
a Grade 1-winning Champion by PYC Paint Your Wagon. Bred in Oklahoma by Michael Pohl and Martin Stacy of Texas, the 5-year-old mare is out of the Grade 3-winning Spit Curl Jess mare Eye A Spit Curl Girl ($193,511) and is a half-sister to the Valiant Hero mare Valiant Curl Girl ($31,672).
GETTING STARTED
Trained in 2020 by Stacy Charette-Hill and Juan Aleman, Curls Happy Wagon won three of six starts while earning $145,822. Each of her victories leading to her cham- pionship were for all-caps black type: the Mildred N. Vessels Memorial Handicap-G1, Las Damas Handicap-G2 and Decketta Stakes-G2.
“She’s the kind of horse that made my job easy,” says Charette-Hill, who four years ear- lier had started the mare under saddle. “They lay a lot of hands on the horses at Mr. Stacy’s farm. So ’Curls’ broke out great from day 1 – bitting her, driving her, the whole works. She did everything right. We’d turn and work her
or go around the turn and let her down a little bit, with a partner, then we’d let them walk through the gate and work together.
“When we hand-opened Curls, everything was fine – never had a problem at all with her,” the veteran trainer recalls. “We came back three or four weeks later and kicked her away with company, and she did perfect, I mean, wow, she could run! Well, the next day she was a little ouchy. I though ohmygosh! It wasn’t bad, but you could tell she was off, just a little hitch.
“We x-rayed her,” she continues. “You could see it from the get-go: a small defor- mity in the bottom joint of her knee. She had been born with it – that’s just the way it was. It wasn’t genetic. It was just the way she was made, maybe because of the way she laid in her mama or whatever. The vets labeled
it degenerative joint disease, but it never changed much except for a little arthritis as she aged. The vet told us to turn her out and make a broodmare out of her, because she’d probably never run.”
In meantime, they tried additional therapy.
“What the heck, we’ll give it a try,” Charette-Hill says. “We did stem cell and turned her out, basically forgot about her because Curls was just going to be a brood- mare. Well, she’d just ran and played in the pasture so much, we thought, since we already had her gate broke, that we’d take her to
Iowa and take a shot, and if it goes wrong,
152 SPEEDHORSE February 2021