Page 42 - Canada Spring 2021

LOOKING BACK
manager, and the Estate of S.B. Burnett and Tom L. Burnett Cattle Company. Interestingly fourteen of the original seventeen owners are still in the syndicate. They meet annually to discuss the syndicate affairs at Ruidoso, New Mexico, the Saturday morning of the All American Futurity.
Added to all the frustrations and near misses in buying Azure Te is the fact that, during his racing career, he came very close to making himself completely unaffordable as a Quarter Horse sire. Buster Millerick, who trained Azure Te, told Jay some years after he had bought him, that Azure Te and Native Diver were the fastest horses he had ever trained and two of the fastest horses he had ever seen. Azure Te’s regular jockey had been set down and Millerick opted to run the horse in the Hollywood Juvenile Championship with a substitute.
He instructed the jockey to let the horse run his own race, but Azure Te left the gate with the rider fanning him with the whip. He ran second and Millerick told Jay he cost Azure Te that race by using the substitute
jockey. Now, suppose Azure Te’s jockey had ridden him and he’d won that stakes race. And suppose that he’d been a head in front of Terry’s Secret in the Del Mar Futurity instead of the other way around. Both were $100,000 stakes races and winning them would have moved Azure Te into greater prominence in the Thoroughbred world. From the publicity of those two races alone it is doubtful that Azure Te would have been affordable as a Quarter Horse sire. I don’t mean to minimize Azure Te’s racing carrer for it was far from shabby. He won the Debonair Stakes at Hollywood Park defeating his half-brothers Nasharco and Chiclero. Azure Te was the only three year
old in the 1965 Hollywood Express Handicap which he led all the way and won by two open lengths.
He led the Hollywood Lakes and Flowers Handicap wire to wire and had career earnings of $199,022. In twenty-six lifetime starts he led at the quarter in 18 and was beaten by aheadin4;ledatthehalfin19and was beaten by a head in 2, led at five
furlongs in 16 and was beaten by a head in two. Azure Te’s best times at the quarter and a half were 21-2/5 and 44-1/5; five furlongs 56 1/5, five and one-half furlongs 1:02-3/5, six furlongs 1:09 flat and seven furlongs 1:22-3/5. Few horses consistently run five furlongs in under :57 as Azure Te did. His speed is backed by a pedigree of speed in which sixty- one of the sixty-two horses in the first five generations of his family tree were either stakes winners or stakes producers. Speed begets speed and Azure Te is as convincing an argument for that truism as any horse on earth, both in his lineage and his sire record.
The Azure Te Syndicate arranged for Ted Wells to stand the horse and in 1968, his first year at stud, and with little advertising time, Azure Te stood for a fee of $1,000 and bred 41 mares. Many of the mares belonged to syndicate owners and, as he was an unproven sire, there were only a few good ones booked to him. The syndicate made a point of sticking to their stud fee and treating all comers
Azure Three wins the 1977 Los Alamitos Derby.
42 SPEEDHORSE CANADA Spring 2021