Page 46 - March_2023

SPEEDLINES
44 SPEEDHORSE March 2023
Julianna Hawn Holt, breeder of Eye Am King.
records, but they didn’t have
his conformation. It had been a thrill to take him to the yearling sale and he had so much action and you never know what a horse is going to bring. You don’t know if people are trying to build up your ego and how sincere they are. But we had several people tell us he was the best horse at the sale. He has
just incredible conformation
and he is real correct. He is the right size, not too big and not too small. He has a really good mind. Just the whole package. It was unfortunate that his racing career didn’t turn out any better. We felt like he was worth taking a chance on. We are only in the first quarter so we don’t know what will happen in the rest
of the game, but we are pretty excited about the yearlings that we sold last year. I’ve talked to some trainers and they’re pretty impressed with how some of them are working, and of course you know everybody has a runner
this time of year. So, we won’t know till they get into a race, but it has all panned out for us at this point, and we have bred a lot of our good mares to him.”
He then added about how others are looking at Eye Am King. “We bred like 84
mares the first year and every year since we have bred over 100 mares a year.”
CONFORMATION & PEDIGREE OF A SIRE
Mac will introduce our look at the pedigree and the conformation of Eye Am King with this story. “A long time ago I had a horse with D. Wayne Lucas right at the end of his time with Quarter Horses. I spent some time with him and D. Wayne has always been one of my heroes. He is one of the sharpest people I have been around. He told me this one time while talking about stallions, ‘Mac, a stallion has got to have three things. They have got to have the breeding; they’ve got to have the conformation; and they have got to have the race record.’ He then told me the only one of those three things you
can compromise on is the race record if they have a legitimate excuse. If there
is something that prevented them from getting that race record, you might still have a chance at his being a sire, and I have watched that over the years and I think he was pretty much dead on. It is really hard to prove an unraced stallion.”
An added note: MJ Farms sire Woodbridge is a home-bred that was unraced but has sired the winners of over $6 million.
Let’s start with Eye Am King’s conformation. Mac described Eye Am Corona this way, giving us the outstanding conformation this colt brought to his
life as a sire. “He has just incredible
© Courtesy Julianna Hawn Holt
“When Julianna put her in the Heritage Fall Sale, we specifically went back to try to buy her. I talked to several people about what they thought she would bring, and it didn’t matter because we bought her for less than what we would have paid for her.”
He continued on how Eye Am King entered the picture. “We bought Eye For Corona in foal to Mr Jess Perry, so that is why Julianna Hawn Holt is the breeder of Eye Am King. We took him to the sale as a yearling and he was the high seller that year. He sold for $300,000. He was sold to HWD Racing Stables.
“Unfortunately, everything from there went wrong. He had colic surgery and then he had shin problems, so he never got a start at two. Then at three they got a start, and
he bowed a tendon in his only start. We had lost Jessie James Jr and we were looking for a stallion to replace him, so we contacted the people at HWD Racing Stables because we liked him so much and made a deal to buy him back. That is how we got him back.”
Mac explains why they brought him back to MJ Farms. “We had Jesse James Jr and we lost him to laminitis, and we felt we needed a Mr Jess Perry son. We had looked at a couple others and they had some race
Mr Jess Perry, sire of Eye Am King.