Page 27 - New Mexico Horse Breeder Spring 2018

general manager for the Oklahoma Quarter Horse Racing Association and then the Texas QHRA. He has worked as a blood stock agent and for a brief time was general manager of Los Alamitos racetrack in southern California.
He held high level positions in the corporate world of online betting and advanced deposit wagering with such companies as UBet.com, American Totalisator (AmTote) and United Tote. He was general manager of UBet’s western region and was named president of United Tote when UBet acquired that company. He was a senior vice president of sales with AmTote.
He has also done marketing at Santa Anita and worked extensively with TVG, the horse racing network.
True has logged hundreds of thousands of miles and been all over the world, from Hong Kong to Paris to Australia, South America, South Africa and Europe. In Ruidoso, he’s now a lot closer to his childhood days in Plano, Texas.
Jeff is the oldest of Michael Gordon True and Deleyne True’s three kids. His sisters, Shelley and
Cheryl still live in Plano. Shelley is a nurse and Cheryl is a teacher and coaches track and basketball.
Jeff ’s dad, who died of cancer in November 2013, was a carpenter who supervised construction sites on major commercial projects. His mother started out as a homemaker, but now owns a company that works with the state of Texas on erosion control.
Jeff says his roots have always been firmly planted in farming.
“My father’s parents were basically raised on a farm,” he says. “My mother’s parents were raised in town and I always gravitated towards the farm. We were always sort of country to the extent you can be in north Dallas.”
“My grandmother was born in Plano in the ‘20s in a little house on the family farm. I’m a fourth generation Texan.”
By age 12, Jeff was accompanying his dad to construction sites.
“That’s where I started to get a work ethic. I learned how to work with people and manage people. I gravitated towards leadership roles and FFA.”
True says he gained a lot of management and business skills from his dad. He saw how his dad dealt with sub-contractors, how he interacted with the owners of buildings he was working on. “He would teach me things along the way,” says True.
Occasionally, Jeff would recruit some of his high school buddies to help him do clean up work for an hourly wage at the job sites.
“Every spring break, every Christmas break, every summer, from seventh grade all the way through college, I was working for him,” says Jeff.
In high school, Jeff was involved in FFA and rodeo. He showed cattle and did livestock judging.
As a freshman, he stood 4-foot-11 and weighed less than 100 pounds but that didn’t deter him from riding 1,200 pound bulls.
Bull riding became the event of choice by default.
“I really couldn’t afford a saddle,” says Jeff. “I was feeding the show heifer and driving my own pickup. I couldn’t afford to buy a saddle bronc saddle, which is what I really wanted to do.”
Besides, he wasn’t exactly the prototype bull rider.
In 1996, Oklahoma Quarter Horse Assoc. Exec. Dir. Jeff True accepts a $100 check from Oklahoma Thoroughbred Assoc. Exec. Dir. Gary Simpson after the Quarter Horse Speedy Lunch won the Remington Challenge where 4 Quarter Horses and 4 Thoroughbreds raced against each other. Simpson also agreed to wear True’s straw cowboy hat for a week.
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