Page 28 - New Mexico Horse Breeder Spring 2018

“I wasn’t that good,” says Jeff. “Most bull riders have long legs and short torsos. I had short legs and a long torso.”
During his junior and senior years at Plano High, he worked on farms in the area, then spent the summer after high school at the Nine Bar Ranch in South Texas.
Jeff went on to Tarleton State, where he earned a bachelor of science degree in agriculture with a concentration in horse production and management. His initial goal was to become a veterinarian but his grades coming out of high school weren’t quite good enough.
By then, the horse and cattle industries were becoming a larger part of his focus.
At the Nine Bar Ranch, True worked with the Santa Gertrudis breed of cattle. He had shown the same breed in high school as part
of the FFA experience. At Nine Bar, there were 700 to 800 cows on the ranch and a couple of hundred bulls.
“I really thought I was going to be a cattle farm manager,” he says.
It was at Tarleton that Jeff first came in contact with Ben Hudson, who would become a lifelong mentor and friend to Jeff. Hudson, who now owns Track Magazine, was serving on an advisory board for the horse production and management degree program at Tarleton State when Jeff was a student there in 1984.
Hudson says Jeff, who last year received the
school’s distinguished alumni award, made an immediate, positive impression on him.
“In the 20 years I went down there (to Tarleton State), he was the brightest kid. He just stood out,” says Hudson. “He wanted to know more. He dressed neater. He soaked up everything that you tried to tell him. I knew he was going somewhere.”
Hudson says he wasn’t the only one who took notice of True’s potential. So did the school’s then-president Barry Thompson. Thompson, who passed away four years ago, would later on be named chancellor of the entire Texas A&M educational system.
Hudson recalls Thompson saying that in all his years as an educator, True was the best student he had known.
Years later, Hudson was part of the Texas Quarter Horse owners and breeders who hired Jeff as executive director of the Texas Quarter Horse Association. And it was Hudson who last summer contacted True when the new ownership group of Ruidoso Downs was looking for a general manager.
True says he and his wife Karen were hiking a trail in southern California when he got a text message from Hudson.
Hudson wanted to know “if there’s a chance” Jeff would be interested in exploring the job opening at Ruidoso. There apparently was more than a chance because Jeff met with the new owners and accepted their offer.
“When those guys (partners) bought Ruidoso, two of them asked me who I would get to run it,” says Hudson, “I told them, this guy loves
the Southwest and he’s tenacious. I knew they needed him.”
At the time, True was running the sales
group for AmTote. That company, says True, is the leading provider of historical horse racing products and is a leading services provider for the advanced deposit wagering (ADW) industry.
“We’re selling all over the world and going big guns. I’m happy,” he says. “I’m surfing every day in California. Doing 100,000 air miles a year. Flying to Maryland, to Paris, London, Hong Kong, Sydney, South America.”
So given all that, what was the deal-maker in his decision to leave it all behind for Ruidoso Downs?
“I don’t know that I can pinpoint one thing,” he says while sitting in his office at Ruidoso a couple of months ago. “I was ready for a change. I had done all the things I wanted to get accomplished at AmTote and I was tired of traveling. Traveling 100,000 miles a year commercially around the world is glamorous for about two months.”
True was general manager at Los Alamitos for a brief period in 2003—about four months more or less—and Ruidoso Downs’ new owners were giving him an opportunity to get back to that end of the business.
“When I left Los Alamitos I was doing what I wanted to do. I had said back in the ‘80s, I had
Jeff True, Johnny Trotter, Stan Sigman, R.D. Hubbard and Narciso “Chicho” Flores after the partners purchased Ruidoso Downs from Mr. Hubbard.
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