Page 71 - Speedhorse February

LOOKING BACK
String were the leading Thoroughbreds
to cross on Quarter mares in the Tucson area, and they wanted an outcross for these Three Bars and Piggin String mares, as
well as colder mares. When Dink looked at Spotted Bull, (and he could look at a horse!) he didn’t particularly like him, because he was breaking type. Three Bars and Piggin String were Quarter type Thoroughbreds. Spotted Bull was a grand looking horse, but more on the classic lines in conformation. He should be, being by *Bull Dog and
out of one of the greatest of all Man O’
War mares, and he was. We don’t run backwards from horses like him today, but at that time, it was quite a different story. Dink wasn’t enthusiastic in recommending him to the other investors until he saw
his mother, and he flatly stated that
Spotted Beauty was far and away the best broodmare he had ever seen. She was a dapple gray, and that’s why her breeder named her Spotted Beauty. So I’m told.
Dink told Echols, “Hell, Ed, we can’t go wrong on this horse!” He was a champion sprinter, and being by *Bull Dog on top and out of this great Man O’ War mare, he said, “Let’s buy him. If the other fellows don’t like him, I’ll buy him myself!” So they brought him back to Arizona and
sold shares in him for $1000 a share.
The syndication was called the Arizona Syndicate, and this was the first syndicate around Tucson, to my knowledge. They are very common now throughout the Quarter Horse industry, and of course, the Thoroughbred people had been doing this sort of thing forever. I knew so little about it at that time, I recall asking Dink to explain the details of how it worked.
They started standing Spotted Bull first at Mel Haskell’s in the spring of 1950, and he proved to be a worthy progenitor with his first small crop of runners. He sired some terrifically fast sprinters, both Thoroughbred and Quarter Horses. You know, he actually bred very few mares, and many of those he did cover
were mediocre. Yet he sired 33 ROM in racing, including Arizonan, Bella St. Mary, Defiance, Hijo the Bull (TB), Hoodwink, Johnny Bull, Manor Man, Oh My Oh, Panama Ace, Raza, Spotted Lady, Sonoitan, Table Tennis, Winken Wayne, and he sired 30 producing daughters. And in all due respect to Lightning Bar, and I dearly loved that horse and couldn’t help but appreciate him, I sold nearly all the Lightning Bar’s and
kept what few Spotted Bull’s I had. I’d breed a mare to him on the average of two each season. They weren’t the all-around horses, necessarily, that Lightning Bar colts were, but they were the fastest horses being bred, and out of his first two or three crops, they won many of the top races in the country. Spotted Bull’s get were faster horses than Lightning Bar’s. They also beat the other Three Bars and most everything else run at them.
World Champion Quarter Running Gelding 1955, Arizonan, retires from racing in 1965. Art Pollard is shown leading the son of Spotted Bull after
winning his last race.
Jack Sheaffer, Quarter Racing World Archives
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