Frank “Scoop” Vessels, III
Bonsall, California
2003 Galbreath Award
(Transcript of Lecture)
The John W. Galbreath Award for Outstanding Entrepreneurship in the Equine Industry has been presented each year since 1990 to one individual whose success within the industry has been due to the utilization of uncommon abilities or innovative approaches to business management. Each recipient has had a positive impact on the equine industry because of his entrepreneurship, and has gained widespread respect for it.
John W. Galbreath, in whose name the award is presented, distinguished himself internationally as both a horseman and a businessman. No one else has ever bred and raced winners of the Kentucky Derby (Chateugay and Proud Clarion) and also the Epsom Derby (Roberto). He was the owner of Darby Dan Farm (producer of over 90 stakes winners) and the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball team, as well as chairman of the board of Churchill Downs. His business interests included large-scale development projects around the world.
Winners of the Galbreath Award have been: John A. Bell, 1990; James E. Bassett, 1991; Cothran Campbell, 1992; John R. Gaines, 1993; Ami Shinitzki, 1994; Robert Clay, 1995; B. Thomas Joy, 1996; John Lyons, 1997; D. Wayne Lukas, 1998; Thomas H. Meeker, 1999; Denny Gentry, 2000; David S. Willmot, 2001; William S. "Billy" Morris III, 2002; and Frank “Scoop” Vessels III, 2003. Recipients are invited to the UofL campus in the fall of their award year to deliver the annual Galbreath Lecture to students, faculty, and guests, usually dealing with their own experiences and their personal philosophies.
Frank “Scoop” Vessels III is unique in that he ranks simultaneously among the nation’s top leading breeders in both the Thoroughbred and Quarter Horse industries. The esteem in which both camps hold him is borne out by the fact that he is vice president of the American Quarter Horse Association and is also the vice president of the California Thoroughbred Breeders Association. Known best for the creation and management of the Vessels Stallion Farm near San Diego, he was a six-time winner of the Baja Peninsula off-road races and is one of the originators of the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series. His farm stands the top racing Quarter horse stallion in the country, First Down Dash, as well as the leading Thoroughbred sire in the West Coast, In Excess (ire). Scoop Vessels is one of the equine industry’s most exemplary entrepreneurs.
The John W. Galbreath Award is a project of the Equine Industry Program (EIP), an academic unit of the University of Louisville’s AACSB-accredited College of Business and Public Administration. Created by an act of the Kentucky State Legislature, the EIP is the only equine program in North America that offers a BS degree in business administration. Through 2001, more than 520 undergraduate students have taken EIP courses. Other EIP functions, in addition to teaching, are industry research and professional service.
Copyright 2003, Equine Industry Program
Equine
Industry
Program
College of Business and Public
Administration
University of Louisville
Louisville, KY
40292
Dr. Robert G. Lawrence, Director
Office: 502.852.7617
Bob Lawrence
Good afternoon and welcome to our 14th annual Galbreath Lecture. We certainly appreciate this good turnout of students and guests, especially on this warm Kentucky afternoon. I just want to comment very briefly on the Galbreath Award. This industry has been presenting awards to horses, or to the owners and breeders of horses, since the days of George Washington, and I mean that literally. But in the late 1980s, after this program was established in UofL’s business college, we began thinking seriously about the important role of entrepreneurs in the horse industry. We realized that even though entrepreneurs are the people who move this industry forward, there were no awards for them. So, we decided to establish an annual award for entrepreneurship.
Naturally, we wanted to name this award in honor of someone who was widely respected in the industry, so we gathered a list of candidates and started investigating. There were nice comments about all the people on our list, but there were often also a few comments such as, “You always had to keep a hand on your wallet when you were dealing with him.” As it turned out, there was only one person on that entire list about whom we received absolutely no negatives, and that was John Galbreath. To be sure, he was a very wealthy and successful international businessman, but everyone who ever knew him, at every level, had only complimentary things to say.
Mr. Galbreath owned the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball club, and was also the first person ever to breed a winner of both the English Derby and also the Kentucky Derby. But the thing that stood out about him was how much people liked him. We introduced this award in Louisville and Jim McKay, then active with ABC, made the announcement. Jim said, “Yes, he was a prominent man, but John Galbreath encompassed everything you could ever ask for in a friend.”
I think Mr. Galbreath would be pleased by those who have won this award over the years; men such as Cot Campbell, Denny Gentry, Wayne Lukas, Ami Shinitzky, and nine more, each one having made his own important contribution to some aspect of this dynamic horse business. If you look at the award trophy as you leave, you will see a list of all the previous thirteen recipients since 1990. I’m very pleased that we have another outstanding winner this year, and I want to ask Rich Wilcke of our UofL equine business department to make the introduction.
Rich Wilcke:
Thank you, Bob. There is no question in my mind that Scoop Vessels personifies precisely what the Galbreath Award is about, not only as an entrepreneur but also as a person. Jim McKay once showed me the guest room in his farmhouse in Maryland and said, “This was built for John Galbreath to use when he visits.” I really believed he was referring to John Kenneth Galbraith, the famous economist from Harvard University, but Jim said, “No, no, it’s for John Galbreath of Darby Dan Farm. He is one of the dearest gentlemen that Margaret and I have ever known, and so we built this special room so that he would feel comfortable coming to visit us.”
I think Scoop is that kind of person, as well as that kind of entrepreneur. He came from a family that has been closely associated with Quarter Horse racing for decades. His grandfather, Frank Vessels, built Los Alamitos racecourse over 50 years ago, and it soon became the flagship facility for Quarter Horse racing, and still is today. His father, Frank Vessels, Jr., stood some of the greatest stallions in the Quarter Horse racing history, such as the legendary Go Man Go, plus the all-time leading Thoroughbred sire of Quarter Horse winners, Beduino, which he imported from Mexico. He did all this on a relatively small farm operation near the track.
In about 1980, Scoop made a major commitment to this business by developing his Vessels Stallion Farm at Bonsall, California. Today, this farm is one of the top horse-breeding operations anywhere in the country. One achievement, which is significant and unusual in this industry, is that Scoop has attained world-class success in both Quarter Horses and Thoroughbreds. A lot of people dabble in both breeds but no one has ever reached a pinnacle of success with each. In Excess is the leading California stallion on the Thoroughbred side while First Down Dash is the number one Quarter Horse racing stallion in the world. And the esteem in which both camps hold him is borne out by the fact that Scoop is vice president of the California Thoroughbred Breeders Association, as well as first vice president of the American Quarter Horse Association.
Just one more thing: Scoop was far and away the prime mover of the American Quarter Horse Youth Racing Program. Now we don’t give this award for contributions to associations but everybody who is involved in the Quarter Horse racing industry – plus the judges that we had, who are all professors here at the business school – agree that for him to make the effort that he has made in trying to bring future generations into the business, and to focus on the long-term viability of the Quarter Horse racing industry, is entrepreneurship in it’s fullest sense.
We are proud to have Scoop Vessels as our 14th Galbreath winner.
Scoop Vessels:
Thank you, gentlemen. Let me begin by thanking everyone connected with the Galbreath Award. John Galbreath was clearly a hell of a man, and to put the Vessels name up alongside his, along with those of the other winners, is very important to me. So, let me first thank everyone who was involved in making this honor possible. I am still amazed about it.
Walking through campus, I could not help but notice that wonderfully realistic metallic sculpture of an American Quarter Horse out there in bright red in front of the business school. It is an amazing specimen, and I am hoping that I can actually take it from the University of Louisville campus and give it to the folks at the offices of the American Quarter Horse Association in Amarillo. I believe they would be very proud to have that beautiful horse on display.
My name is actually Frank Vessels III. They call me “Scoop” because I used to hang around the horse stalls a lot when I was a kid and so my grandfather gave me the nickname Scoop. Unfortunately, it stuck. You have to be careful as you are growing up because sometimes things stick to you for a lifetime.
I am going to tell you a little about where our family came from in this industry, and about the path we took to where we are today. It is my hope that through this you will grasp a little of my passion, and perhaps understand something about the passion that it takes to become part of this industry. I am a huge believer in passion in anything that you do. You need to have passion for anything you are involved in, whether it is racing off-road cars or breeding horses – otherwise you’re just spinning your wheels, going through an exercise. You know if you have a passion for something or not. If you can’t stay away from it, you probably have a passion.
Let me tell you something else. I am not really a public speaker, and never have been. Oh, I went to school, but there are just some things in life that never come to you. When I heard that a part of this award was to give a 45-minute lecture, I thought, “I have sure been given lots of 45-minute lectures but I don’t recall ever giving one to anyone else.” So I hope you will bear with me. I plan to talk about some things of importance to me and maybe you will find them entertaining.
I was born in 1952, shortly after the end of the Korean War, and about 10 years after the American Quarter Horse Association was founded. That was an exciting time around Vessels Ranch, when I was growing up. Granddad had just started a new track for Quarter Horse racing; the first such track on the West Coast. Up until then, Quarter Horses were only run in Arizona, Texas, and New Mexico, so it was a big deal to bring Quarter Horse racing to Southern California. Over the years, we haven’t actually moved far away but we have ventured a bit more.
Just a few years before that, my grandfather had helped to bring an organization called the “National Quarter Horse Racing Association,” which was located in Arizona, under the umbrella of the American Quarter Horse Association. Both organizations had been going down a similar road but not making much headway, partly because of all the in-fighting. Frank, Sr., got them both going in one direction and, after these two groups started working together, Quarter Horse racing began to take off. The AQHA became a center of all the rules and activities, which gave my grandfather a workable registry and a vision of a huge expansion of Quarter Horse racing.
When I was a kid there were always people around. There were people in suits and ties, and everybody wore a cowboy hat. Everybody talked about the great future of Quarter Horse racing, and how big it was going to be. It was an amazing time. I was just a kid running around but I think every single person was excited about what was going to happen once we got that track finished. I remember as a young child running around kicking dirt as the bulldozers moved the land around, even riding in the bulldozers that would soon become the track where the horses would run. Nobody knew then just how important that dirt would become for the future of Quarter Horse racing or how many great horses would run over that surface.
My Granddad and Dad had a lot of good ideas and one little problem, not enough horses. They quickly discovered that Southern California was too far for people to go to run their horses. Of course, we did have a few local trainers take a stab at it. Granddad hired Farrel Jones, who ended up being a pretty famous trainer, but he sure didn’t know what to do with Quarter Horses when he started out at our place. Anyway, they began offering weekend match races. People would come from all over on Sundays, bring their beer and match their horses. Granddad loved the idea of having everybody come to the track but he absolutely hated getting beat.
As a result, when he heard that there were a lot of good broodmares with speed available in Louisiana, he soon went there to get some. Most of them had Thoroughbred bloodlines from the old Army remount stations. I still remember when I was small that he was gone for quite a while on that trip. He ended up sending back two train-car loads of mares from Louisiana; three of which became foundation mares of our operation today. Anyway, Granddad now had all these mares and was planning to raise our own horses so that we’d never get beat again, which never happens.
In those days, Huntley Gordon was an old family friend who owned a lot of land in that area. He was the great-grandfather of Robbie Gordon, the NASCAR driver. My Granddad was a good friend of Huntley Gordon, who had heard of a stallion in Arizona named Clabber. He was supposed to be the all-around Quarter Horse. It was said you could do ranch work on him all morning, rope on him all afternoon, and then run him in races in the evening. At the time, he was the world’s champion quarter running horse. These two guys got into a convertible, drove to Tucson, and bought the horse – likely for a pretty sweet sum at that time. Robbie Gordon’s dad has a photograph in his office of these two men in that convertible pulling a one-horse trailer and smoking big cigars. They must have thought they had hung the moon.
So, now we had a world champion stallion coming back to breed all those mares from Louisiana. Looking back, I consider that point in time to mark the real beginning of Vessels Stallion Farm. In years to come, there were many great horses on that place. My Dad continued not only to promote the track but also to work in Sacramento to get the legislature to legalize pari-mutuel wagering on Quarter Horses. By the mid-1950s, we were running quite a bit and there was no longer a horse shortage. Owners and trainers had discovered that running in Southern California was nice in the winter. We had some great meets and there were some really fast runners in those early days. Whenever we had famous horses, we would pack the stands.
When I was a kid, I would go to the backside of the track every day after school. Today, you can’t do that in most places and that has always bothered me. I think we have lost generations of kids who weren’t able to grow up around the backside of the track. All of us would go there and our sports heroes were the horses in the stalls. Even when we ran races, one would be Go Man Go and the other one Easy Jet or whomever. That was the passion that we had. Other kids had baseball cards, and I suppose if they had had Quarter Horse trading cards at the time, my buddies and I would have packed them around. I remember us following Go Man Go up to the paddock and back. And, if given the chance, we would hold horses while they were washed.
That was the difference between our heroes and those other sport heroes on the trading cards. Our heroes you could actually touch, feel, and see everyday – and they never talked back.
I remember the first time that it finally sunk in that a trainer is a person who could take an animal with raw talent, guide him in a certain direction, and formulate the rest of his life. I think I must have been about 12 years old. Earl Holmes was our horse trainer, and I began to understand that he could determine whether a stallion turned out to be a good one or whether he ended up a gelding, and that mares could make you money in the sale rings. But those trainers were the people who took that raw talent and send it in the direction that it needs to go.
The first time it sunk in was with a horse named Scooper Chick. He had shown a lot of brilliance but he wasn’t very consistent. He was really fast at times but had never run in a stakes race. The Los Alamitos Championship was coming up and while he was entered, there was an obstacle. There was a horse coming from Oklahoma called Easy Jet. Easy Jet at that time was undefeated; he was the champion, the monster, the top-ranked team. I watched Earl Holmes live with Scooper Chick for days. He worked on his feet, he managed his water, he galloped him at certain times, and he even took him to the track while it was still dark because he didn’t want everybody to know what he was doing. To make a long story short, he snuck up and beat Easy Jet.
That was an event that I will never forget because it was the first time that I truly understood what trainers do, and how much fun they could have. In my teens, I started showing horses – mostly working cow horses and cutting – and I roped a little bit. That gave me some idea of how hard it is for a trainer to map a horse’s future and have it all happen at a certain time. To hold all of that pent-up energy and then have it explode at the right time, not a day late or two days early but exactly at post-time. As anyone who has been around horses knows, it is a kind of a “give-and-take-and-then-reward” type of situation. I guess that is an approach that we can all use a little bit of in other aspects of our life – give and take, and then a reward.
I played the usual sports in high school and I even played a little college football but I never found anything I really loved until auto racing came into my life. For some reason, I fell completely in love with that sport, off-road racing in particular. Most of you from this part of the country have probably never seen or even heard of off-road racing. But in the late 1960s, there were a few guys enjoying some beers at a bar in Tijuana, Mexico. They started looking at a map of the Baja Peninsula and talking about a place down in La Paz called the Los Arcos Hotel, which has a big porch with rocking chairs. Someone said, “I bet I can beat you down there.”
That is just how the Baja race started. There was a $100 bet, five guys and five vehicles, and they took off from Tijuana, locating their fuel along the way. They had a wonderful time, and today the Baja 1000 is one of the greatest adventure races in the world. There are a few other well-known off-road races, some of them in the Sahara Desert and places like that, but if you are a rally-type adventure racer, the race that you really want to win is the Baja 1000. It is a big deal.
In 1971, I suddenly found myself in the middle of something brand new and exciting. It had only started in the late 1960s but by 1971 every automotive product wanted to be “Baja-proven.” The tire manufacturers and the truck makers – Chevrolet, Dodge, Ford – all wanted to be Baja-proven. They brought tractor-trailer trucks, and were sponsoring drivers and professional teams. It was exciting for a kid just starting out. I was soon sponsored by Chevrolet, BF Goodrich tires, and Mobile One oil. I was having a great time and getting paid to boot; a dream come true. In 1974, I won Rookie of the Year honors, and the Baja 500 in 1975.
It is a long grueling trip down that peninsula – some of those races are 23 hours long – but what racing did was to teach me a lot about myself. It made me press myself. It made me push the envelope a little. It helped me find out whether I could go further, and whether I could run with the big boys. That is something everyone has to find out about himself sooner or later. You have to push yourself to see if you can take it – for your own good. Racing taught me a lot about myself. It was also the time that I met my wife, Bonnie, who has been a good friend and partner for years. She followed me down those 1,000-mile races in the dirt. I don’t why but she did.
During the early 1980s, I took time off for a dream that I had had. Because of the sale of Los Alamitos, I was given an opportunity to design and build our Vessels Stallion Farm. It was something I had always wanted to do. I had been looking at horse farms all my life, but I had my own ideas. I wanted to do it myself, and I suddenly had a chance to do it. We had made some money on the sale of the track, and so I wanted to create a showplace, especially one with green pastures, since in Southern California it is sort of an oddity to have green pastures.
I also wanted a farm that would breed both Quarter Horses and Thoroughbreds. That may seem easy but politically it was not – it took a long time. We already had the Quarter Horses but it took ages to get our first Thoroughbreds there. I was 30-years old at the time, so it was a big dream. While we were under construction that first year, we set up steel panels for a round pen and broke 12 babies there. Bulldozers were moving around, fences were being put up, and the barns were being built, but we felt we had to go ahead with the horses that needed training.
One of those dozen babies that first year was First Down Dash. He was special from the beginning, although none of us really knew it. Yet, he became the foundation that propelled the Vessels Stallion Farm to the top of the world of Quarter Horse racing. He became Champion Two-Year-Old, Champion Three-Year-Old, and World Champion, after winning the Champion of Champions race at 3-years old.
In 1992, my mother died and we were faced with some pretty heavy inheritance taxes. I did not want to break up any of this property. We had about 3,000 acres there in San Diego County, and with the population coming, I realized the longer we held on, the more valuable it would be. So my need was for some vehicle to get Uncle Sam off my back. That vehicle ended up being First Down Dash.
As a racehorse, he had earned approximately $890,000 himself. But by the time his first three crops had gone to the track, he had produced three consecutive winners of the All American Futurity. This, as many of you know, is the richest event in Quarter Horse racing. No other stallion had ever sired three consecutive winners, much less in his first three crops. It was as if somebody hit me in the head. If it were ever possible to syndicate a stallion, this would be the time. The problem was that no Quarter Horse had been syndicated in a long time and the economy was at the absolute bottom. I talked to many people who laughed and scoffed, but by splitting him into 40 shares of $175,000, we syndicated him in about three days. That stallion is the one that allowed us to keep our farm together and he is still out there today.
Syndications allow you to take money out as needed. An outstanding racehorse can get so valuable that you have to take a hard look at whether you can afford to have so much capital wrapped up in one animal. Syndications let you withdraw some of that value while still maintaining control of the horse for your breeding farm. That is what we did. We kept 10 shares with two seasons per share, which has allowed us to breed our own mares and to sell some seasons outright. We have kept those shares rather than flood the market. His shares have risen to $300,000 each, and his sale yearlings today average about $100,000, which is amazing for a Quarter Horse.
We have been lucky and we have had a lot of good sires at Vessels, both before the new place and now. First Down Dash is currently the leading all-time sire in Quarter Horse racing. To date, his foals have earned slightly over $43 million. His sire, Dash for Cash, died a few years ago and his progeny earnings were right at $40 million. To give you a feel for the gap, the next two Quarter Horse stallions are at $22-23 million. There is a huge gap after those two guys.
Some time after we syndicated First Down Dash, I contacted a friend of mine, Blane Schvaneveldt, who is a kind of icon in Quarter Horse racing. We decided to have our own annual sale at the ranch, which we have been doing now for about 12 years. We’ve been lucky enough to sell some awfully good Quarter Horses through our ring, but once again, people advised me it was a bad idea. “All the sales are in Oklahoma and Texas!” Some now say I was smart enough not to listen, but I don’t know if I was smart or dumb but it worked. We sold the highest priced yearlings ever sold in Quarter Horse racing, and this past year we sold 412 head.
Because I was a little nervous about starting a brand new sale out there, I decided that we needed to try something different, something that hadn’t been done before. So I had some friends in the television business come out and put our sale onto satellite TV. We decided to televise our sale and allow live bidding over the phone. This approach had been tried before in the cattle business. What I wanted was for some guy in Texas to be able to lie on his couch with a beer in his hand and bid on a yearling in California. We did this TV sale for four or five years.
What it best accomplished was to give us our own television show. We had the chance to broadcast our own Vessels Stallion Farm message for a day. We could put on whatever we wanted to, and it turned out to be very important, not only for the sale but also for everything else that was tied into our breeding, our stallions, and for all the other marketing during the rest of the year.
Also in the early 1990s, another thing happened that would change the look of Vessels Stallion Farm. All this time I had been looking for a good Thoroughbred horse. I tried to attract people there, but I did not want an average horse. I wanted something special, something good. But it was tough to attract some people because they had a problem with us being a Quarter Horse operation.
Then Mike Pegram, who is a good friend of mine because of having spent years in Quarter Horse racing, contacted me and said he had loaned a guy $400,000 on this stallion and needed a place to put him for a few weeks before going to Kentucky to sell him. I told him we had a stallion stall and to bring him down. After a couple of days, here comes this stud. The farm manager and I went out as they unloaded the horse off the trailer, and he was fabulous, just an unbelievable individual.
The horse’s name was In Excess (Ire). He had earned $1.8 million dollars, had won four Grade I races in 1992, and was second runner up in Eclipse balloting. Here I had been beating my brains out for the last few years when all of sudden the horse I’d been looking for accidentally ends up on my front doorstep. After a few days of staring at him, I picked up the phone and called Mike. He was in Kentucky and just leaving a farm there. For whatever reason, he was pretty agitated, and so I guess I caught him at the right time. Anyway, I offered $250,000 for half the horse and he said, “OK, we have a deal.” And like that, Vessels had a top Thoroughbred stallion.
A few years later along comes Indian Charlie, a colt by In Excess, who wins the Santa Anita Derby. Not only did we have a top horse but also our farm was suddenly getting known in the Thoroughbred industry. The stallion was getting lots of attention, people were running out from Lexington to try to buy him, and I was just trying to hold them off. It was a pretty wild time. Both Pegram and Bob Baffert wanted us to move him back to Kentucky, yet I kept trying to tell them that I have been waiting all my life for this horse. He was our entry into the Thoroughbred business. Mike kept pushing me and so I said, “Okay, we will syndicate the horse in California.”
Now, you have to remember that I had just got into the Thoroughbred business. I knew a lot of people in racing but I didn’t honestly feel comfortable that I could syndicate this horse. Of course, I didn’t tell him that. I said, “I will put money in your pocket and we will keep the horse here.” They didn’t think we could do it, and, in truth, no stallions had been syndicated in California in a long time. But we got it done, again in three days. To think that we could step into the Thoroughbred industry and syndicate that kind of horse shows you that I think people can do anything. When people tell you it can’t be done, or try to usher you away in another direction, it all comes back to your passion. If you really believe in it, and think you can, then go ahead and do it!
We had always had Thoroughbreds around to cross on our Quarter Horses. The horse that Rich mentioned, Beduino, was brought from Mexico by my father. I will never forget the day I first heard of him. We were down there at an AQHA convention and this Mexican fellow was bugging my dad about going to see this horse. Sometimes it is hard to go look at one more horse. But Dad went out there and then came back that evening and told my mother, “This is probably the greatest horse that I’ve ever seen.” The horse was a Thoroughbred stallion named Beduino. Not too stellar in the Thoroughbred ranks but if you look at the history of Quarter Horse breeding, it seems that horses that have not quite made it in Thoroughbred racing have often become the best sires in Quarter Horse ranks. That was sure the case with Beduino.
We followed him for awhile. We had sent one of our Quarter Horses down to this Mexican fellow to match-race, and for two or three years he was the best Quarter Horse down there. In Mexico City, he was matched up against Beduino and beaten. He came back twice more and each time Beduino beat him. Actually, this fellow ended up being our partner in Beduino. He challenged the whole world for the fastest Quarter Horses to see if they could outrun this horse. Some guys found a horse named Come Six, which had been a world champion gelding. Our partner told them, “You can do whatever you need to do,” and they did. Come Six had never been beat when he broke on top and he broke on top big time that day. But the big grey Thoroughbred, Beduino, beat him. That was when we brought the horse up to the U.S. and started breeding mares. Beduino’s daughters have made First Down Dash.
Currently, we are reshuffling some of our stallions at the farm. We currently have three syndicated horses: First Down Dash, Fishers Dash, which we consider to be First Down Dash’s best son, and In Excess. We also have a horse named Free House, which I hope everybody remembers. He earned $3 million, and was two-time California Horse of the Year. He is a great-looking horse and his first crop is at the racetrack now. In fact, he just had his first stake’s winner. Devon Lane and Apollo are two Thoroughbreds that we use to cross on our Quarter Horse mares. I see Thoroughbreds as our outcross, as opposed to so much inbreeding, which we don’t like.
During the 1990s, I became a member of the board of directors of the American Quarter Horse Association and have been chairman of AQHA’s racing committee and racing council. As mentioned, I am now first vice-president. One of the most satisfying things we have done is to bring racing into AQHA’s youth program. There are probably 60,000 Quarter Horse youth but most programs have been on the show side. We now have youth race experience in which 16 kids end up being placed with a trainer for five days at our MBNA Challenge Championships. They live and breathe with those horses and trainers, and in their spare time they go to the racing office, to the concessions, to the steward stands. They get to see the ins and outs of racing.
It has been fun to be involved with the American Quarter Horse Association. We have about 345,000 members and four million horses, along with all kinds of disciplines, from ranch remudas in West Texas to jumping, show, pleasure, halter, and racehorses, plus regular recreational riding horses. It is exciting for me to be involved in the AQHA, but then I have always liked being involved, even in car racing. I don’t care for people who complain on the backside, or behind your back, or in chat rooms. Those people are usually the ones who don’t understand what is going on. The more involved you are, the more understanding you have of the organization and the industry.
With that, I’ll stop since I have kind of run out of things to say. Besides, my mouth is a little dry and most everybody is still awake. Thank you.
Question: What is the single most important piece of advice you would give someone that you learned about being a success in the horse breeding business?
Scoop: There are a lot of things that happen when you are going to buy a mare or a stallion, or when you are making other decisions. There are a lot of traps. People will send you in weird directions. They may not want you to buy that horse or they will have some fancy theory or some old wife’s tale that doesn’t make any sense. My advice is as follows: If you like the horse or the decision, and you feel you have done your research and believe it is going to help your program, then do it and make it work.
Question: Being involved in off-road racing was obviously an exciting pursuit. Can horse breeding or racing give you a rush of adrenalin anywhere near that?
Scoop: Off-road racing was fine. It was an adventure, but I also got paid. It was a job. I worked for the manufacturers. It taught me a lot of things about speaking to sponsors, going in front of important people, holding my own against the other drivers, and things of that nature. But, honestly, it never compared to breeding and racing your own stakes winner. It doesn’t do that. There is something about watching your horse cross the finish line first. It is a tremendous feeling, and, frankly, it is something that, when I got through with off-road racing, I couldn’t wait to get back to.
Question: Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future of horse racing, and, of the two types of racing – Thoroughbred and Quarter Horse – which do you think is poised for a brighter future?
Scoop: Those are tough questions. I am optimistic about horse racing. I believe that there are some very positive things happening for the sport right now. As for the second part, one way to look at it is to say Quarter Horses have a brighter future because they have further to go. Right? Thoroughbred racing is the big challenge for us. We are in a regional Thoroughbred market in California but we are in the national market in Quarter Horses. There are no better studs than ours in Quarter Horse racing. But In Excess is number 30 worldwide, and Free House, while the top freshman sire in California, is way down on the national list. So there are two different animals there.
We could hold our own on any racetrack in the world in Quarter Horse racing but it is going to take me a while to put a horse next to one of the sheiks. I would like to be on the receiving end of those high prices at Keeneland right now, but it is awfully hard to compete against those guys. We have been pretty lucky and will be again. One of these days, we might have a horse in a classic race, but I don’t know if we can ever compete consistently at the top. But what makes Thoroughbred racing so interesting to us is that there are a lot of levels, and we can fit in somewhere profitably. In Quarter Horse racing, you can only make money at the top level. That’s the difference.
Question: How important has satellite or Internet bidding been to your sale and do you think remote bidding will become more or less important in the future?
Scoop: I think satellite bidding is really important and I love the concept, but it is a very expensive venture. It cost us $25,000 a day, and we eventually got to the point where I felt our sale was sufficiently well known that we didn’t need to spend that kind of money. We tried Internet bidding also but, while I think it’s the wave of the future, I didn’t feel it had caught on enough to be profitable in the auction sale business. If you are buying a yearling, you had better have someone there looking at the horse to see if the legs are on the right way. But when you buy broodmares, most of the needed information is right there on the page. So I think buying horses on the Internet, especially broodmares, is the wave of the future, as long as you do your due diligence.
Question: In 2001, the high-selling yearling at your sale brought $700,000. Clearly, he was well bred and good-looking. How did he fare as a racehorse?
Scoop: Not very well. He did win one stake, but they are standing him right now in New Mexico. I just talked to the owner not long ago and he is extremely excited about his breeding potential. So, as long as the man is still enthused…
Question: If you were strictly a casual fan with no connections or involvement to either, would you personally prefer to watch horse racing or a motor sport and why?
Scoop: My answer would probably have to be a motor sport. The fact is, horse racing for a casual person off the street can be pretty tough, even intimidating. I know how to read the Racing Form and I occasionally gamble on some horses but I am not what you would call a real punter. My track buddies would hate for me to say it, but horse racing can be intimidating for newcomers. Auto racing is simpler.
Question: Since you ship a lot of Quarter Horse semen, do you have strong opinions about The Jockey Club’s ban on artificial insemination in Thoroughbreds?
Scoop: Not really. The difference between the two registries is just that the American Quarter Horse Association has made the decision to accept technology. AQHA not only allows AI, but we even freeze semen and do embryo transfers. We have become used to these things and there are a lot of positive things about technology. But The Jockey Club’s rule is that they don’t allow it, for their own reasons. We don’t object, but, in my book, AI is safer and cleaner, all the way down the road.
Question: Are you working on any other business ideas or projects, and if so, is there anything that you are really into now that you might be able to share with us?
Scoop: I’m really involved in the American Quarter Horse Association and, as a result, I have put a little of our entrepreneurial stuff on a backburner. When you get on the AQHA board, it is a five-year commitment. I thought my knowledge of racing would be a great help but for the first two years I never dealt with racing. The idea is to teach you about the other disciplines. Then in the third year you start getting the blend of both, and now, as first vice-president, I am totally wrapped up in the Association and the problems that may or may not come about in the future.
We have some problems within the breed regarding genetics that we need to get a handle on. As the technology of genetics gets more sophisticated, the future begins to get a little scary. Are we going to be able to identify the specific genes that make horses run short or long? How far can we let that sort of thing go? So as far as the Association is concerned, these are important issues. We have some genetic diseases that we need to get a handle on. I have no big projects other than that right now.
In closing, let me share that I was shown a list of student questions that were not asked. One of the questions asked: “Who is faster? Robbie Gordon or me?” I choose to answer that one. It is me…and I am faster than his Dad, too.
Thanks very much.
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