Sunday, August 24, 2008
My Favorite Travers Stakes
It’s Travers Stakes weekend. I am remembering my favorite Travers moment. This was the moment when I shouted from the rooftop at Saratoga Race Course that it was time to put Holy Bull up on a Wheaties box.
Before we had blogs, before the Internet, before You Tube and the Olympics broadcast in HDTV, the Wheaties cereal box was where we caught our daily glimpse of primo athletes. I don’t recall that Wheaties ever featured a horse on the cereal box but it should have, after the race Holy Bull ran to win the 1994 Travers Stakes.
He was pressured for more than half a mile early in the race, standing up to a very strong pace. In the final sixteenth he was challenged again all the way to the wire, turning back Concern at the finish by only a neck.
Most horses simply don’t have it in them to run that kind of race. Yet Holy Bull wasn’t “most horses.” He stood so far above the rest, most notably on Travers day that I wrote in the Lexington Herald-Leader: “This horse can pitch a no-hitter like Nolan Ryan. He can pull off Tonya Harding’s triple axel without falling on his butt. He can shed tacklers like Emmitt Smith. He is Mary Lou Retton resurrected in the muscles of a big gray horse and if he did some flips on the balance beam, nobody would be surprised.”
The athletes are outdated. But not my memories of Holy Bull’s Travers. The Saratoga crowd was so fired up over this race that people were talking about the Bull in the streets that night.
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My Favorite Travers Stakes"
Written by Maryjean Wall
Visit Maryjean Wall's new site at "
Celebrating the Horse"
Friday, August 22, 2008
Genuine Risk, 1977-2008
On a wall in my house hangs a photo that evokes my favorite memory of Genuine Risk. Photographer Tony Leonard caught the mare in perhaps her most poignant moment, gazing backwards, lovingly at her first live foal, Genuine Reward, as he cantered alongside her in a paddock at Three Chimneys Farm.
Whenever this print catches my eye, I am reminded of how proud Genuine Risk was of this baby. I spent a lot of time with both of them, while writing a start-to-finish series of mom and foal for the Lexington Herald-Leader. The series took me to a lot of places: from Three Chimneys Farm near Midway, Ky., to the Upperville, Va., Newstead Farm of Genuine Risk’s owners, Bert and Diana Firestone, to the Middleburg Training Center, to Florida, and to the private training facility they once owned at Saratoga.
I couldn’t write enough about mom and foal. People watched the colt’s progress with great interest because they were caught up in the story of this Kentucky Derby-winning filly who finally had a foal after 11 years of trying.
“We’ve had 50 or 60 calls a day, mostly from non-horse people,” Dan Rosenberg, then general manager of Three Chimneys, said at the time. Genuine Risk received cards, letters, phone calls, gifts, and flowers. Rosenberg told the Herald-Leader how the farm had “heard from women who’ve had difficulty in maintaining a pregnancy, or who had children late in life. We didn’t anticipate such an emotional response from so many people.”
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Written by Maryjean Wall
Visit Maryjean Wall's new site at "
Celebrating the Horse"
Wednesday, August 06, 2008
Featured Farm: Oak Haven
Drive into Oak Haven Farm, off Leestown Road between Lexington and Midway, and your first impression is one of seclusion, of peace, and of solitude. A creek surrounds the farm on three sides. The occasional canoe floats by.
Time must have stopped long ago on these serene, idyllic 60 acres where Civil War buttons and bullets, mostly Confederate, have turned up in the fields. A couple of slow trains pass daily through the property. The railroad tracks run alongside the farm’s own depot, a whimsical miniature looking quite as quaint as a doll house from Victorian times.
One of the partners in the ownership of the farm is driving down the tree-lined road past the little train depot, checking on weanlings and yearlings by the popular stallions Gone West, Victory Gallop, Sky Classic, and Medaglio d’Oro.
This particular owner, it turns out, is as quaint a piece of work as the little train depot. The day we made Ed Frederick’s acquaintance, he was wearing a Scottish kilt.
Our introduction took place on a Sunday, some fifty miles from the farm at Eminence, Kentucky, at an entertainment venue called the Highland Renaissance Festival. Frederick, in kilt and leather lace-up boots, looked as medieval as many other folk who were strolling about the forest and town center of this land of make-believe.
Frederick and his partners founded the “faire” two years ago, which made this its third summer of operation. A renaissance faire is meant to resemble a medieval county fair, a place where you can walk about wearing period costume (or not) while perusing vendors’ booths for peacock feathers, jewelry, and the like. Over here you can witness a jousting tournament. Over there, a ribald comedy act of the sort that medieval faire-goers might have watched. There are sword-swallowers, fire-eaters and jugglers. There are beautiful horses turned out in medieval tack.
The question quite naturally is what a Bluegrass horse farm owner is doing running a renaissance faire. Frederick, we discover, slips easily back and forth from kaki-wearing farm-owner to kilt-wearing faire-goer because he is a renaissance man himself.
He reads history. He plays bag pipes. He trains race horses. He used to play drums in a rock ‘n roll band. Every year he travels to Scotland and once spent a night in the castle — in the very bedroom — of the overlord who annihilated Frederick’s clan of origin, the MacGregors.
“It was like the last great act of defiance,” Frederick said. “I was doing some research to find castles and just came across it, in Loch Lomond. So I called them up and asked, ‘What’s the chance of renting the guy’s bedroom? Sign me up.’”
Back in Kentucky, Frederick founded the faire with his partner in ownership of Oak Haven, Stephen Baker (owner of Baker Ranch near Iredell, Tex.), Frederick’s wife, Linda, and Mark and Ludmilla Lowery, the latter also fans of renaissance faires. Frederick and Linda had discovered renaissance faire-going while he was managing a farm in Texas about 15 years ago. They have been to renaissance faires all over the country.
“If you go to enough of these things you get to be friends with everybody,” he said. “I like going to the races. I never go to the races without seeing somebody I know. There are lots of parallels with the race track community.”
Three days later, I met up with Frederick at Oak Haven Farm. On this day, he wore the kakis favored by Bluegrass horsemen.
He drove me in his double-cab truck through the long, narrow 60-acres, along the main drive lined with oak trees. He and Baker, the Texan, “looked at probably 100 farms for sale,” Frederick said. “This was first one we looked at,” and they went back to it. “The thing that sold me was the oak trees,” Frederick said.
Last spring at Keeneland, Oak Haven Farm won two races. The farm keeps horses in training in Lexington and Frederick also manages between 40 and 50 horses with various trainers at southwestern tracks like Lone Star, Remington Park, and Louisiana Downs for Baker and other clients. As with all farms, the big goal at Oak Haven is to win the Kentucky Derby or a Breeders’ Cup race.
They thought they were on their way in 2004, with a colt named Tricky Taboo that Frederick trained. “He looked like he was destined to run in the Derby and he ran second in 2004 in the $500,000 Lane’s End Stakes (won by Sinister G). But he couldn’t take the pressure. He just fell apart.”
Baker Ranch also bred and raced Slewpy’s Storm, the leading Texas-bred older mare in 2005.
The operation at Oak Haven is small and semi-private, with horses kept for only one client besides the partnership of Baker and Frederick. Perhaps only four yearlings will go to the September sales at Keeneland. But that’s the way the partners want it on this serene, secluded property surrounded on three sides by an ancient creek and where a slow train passes through.
Written by Maryjean Wall
Visit Maryjean Wall's new site at "
Celebrating the Horse"
