“I told them,” he says. “You can't make a hardboot out of a Virginia redneck. And that's all I've ever been. Never pretended to be anything else. Just a Virginia redneck that loves horses.”
When you have spent as much time as Beau Lane among these unerring vehicles of humility–from the Appaloosas of his youth, to two Kentucky Derby starters in the last seven years–you tend to develop total immunity to self-importance. Even at 80, you never know what's coming next; nor, when something does happen, whether it will turn out for better or worse. So when his peers selected Lane for the 2020 Breeders' Hardboot Award, his initial reaction was the one he just shared, seated beside his consignment at the recent September Sale.
But then he started looking down the previous recipients. One of the first, back in 2001, was Robert E. Courtney. He remembered seeing the old sage in 2009, when perilously exposed to the market slump.
“How you doing, boss? I'm going to be lucky to make it.”
“Oh, you'll make it,” Courtney replied. “Hard times make a monkey eat red peppers.”
Lane chuckles at the memory.
“He was a great guy,” he says. “And when I saw some of those names that had won that award, people like him, and Henry White, I thought, 'Whoa, man, this is quite an honor. These are some best horsemen I ever knew.'”
He grins wryly. “And most of them are gone! But I was raised in an era when to have the reputation of a horseman, that meant something. You had to earn that title.”
Though his draft was lurking way out under the water tower, no true connoisseur was going to neglect checking over the youngsters raised by such seasoned hands. Among those to swing by were Spendthrift Farm, who gave $335,000 for a Constitution colt; and Donato Lanni, who had $250,000 for a Tonalist filly. While Lane emphasizes the credit due to his daughter “J.B.” and her husband Michael Orem, he remains wonderfully spry in body and soul, full of enthusiasm and humor. And for all his self-deprecation, he is prepared to make one concession regarding his career.
“Well, I'm different from a lot of folks down here,” he acknowledges. “I came from the bottom up. I didn't get here from the top down. When I got to Kentucky, I had $60 and six old mares. I paid my first month's rent, and told my wife, 'Honey, I think we're broke.' And she said, 'Game's not over yet, Beau.' She was a basketball coach, and none of her teams ever quit. She still had faith in me, and we went to work.
“I've never been able to go out and buy a mare for half a million, and breed her to Tapit every year, and then feel good about what I raised. I have to buy a $25,000 mare and breed her to a $15,000 stud. And then, if the foal runs, hey, I'm on the right track. I mean, I'm glad those folks are here, doing as well as they are. But I come from a different school.”
That school, as already intimated, was in rural Virginia where his grandfather had started manufacture of the iconic Lane cedar chests.
“He was a lot smarter than me,” Lane says. “And he would tell me, 'Beau, if you keep fooling with these horses, you're going to be scratching the poor man's ass the rest of your life.' And you know what? For most of my life, he was right!”
Though Lane had been riding since boyhood, for a time he explored other ways of fracturing bones: playing football for Virginia Tech, for instance, albeit not all five of his broken noses were necessarily confined to the field of play. Nonetheless his heart was early set on a career with horses.
Having started with Appaloosas and Quarter Horses, his first experiment with Thoroughbreds was, candidly, a disaster. He quickly established that you couldn't run one of those down with a rope from a jeep; but soon gained subtler insights and found a niche buying mares for friends standing Quarter Horses out west.
“Because their horses could only run 330 yards, holding their breath,” he says. “Bugs Alive In 75, I must have bought 200 mares for that horse. Any mare that ran :21-and-change, from Narragansett in Rhode Island all the way down to Charlestown. I was selling them as fast as I could buy them. I got to know everybody out there [in the West], a lot of wonderful people.”
And the package would include delivery. Lane would load seven, eight mares onto a trailer and drive 125,000 miles 10 years straight. In addition, there were long overnight commutes to Kentucky, to get his own mares bred. He didn't want to admit it, but in his chosen walk of life the sun was setting on his home state.
“Nobody worked harder to stay in Virginia,” Lane says. “My great-, great-grand-daddy was killed at Gettysburg, in Pickett's Charge. I've been a Virginian since John Smith. That was when the first Lane was here, as one of his soldiers. I didn't want to leave and I stayed too long. The blood was no longer available, to prove my mares. I had to follow the stallions.
“All the big people died and nobody took their place: Taylor Hardin, Paul Mellon, Elizabeth Dodge Sloan. Trying to make it in Virginia was like trying to knock a wall down with your head. And I needed the better land. I was in southern Virginia, where all the hard work is done! Well, it's red clay and you cannot raise a top horse on red clay. You have to be able to train him hard. When I was racing Quarter Horses, I had some that qualified for $1-million races. But next morning, you'd have slab fractures, hairline fractures. You just couldn't get them there. But here you can raise the best horses in the world.”
The final straw came when Lane played up everything he had made, driving across the continent, in a public offering of Newstead Farm that fell apart with an untimely change in the tax regime. He lost $600,000 and fled “flat broke” to the Bluegrass. Of those six mares, a couple were so mean that they had been given away; others had cost him no more than a couple of thousand. Yet one delivered a G1 Oaks d'Italia winner and the daughter of another won $300,000 in Lane's own silks.
“A lot of breeders won't race a horse,” he says. “But sometimes they'll come through when you need it the most, and that filly got us rolling again.”
So his cherished coach had been right: the game wasn't over. By 2006, Lane had rallied sufficiently to acquire 160 acres in Bourbon County, aptly adjacent to Stone Farm: E.H. Lane III and A.B. Hancock III were now neighbors, just as the first to bear their respective names had once shared fences in Virginia. Sure enough, Lane delved into his family's Turf roots to name Woodline Farm for the horse that won the Clabaugh H. for his great-grandfather exactly 100 years before.
It was not long, however, before the 2008 financial crisis returned Lane to an uncomfortable brink. (Moreover he lost his invincible coach, soon afterwards, albeit has since found touching consolation in remarriage to Gail, a boyhood sweetheart.)
Just around that time, Lane had bred a Dixie Union filly.
“The most beautiful thing I'd ever raised,” he recalls. “And I got really cocky. I put a $240,000 reserve on her. And didn't get it. Well, then here comes a couple really sharp horsemen, offering the $240,000. But I said, 'Nope. You had your chance to buy her.' That was in July. In September the bottom fell out of everybody and I didn't have a dime.
“But for a horse at Charlestown that made me $140,000 at the track, I wouldn't have made it. But I did, see. All the time I kept thinking, 'I can't believe I didn't take $240,000 for that filly.' And guess what? I sold a million-and-a-half worth of foals out of her. She bought my farm for me.”
Actually that mare's first foal had to be sold privately as an identical RNA, at $240,000. Willie Browne took the colt home to Ireland and sold him for 1,150,000gns at the Newmarket breeze-ups the following spring. Another famous pinhook wagered on this dependable nursery followed in 2013, when a Giant's Causeway colt made $525,000 as a September yearling for clients Bob Cummings and Annette Bacola of Coffee Pot Stable. He was sold on by Northwest Stud for $1.6 million at OBS in March and, as Carpe Diem, won Grade Is at two and three before derailing in the Derby.
This year another Woodline graduate, Zozos (Munnings), also made the Derby after chasing home Epicenter (Not This Time) in the GII Louisiana Derby for breeders Barry and Joni Butzow. Another from the same crop, meanwhile, is homebred Best Actor (Flatter), sold to Gary and Mary West for $330,000 as a yearling and winner of the GIII Smarty Jones S.
Patrons and purchasers alike know that Woodline horses won't be hot-housed, but raised with their vocation in mind: first to trust their handlers; and then, no less so, their own physical zest.
“We treat a horse like a horse,” Lane explains. “And it can be hard in this industry to do that. Because we raise them in large fields, 14 head together, and when you do that, they're like kids: they wrestle and kick and throw each other down.”
The sales ring, of course, has become increasingly fastidious about that kind of thing, with every bruise hunted out and magnified by nervous veterinarians.
“Hell, they got better X-ray machines in the back of these trucks than in the hospital,” Lane says. “It's a different business today. I'll tell you who changed it: a guy named D. Wayne Lukas, when he said he'd keep his catalogue closed, all he'd do is look at the horse. And everyone says, 'Whoa, wow, okay. Well, this horse here toes in a little bit; and that one's a little offset. We can't use them.'
“I remember when, if you had a horse that toed in a little, you told the blacksmith to trim him natural. And when we did that, we didn't have any sesamoiditis. We kept them the way God made them. If they could walk through it, it was no big deal. A lot of good horses are ruined by people putting screws in their knees and ankles when they're babies. Because guess what? God didn't make that foal to move that leg like that. We used to raise racehorses, not show horses. I showed the Grand Champion Stallion in Chicago, in 1971. I've been there. I ain't going back.”
Tellingly, asked for the most important lesson learned from other breeds, Lane replies: “Well, it was a different way of doing things, no doubt about it. But it taught me early that anytime you treat a horse like anything but a horse, it doesn't work. He won't be happy. You try to make something else out of him, next thing you know, he's got a belly full of ulcers. But treat a horse like a horse, keep them happy and healthy, they'll give you all they got.”
Perhaps this commercial instinct to standardize the animal reflects a wider timidity?
“You got to take a shot,” Lane agrees. “And that's what worries me about a lot of the younger generation: they won't take the chance. This is a gambler's game. And the only thing that's going to save this industry is to fill those gates. Gamblers can't make money on four-horse fields. Don't think that you can B.S. your way with these gamblers. I remember when Charlestown had four or five big-time gamblers coming out of Washington every night to bet five or 10 thousand bucks. Then one night the State Police came in and told them to hit the deck and spreadeagle. After that, they never came back–and that track went downhill for 20 years. And it would be gone now, but for the casino deal.”
Every last one of us with a stake in this game, after all, is also a gambler of sorts.
“I've bred to Gun Runner,” Lane says. “That's enough gamble for me. They tell me, 'Pop, you could lose a lot of money doing that.' And I say, 'Hey, I could make a lot of money, too.' It's like the share I bought in Silver State. I know that's a gamble, but I also know that Olin Gentry put that family together and lined up all those 'fours' [i.e. family number] one after another. It'll surprise me if he fails–but if he does, it will be because Hard Spun didn't do his job.”
Here at the sharp end, then, it's ultimately a case of standing toe-to-toe with Lady Luck. A lot of people, with each of her slaps, grow merely in cynicism and bitterness. Happily, our community also has people like this, who rock on their heels only to bounce forward again, instead gaining only in warmth and insight.
Lane remembers the last time he saw the late Billy Turner, a forgotten man after training one of the greatest horses that ever lived, and shakes his head. “I mean, this industry's hard on you, buddy,” he says. “You've got to ride it out. But I keep saying, 'I got to keep living, so I can win the Derby.' And if I have another 10 years, you can bet your ass that's what I'm going to do! I'm breeding the best mares now that I've ever bred, to the best horses I've ever bred. I've got a shot. That's what keeps me going, and that's what keeps those guys over there going too.” He gestures to the adjacent consignment. “They all got a shot.”
Lane points to his 17-year-old grandson, showing a yearling.
“He can foal a mare as good as me or better,” he says proudly. “I just hope we have a business to leave; that with all our wisdom, we don't screw it up. Don't get me started, how we're making it tougher on the little man.
“But gosh, I've had a wonderful life. And I'll tell you this, there's nothing better than this industry, than these horses. You get the lowest of lows, as well as the highest of highs, but I feel sorry for a guy that goes to work every day and sits in the same office chair and has the same B.S.
“I just want to raise a great horse. I've raised a lot of good ones, but I've never raised that great horse. Yet. But I'm still here.”
A pause, another chuckle. “I'm still here. And I got probably 25 mares in foal. And any one of them could be carrying it. Right?”
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