Letter to the Editor: Terence Collier Regarding the Passing of Dr. Billy Marrs

It seems that every tick of the clock marks the demise of another friend and colleague in my life. Word came in today of the passing on January 15th of Dr. Billy (Merritt William) Marrs, who died in Indio, California, close to his winter home in Palm Springs. Such news usually travels fast in our circles, but this veterinarian has spent more of the last few years on out-of-town golf courses than on the backside or at a horse sale. Nevertheless, there will be a few tears and many fond tales told among Thoroughbred people of this colorful and loveable character.

Billy Marrs was a Lexington native, born in 1946, a graduate of the University of Kentucky who went on to a degree in Veterinary Medicine from Ohio State in 1973. His early mentors have already left for that great clinic in the sky, but anybody around Thoroughbreds in central Kentucky from the 1980s on will remember 'Doc' Marrs pulling up in his Cadillac, enveloped in a cloud of cigar smoke. One short car ride as his passenger and you got out smelling like Winston Churchill! He eschewed the Suburbans, the Tahoes and the SUVs and worked from either the trunk or the back seat of his gray DeVille. There was much competition for space in the car and it took forever to get the ancient X-ray camera from under the sets of golf clubs. Because he was an independent veterinarian and not connected to the two or three large veterinary groups in town, I frequently put Billy on veterinary arbitration disputes at Fasig-Tipton sales. He would always be very late or very early and invariably had to ask if he could borrow a scope from one of the other panel members.

Billy and I had close mutual friends in Jack G. Jones, Jr. of Mineola Farm in Lexington and California bloodstock guru Rollin Baugh. Jack was his lawyer, golfing companion and client. In the late 1970s Billy and Jack scouted the sales together for Buckram Oak Farm's owner Mahmoud Fustok. Jack remembers with certainty that at the Saratoga Yearling Sales, both Danzig and De La Rose were passed by Billy and made Fustok's short list, only to be underbidders on both in successive years. For a few years, Rollin was accompanied by Billy at Royal Ascot. He would call me the week before the famous English racing festival and the conversation would always jokingly open, “Well, Lord Collier, where should I be dining this year in London?” or “Can I wear brown suede shoes in the Royal Enclosure?”

Without delving too deeply into Dr. Marrs's private life, in Lexington, there seem to be no close family members surviving him in his hometown. He was married twice–once, for 13 years, to the very popular and bubbly Eloise, a leading light in local banking circles. Since October last year, he was engaged to the equally attractive Karen Nielsen, to whom I extend my sincere condolences.

Dr. Marrs got out of the veterinary world before it left him behind. He was old school. And he never let an equine appointment stand in the way of a round of golf. His many friends, of which I was honored to be one, will miss a man who did it his way.

Terence Collier

PS: There will be a celebration of life in Lexington in April and details will follow.

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Letter to the Editor: Terence Collier

However the TDN looks upon itself introspectively, the daily readership of its North American content can probably deduce that without advertising revenues from the Thoroughbred breeding industry, it would be difficult for its publishers to put out such an excellent and comprehensive daily edition. The lead article in June 27th's issue by Bill Finley–“Do we really need so many stakes races?”–obviously comes from the writer's perspective more concerned with payoffs from exactas and trifectas than the majority of the TDN's readers.

Bill says, “The problem is obvious. There aren't enough horses and there are too many stakes.” He says, “the American Graded Stakes Committee hasn't done its job.”

His solution, all too glibly proffered by one with little skin in the breeding and owning game, is to throw out iconic races like the Mother Goose, the Hollywood Gold Cup and to take the knife to the NYRA stakes schedule. Simple answer, problem solved.

Hardly!

During my 43-year career with Fasig-Tipton, I attended many grading review meetings of the American Graded Stakes Committee (AGSC). Of all the alphabet committees that the Thoroughbred industry has spawned, I have never known a group of professionals more effective, more diligent or better-prepared than these unpaid guardians of our graded stakes system.

Let's take it step-by-step. It is a simple process to take the scalpel to the number of stakes races. There is currently a minimum purse requirement of $50,000 or $75,000 for a stake to earn the “black-type,” that will appear in a Thoroughbred's pedigree. The Thoroughbred breeding industry, with the assistance of TOBA, The Jockey Club and the Society of International Thoroughbred Auctioneers, monitors this system on a day-to-day basis to ensure black-type standards are correctly maintained. That minimum is reviewed annually and, with the dramatically improved purses everywhere at maiden and allowance levels, there is justification for a school of thought to raise the minimum. However, the consequence of, let's say, doubling the minimum, would eliminate a lot of stakes races from black-type, but would, at the same time, devastate the racing programs of second-tier racetracks, who rely on the “honor” of awarding black-type to encourage owners to stay or come into the game.

Anyway, that would be a meaningful debate. By tradition, the number of graded stakes should be an acceptable percentage of the total black-type races. The Graded Stakes Committee should be considering the “pyramid” created by total of all races on the bottom, to Grade I stakes on the top. The pyramid system is acknowledged by every recognized world-wide racing authority.

In my active years, the U.S. percentage was always far the lowest of any major international racing country, albeit, truthfully, because North America has an overwhelming number of total races. Each year I read in the TDN the annual report of the AGSC, which regularly features a consistent and regrettable number of downgraded or eliminated stakes races.

If those who currently sit on the AGSC are not maintaining the standards established by their predecessors, they should be open to question from anybody who cares about the quality and diversity of racing in North America, including Bill Finley. It is a simplification to say that, because our foal crop is well under 50% of its peak, we should slash the number of graded stakes.

Bill's example of short fields in such races as the 2022 GII Mother Goose is a fixable aberration, which, if seen repeated, will result in yet another downgrading of a race which was, until recently, an integral Grade I part of the Fillies' Triple Crown.

Bill's quoting the statistics of racehorses now running less than six times per year, half of what it was 20 years ago, is not caused by an excess of stakes-races. The blame for that, if blame is the right word, is squarely on the shoulders of trainers with divisions of high-class horses who feel that their win-to-runner percentage is inviolable. We have quality racing year-round in the U.S. We should incentivize trainers to run more frequently and penalize those whose runners fill a stall year-round and only show up at the racetrack every other month at most.

Don't do what we so frequently do in every walk of life–make a knee-jerk decision that wipes out decades or even centuries of racing history. Give Bill Finley back his full fields, his exactas and trifectas and the opportunity to experience an AGSC grading meeting. Perhaps he will appreciate the hard work this group undertakes to maintain the integrity and tradition of racing in North America.

Yours respectfully,

Terence Collier

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Real Rider Cup to be Held Before Fasig July

The Kentucky leg of the Real Rider Cup, a charity show jumping event created by Anita Motion to benefit Thoroughbred aftercare, will be held Saturday, July 9–two days ahead of the start of the Fasig-Tipton July sales–at New Vocation Racehorse Adoption Program at Mereworth Farm in Lexington.

Among those set to participate are Zenyatta's son Cozmic One (Bernardini), who will be ridden by Real Rider Cup veteran Sergio de Sousa; and Grade III winner Sticksstatelydude (First Dude) with exercise rider Kristin VanMeter.

1/ST Racing is furnishing an entire team coming in from the West Coast, consisting of Jodie Vella-Gregory, Manager of Innovation; Aaron Gryder, Vice President, Industry Relations and former jockey; and Dr. Dionne Benson, Chief Veterinary Officer.

Fasig-Tipton's longtime announcer Terence Collier will announce the Real Rider Cup event. Riders are still accepted, and fundraising continues through the Maryland leg of the event in mid-September. Title sponsorships are also available for the Kentucky event. All proceeds benefit the Retired Racehorse Project, New Vocations Thoroughbred Adoption and the Fair Hill Thoroughbred Show. For more information, visit www.therealridercup.com.

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Longtime Fasig-Tipton Auctioneer Steve Dance Passes At Age 78

Steve Dance, a senior member of Fasig-Tipton's auction team for five decades, passed away suddenly on Tuesday morning, May 25, at his home in Jarrettsville, MD, he shared with his wife Nancy. He was in his seventy-eighth year and it was suspected he suffered a massive heart attack. Steve worked until the last day of his life and the many sellers and buyers at Fasig-Tipton's 2-year-old sale, just a week ago in Timonium, MD, would have seen him plying his lifelong trade in the auction stand at Timonium in his beloved home state.

Hiram “Steve” Dance was born in 1943 in the small, country town of Towson, just a few miles north of Baltimore. The then-struggling Thoroughbred auction company, Fasig-Tipton, in the late 1940's had appointed Humphrey Finney, another Towson resident, as its president. Although Finney left Towson in 1953, Steve's uncle, “Laddie” Dance, Humphrey's son John Finney and Larry Ensor, all subsequent luminaries at Fasig-Tipton and all “Towsonites,” befriended the younger Steve and found a variety of jobs for him at a rapidly expanding number of the company's nationwide auctions.

Honing his horse auction skills under the likes of George Swinebroad, Laddie Dance and Ralph Retler was a daunting task but Steve's hard work, reliability and enthusiasm paid off and he became a full-time auctioneer and bid spotter for the company in 1972.

From that time forward, Steve did not miss a single Fasig-Tipton auction in a career which lasted for an enviable fifty years.

But the glamor and celebrity of the Thoroughbred world did not monopolize Steve as it did with many of his peers. Again, until the day he died, Steve owned and operated the company founded by his grandfather in 1912, the Milton J Dance Auction Company. From the company's present base in Towson, Steve sold everything from pots and pans, to antiques, to multi-million dollar mansions. And, if there was such a thing as spare time, he traveled the length and breadth of the country selling and bid-spotting at celebrated motorcycle auctions from Daytona, FL to Sturgis, ND.

His “metier” was undoubtedly the Thoroughbred horse, but his passion was motorcycles – BMW motorcycles to be precise. Steve was a riding encyclopedia of BMW bikes and owned up to 20 at a time in his busiest years. He rode them all over North America – Alaska to New York to Florida. He converted me to BMW's in the mid 1980's and, without question, our ride together from the two-year-old sale in Miami to the two-year-old sale in Dallas was the greatest road trip two friends could make.

Steve found great happiness in later life, when, in 2011, he married his soul-mate and loving companion Nancy, who survives him in Jarrettsville, MD. Steve is also survived by his two daughters Erica and Whitney, his son Lee, step-daughter with Nancy, Layne, and three brothers, Andy, Scott and Tom.

Notice of funeral arrangements will follow.

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