Tawny Port Another Strike for Wente

He really does seem to have some kind of Midas touch right now. And a lot of people, hitting a formula that has paid off with such remarkable consistency, would be tempted to raise the stakes. But it's not just the fact that Tommy Wente is perfectly well acquainted with the other kind of luck, so routine in this business, that will stop him getting carried away. Because even if he believed that his model might be adapted to a higher level of the market, he would miss the sheer buzz of beating the odds.

“I can't go in there and buy those mares for $200,000 or $300,000,” Wente says. “They're just not going to work out for me. You'd be so heavily invested, at that point, it would be no fun. And that's what keeps me going every day, the fun of it. Trying to find young mares with blank dams, and just sitting on them for a couple of years, and seeing if their families can go to work for you. Because when they do, it's so much more of a thrill if you took a shot on something nobody wanted.”

And who knows, maybe there's something in this temperate response to his recent success that explains why his program is functioning so effectively in the first place. Maybe the kind of person who would become giddily convinced of his or her genius would never have had the clarity required to spot the same bargains.

Wente first demanded our attention last fall, thanks to the very first crop bred from a handful of mares acquired, some five years previously, after he had moved his program from Indiana to St. Simon Place in Kentucky. Four of these juveniles had contested “Win and You're In” races for the Breeders' Cup. Three won; the other ran second. Their dams had cost Wente and his partners a total $32,400.

Everyone was asking him what his secret was. He shrugged. “Am I just really, really lucky?” he asked his buddy Tommy Eastham of Legacy Bloodstock. “Or is something going on here?”

“Well, I guess anybody can be lucky once or even twice,” Eastham replied. “But man, you're just doing it over and over again. You've got to be doing something right.”

Rattle N Roll won Keeneland's Breeders' Futurity | Coady

The right thing to do, next, was to close out the cycle by cashing in a couple of those mares. Wente had bred GI Breeders' Futurity winner Rattle N Roll (Connect) from Jazz Tune (Johannesburg), found for just $20,000 at the Keeneland November Sale of 2016. Back at the same auction last fall, Hunter Valley Farm bought her for $585,000. C J's Gal (Awesome Again) had been even cheaper, picked out for $9,500 in the same ring in January 2016. Her daughter Hidden Connection (Connect) having won the GIII Pocahontas S. by nine lengths, Woodford Thoroughbreds gave $450,000 for the mare.

Time, you would have thought, to let the dust settle awhile. But Wente was only just getting started. Since then, a couple of other mares to have caught his eye have also made a name for themselves.

Just about the least surprising thing to emerge from the GI Kentucky Derby success of Rich Strike (Keen Ice) was that his dam Gold Strike (Smart Strike) had been sold to Wente deep in the 2019 Keeneland November Sale, for just $1,700. Admittedly this was a rather different case: an older mare, picked out for a friend. But then last weekend Tawny Port (Pioneerof the Nile), who had finished seventh at Churchill, confirmed himself one of the crop's most progressive colts in the GIII Ohio Derby. And it turned out that his dam Livi Makenzie (Macho Uno) had likewise been sold since his foaling, to Wente and partner Scott Stephens, for $30,000 at Keeneland November 2020.

Wente happily credits this latest coup to Carrie Brogden of Machmer Hall, a trusted mentor ever since his Bluegrass transfer.

“When I'm at a sale, I never go to the barns to look at mares,” Wente says. “I never look at a book and say, 'Okay, let's go see these 10 today.' I buy them coming into the ring, and I'm trying to get a deal on. And Carrie was sitting there, and said, 'Hey, this mare coming up, you need to take a look at her: we sold the Pioneerof the Nile yearling out of her for WinStar in September for $430,000.' We're kind of suckers for chestnuts anyway, and I liked the way she looked, and I figured that a real good Pioneerof the Nile colt could be anything. I just thought the mare might be too expensive. Because she could run, she was a stakes winner [and graded stakes-placed]. I thought she'd make $75,000 to $100,000. But I thought, 'Hell, we'll give it a shot.' And we got her.”

Tawny Port followed up a Stonestreet Lexington win at Keeneland with last weekend's Ohio Derby | JJ Zamaiko Photography

She came with a bonus, as she was carrying a filly by Always Dreaming–who has meanwhile obtained a residual value as half-sister to Tawny Port. And while “a really nice colt” by Global Campaign followed this spring, his Apr. 25 delivery left his mother only a short window and she missed on a single covering.

“But that's fine, she's in her prime [13] and the year off will do her good,” Wente remarks. “She can get back on an early cycle next time. But we do like her baby, and if Tawny Port can go on and win a Grade I, then it's all good. She's a really laid-back mare, a real sweetheart.”

As for the dam of Rich Strike, she was being culled so cheaply that Wente reckoned her ideal for Indiana horseman Merrill Roberts.

“When I'm buying these mares, a lot of the time I'm thinking in the back of my head about people who have asked me to look out for one,” Wente says. “That particular mare I bought strictly for my buddy Merrill, because they'd just got a stallion [Candy Ride (Arg)'s son Looking Cool] going and I thought she's be perfect for him, with her race record and pedigree, if they could get her in foal.”

Unfortunately that final part of the equation proved difficult, and Roberts turned her over to Austin Nicks the very week that her son came out of nowhere to land the Derby. (Nicks, unsurprisingly, wasted no time in sending the mare to Munnings!)

As already indicated, however, Wente has a properly seasoned perspective on all this success. In fact, he has an unhappy bond with Eric Reed, trainer of Rich Strike, whose career was likewise nearly unraveled by a barn fire.

Wente had become captivated by horses when visiting the barn of his stepfather, former Hoosier Park trainer Tom Hickman. Before long, even though money was tight, Wente found himself buying one of the babies.

“I way overpaid, though!” Wente recalls. “He charged me $5,000 and, looking back, the horse probably wasn't worth $200. It was for me, though, at the time. I wanted it so bad. I was driving a truck in those days, and giving him like $500 a month for this horse. And I'd just got it all paid off, and the horse had just had his first run. They were stabled down there at the old Quarter Horse track in Henderson, Kentucky, and one night I got a call, 2 a.m., to say he'd lost all these horses burned up in a fire.

“He had always told me, 'You know, if you're not willing to put $1,000 in an ashtray and burn it, don't get into this business.' To this day I always try to remember that. Only in my case it wasn't bills in an ashtray. It was that poor horse in a burning barn. But I was hooked, even so. Next day I was back on it, looking for a new one.”

Wente picked out the Derby winner's dam at Keeneland November in 2019 for a friend | Coady

Looking back, in fact, Wente wonders whether the early difficulties he has had to overcome–both in his own life, and then in his journey of Thoroughbreds–have condensed into a foundation stone essential to his better fortunes now.

“We were raised poor,” he stresses. “And I had my struggles, trying to find my way. I couldn't save money. I owed everybody. I robbed Peter to pay Paul. But I straightened up. I figured I wanted more from life. And I think it was the horses that did that for me.

“I don't know if you need that; whether you need to know the bottom to appreciate everything more. But now, when I look back to when I was new to the game, and thinking of those really poor horses as the best thing in the whole world, and my stepdad teaching me all those things, him being so back in the old ways, I think that really helped me towards where I am today. Having all that under my feet gave me a different perspective.”

Wente is candidly disparaging about the animals he raised in Indiana, but they sharpened his judgement and taught him to respect every horse as a potential opportunity. Coming to Kentucky just elevated the caliber of the disrespected, the rejects.

Conceivably, moreover, perhaps the resilience Wente had himself acquired can be shared with the young stock on St. Simon Place?

“It's so true,” Wente replies. “If you baby them, pamper them, to me they're not going to make racehorses. They need to get out there, need to knock heads, knock bodies. They need to get cuts, to get sore. They need to be in the snow, in the rain, in the heat. They need a struggle. Because when I struggled, I got tough. And I think it's the same with horses.”

MSW One Timer, another bred by Wente and St. Simon Place | Coady

Maybe, then, that's at least part of the answer. Not that many of those asking Wente for his “secret” will find that very helpful. It was only as an outsider, making a journey few would choose by design, that Wente found redemption in horses. Maybe that couldn't have happened if, like so many competitors, he had been born to this way of life, and not in suburban poverty near St. Louis.

“Everybody's just shaking their head and they're like, 'How in the world are you doing this!?'” says Wente with a chuckle. “And like I said, I don't know whether I'm just really, really lucky, or I'm doing something right. But I think the people that have the wealth to back themselves up would still rather buy mares with more page, mares with some produce under them, mares that are already proven out. But they've got the money. Me, I do the opposite. Because I have to buy cheaper mares, I'd rather buy one that has no page but might get some runners. Because things can change so fast. I bought Spanish Star (Blame) for $1,500 off the track [Keeneland November 2017], and then, bam, her brother [Sir Winston (Awesome Again)] wins the Belmont. And now she's had One Timer (Trappe Shot).”

That colt is currently four-for-five, his sole defeat at the Breeders' Cup. But while a lot of things have been falling into place, Wente emphasizes that he has not done it all on his own. On the farm Calvin and Shane Crain run a parallel sod-growing business, and he has partners in a broodmare band now extending to 40 or so, as well. And whatever inspiration Wente may bring to the equation himself, he will only take credit for perspiration.

“You've got to be dedicated,” he says. “You have to live and sleep this business. I'm hands on. I like to get out there and mow my own grass. I don't know if that helps me do what I'm doing, but I do know that I love it. And since I came over here, and Carrie took me under her wing, everything's been going great. I just feel blessed.”

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Smart Digging Strikes a Rich Seam

Well, if it was hard enough to make sense of his performance, then don't expect things to appear any more conventional when you look at the pedigree of Rich Strike. His grandsire and dam share the same paternity. His mother was discarded a couple of years ago for $1,700; his half-sister was claimed only last month for $5,000; and his sire's only previous stakes winner had emerged in Puerto Rico.

But if communal incredulity over the GI Kentucky Derby must have been flavored with extra piquancy for the breeders of the winner, who lost him to a $30,000 claim at the same track last September, then the bigger picture might yet permit them ample consolation.

Most obviously, albeit in somewhat haphazard fashion, a 10th Derby winner has refreshed the record established by Calumet Farm in its heyday as the premier Classic brand of the Bluegrass and highlights the wholesome aspirations sustaining its regeneration.

Eight Calumet homebreds won the Derby between 1941 and 1968, under Warren Wright, Sr. and then his widow Lucille, but the one subsequent success prior to Saturday had poignantly come in the same year, 1991, that the farm declared bankruptcy–courtesy of Strike the Gold, whose name obtains a curious resonance now that the baton has been seized by Rich Strike.

The Kwiatkowski rescue eventually paved the way in 2012 for Calumet's lease to Brad M. Kelley, who immediately found a horse to condense his priorities–not just for the renewal of the Calumet legacy, but also for a maverick challenge to the short-termism he evidently believes to be undermining the modern American Thoroughbred. Oxbow exhibited a teak constitution in campaigning without pause from October through July, taking in seven states and six different distances. At stud, admittedly, Oxbow struggled for commercial traction, but last year he came up with one of the key Classic protagonists in Hot Rod Charlie, who had changed hands for $17,000 as a short yearling.

Now Calumet has achieved virtually the same thing with Keen Ice. He, too, had to demonstrate rare physical resilience in soaking up four campaigns, the first three for Donegal Racing before Calumet entered partnership. And while his only two wins outside maiden company included one that nobody could sensibly take at face value, when shocking a Triple Crown winner in the GI Travers S., he banked $3.4 million in 24 starts, 15 at Grade I level. Much like his son last Saturday, he was never happier than when able to reel in a hot pace.

The Calumet model will always be too idiosyncratic for many commercial breeders, so presumably a monster opening book of 176 for Keen Ice featured a significant contribution from the farm's home herd. The average achieved by the resulting yearlings fell short of a (rather stiff) opening fee of $20,000 and traffic was quick to slide, through books of 73, 43 and 48. Keen Ice is now down to $7,500, the same as Oxbow, who himself was supported with 187 mares in his fourth book but was down to 15 three years later. Now, for a second year running, an ostensibly “uncommercial” Calumet sire is demanding renewed attention–this time with a Derby winner at the first attempt.

Calumet has more to celebrate than regret, then, despite allowing Rich Strike to slip from their racetrack program. Okay, so nobody should be running a horse under that kind of tag if he is 17 lengths better than the grade. But the team will definitely be hoping that Rich Strike can corroborate his breakout as well as did, say, Mine That Bird (Birdstone) when he proceeded to run Rachel Alexandra (Medaglia d'Oro) to a length in the GI Preakness S.

Keen Ice, after all, is earlier into his career than was Oxbow when Hot Rod Charlie made us ask how much he might owe to sire (his dam having already produced an Eclipse champion). If Keen Ice has really done very little besides this jaw-dropper, then there remains a feasible case for saying that his stock will only just be finding their stride with maturity. He has managed 20 other winners this year already, at a 27% ratio that stands up to the likes of Practical Joke, Connect and Caravaggio among rivals in the intake maintaining a higher fee. And while the Calumet breeding program can hardly match such quantity with seamless quality, it will be reliably oriented towards mares that pack in slow-burning assets of robustness and staying power.

That willingness to play a long game, to remain stubbornly out of step with the fast-buck breeders who mate to sell, not run, is predicated on a faith that the Thoroughbred will ultimately have to adapt to a very different environment: one where trainers must can the pharmaceuticals, and where turf/synthetics are no longer commercially toxic. Kelley and his team, on that basis, will hope someday to do exactly what Keen Ice's son did on Saturday, and catapult from the neglected margins to the heart of the action.

Quite apart from promotion of his sire, then, they have another reason to hope that Rich Strike may have hit a genuine seam of gold–and that's to vindicate the kind of thinking that governs Calumet matings. Because here, too, Rich Strike is not an orthodox project.

True, one of the greatest breeding operations in history recently came up with a European champion with inbreeding of equally daring proximity: Enable (GB) (Nathaniel {GB}) is by a grandson of Sadler's Wells out of one of his daughters. Moreover Juddmonte had previously produced GI Pacific Classic winner Skimming by matching one son of Northern Dancer, Nureyev, with a daughter of another in Lyphard; while their sister matriarchs Viviana and Willstar were by Nureyev out of a daughter of Nijinsky (also, of course, by Northern Dancer). So if duplicating a noble influence as closely as the second and third generations was good enough for Prince Khalid, it should be good enough for the rest of us.

In this instance, Calumet chose to double down on Smart Strike–who gave us the sire of Keen Ice, Curlin, as well as Rich Strike's dam, the accomplished Canadian filly Gold Strike. That was an extremely hygienic choice. Smart Strike has proved a fine sire of sires. The farm's lamented English Channel, in his sphere, absolutely bore comparison with Curlin, while Lookin At Lucky is criminally undervalued as a sire of Derby and Breeders' Cup Classic winners now down to just $15,000. But the key to thickening out a pedigree with Smart Strike is surely the depth of his own family, as a half-brother to Dance Smartly (Danzig) out of one of the four champions foaled by one of the great misnomers, No Class (Nodouble).

But that's only the start of the way this pedigree has been carefully inlaid. The success of Smart Strike's sire Mr. Prospector opened unexpected horizons for his only older sibling Search For Gold, a stakes-placed sprinter at two. And though his stud career proved little more than opportunist, Search For Gold resurfaces here as sire of Rich Strike's third dam, Panning For Gold, a minor stakes winner at the old Greenwood Raceway.

Panning For Gold was mated with another forgotten name, Dixieland Brass–a son of Dixieland Band who broke down when odds-on for the Florida Derby and ended up standing in British Columbia for R.J. and Lois Bennett of Flying Horse Farm–who had added her to the home broodmare band a couple of years before his arrival. The resulting filly was unraced, but it was her match with Smart Strike that produced Gold Strike for Harlequin Ranches: champion sophomore filly of Canada, on the strength of her wins in the GIII Selene S. and Woodbine Oaks, and now dam of a Kentucky Derby winner.

All six of Gold Strike's named foals prior to Rich Strike had been fillies, notably GII Natalma S. winner Llanarmon (Sky Mesa). The latter's endeavors ensured that Calumet had to pay $230,000 for Gold Strike, though already 13, when she was offered carrying a sibling to Llanarmon at the Keeneland November Sale of 2015. When she went to the same sale four years later, however, she was picked up for just $1,700 by Tommy Wente of St. Simon Place. At that stage, eight years after foaling Llanarmon, she had been either been fallow or produced unraced foals; Rich Strike himself was listed as an anonymous weanling colt by Keen Ice.

Wente has a remarkable eye for a bargain mare. Incredibly, in fact, Rich Strike only got into the Derby because he had one more qualifying point than Rattle N Roll (Connect)–bred by St. Simon Place after his dam was picked up for $20,000 at the 2016 November Sale. That mare was cashed out for $585,000 in the same ring last November.

As it was, St. Simon was represented in the GI Kentucky Oaks by Hidden Connection (also by Connect), whose dam was a $9,500 steal before similarly making her home run at $450,000 at Fasig-Tipton last fall.

Unfortunately Gold Strike has evidently become a difficult breeder, with no foal since. She is in the best of hands right now, being evaluated for breeding, but obviously the odds are steepening at the age of 20. Regardless of how things play out, hats off to Wente. Anyone can get lucky and do something like that once, but this guy has done it time and again.

One other foal bred during Gold Strike's residence at Calumet did make the track the year after she was culled. My Blonde Mary, a filly by Oxbow who has won three claimers in 29 starts, was hooked for a basement tag at Tampa Bay last month by trainer Douglas Nunn and Winner Circle Stables LLC. Doubtless they had spotted her half-brother grab third in the GIII Jeff Ruby Steaks just a couple of days previously. Alert business, if so, for another creature of highly volatile value!

The real status of this family, not to mention his own stud prospects, may vary wildly according to what Rich Strike does next. Perhaps it will simply turn out that those Turfway synthetics were not to his taste, and/or that he has reserves of stamina that could only be drawn out, even at 10 furlongs, by the kind of ferocious pace that suited his sire. But if the jury must remain out, equally, on the lessons available in his pedigree, for now we must credit Calumet for achieving something so very conspicuous with such a “striking” blend of genetic flavors.

In addition to the Smart Strike overload, and the mirroring of Mr. Prospector with his brother along the bottom line, we should note extra seams of “ore” from their dam Gold Digger behind Keen Ice himself. His fourth dam, and absolutely pivotal to his appeal, is the Emory Hamilton matriarch Chic Shirine–a daughter of Mr. Prospector.

And actually there's another sliver of Mr P. lurking via the second dam of Awesome Again, damsire of Keen Ice. But the main service of Awesome Again, for those breeding to Keen Ice, is another extremely close reinforcement: his sire Deputy Minister is also responsible for the dam of Curlin. That gives a 3×3 footprint to one of the all-time broodmare sires. Almost as potent in Keen Ice, then, as Smart Strike in Rich Strike. This precious payload of Deputy Minister, combined with that Chic Shirine–Too Chic (Blushing Groom {Fr}) bottom line, will perhaps make Keen Ice especially attractive to anyone who wouldn't mind retaining a filly.

So Rich Strike and his sire each intensify one of the key influences on the modern breed. For both horses, what happened on Saturday may yet turn out to be too good to be true. In view of what Calumet stands for today, however, it would be extremely healthy if each proved able to build on this breakthrough.

You can be sure that some commercial breeders will no more buy into Keen Ice than they did Oxbow, following Hot Rod Charlie. But it's auspicious at least to see people challenged in such similar fashion, two years running. There may not be big bucks at ringside, yet, for the kind of hardiness, stamina and old-fashioned depth of pedigree sought by Calumet for their stallion roster. Perhaps, however, that might gradually begin to change as people see how these attributes, integral to the farm's original glory, remain just what you need for the first Saturday in May and that we will only need more of the same, if we continue cleaning up the game as we must.

Kelley and his team have realized that some of the least fashionable assets of the Thoroughbred are exactly what can make it most sustainable in an uncertain future. This particular Derby winner may or may not prove eligible to change perceptions and it won't necessarily be the Calumet team who find the stallions that ultimately end up doing so. But that won't alter the odds that the eccentricities of today may well become the orthodoxy of tomorrow.

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‘A Big, Attractive Colt’ Is First Foal For Lane’s End Stallion Gift Box

Grade 1 winner and three-time graded stakes winner Gift Box's first foal arrived January 19, 2022 at St. Simon Place.

The colt, bred by St. Simon Place and Machmer Hall, is out of Chelsea Road (Speightstown – Lambert Point, by Charismatic) who was the top priced mare purchased at the Keeneland November Sale for the sire.

Tommy Wente said of the foal, “He's a big attractive colt. I'm very pleased. (He's) got great leg and substance and a very kind eye.”

Carrie Brogden added, “He looks just like his father did as a baby.”

Gift Box (also bred by Machmer Hall) broke his maiden at Belmont Park with an impressive 93 Beyer and went on to become the highest-earning colt of leading sire Twirling Candy. The stallion comes from a strong female family, whose siblings include Stonetastic, Special Forces and Gina Romantica.

Gift Box stands for $10,000.

The post ‘A Big, Attractive Colt’ Is First Foal For Lane’s End Stallion Gift Box appeared first on Horse Racing News | Paulick Report.

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Method in the ‘Madness’ Connecting Star Juveniles

Any farm, really any farm–right up to the most iconic Bluegrass nurseries–would have been proud to have two juveniles as accomplished as Rattle N Roll (Connect) and Electric Ride (Daredevil) heading towards the Breeders' Cup. And for both to have meanwhile dropped out, in wildly contrasting circumstances, would only have reiterated the odds to be overcome by even the most lavishly resourced operations. Rattle N Roll, winner of the GI Claiborne Breeders' Futurity, can regroup next year after a minor foot issue ruled him out of the GI TVG Breeders' Cup Juvenile; tragically there is no such comfort regarding Electric Ride, the GII Chandelier S. runner-up, following her freak loss (reportedly to an anaphylactic shock) a couple of weeks ago.

Incredibly, however, the farm that bred both still retains, not one, but two unbeaten contenders for Friday's 2-year-old card at Del Mar. Hidden Connection (Connect), nine-length winner of the GIII Pocahontas S., looks formidable in the GI Netjets Breeders' Cup Juvenile Fillies, while One Timer (Trappe Shot) heads for the GII Juvenile Turf Sprint off a 12-length maiden win and two stakes scores. A banner achievement for any breeder. Impossible, then, to give adequate credit to St. Simon Place, whose scale of operation can be judged from the aggregate cost of the mares responsible for these four youngsters.

Tommy Wente, the man responsible, quickly does the math.

“Out of the four mares, you know, I think it's less than $34,000 I got tied up in them altogether,” he says.

Actually, it's $32,400.

Wente telephoned his friend Tommy Eastham of Legacy Bloodstock after One Timer won at Santa Anita and Electric Ride ran second in the Chandelier on the same card.

“I just want to know, Tommy,” Wente said to his namesake. “Is this luck, or am I doing something right?”

“Well, when Hidden Connection won the other day, I guess I might have said a little luck,” replied Eastham. “But after these two here? You've got be doing something right.”

Then, when Rattle N Roll won his Grade I a few days later, Eastham called again. “Man, whatever you're doing–just keep doing it!”

So what's the secret? When you think about the fortunes being spent by others, it feels like a pretty big question.

“Everybody asks me that!” says Wente, who runs the breeding division of St. Simon while partners Calvin and Shane Crain concentrate on a parallel sod-growing business. “I'm known for going in there and buying cheap horses. But they're not really cheap horses, in my eyes. For me, they're very well-bred horses that come from very good farms. Okay, so they've been culled: this one's got a bad knee, this one's a little sore, this one needs more leg. But that's what I look for, because I can't buy mares that are perfect.

“So I look for the kind I can breed to something that can fix them. I see whether I can breed [any issues] out of them, and can get me something on the ground that I can sell. But that's what makes it even more amazing to us, everything that's been happening. Because often you can get by with those kinds of mares if you're racing their babies. But we sell [nearly] everything.”

One observable trait, consistent with accepting perceived flaws to meet the budget, is that all four of these mares were very lightly raced. But the real key is to find a filly out of a young mare who has been given a chance with good covers and, ideally, has already achieved prices suggestive of good physicals.

“That way I can just sit back on them,” Wente reasons. “I can let the family grow for a few years.”

A perfect example of the modus operandi is One Timer's dam Spanish Star (Blame), picked up for just $1,500 at Keeneland November four years ago.

“I knew where she was raised, I knew the owner Tracy Farmer, I knew they did it right,” Wente recalls. “Okay, she didn't work out on the racetrack, but she was the first foal of a mare that had some stuff going, she had a son by Awesome Again in work. And that turned out to be Sir Winston. A year later he wins the Belmont and, bam, I can sell the half-sister [privately] for $150,000.”

Now Wente is hoping to close out the exploding value of a couple of other diamonds found in the rough, with the dams of Hidden Connection and Rattle N Roll both scheduled to enter the ring next week.

C J's Gal (Awesome Again) was discovered at the Keeneland January Sale of 2016, having derailed after a single start. Wente knew that the big spenders would literally overlook her, being on the small side, and landed her for $9,500. Her first foal, a Tourist filly, made $70,000.

“So from there,” Wente says, “we're free-riding.”

Okay, so her second foal was a $49,000 RNA weanling who was ultimately let go for $40,000 the following September. But at least that meant Hidden Connection could benefit from the farm regime for another few months–and that, to be fair, could be as important as any other ingredient in St. Simon's success.

“I try to raise a great product,” Wente says. “I love my feeding program, I love how we wean them. And I don't put horses in a barn. Our horses are outside 24/7, raised in herds of, like, 10. And if they get kicked, they get kicked. If they get snotty noses, they get snotty noses. You know, to me, that's what makes them tough. You have to let them go through all that stuff. In my opinion, we give them too much medicine; we baby them too much. I think we get caught up, with so much money tied up in them, wanting to protect them. 'He's limping today, he doesn't feel too good, better get him inside.' No. Let that horse be a horse, let him figure it out.”

C J's Gal is offered as hip 148 (with a Frosted cover) at Fasig-Tipton; while Jazz Tune (Johannesburg) is catalogued as hip 222, in foal to Liam's Map, at Keeneland. Wente picked her up, a $20,000 apple from the tree cultivated by the late Edward P. Evans, at the same sale five years ago. She had won a Parx maiden (though in another light career) in the silks of William S. Farish. Jazz Tune has some wonderful old-school seeding to her family, out of a Pleasant Tap half-sister to two Grade I winners (plus another at Grade II level) out of the Northern Dancer blue hen Dance Review.

Mind you, no matter how much you get right, you always need a bit of luck. How fortunate, for instance, that Jazz Tune did not meet her reserve at $55,000 when Wente returned her to Keeneland, with Rattle N Roll in utero, in 2018. But sometimes it just takes a little time to develop value. One Timer, for instance, made no more than $21,000 as a yearling, his sire having meanwhile been exiled to Turkey. While we've already noted how Hidden Connection struggled for traction.

But the yearling Electric Ride brought $130,000 from Quarter Pole Enterprises at Fasig-Tipton October, some yield for an Indiana-bred daughter of a mare, Why Oh You (Yes It's True), bought for $1,400 deep in the same Keeneland November Sale that produced Jazz Tune. Electric Ride advanced her value to $250,000 through Eddie Woods at OBS the following April, while Rattle N Roll proved a still more profitable exercise for his pinhookers. A $55,000 Keeneland November weanling for Rexy Bloodstock, he made $210,000 from Kenny McPeek in the same ring the following September.

No doubt about it, then, a grounding at St. Simon Place is becoming ever more trusted; and its graduates are punching ever more above weight. Wente has now expanded its broodmare band past 40, some owned with another partner in Scott Stevens, and raised around $750,000 from eight yearlings at Keeneland in September, selling as usual through Machmer Hall.

“You've got to surround yourself with good people, people willing to help,” Wente stresses. “Because I have to reach out every day. I couldn't do what I'm doing without Carrie Brogden. She's opened a lot of doors for me, and she's always No 1 about the horses. People like her and [husband] Craig have been there and done it all. If she's says, 'Tommy, you want to pull that horse from the sale,' I'm pulling the horse from the sale. I'm going to take criticism and use it.”

That said, the driving principle remains the sweat of his own brow.

“At the end of the day, I truly believe that it's the time you put in raising them,” he says. “It's the cutting the grass, fixing the fenceboards, fixing the water. It's everything together. If you want to be the person who just sits in the house watching TV, letting everybody else do your work, fine. But I do my books, I do my matings, I do my contracts, I do my registrations. I'm as hands-on as I can be.”

They say that necessity is the mother of invention and maybe those big farms that find themselves mere bystanders at the Breeders' Cup can learn something from the strategies Wente has adapted to work his budget. Maybe insisting on perfection, on the very best that money can buy, invites its own fragilities. Maybe it's more important to concentrate on connecting with horses, and connecting them with their environment. Nothing, that way, gets in the way of the passion.

Wente first had his imagination captured when visiting the barn of his stepfather, former Hoosier Park trainer Tom Hickman, some 20 years ago. He was captivated. He simply had to have one of these beautiful animals. The one he bought, an Indiana-bred, ran once and showed nothing. Then one night the phone rang.

“We had them boarded over there at the old Quarter Horse track, Riverside Downs, in Henderson, Kentucky,” Wente recalls. “About two o'clock in the morning I had a call from the trainer. They'd had a barn fire, lost all these horses. Of course, my stepdad's horses were in there, my horse was in there. It was the low of the low. My very first horse, lost in a barn fire. But I knew I was hooked–because the very next day I was looking for another one to buy. And I've been hooked ever since. The highs are high, the lows are low, and there's no in-between. It's the guys that can take those lows, and keep on going, that are going to make it.”

So here's one such, who boards the plane for California on Thursday not just flying the flag for a 400-acre parcel of Kentucky, but for every small breeder striving against the perceived odds.

“I'm for the little guy,” Wente says. “I am a little guy. I started out in Indiana, okay. I raised so much crap over there that nobody wanted. And then I've come over here to Kentucky, but I kept the same mindset. I never changed what I did. I just started buying Kentucky stuff, and dealing with Kentucky stuff, the way I did the Indiana stuff. You don't need to have Justify or Tapit. The highest stallion we've used would be $30,000, tops.

“So I want the little breeder to know, keep your head down, keep doing what you're doing. People know me as that crazy guy going in there buying horses for $1,000, $2,000. But you know what, there is some kind of method in my madness. I haven't figured it out yet. But there's something going on, right? I've proved you can do it. You can do it, man. If I can do it, anybody can do it.”

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