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By Wandering Eyes · Posted
For a 3-year-old colt, the first Saturday in January at chilly Aqueduct Racetrack is a lot more than five months removed from the first Saturday in May at Churchill Downs. View the full article -
By Wandering Eyes · Posted
In the kickoff of stakes action Jan. 3 at Gulfstream Park, Sister Troienne easily dispatched five other 3-year-old fillies to post a comfortable victory in the $157,500 Ginger Brew Stakes.View the full article -
By Wandering Eyes · Posted
Dazzling Dame (Girvin) shot out to the front and romped in Saturday's $150,000 Busanda S. at the Big A, good for 20 points on the road to the Kentucky Oaks. The 2-1 chance showed the way through fractions of :23.55 and :47.20, let it out a notch on the far turn and dropped the hammer in the stretch to win by daylight. Two Bits (American Pharoah) was second. Dazzling Dame was already a two-times stakes winner. She won the Sorority S. at Monmouth Aug. 17 and White Clay Creek S. at Delaware last out Oct. 11. Her lone career defeat was a well-beaten fourth in the GIII Pocahontas S. at Churchill Downs Sept. 13. Sales history: $50,000 RNA Wlg '23 KEENOV; $65,000 Ylg '24 OBSWIN; $45,000 2yo '25 OBSMAR. Lifetime Record: 5-4-0-0. O-Respect the Valleys, LLC B-Maria M. Haire (Md) T-Brittany T. Russell The post Girvin Filly Dazzling Dame Romps in Busanda appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions. View the full article -
By Wandering Eyes · Posted
His favorite Gary Biszantz line is an instructive one: “You know, I may not be right-but I'm never confused.” So while anyone who read our interview with his employer might be unnerved by the sheer force of his personality, Mike Owens himself has always appreciated its clarity and drive. He could hardly have lasted all these years as manager of Cobra Farm, right up to its sale earlier this year, without finding a reliable register for their relationship. Biszantz, to you or me, might seem larger than life; to Owens, he has simply made life larger. As he says himself: “Gary's stories are great. But what's really great is that they're all true!” To Owens, nothing captures the ethic better than the way Old Trieste (A.P. Indy) was gunned into the lead before fading when an outsider for the 1999 GI Breeders' Cup Classic. “He's a fast horse and that's what I want everyone to see,” Biszantz announced. “If it doesn't happen, it won't be his fault. It will be mine.” “And that's the way Gary has always been,” Owens remarks. “He's willing to shoulder those things. Yes, I've seen him upset after a race. But just give him a little time and it'll be, 'Ah, we're okay. We live to race again.' That's his attitude. It was a real passion, and he has so much energy. “Just think about how he always was about medication. He was never afraid to tell that story. Some people listened but others, they just thought him brassy enough and said, 'Oh gosh, here comes Gary Biszantz again.' And he was right. He sees they're making progress now but he was trying to tell them 20 years ago. He often said that if you made the industry a dictatorship, he could straighten it out in a heartbeat.” Owens got more than he bargained for, then, the day a guy he knew nothing about gave $100,000 for a Marquetry colt out of his consignment at Fasig-Tipton. That was around the fourth year of Cornerstone Stable, which he had started with two clients and the promise of four mares. By now he was already foaling out 30, and breeding 50; and in 1997 they topped a session at Fasig-Tipton with a $250,000 colt from the first crop of Dehere. That was neat, having foaled Dehere six years previously, 10.30 one Saturday morning at Due Process Stables. His wife at the time was working there for Robert Brennan, and three days later they delivered the Cryptoclearance filly that would become Strategic Maneuver. “Then the two of them go to Saratoga in 1993 and clean up,” Owens recalls. “It had been 80 years since a colt had gone up there and won all three graded stakes for 2-year-olds; and she won the Schuylerville and then the Spinaway.” Jeanne had warned him that life with horses was tough. “And I said, 'Listen, you're going to have to beat me out to that barn,'” Owens recalls with a chuckle. “She never did! I had a background not in horses, but agriculture. Grew up in rural south-central Kentucky, and my uncle had cattle and tobacco. But I came up here and had a corporate job in town for 18 years. I always say that if they'd had a 25-year-and-out retirement program, I'd have stayed.” But it was the kind of job that hadn't impeded him from farming a little hay and tobacco, some cattle, on various tracts around Lexington. Then, when he saw how they went about the Thoroughbred game, he gave a shrug and said to himself: “I can do this.” And now this character Biszantz, who had bought the Marquetry colt, had bought Brennan's farm and was sending his overflow mares there. When the manager moved on, a couple of years later, Owens surrendered the Cornerstone lease and went to work for what was now Cobra Farm. To those 90 acres, Biszantz added another 144 by acquiring the old Whileaway Farm from the Humphrey family in 2001. “Memorial Day weekend, we moved a 'dozer, two earthmovers, two scrapers onto that farm,” Owens recalls. “And by Labor Day, we'd built a new barn, renovated two others, put in a lake, redid the roads, all new electric underground, all new water. It was a dry summer, and everything looked a dustbowl. But Labor Day weekend it started raining, everything greened right back up, and we were off and running.” They had to overcome a shattering blow soon after, with the premature loss of Old Trieste to laminitis. “The killer was picking Gary up at the airport and turning left,” Owens says. “For the first time we weren't turning right to go and see the horse at Jonabell. That was such heartache. He had graded stakes horses in each of his three crops, and I really think he was off and running to be a great sire.” Owens himself bred Old Trieste's GI Blue Grass winner Sinister Minister. “Baffert was beaten by him in a claiming race, went after him and bought him,” he recalls. “Going down the back side in the Blue Grass, his mouth was just gaping open from Garrett Gomez trying to slow him down. Finally, he said, 'Screw it, just go.' And nobody could catch him.” Another distinction as a breeder was very apt: Owens was the first person to collect a $25,000 breeder's incentive award. Apt, because this was one of countless ways in which he has quietly put his shoulder to the wheel for the benefit of the Bluegrass community, through programs such as the Kentucky Equine Management Internship and the Kentucky Equine Education Project. He has also put in long service on the Lexington/Fayette County Planning Commission. So it was also as a good citizen, as well as an accomplished professional, that his peers named him Kentucky Farm Manager of the Year in 2008. “I don't know,” Owens says with a shrug. “Hopefully we did a little bit of good. Frank Penn twisted my arm about the Planning Commission and I've probably spent way too many years down there. But Frank needed horsemen to make people realize how important the industry is to this area. It's hard to get them to realize that when we don't have a beach, a ski slope. But this right here is our tourism.” Besides, he felt a debt to Penn: one of several people who assisted his transition into the signature industry of his home state. “I could list a lot of people,” Owens emphasizes. “I wouldn't have been able to accomplish what I did without Frank, without Dave Fishback, without Mike Spirito, a lot of special people that gave me a chance. I mean, I was novice coming into this, I really was. People like that, you learn from every day. And you remember that, when you've got the youngsters underneath you. And God love her, my former wife gave me the opportunity to leave the corporate world and go do this. Fortunately, it took off!” The biggest leap of all, of course, was owed to Biszantz. The respect between them is unequivocal. As Biszantz puts it, in his interview: “It was his farm, I just lived there!” Owens says that they were always perfectly willing to have an argument without falling out. Mind you, one party obviously tended to be in a somewhat stronger position. Briefed to run the farm as a business, for instance, Owens asked for two bands of broodmares-one from which to sell, another from which to race. “But as soon as he saw that nice colt over there, it was, 'No, I want to keep this one!'” Owens says wryly. “And I'd say, 'Gary, that pays the bills for the year.' 'Well, we'll worry about that later.' That's pretty much the way he was. I said, 'Okay, Gary, you pull the trigger. We'll do our best to make it work.' But we had a bunch of clients the last several years. I foaled out 30 mares last year. And we've sold some good horses. But as soon as that happened, he wanted to go buy another one!” Biszantz was already nearly 80 when spending a record $430,000 at the 2013 New York-breds' sale at Saratoga. “They had watched the sale that first night and Betty Bisantz said, 'You know Gary, I'll partner on a horse with you.' So that morning Robin and I came up with a shortlist of six or seven and he said, 'Come on Betty, let's go look at horses.' And Betty's got a sharp eye for a horse.” They came back with a Tapit filly at the top of their list. “I said, 'Betty, that's your sale-topper right there,'” Owens recalls. “'You're not going to afford her.' Well, you don't tell Gary Biszantz that! And afterwards all the news people are around him, and I can hear him right now: 'Oh yeah, we got a plan. We'll get her broken and we'll send her to Clement and she'll be my next broodmare when we're done.' And I said, 'I thought I was out of the broodmare business! I guess I'm back in.' But that's Gary Bisantz for you, to a T.” Nor is the team done yet. They're still doing the odd pinhook, even have the odd mare in foal. “That's what I liked best, and what I did for the longest time: foaling mares,” Owens says. “Because you never know where the next one's coming from. Look at Thorpedo Anna. There's something for everyone, at every level. I was in the winner's circle with Open Mind as a 2-year-old. Jeanne had foaled her. Somebody had culled her as one that was never going to make it. She was named because Wayne Lukas saw her and said, 'Oh, let's keep an open mind about this one.' That's what makes this thing fun. You just have to keep doing it, get them to the gate. And the good ones pop up. Horses keep you honest. You just have to give them a chance.” The post Owens the Cornerstone of Cobra Farm appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions. View the full article -
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