Keeneland Breeder Spotlight: Owen Puts Stanley In Best Of Tempers

[Wandering Eyes]

Mark Stanley had a fair idea what must have happened when hearing a sudden cascade of message alerts as they drove along.

“Based on, nobody calls to tell you a horse ran bad,” he says wryly. “We were out with our grandkids, so I'd taped the race. And then my phone just starts exploding. So I knew he must have won, even before we got back and watched it. Obviously I have nothing to do with him, now, but we've enjoyed following him a lot more than I thought I ever would, watching somebody else's horse. But that's what's fun about this whole business. Those 20 or 30 guys texting about the race, it's like a team, everybody rooting for everybody else.”

And, in fairness, Stanley does still have skin in the game. As a first foal, Owen Almighty's success in the GIII Tampa Bay Derby is a valuable boost to his dam Tempers Rising (Bayern); and any breeder is going to enjoy the ride, once a colt starts being measured out for a blanket of roses.

The GI Blue Grass Stakes will be a crucial junction for the Speightstown colt, with options of proceeding towards the GI Kentucky Derby or reverting in distance for the GII Pat Day Mile. And that might well boil down to whether he takes sooner after his dam, who herself contested a Classic at Churchill Downs only five years ago, or his sire.

Tempers Rising won just a maiden in 14 starts for Stanley, but after running second in the GII Fair Grounds Oaks was given her chance in the postponed GI Kentucky Oaks of 2020, by no means discredited with a midfield finish.

“I always thought her a better racehorse than her record showed,” Stanley says. “She was always knocking on the door, and made over $300,000.”

At one point Tempers Rising was put in a digital sale, but that was never more than an experiment and Stanley unhesitatingly retained her at $150,000. On her eventual retirement, he then made another astute call–one that other breeders would do well to emulate–in sending this unproven mare to a proven veteran in Speightstown.

The resulting colt was obviously a cracker, judging from the $360,000 paid for him as a foal at Keeneland by Sycamore Hall Farm.

“Yes, he was good-looking,” Stanley says. “But I'm a bit of numbers guy, and when I looked into it, Speightstown's weanlings sold about as well as his yearlings. So I went ahead and put him in the November Sale, and it worked out.”  (Sure enough, the colt proved a pretty neutral pinhook in realizing no more than $350,000 from Boardshorts Stables at Saratoga the following summer.)

So can the breeder offer Flying Dutchmen, the owners of Owen Almighty, any encouragement regarding his potential to stretch out?

“Well, I think that these guys have done a lot better than I ever do, so I'm going to stay out of it and just enjoy whatever they do,” Stanley emphasizes. “I thought the Pat Day was a good spot, but I understand Derby fever, too. I always thought that the mare just needed a little speed, and of course that was Speightstown's calling card. But from what we're seeing, he got some endurance from his mother, too. So the combination seems to have worked out pretty well.”

Owen Almighty as a foal | courtesy Taylor Made

Whatever happens, Tempers Rising has enjoyed an immediate vault in status, vindicating Stanley for the further opportunities she has been given since. Her second foal, a Constitution colt, was pinhooked from the September Sale at $185,000 and has been catalogued by Tradewinds Stud at the upcoming Arqana Breeze-Up Sale. Next in line is a colt by none other than Not This Time; and while Tempers Rising missed last year, that left her vacant for an early cover by McKinzie this time round.

“We were real excited about the Not This Time, even before all this,” Stanley says. “He's put together the same way as Owen, very athletic, but a little bigger. He's at TaylorMade, where they obviously see a lot of the stallion's foals, and they think a lot of him out there.”

Stanley got to know the Taylor family as Little League baseball coach to Duncan's son Marshall, and his interest in other sports has also been stimulated by daughter Alex's marriage to Chief Stipe Davenport, who has just succeeded his father Scott as Bellarmine University basketball coach.

Alex, for her part, has long been integral to the Stanley equine program, as it was her toddler tantrums that prompted the naming of its very first recruit. That was back in 1993, when Stanley joined a gang of pals for a weekend at Saratoga.

“There were 16 of us, my brother and 14 other guys,” he recalls. “And actually Kenny McPeek was in that group. Well, you know how smart you get at the track sometimes. And we decided that instead of just betting on these horses, we'd get together and buy one. They had a 2-year-old sale, first time I've known them do that during the meet, so we went over and circled the three fastest times. And the one that fell in our price range was this Temperence Hill filly. I signed the ticket [for $70,000] and we went out and celebrated for two days. Two weeks after that, the bill comes. And not a one of them could be found. Not one of the 15! So now I was in the horse business.”

Alex was two at the time and, playing on the sire's name, Stanley named the filly Her Temper. Within weeks of entering McPeek's barn, she had won a Turfway maiden and a Keeneland allowance; and the following spring, back at Keeneland, she added the GII Beaumont Stakes. So were there 15 guys kicking themselves then?

“Well, virtually every time there are 16 guys in the winner's circle photo!” replies Stanley with a chuckle.

Keeneland was already a track dear to his heart. “I've no background at all in racing, I'm from West Virginia, but when I came to U.K. [to study engineering] we'd go out there Friday afternoons,” he recalls. “Mainly because of the girls! But I got into the whole atmosphere and pageantry. And then, working with Kenny early, he's so good with his owners, at communication and keeping you involved.”

Variations on a theme since Her Temper include GI Ruffian Handicap winner Swift Temper (Giant's Causeway), sold privately to Japan after falling shy of her reserve at $2.05 million at the 2009 Keeneland November Sale; and Quiet Temper (Quiet American), a $90,000 September yearling who won the GII Fair Grounds Oaks the following year.

Stanley, who manufactures auto parts for Toyota, mischievously explains that only the fillies are branded this way. “Boys don't have tempers!” he says, plainly not in earnest. “But as Alex got older, and that first horse having done pretty good, she took pride in the names. Remember we've also had graded stakes winners called Golden Temper (Forty Niner) and Pleasant Temper (Storm Cat), too. So we've tried to match Alex through the stages of her life.”

Stanley's mother also contributed to the family's engagement with the program.

“She and I used to love going to the track together in the mornings,” Stanley recalls. “She especially loved watching them get a bath after they'd worked. She used to follow Pleasant Temper, in particular, and Elliott [Walden, trainer] treated her like a queen. When that filly ran in Chicago [in 1997], Elliott arranged a limo to pick her up from the airport, and we had lunch in the stakes room, all the shrimp you could have, wine, whatever.

“And then we ran terrible! About a month later, my mother's having open heart surgery and I'm sitting with her in the hospital. And it comes up on the screen that Arlington was closing–it was back when they were battling the riverboats–and she turned to me and said, 'I knew they were giving me way too much.' She thinks she broke them.”

Mark and Nancy Stanley | courtesy Mark Stanley

That longstanding connection to the Walden family connects two milestones in which Stanley played a gratifying role.

“In 2001, Pat Day won his 8,000th race on one of mine that Elliott trained,” he explains. “And his groom was a young Bret Jones [of Airdrie, son of Brereton C. Jones]. And then, last October, Irad Ortiz won his 4,000th race on Good Temper: Will Walden training, and Brereton Jones as breeder. So it's full circle.”

Earlier this month that Collected filly, just $40,000 deep in the 2023 September Sale, won an optional allowance on the Fair Grounds turf by over seven lengths. “Will picked her out for me, and I'm keen on seeing her go a little longer,” Stanley says. “It's fun, I knew Will when he was three or four years old. He has fought a lot of things but come out on the good end of it.”

Good Temper forms part of what is nowadays a considerably reduced program. “The initial theory was to buy fillies and accomplish enough that you could breed them,” Stanley says. “But then it got to the point where, one Thanksgiving, [his wife] Nancy's father asked me how many horses we had. And I said, 'I don't know, eight I think, counting babies, eight or 10.” And Nancy said, 'You better count them again.' And it turned out to be 19. I realized then that I couldn't afford to tie up so much money, and we sold most of them. Now we've just four on the track, plus Tempers Rising and her yearling.”

Quality not quantity, then: a single mare, with a first foal on the track, and he's giving everyone Derby fever. That's a condition Stanley fully understands, having sampled it himself in 1999. Though he made no show on the day, Ecton Park (Forty Niner) later beat Lemon Drop Kid in the GII Jim Dandy and Menifee in the GI Super Derby.

“He probably shouldn't have run, but it was my first and only chance so I'm glad we did,” Stanley reflects. “For this year we already have our seats, so we'll be there rooting for Owen, whichever race he ends up going for.”

Because ultimately this game has been about enjoying the ride, and in the right company–as exemplified by Ecton Park himself, when he failed to meet his yearling reserve at $190,000.

“So I went back to Bill Harrigan, made him an offer, and we shook hands on it,” Stanley recalls. “And I know for a fact that somebody else went in an hour later and offered him $30,000 or $40,000 more. But Bill stuck to our handshake, even though we didn't have anything in writing. I've always admired him for that. That's the straight-up kind of guy you like to do business with.”

And experiences of that kind, with families like the Waldens and the Taylors, trainers like McPeek and Dale Romans, have long made Stanley rejoice in that fateful Saratoga excursion, all those years ago. “I probably would have been better off, financially, if that first filly had just tanked and I'd quit,” he says. “But over the years I wouldn't have had anything near the same fun.”

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