Greatness In Small Things

[Wandering Eyes]

With Spanish moss hanging smokily in the sunbeams, live oaks spread their embrace like wise old graybeards in conference. They make the pasture a little harder to maintain, but it's worth the extra effort to give the horses all that deep shade during the dog days of summer. And while Dr. Krista Seltzer tends to apologize that there's “nothing fancy” about Solera Farm, in many ways it appeals as an edifying alternative to more industrial operations.

Certainly there are a couple of stallions here exemplary of the independent outlook Krista and her father Ed have brought to their farm outside Williston, Florida.

True, one of those stallions is now pensioned. But for those who hanker for the days when limits on quantity locked quality into stallion books, even the chance to pat a horse like Greatness on the neck feels a treat. This was the last active son of Mr. Prospector at stud in North America–and he's out of a Danzig mare! This glorious throwback's final handful of foals were delivered in 2023: while the old fires might still burn, his hindlegs would no longer support them. But he's looking terrific, at 26, beautifully tended by a team headed by farm trainer Curtis Garrison.

No fewer than 176 of 225 lifetime starters by Greatness have been winners. Only three at graded stakes level, admittedly, but he also has a millionaire besides several that broke track records; and there are limits to what any horse can achieve, standing in Florida at $2,500. The question now is whether his young neighbor Rogueish will be given more opportunity, having mustered two stakes winners, and 11 overall, from just 20 starters through his first two crops. (Not to mention his conversion of a $1,500 short yearling into a $220,000 2-year-old.)

A homebred son of Into Mischief, Rogueish was a juvenile meteor who won what turned out to be his only start at the Fair Grounds by nearly seven lengths.

“Curtis knew the horse was special when he left here,” Krista says. “Of course we're only working against our own horses, but Curtis has done it long enough. And then Steve Asmussen really liked him, too. After that first race, my dad was offered good dollars. But he said, 'Why would I want to sell, at my age?' Because we'd never go out and buy an expensive colt, and here was one we had bred ourselves. But then he strained a tendon. And my dad said, 'I know it's crazy, but I believe in this horse, and I believe in the pedigree: let's stand him.'”

Getting traction has been challenging, but Krista hopes that people will respond to the way he has seized limited opportunity.

“They're sound and they have good brains,” Krista says. “He's a decent-sized horse, not towering–16, 16.1–but he has a huge hip, and that Into Mischief speed and precociousness. Which is actually in the granddam, too. She never ran, she had some knee problems, but she was very fast.”

Moreover she was a half-sister (by A.P. Indy) to Greatness, and that makes Rogueish an apt symbol of the way Krista and Ed are still looking to the future–whatever the impression made by a dispersal at Keeneland last year. For while Ed had lately turned 90, that was not a case of a family getting out of the business. There were simply partnerships to be dissolved, market value to be established, that kind of thing–and Krista and Ed were glad to invest in retrieving some cherished stock. It wasn't always cheap, notably in the case of a $1-million Gun Runner filly out of Rogueish's sister at the September Sale; but $10,000, for instance, was a small price to pay for a 14-year-old daughter of Greatness in foal to Rogueish. Nobody else, after all, could be quite so attached to the prospect of a foal inbred 4×3 to Harbour Club, who ran second in three Grade Is (once by a nose) before giving them Greatness.

That has always been Ed's way: while the idea is to make the business pay, he has never been enslaved by commercial vogues, preferring to plow the lone furrow.

“He's been amazing for picking out stallions on the cusp,” Krista says. “I remember, way back, people saying, 'Okay, who are we going to? Don't tell me, your dad's new favorite stallion, right? Into Mischief?' And rolling their eyes, because nobody was using the horse at that time. Twirling Candy, same thing, before he had really hit. Looking at one of his babies, we said, 'Nice horse!' And the consignor said, 'Yeah–but what can you do with a Twirling Candy?' So, method to his madness!”

That outlying approach is consistent with Ed's entry into the game. He knew zilch about horses, as a young man in Chicago, when one of the guys in a card game said he had just bought one for $2,000, and somehow Ed found himself taking an eighth. That horse did nothing, but Ed became intrigued and starting claiming horses at Arlington and elsewhere. Long before the internet facilitated research, he was seeking turf strains in the pedigrees of horses struggling on dirt.

Ed was born with brains not money and, after Harvard on a sports scholarship, deployed one to make the other. He built up automobile dealerships, then played up the winnings in real estate. As he thrived, he was able to upgrade his Thoroughbred program, extending to a Kentucky farm that consecutively produced Classic winners either side of the Atlantic: Midway Lady (Alleged) won the 1000 Guineas and Oaks in 1986, a year after Tank's Prospect won the Preakness.

Krista remembers spending the summer after school on the farm–in total contrast with her dad, she has been a hands-on horsewoman all her life–and watching a Mr. Prospector colt out in the field.

“He was plain brown wrapper, a bit of a Roman nose–and I absolutely loved him,” she recalls. “His gallop stride, he'd be doing two fence posts, and all so effortlessly. He just had this incredible fluidity. And he was such a cool horse, too, chill and easygoing just like his mother.”

Wayne Lukas bought Tank's Prospect for $625,000 at the old July Sale in 1983, in the same Keeneland ring where the dispersal took place over four decades later. In between, a double tragedy–Krista lost both her mother and brother–naturally prompted the suspension of the program for a time, but ultimately the horses provided valuable solace.

“After all that grief, they were like Dad's happy place and he immersed himself back in it,” Krista explains. “But actually going round the sales has always been a chore for him, so he'd pick out filly pedigrees and I would go look at them. Anyway one of the last times he did come to the barns, a September Sale maybe 20 years ago, was to see one in Beth Bayer's consignment. And I didn't really like the filly, but Beth said, 'Can I show you this other one I really like?' She was by Yes It's True, and I loved her. I opened the catalogue and said, 'Dad, look!' The fourth dam was Midnight Pumpkin, the dam of Tank's Prospect.”

The page, otherwise, was not quite up to Ed's standards but he thought she might warrant $30,000-$40,000.

“So she comes into the ring and I sit in front of Dad,” Krista continues. “And she goes past $42,000, $45,000, makes $72,000. And I said, 'Darn, I really liked her. Too bad.' And then I see the guy bringing the ticket to my dad. 'Well, you really liked her, right?' And that was It's True Love: stakes winner, graded stakes producer–and granddam of the Into Mischief weanling that we sold for $900,000 at the November Sale. So, in a way, that really brought things full circle.”

It was around the same time that Ed bought these 300 acres in Florida. Krista had meanwhile qualified as a vet, an ambition dating to a girlhood in rural Oklahoma. She remembers making her brother bring torn stuffed animals to her surgery (the closet) to be sewn up. This is also a woman with hinterland, having strayed from her vocation with college stints in art history and French, but a summer internship in Lexington under a cherished mentor, Dr. Chief Stipe Byars, clarified a fascination not just with animals but explicitly with medicine. After deep qualification, taking in five universities, she now has the unusual distinction of serving as resident veterinarian (excepting repro) on a family farm where she also manages the breeding stock.

“Of course, Dad always had the final word,” she stresses. “But I'll have a lot of input into what we keep or sell, and work with consignors, keep an eye on what we have in Kentucky, a lot of clerical stuff. And managing the stallion. So I wear a lot of hats. I don't really do surgery anymore, obviously. If it can't be knocked down on the lawn, then we don't do it!”

The respective expertise of father and daughter complement each other ideally–and find a common margin in the belief, hardly fashionable these days, that you build a family by putting winners under a mare. They seldom use new sires; never, certainly, with unproven mares. Broodmare recruitment has been driven by blood, and if that requires flaws of size or conformation, for the sake of affordability, so be it.

“It's a crapshoot,” Krista acknowledges. “My dad and I will have discussions about which stallion to go to. I'll say, 'She needs this and this, physically; this, mentally; or this, for soundness.' Sometimes we'll disagree, of course. A lot of times he's right, and sometimes I am. He's probably more right than me, but he's been doing it longer!”

And the show goes on, as emphasized by that seven-figure docket for the Gun Runner filly.

“That's a sixth-generation horse,” Krista notes. “For someone that has loved the game so long, and has put so much into these families, that was very emotional. Dad said, and I get this, 'I'm 90 years old! Breeding from that filly, by the time they're running, I've got to live till at least 100!' But the passion is still there. I have to say, he's amazing.

“And that filly's doing great. She can get a little hot-headed. Curtis doesn't want to put speed into her too early, because she already wants it and it'll crank her brain up. So he's like, 'Slow down, girl.' He's so good like that.”

Solera plays a long game, and an attentive one. There are pensioned geldings, pensioned mares, and of course even a pensioned stallion.

“They've been good to us,” Krista says with a shrug. “So long as a horse is going to live an okay life, then we're going to try. We feel like when you breed, you are responsible for them–and you stay responsible.”

That's the length of perspective arising from the parallel bonds between father and daughter, on the one hand, and the families they have cultivated together.

“Wherever I'm handing them off into the world–the weanling sale, the training barn, wherever–I want them to have as solid a foundation as they can,” Krista concludes. “I love breeding a good horse, and love raising one. We always strive for a pedigree that can bring mentality, soundness, physique. You don't always get everything, but you're always trying. From day one, we want to give those babies everything we can to be successful.”

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