Breeder Spotlight: Proud Missouri Citizen A Model For Bull Run, Presented By Keeneland

[Wandering Eyes]

Precocious kid, streaks ahead of his peers, brought crashing to earth? Hang in there, boy. Because if that's pretty much where the champion juvenile finds himself, heading into the GI Kentucky Derby off a disappointing run at Santa Anita, he need not seek far for inspiration.

Robert Low bred Citizen Bull (Into Mischief) with his wife Lawana from their mare No Joke (Distorted Humor), who had cost them $750,000 as a yearling at the 2017 Keeneland September Sale–just days after her half-sister Moonshine Memories (Malibu Moon) had won the GI Debutante Stakes. Unfortunately, No Joke never made the racetrack.

“Just one of these hard-luck fillies,” Low explains. “Plagued by little, niggling issues. She did show flashes of brilliance, in her works, even as we were trying to take it easy and let her work through those things. But she's absolutely gorgeous, a wonderful physical, so at some point we decided to turn her into a broodmare. And that has obviously turned out a good decision.”

But this was hardly the first time Low had discovered how a hard road will often lead to the summit.

He was still a University of Missouri student when buying himself a dump truck in 1970. “Really, it was downpayment on a dump truck,” he clarifies. “A pretty old one, too, and not that profitable because it kept breaking down.”

But still–what kind of 19-year-old does that, when his buddies are boozing and chasing girls?

“Some of my fraternity brothers and classmates did say I was crazy,” Low admits. “But I was a pretty enterprising youth, raised on a farm, and I'm sure my parents had helped spot me a couple cows, that kind of thing. So when I went to college, I had a few dollars stored away that I could invest. And driving that dump truck, it was really like a summer job.”

Except then he remembered what everyone in the meatpacking trade had always told his father, a market news reporter: the guys who made the real money were the truckers.

Citizen Bull works at Churchill | Coady Media

“I would find out that it wasn't necessarily true,” Low recalls. “But it got me interested, the talk at the kitchen table about over-the-road trucks. So when my dump truck wasn't working out, I decided I'd trade it for one of those. And that's how we got started.”

He didn't just do well. He did too well, a sapling rocketing too tall for its roots.

“Early, mid-'70s, we were essentially doubling the size of the company: one truck, two, four, eight, and up,” Low explains. “Pretty soon, say just prior to 1980, we had 300. But that kind of rapid growth, I don't know where you can do that now. High-tech, maybe, but in trucking you have assets that are expensive. So going like that, you create a lot of debt–and your debt-to-equity really hasn't had a chance to catch up.”

And then, at that peak of vulnerability, he ran into a historic spike in interest rates: 20 percent and more, plus he was borrowing at two to four points above the prime rate. In 1979, not yet 30 years old, Low cleared $1 million profit. The following year, he found himself in a bankruptcy court.

Through around four years in Chapter 11, he learned to live scrupulously according to his means: not a cent spent that hadn't been earned. He would come to work every morning terrified of a call from the bank. Would the day's cashflow hold out? It was a highwire and, just as it seemed ready to snap, Low's mother insisted that she should help.

“And actually that became a tremendous motivation,” Low says. “Because she was just a regular working person that had gotten her home free and clear. She borrowed $50,000 and gave it to me, at one of the darkest points, to keep the company going. And I think that really turned the situation around, emotionally. I mean, you can't leave your mother hanging out there with nothing. You are very highly motivated, to get her paid back!”

Today, looking back as CEO of Prime Inc.–with a fleet of 6,500 trucks and revenues exceeding $2 billion–Low recognizes that the furnace must first be endured before steel can cool and harden.

“I was a prideful country boy,” he says. “My parents, my relatives, had always paid their bills. It was a stark awakening. But I learned so many lessons about business, and about life and people. We got it together, got the company reorganized–a different business model, a different attitude–and really never looked back.”

It was also to his parents that Low owed his passion for horses, first through the hogs-and-cattle environment in which he was raised and then, more specifically, by introducing him to Oaklawn.

Sweet Melania with the Lows | Keeneland

“I was farm boy,” Low recalls. “Fancied myself a bit of a cowboy, and took pretty naturally to it. I rode my horse in the Christmas parade, that kind of thing.”

Doing so, in fact, produced a life-changing opportunity to flirt with a girl in the fifth grade.

“Though Lawana's memory is different from mine,” Low says with a chuckle. “I'm quite sure that she didn't invite me to put her on the horse, but that I invited her.”

One way or another, horses have remained a bond in a marriage now extending beyond half a century.

“Oh, she loves them,” Low confirms. “She works on the matings and likes handicapping, though she doesn't seem to give me many of her winners! But yes, from early in our marriage we would go to Hot Springs together. Having been there with my parents, as a kid, I just have so many good memories down there, and it's become very dear to our hearts.”

So when the business began thriving more sustainably, in the early 1990s, the Lows could have no more fulfilling reward than to start a stable. One of their earliest investments was Capote Belle, who won the GI Test Stakes, and they have twice since followed the Derby trail all the way to the first Saturday in May. Needless to say, both Steppenwolfer (2006) and Magnum Moon (2018) took the Oaklawn route, albeit there was quite a contrast in their fortunes at Churchill. Steppenwolfer, only placed in the Rebel and the Arkansas Derby, outran his odds in third; Magnum Moon, who had won both races emphatically, trailed home covered in mud.

“Steppenwolfer was a great ride,” Low recalls. “He was trained by Danny Peitz, who's primarily a local Oaklawn trainer. Actually his brother worked for us in our shop here at Prime. So it was a big family deal, one of those experiences that really reinforce your enthusiasm.

“Same with Magnum Moon, going into the Derby as leading points scorer: to have won those races at our home track, around friends and family, created memories to last a lifetime. But I think it remains the rainiest Derby on record, just a bog, and he lost all chance getting bumped around out of the 16 hole.”

Tragically, Magnum Moon would never get a shot at redemption. That summer he was struck by laminitis and, despite showing prodigious courage and patience over the following months, eventually succumbed.

Built cruises along on the tab at Churchill | Coady Media

“We loved that horse so much,” Low says. “Probably even beyond his talent as a racehorse, he had an incredible will to live. He was in that clinic for almost a year, trying to recover. We'd have signs of progress, then a setback, but all the way through he was totally classy, smart, did everything right.

“The game obviously has its highs and lows, so you need to cherish those highs and learn to cope with the lows. If it's going to be destructive to your life, you need to be doing something else. Because all it takes is a stroke of very bad luck, one bad step.”

Returning to the Derby this time obviously feels different, rooting for a horse in someone else's silks. But the Lows retain plenty of skin in the game, between breeder's prizes and Citizen Bull's family.

“We have the mare and the half-sister, who just foaled a beautiful colt by our stallion Colonel Liam,” Low notes. “No Joke has a fantastic Mandaloun yearling colt and a spectacular Life is Good weanling colt–but I think she may be going back to Into Mischief from now on!”

There were Derby dreams for Colonel Liam when bought as a juvenile for $1.2 million, but he only paid off that investment once switched to turf. Now building a new career under the skilled supervision of Ocala Stud, his unexpected flowering reminds us that horses, for better or worse, remain ever unpredictable. That leaves the Lows, like anyone else, facing tricky strategic calls to maintain a viable program. The dam of GII Pat Day Mile contender Built (Hard Spun), for instance, was sold when he was a weanling for just $40,000 at the Keeneland November Sale. Both No Joke's previous foals having been retained, moreover, Citizen Bull was allowed to go for $675,000 after catching the expert eye of Donato Lanni for a partnership headed by SF/Starlight/Madaket.

“Hindsight's always 20/20,” Low says. “Sometimes you'll make the wrong call. You hate to give up those beautiful Curlin mares, for sure, but before Built we felt like she hadn't produced for us, and needed moving on. I mean, I'm a businessman. Nobody likes just losing money year after year, so you need to manage things somewhat in the hope of ending up with a good, profitable venture.

“We get together, try to evaluate where we are, make a decision and go with it. We really appreciate and respect the Taylor Made operation–Mark Taylor and Jeff Hayslett are very helpful–along with our farm manager Denny Wilson, and Jacob West as our bloodstock manager. And as we've said, we still have very good reasons to be cheering for Citizen Bull.”

A breeding program of your own, of course, loads residual value into well-bred acquisitions like No Joke. That spurred the Lows into an extra bid or two in stretching for a $1.9 million Curlin filly out of Matera (Tapit), stakes-winning half-sister to Not This Time and Colonel Liam's sire Liam's Map, at Saratoga last summer.

“Being farmers, breeders, that gives us a little backstop,” Low acknowledges. “That filly's with J.J. Pletcher in Ocala and it looks like she'll be going on to Todd pretty early, maybe in four or five weeks, hopefully then Saratoga. So we're excited about her.”

The Lows lead Colonel Liam into the winner's circle after the Pegasus Turf | Coglianese

But there is a further, clinching satisfaction for their whole program: the fact that the Lows have their mares and foals at Primatara Farm, right on the doorstep of the palatial home they built near Springfield, Missouri.

“We love being round the horses, and really it's why we have the farm,” Low says. “And we take a great deal of pride that a champion 2-year-old was raised outside of Kentucky. Of course we do the Kentucky-bred thing, we ferry back and forth. But Denny, and Holly Hurshman and the rest of the crew, just do a great job. It's so gratifying to watch these horses growing up, a big part of the enjoyment that we get out of the sport.”

No doubt as many people told Low he was crazy, trying to raise champion Thoroughbreds in Missouri, as they did when he bought that truck as a teenager.

“They talk about the limestone and water in Kentucky,” Low says. “Well, we have limestone, we have good clean water, rolling hills. It's a beautiful environment. We know we need luck, everyone does. But while luck is always nice, it's also about having a good game plan. And, especially, good people. In the end, that's what gets you through. Whether racing, or trucking, logistics, whatever it is, if you can surround yourself with good people, that's going to make the difference.”

The post Breeder Spotlight: Proud Missouri Citizen A Model For Bull Run, Presented By Keeneland appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions.

View the full article