Paul Tackett: Selling at Keeneland 64 Years Straight

[Wandering Eyes]

“Phil,” he told his son. “No Tackett ever gave $95,000 for a horse. We're in pretty precarious territory here.”

Partly, of course, that was simply a matter of inflation. By the 2014 Keeneland January Sale, Paul Tackett had already been selling horses for half a century. From his first Keeneland consignment, in 1961, he sold six yearlings for $6,100 and imagined himself rich. Even so, the bid felt uncomfortably steep-albeit Morrow Cove (Yes It's True), carrying a first foal by Big Brown, was a big young mare with two stakes wins to her name.

“My mother used to make dresses for my sisters out of feed sacks,” Tackett remembers now. “We were poor, but my parents had decided that didn't mean we had to stay that way. They had a lot of work ethic, and a lot of pride. Every night, those dresses would be starched and ironed, she'd put my sisters' hair in rollers and make them shine their shoes. And when they got on that bus, they looked like they'd stepped out of a bandbox.”

But subsequent events have only made Tackett grateful that they went to their limit for this mare-first and foremost, the tragedy that claimed Phil in 2020, at just 52. “Congestive heart failure,” Tackett explains. “And he never said anything, was still working seven days before passing away. Even as a boy, he'd pick out what he thought the smartest horses in a sale. And often he would be uncannily right. He put a filly through the ring when he was 11 years old. I had a man walk beside him, so he wouldn't get in any trouble, but Phil had rubbed the filly at home and brought her up to the ring.”

Phil's knack had not deserted him here, either. The mare's Big Brown colt would retrieve $70,000 of their outlay, and subsequent foals did better yet: notably a Pioneerof the Nile foal-share at $370,000. And then, at the 2023 September Sale, Tackett brought her Omaha Beach colt down from his little farm near Georgetown. “Nice colt, kind of big and gangly,” he recalls. “We had him in Book 4 and Donato Lanni bought him for $260,000.”

Nevada Beach did not start as a juvenile and only surfaced in April. By September he was winning the GI Goodwood Stakes. Tackett remembers watching the horse hook up and go, shouting to his wife, “Look here, look at this country horse!” And while Nevada Beach never got involved in the GI Breeders' Cup Classic, he regrouped a few days ago to win the GIII Native Diver Stakes.

In the process he further elevated his American Pharoah half-sister, rejected by the tire-kickers when offered at Fasig-Tipton last October. Fortunately Coolmore allowed Tackett to buy out the foal-share, and someday she will return to her native farm to take the place of her mother.

“I lost the mare, she colicked,” Tackett explains. “And they had to do a Caesarean to get the filly. But now I've an American Pharoah half-sister to a Grade I winner that couldn't bring $30,000 at auction. The only filly the mare ever had.”

Nor is she the only legacy of his late son's ability to push Tackett into a gamble. Phil had always been a fan of Arrogate, and in 2020 proposed sending him their stakes-placed homebred mare Saharan (Desert Party). Having initially protested that Arrogate was beyond their means, Tackett eventually managed to arrange a foal-share. But Phil never lived to see the resulting filly, who realized $350,000 as a yearling.

Then her purchaser John Rogitz wrote to Tackett out of the blue.    He had read about Phil, and asked whether he could honor his memory by naming the filly Philippa.

“Now that is a good human being,” says Tackett, still palpably moved by the gesture. “She broke her maiden on the turf this fall, and now he's said that he'll be sending Philippa back to the farm. That's the reason I get up in the morning, the reason I stay in this business: when you can meet individuals like that.”

He has seen many come and go in this business, and knows that those who stay humble are worth more than any balance sheet. Depression Era values were still prized when he was born, in 1937; certainly his father never forgot where he had come from.

“He had a sixth-grade education,” Tackett says. “But once he got on his feet, he helped so many people. Small farmers working for him would say, 'We've a chance to buy a little place of our own.' And, though he'd be losing them, he'd say, 'Let me go to the bank with you and I'll sign for you until you get on your feet.' At his funeral, I had 15 or 20 people come up and say, 'If it hadn't been for your father, I'd never have owned my farm.'”

In his own youth Tackett was expected to show all the same drive, but he had also been shown the poetry of life-and of the Thoroughbred, in particular.

“I must have been about eight when my dad first brought me to Keeneland,” he recalls. “I couldn't see over the rail, but could climb up with my toe in the V-mesh fence and look over. And I thought, 'These are the most gorgeous animals I ever saw.'”

At home in Stamping Ground they raised tobacco and cattle, some sheep and hogs, but there were also draft horses and a pony the boy could ride. When no more than 12 or 13, Tackett bought a Tennessee walking mare and started a little showing. “But I guess the judges must have kind of aggravated me,” he says wryly. “Because one day I decided to buy a Thoroughbred: if he could put his nose down on the wire, we wouldn't need anyone to tell us who's best.”

Tackett did start at the University of Kentucky but once marrying Jean Ann, he was expected to go to work.

“My sister said, 'The cutest girl walks by my house to school every day,'” Tackett recalls. “I said I didn't have time for any of that. But then I went to a football game and she was a majorette. And when I saw her twirling that baton, I told my sister, 'I don't think I'm as busy as I thought I was.'”

They will have been married 69 years next month.

Back then Tackett was working at a Lexington stockyard    part-owned by his father. Mondays they staged a horse sale: drafts and ponies, mostly, but one day a fellow came through with a Thoroughbred mare. He would take $1,000 for her and her weanling.

“So I bought her,” Tackett recalls. “My dad wasn't very happy but that fall a man gave me $950 just for the weanling. I thought, 'This is pretty good.' So then I brought those six yearlings to Keeneland. I was so green. If I'd worked a year at Spendthrift or Calumet, I could have seen things it took me 10 years to see for myself. So the whole business was self-taught. But that's why I don't know much!”

He gives a self-deprecating chuckle. But somehow he made it all work. Like many of the best stockmen, he had honed an eye for conformation working with steers, and always checked over the stakes horses in the paddock. One day he read Bull Hancock saying that Nasrullah and Princequillo crossed well. Well, Tackett had his $3,000 mare by Mt. Hope, who was by Nasrullah's son Nantallah; so he bred her to Princequillo's grandson Verbatim. The poor man's version, he called it.

“I sold the yearling for $16,500,” he recalls. “His name was Hopeful Word, and he won over $1 million: won the Clark, the Stephen Foster. And the only reason I bought the mare was that I had a friend racing at Charlestown, who'd bought a $1,600 yearling out of her. He'd already won something like eight races with that horse, ended up running him till he was 11.”

It's hard, he acknowledges, to outrun pedigree. His best angle has been to buy well-bred mares with unfashionable covers. It's a long game, and you can give her a better shot only a year later. Not that he is terribly comfortable with the “halter show” sales environment, altered beyond recognition since 1961.

“Back then, see, it was a sport,” he laments. “People kept most of the horses they raised. So horses weren't prepped very much, whether you were a small or big farm. Now here come the agents, the vets, the scoping, the video, the X-ray. When they don't X-ray, mostly they're just immature. So I'll take those home, castrate them, turn them out. Might wait till they're two to break them, run them at three. They all win.”

Obviously he needs to put bread on the table, and accepts that some kind of sales prep is necessary through summer. “But you have to know how to take care of land,” Tackett says. “Horses are a crop like any other. So you've always got to be putting down some lime or sowing some clover. And land will get a little stale on you. Tesio had 1,800 acres, and used 600 at a time, so every parcel got two years' rest.”

These days Tackett himself is down to 85 acres and 10 mares.

“This was my 64th straight year to sell a yearling at Keeneland,” he reflects. “I love selling horses, but what I love most is raising a runner. When I breed, I'm really not thinking about what it'll bring at the sale. Even though I want to sell, and sell good, I don't want to handicap him one bit to sell him. I want him to be a racehorse.”

To that end, young stock is reared outdoors.

“You take a boy that stays home playing piano with his mother, and a kid from the ghetto, who's going to win if you put them in the boxing ring?” Tackett asks. “We'll bring them in two or three times a week: trim them regularly, worm them, handle them some. But they're out 24 hours and we feed them in tubs out in the fields. Fillies and colts run together till January 15. They have to compete out there.”

Tackett teases his wife that no more should be carved on his tombstone than: “An old horse farmer from down on Stamping Ground Road.” But you don't have to spend much time in the company of this delightful gentleman before deciding that few of us could aspire any higher.

“The way I've lived my life satisfied me fine,” he says. “I've made my own decisions, some good, some bad. I didn't have to work for somebody else, and I got to be outside with these horses. And if I never raised a champion horse, I did raise a champion family. I've outlived many friends but been lucky in the ones I've had, and still have. Us little guys all fight the uphill battle.

“We've done it a long time. But to breed a nice horse is still a big thrill. I've always felt like I was the underdog, and that everybody else was probably smarter than me. So I always felt like I had to get up earlier than they did, and work harder, if I was going to compete at all. And I still feel that way. I'm very humble about what little we've accomplished. I've had such good employees over the years, and vets and farriers.”

Beyond that, it just comes down to treating people right. “If you don't, it'll come back to you,” he says with a shrug. “I probably never did sell a horse to a man that I couldn't sell him the second one. Because I never tried to cheat, I just tried to present a good, sound, honest horse. Really my reputation, and my father's reputation, we worked all our lives to make it good-and keep it good. And that's worth more than all the money you'll ever get.”

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