No Regrets For Eddie Woods, But Buyers Missed Him At OBS March

[Wandering Eyes]

“All the fancy stallions: Danzig, Forty Niner, Pleasant Colony, Halo. And then there were these two bottom-line fillies, a Spend a Buck and a Mari's Book. And they told me to get them ready for the 2-year-old sale.”

Eddie Woods is going back three decades, to the start of the business he closed last spring. He had rented a barn at Classic Mile in Ocala, with a single client in Elmendorf Farm.

“Okay, so the Spend a Buck was a moose, great tall thing with a big pair of ears on her,” Woods resumes. “The Mari's Book was strong, like a colt. You couldn't give her a shot. One day I forgot and had the chiropractor in there. And she hit a spot. You could hear the rumble at the other end of the barn: the chiropractor's after getting knocked off a bale of hay, and the filly's standing there trembling with the needles still in her. But anyway they were being compared to all the rest of them, out of their graded stakes mares. So we go to work.”

Then, as the auction neared, Woods made an announcement to Elmendorf manager Bobby Spalding.

“Hey, Bobby, we're not going to the sale with these two.”

“Which two?”

“Spend a Buck and Mari's Book.”

For a moment, Spalding was silent. Then he told him, in plainer terms, that he assumed Woods was winding him up.

“What about the Danzig?”

Woods shrugged. “So, so.”

“Come on now, Eddie!”

“I promise you, they can really, really run. I'm not taking them.”

Well, the Spend a Buck was triple Grade I winner Antespend. And the other filly was Mari's Sheba, the dam of Congaree.

“And the Danzig never broke her maiden!” Woods confirms.

He had passed his first big test. Clearly here was a man who knew what he was about. Since then, Woods has developed so many elite performers that the market recognized a diminishing opportunity, at OBS last March, when his penultimate consignment included a record-breaking $3-million Gun Runner colt. That price was a measure of the litany of stars to have graduated from his program, the most recent including Citizen Bull, National Treasure and Good Cheer; and was duly vindicated last September, when the colt won the GI Del Mar Futurity as 'TDN Rising Star' presented by Hagyard Brant.

“People get comfortable in your barn,” Woods reflects. “Coming in to look at horses, they develop a trust. You've learned what they're looking for; they've learned confidence in you. You can tell a guy: 'Look, you don't need him.' 'Why not?' 'Buy him and find out! But you do need that one over there.' Okay, so usually they won't go for the one over there. But they'll keep an eye on them, and when they turn out? That takes years to evolve. But it gets to the stage where your top customers walk into your barn, hand you the card and say, 'Fill it out.'”

Eddie and Angela Woods watching their final horse sell at OBS last April | OBS

Being honest with the buyers might mean that somebody would consign elsewhere next time. But long term, Woods found that you're better off with repeat business at ringside than repeat business from people trying to offload a problem.

That approach made Woods the cornerstone of a market that has changed beyond recognition during his career. The sector's success brought corresponding pressures, and possibly his retirement will leave a bigger void in the upcoming sales cycle than in his own life. He's still very much on the scene, of course: his antennae remain too alert simply to shut down, and he enjoyed helping a few people out at the yearling sales.

What he won't miss is delivering bad news. If routine updates to partners and clients were shared by email or text, that had to be delivered verbally. “So when they answer the phone, it's: 'Okay, so what's happened?'” Woods says. “One individual just said: 'No, not today. Please not today!' So not to make a bad phone call in months, that's been really nice.”

Everyone sees headlines about home-run pinhooks. But those have to carry a lot of failures; and if the market has soared, it has only done so in tandem with the cost of yearlings. But if the highwire has become higher and narrower, the basic satisfaction of the process remains: the daily fulfilment of working with the animals he loves.

“The breaking season was the best part,” Woods says. “You see a lot straightaway: 'Oh, we're in trouble with this one. But oh, look at this one, can't mess this up.' That kind of deal. That was fun. But the way the whole thing has mushroomed, it's scary stuff now. When I first came to Keeneland, in the '80s, I wouldn't look at a horse in the first two books. We mopped up RNAs, horses in the back ring, no repository or anything. You winged it. Just physicals. If they had a pedigree, you couldn't touch them.”

Woods accepts that with the stakes soaring, some of the fun has gone out of the business. To be fair, however, that might be a more general syndrome. He recalls the old days, in Ireland, where he emulated his father (who had won on Arkle and meanwhile gone on to train) as steeplechase jockey. True, amateur riding in Ireland back then was fiercely competitive. This, after all, is a man who rode Cheltenham Gold Cup winner Royal Frolic in a hunter chase.

“Amateur racing was proper tough,” he admits. “There were some real gambling yards. Your instructions were always the same, but you'd know going to the start. Sometimes he can barely make it down there, he's so fat; or else you can't hold him, he hasn't been out of his stall in a week and he's just wild. Then one day he's all business, looks wonderful: 'Oh wait a minute, here we go. Today's the day.'”

When first arriving from Ireland, Woods cut his teeth with Tony and Joanne Everard at Another Episode Farm: a tremendous grounding, high volume, cheap horses, clients from now defunct tracks in places like Detroit or Boston. Then, when he got his start from Elmendorf, Joe Greeley of Sabine Stables came on board.

“Joe was a semi-retired stockbroker in New York and pretty game,” Woods recalls gratefully. “We got competing with some of the others who were then starting to buy expensive horses for 2-year-old sales. You could see the water rising the whole time. We went with it, and it worked. I'd been buying lesser horses for myself but then we got a couple of partnerships going, and it kept growing. Every time, you'd up the ante.

“You got as much pedigree if you could afford, but it was always about the individual. That's how Baffert changed racing in this country: horses might come out of Texas, but they looked lovely–and they ran. Whereas a lot of the really well-bred horses just didn't crack it: weren't sound enough, correct enough, whatever.”

The breakouts for Woods, commercially, were Left Bank as first champion; and Harmony Lodge, as first seven-figure sale.

“First crop of Hennessy, and she was gorgeous,” Woods recalls. “Never did get overly big, and didn't go much further than a mile, but she turned into a Grade I filly. Selling those two, it kind of gave you a shingle to hang outside the barn.”

Woods cautions against exaggerating how far the market has become dependent on the stopwatch.

Eddie Woods | Photos by Z

“The whole thing was always about the clock,” he says. “And a rider can ruin your career in 11 seconds! By not getting away, or the horse wants to get down on the rail, or won't change his leads. It's all over, you're done. Unless he's stunningly good-looking and you find someone to believe you, that he's really nice. You'll get him sold, but you won't get your gravy.”

So it's quite straightforward, really: all you need is “white lightning, right lead, off the rail and a spectacular video”!

There's the odd pleasant surprise. “The little brown filly,” Woods says. “You think she's no good and here she comes, at the end of the day, sound and just wants to do the job. We've never had a good horse that was bad acting. Most of the really good ones were like Brant. Take the shank off, he'll drop his head and eat grass. Doesn't give a damn. One of the coolest things I ever saw was when Pharaoh won the Breeders' Cup and everyone goes over to Rice Road next day, and Baffert walks him into the center of the circle and basically throws down the shank. And the crowd converged on that horse, patting him and everything, and you think someone's going to get killed here. But that's the good horse, right? Not all of them are like that, but when they are, that's the superstar. Usually when you walk down the barn in the afternoon, all the good ones are lying down asleep.”

Woods is transparently cheerful about the decision he has made. The one thing he will miss is the farm, because of all it represents.

“I built it and loved it,” he says emotionally. “There were watermelons everywhere when we went in and for years we'd get a weed crop of them. Actually I found one last year! And we had to move so much dirt for the racetrack. You need a good track, or you have nothing. And you can train on that one when most people in Ocala are underwater. But you know what? We only closed on the farm in March, started work on Apr. 9. And we moved in Dec. 31. A lot of cussing, in between, and the cost was extortionate. I think if we'd have bought a [ready-made] farm, that would be one thing. But when you build something up like that yourself, it's different.”

Ultimately, however, the decision was a relief.

“Financially, we'd had several really good years, so we were in good shape even prior to selling,” he says. “But I was just done with it. Getting the workforce is now really hard. We had 72 on the payroll, including a lot of guys on visas. It's drastically expensive to bring them in, house them, pay them. The day rate wasn't covering it, the sales had to, and my day rate again was already as much as people are charging at the tracks. But it wasn't like I had to stop. I wanted to.”

By the end, more were being prepared for the racetrack than the sale, instead of the other way round.

“Things change,” Woods says with a shrug. “But that was one of the other reasons I wanted to leave the business. Because I didn't want the business to leave me. We've a lot of younger guys doing a good job. My clients are older, fading away, and the younger wealth is coming in and wanting to do it with guys their age. A lot of people in our industry blew it all when it was going away on them, trying to revive it. I wanted to be done with it before it was done with me, and just go out good.”

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