Into Mischief’s Crowning Moment

[Wandering Eyes]

A first general sires’ championship in North America–after finishing 35th, 13th and fourth in the three previous years–sets a formal seal on what has long been clear to everybody about Into Mischief. But there is something especially apt about the fact that the Spendthrift phenomenon should scale this final ridge, and attain the summit, as the 2010s draw to a close. Because you could argue that he is not just stallion of the year, but stallion of the decade.

Not in any kind of strict sense, admittedly. For one thing, he cannot yet rival the achievements of Tapit–and remember that Gainesway’s multiple champion also had to earn his stripes, working his way through the ranks from $12,500 to the stratosphere. In broader terms, however, there is no mistaking the fact that Into Mischief is very much a stallion for our times. Because since his first foals were delivered, in 2010, he has become the poster boy for the way his farm transformed the commercial breeding landscape.

Spendthrift’s owner B. Wayne Hughes has himself enjoyed a career just as instructive of the miracles that can be achieved if you can create and serve the right market.

His father was a sharecropper in the Oklahoma Dust Bowl, and joined the exodus towards California described in The Grapes Of Wrath. The self-made fortune of the boy who remembers that migration, a mattress strapped to the roof of the family car, is a classic fairytale of American capitalism: Hughes and a partner each put up $25,000 to start a storage company that ended up valued at $40 billion.

So when Hughes came into the breeding business–as an outsider, and more or less by accident–he brought with him a radical eye for its inefficiencies. As he once told me: “Unless you’re a rich person messing around, like I was for 20 years, it wasn’t a good business model.”

With a couple of young stallions to launch into the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, Hughes and his team devised a series of incentives to engage the imagination of smaller breeders, in particular. First came Share The Upside: commit to the stands-and-nurses fee for two seasons, and you get a lifetime breeding right. After that, Hughes and his team offered Breed Secure, suspending the covering fee until the resulting weanling (or yearling) was sold, and even then letting the breeder keep the first $6,000 (or $12,000) against keep.

The idea was that while the yield would obviously be less, turnover should go up. The competition was aghast. One farm owner complained privately that Hughes was making it impossible to stand a horse in Kentucky for $10,000 or under. But now he and many others have introduced similar schemes of their own.

Hughes knew that would happen. Anybody who wanted to stay in business would have no choice–even those who thought their high-end stallions inviolable to such “cheap” maneuvers. And that was because the expensive horse is never guaranteed to make it; just as the cheap horse never has zero chance. Thoroughbreds being what they are, Hughes was confident that the Spendthrift revolution would catapult a pauper among the princes.

Opening at $12,500, Into Mischief mustered only nine Share The Upside contracts in his first year. (Oh you happy few!) That debut crop numbered just 42 named foals, but seven would become stakes winners.

In 2012, just as Into Mischief was launching first runners, he covered 50 mares at $7,500. The following year, further assisted by the emergence of his half-sister Beholder (Henny Hughes) to win the GI Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Fillies, he entertained 210–and in the six years since, he has had another 1,352 trysts. In 2020, Into Mischief will command a fee of $175,000.

Everybody needs luck, of course, as well as enterprise. When Into Mischief went to stud, he had just been a son of Harlan’s Holiday out of an anonymous Tricky Creek mare who once changed hands for $8,000. But Beholder went on to win another 10 Grade Is; and another sibling, a Scat Daddy colt, became a $3-million September sale-topper, a Breeders’ Cup winner, and now a 252-cover Ashford rookie: Mendelssohn.

The inexorable rise of Into Mischief, moreover, could become steeper yet. His 2-year-olds of 2019 were still the result only of $45,000 covers, so the more upmarket mares he has since been entertaining have yet to add their own genetic wares to the mix. Though by no means guaranteed, it’s certainly being widely anticipated that these mares will improve Into Mischief’s chances of stretching his stock beyond its trademark, one-turn whizz. (In his own track career, comprising just six starts, he won a Grade I at two before soon reverting to seven furlongs.)

In fairness, he has already contrived a GI Kentucky Derby third, Audible, out of a Gilded Time sprinter. But the leading contributor to his 2019 haul, which exceeds $19 million, is a classic Into Mischief dazzler: Covfefe, dashing winner of the GI Longines Test S. and GI Breeders’ Cup Filly & Mare Sprint.

Significantly, Covfefe earned a much smaller percentage of her sire’s overall tally than did the principal performer for all the other stallions towards the top of the table, attesting to the sheer range of Into Mischief’s arsenal. Moreover, he would also have been champion in four of past five years, even though the stallion who did finish on top invariably owed more to his premier runner.

Sure enough, Into Mischief’s 221 winners of 346 races in 2019–all these figures subject to overnight updating, incidentally, being through Dec. 30–put him in a different league. He is, in fact, the first North American sire to have 200 winners in a calendar year. (Hats off to Kitten’s Joy for the closest pursuit, with 188 winners of 303 races, even if Bricks and Mortar has granted Giant’s Causeway a posthumous interruption of the perennial turf champion’s reign.)

But it’s about quality as well as quantity. Into Mischief’s nine Grade I performers this year match the four and five who respectively represent the two stallions on the lower steps of the prize money podium: Curlin, whose personal best haul (starring Vino Rosso) elevates him to second, as in 2016; and Tapit, who maintains his wonderfully consistent output in third. We recently celebrated Tapit’s $150-million milestone and, even in his first campaign without an elite scorer, he still outperforms the rest on several indices–notably his 26 black-type winners, at 8.9% of starters, and his 13 graded stakes winners.

Hard Spun, in fourth, deserves extra credit as the least expensive living stallion in the top 15; and also as sire of three Grade I winners in 2019, a tally surpassed only by Quality Road on his way to a dizzying new fee of $200,000. The only Kentucky sires younger than Quality Road in the top 20 are also at Lane’s End, namely The Factor (at much the cheapest fee) and Twirling Candy.

As he turns 15, however, Into Mischief himself remains very much in his pomp–and in some respects he has fewer miles on the clock, bearing in mind those small early books, than rivals who were in demand from the outset. He has been now been America’s leading sire of 2-year-olds three times in the four years since he has had runners out of his 200-plus books.

In setting such industrial numbers, Into Mischief has been aided by a libido and fertility as extraordinary as his genetic impact. These attributes, moreover, have now enabled Hughes and his team to push the boundaries yet again. They are now offering Quarter Horse mares the frozen semen of Into Mischief at $10,000, along with that of retiring sprint champion Mitole (Eskendereya) at $4,000.

No two-turn aspirations there, naturally! But whatever his more aristocratic partners may yet deliver Into Mischief, the fact is that he has punched above his weight right from the get-go. His very first crop was highlighted by the $5,500 yearling Goldencents, who became his sire’s first Grade I winner in the Santa Anita Derby and then added two editions of the Breeders’ Cup Dirt Mile.

Goldencents, of course, is now standing alongside his sire at Spendthrift–and, guess what, ends 2019 atop the second-crop sire list. He was the leading rookie by winners last year, with 29, 10 more than his nearest pursuer Cairo Prince; though Jaywalk’s success at the Breeders’ Cup allowed studmate Cross Traffic to relegate him to second by prize money.

This time round, Goldencents is top of his intake by both winners and prize money, with four-time Grade III scorer Mr. Money and GII Louisiana Derby winner By My Standards leading the way. It must be said that Goldencents has a pretty ordinary family, making it massively auspicious for the next phase of Into Mischief’s amazing story–as a sire of sires–that his son appears to be replicating the goods.

Cairo Prince, for his part, consolidated extremely well: second in the prize money table but joint-top with Fed Biz by black-type winners, and with Will Take Charge by graded stakes horses. Noble Mission (GB), having corrected a few misapprehensions in producing a dirt sophomore as accomplished as Code of Honor from his first crop, is a deserving third by earnings.

This year, Spendthrift has played up its winnings in eye-catching fashion, recruiting a series of really top-class prospects off the track. In the meantime, however, the competition catches a break in the freshman table.

Testing out his big fee, American Pharoah has done the necessary, top by prize money and only just eclipsed by runner-up Constitution in terms of winners (29 vs. 27, a tally matched by Tapiture, with Competitive Edge and Wicked Strong on 26).

Pharoah can obviously be expected to follow through with maturing, two-turn sophomores, so an all-the-way Breeders’ Cup winner over five furlongs lays down a pretty stunning marker. Much as had been anticipated at Ashford, Four Wheel Drive is only one example of his sire’s presumed efficacy on turf. American Pharoah could well become an important transatlantic influence, with juveniles already placed at the elite level on both sides of the ocean.

Constitution, having matched Pharoah’s eight graded stakes performers, is hiked to $40,000 (from $15,000) after nailing a Grade I through Tiz The Law; Palace Malice, third by prize money, followed suit with Structor. But how about Liam’s Map? Two black-type winners–and both, amazingly, scored at the Grade I level.

History suggests there’s still ample time, despite the market’s tendency to panic, for the slow burners to come through. Not so long ago, after all, Into Mischief himself was one. For now, however, the lay of the land can be judged from that $8.2-million Keeneland September sale-topper: a half-sister, by American Pharoah, to the new champion sire.

For if the freshman’s table is headed by a wonderful throwback, the first Triple Crown winner in a generation, then Into Mischief is definitively a stallion for his own epoch; one who not only reflects the 21st Century commercial landscape, but has gone a long way to shaping it.

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