Stud: Adventures in Breeding
By Kevin Conley
Bloomsbury, 209 pages, $24.95
The most expensive 30 seconds in sports occurs far from any sports arena, and the players who take part have long since lost their fighting trim and bid farewell to cheering fans. “The terrible, swift deed,” as author Kevin Conley describes it, is not the swinging of a bat or the hiking of pigskin, but the sexual coupling of thoroughbred horses that takes place at stud farms across the country every spring.
While the thoroughbreds’ performances on the racetrack garners far more excitement and media attention than their performances in the breeding shed, the propagation of racehorses is potentially far more lucrative than racing itself. The stallion Storm Cat, who lives at Overbrook Farm in Lexington, Ky., brings in $500,000 for the “live cover” he provides to the lucky few mares who get a date in the breeding shed with him. At the racetrack, he showed serious speed as a 2-year-old, but surgery sidelined him the following year, and he retired without ever fulfilling his early promise. When Storm Cat’s first few crops of fillies and colts ran rings around their competitors, his prowess as a stallion became evident. His offspring won more than $21 million at the track in 1999 and 2000, and several of his colts have retired to become successful stallions themselves. With 50 guaranteed-live-foal breeding contracts this year, Storm Cat stands to earn at least $20 million this year. The winner of the Kentucky Derby, by contrast, takes home a measly million or so.
At $500,000 a pop, little is left to chance. As Conley artfully explains, the mating process requires a large supporting cast: Two people distract and soothe the mare, who wears padded boots on her hind feet in case she should kick out at the stallion, an act of defiance that has ended quite a few breeding careers. One handler helps the stallion clamber aboard the mare’s hindquarters, while the so-called tail man lifts the mare’s tail out of the way, and the stallion manager, wearing a latex glove, helps guide the stallion to his final destination. It takes some stallions a few tries to complete the operation, and pauses in the action elicit shouts of encouragement from the handlers (“Get up, son!” “Go, buddy!” “Hyup! Hyup! Hyup!”), whose job it is to bring the mating to a speedy, safe and successful conclusion.
Conley is an editor and writer for The New Yorker who had no prior experience of the horse business. He approaches his subject with the jaw-dropping astonishment of a newcomer and a seasoned reporter’s eye for detail. He is particularly struck by the matter-of-fact attitude of the breeding crew. “In the middle of all the rearing and bellowing and heaving of loins,” writes Conley, “there’s one quality that’s easy to miss when you visit a breeding shed: how normal it all is to the people who work there.” The horse handlers are so thoroughly inured to “the brutal theatrics of the live cover” that they are at ease debating school board politics while facilitating the mating of several million dollars worth of highly sexed horse flesh.
In the course of observing so many breeding-shed rendezvous, Conley comes to appreciate each stallion’s idiosyncrasies, and his descriptions of their amorous antics are by turns humorous and poignant. Throughout the book, he remarks on the range of bizarre sounds uttered by the stallions before and during the sex act. Storm Cat’s call is “frightening and long and full of the inevitable, like the squeal of tires that you know will end in shattering glass.” Another stallion “lets loose a rumble in the sexy basso range, like one of those candlelight-and-Champale singers, Barry White or Teddy Pendergrass. . . . It [is] . . . full of tenderness and longing and such sheer volume that the shed can barely hold the sound.” Most astonishing of all is the cry of Cee’s Tizzy, who is suddenly a hot property, having sired Tiznow, winner of the 2000 and 2001 Breeders’ Cup Classics: “Once he’s ready, he rises up, prancing forward to tuck himself in, and he lets out . . . a giggle, . . . high-pitched, nervous, leaving an impression of antic and inappropriate glee. . . . [H]e’s Hef, only young and without the editorial responsibilities.”
Conley’s reporting goes far beyond the intimacies and intricacies of the breeding shed. He provides a condensed but authoritative and witty account of the horse through history. Observing that “[t]he connection between wealth and horses goes back to the beginnings of civilization,” Conley begins with the domestication of the horse and moves on to the origins of the breed known as the thoroughbred, which traces its bloodlines back to three fleet-footed stallions of the late 1600s. He describes the founding in mid-18th Century England of the Jockey Club, which to this day oversees the breeding industry (through its U.S. and various foreign affiliates). It was under the auspices of the Jockey Club that the General Stud Book was established, which systematically recorded all thoroughbred pedigrees. Conley points out this stud registry assured the value and authenticity of thoroughbred stock and thus “turned the sport of kings into the liquid and highly speculative business it is today.”
Conley chronicles the heady atmosphere that surrounds the billionaire Arab sheiks and Kentucky bluegrass bluebloods who casually bid in the millions of dollars for untested yearlings (“optimism on four legs”) at auction. He describes how the powerful titans of the breeding industry, the Farishes, Hancocks and Phippses, control the best bloodlines, thus ensuring their own future success on the track and in the breeding shed.
But the author is careful to present a balanced view of the breeding industry, and he gives equal time to the less well-heeled, but far more numerous, players in the business. One such character is Loren Bolinger, who owns Running Horse Farm, a 25-acre breeding operation in Albuquerque. Bolinger readily admits that for 32 years, he has worked with “inferior horses.” Far from his tweedy Kentucky counterparts, Bolinger is “a counterculture curmudgeon who wears his gray ponytail tied back with a hair twistie.” Conley explains that mares with fertility problems and mediocre stallions whose ornery behavior causes them to be banished from more-polite society “often get sold down the river, . . . and places like Running Horse are left to oversee the mating of the mean with the hopeless.” But even so far from the bluegrass of Kentucky, runners are produced with enough regularity to keep the stallions’ appointment books full.
Breeding and racing horses is a sometimes-agonizing business where failure is the norm. Having grown up in a family with a small but all-consuming thoroughbred-breeding operation, I appreciate Conley’s recognition of the “logic-resistant optimism that can weather heartbreaks.” Breeders who operate on a shoestring find consolation in rags-to-riches stories like those of Cee’s Tizzy. It is likewise consoling to be reminded that even those who can afford to spend unfathomable sums of money on horses are not guaranteed success: Snaafi Dancer, who brought a record $10.2 million as a yearling, was never sound enough to run a race, and, adding insult to injury, proved sterile in the breeding shed. Snafu Dancer, they should have called him.
For better or for worse, the breeding industry’s viability is predicated on the soundness of thoroughbred racing. Unfortunately, the racing industry is struggling to survive, as bettors leave the racetrack’s parimutuel windows for the slot machines and roulette wheels of casinos. I hope “Stud” will generate excitement for the sport of kings, not just those 30 dirty seconds, but also the thrilling seconds in the stretch at racetracks from Santa Anita to Belmont Park.
