Cline Embraces the Everyday at Lane's End

Sure, he has met the odd monarch or statesman. The Queen of England and President George H.W. Bush have been to the farm several times. “Pretty heavy duty stuff for a kid from Versailles,” Mike Cline said, shaking his head. But if forty years working for Will Farish at Lane's End has taught him anything, it's that class sets people apart; same as with horses. Class, not wealth or power.

Every time she has left Lane's End, after visiting the former U.S. ambassador to her court, the Queen has taken time to be introduced to a handful of the staff. “You know, the chef, or whoever it might be,” Cline said. “And we're in this line waiting to go in to meet her. These other guys are pale ghosts, sweating through their shirts. But I'm cool–because I know all I have to do is talk about horses. She's in Kentucky, she wants to talk horses. So I have no problem talking to her. What a personality, an unbelievable sport.”

He's even been on Air Force One, if only to deliver a dog to President Bush; “41,” as Cline's employers know him, as distinct from his son, the 43rd President.

“We took the dog to Cincinnati, pulled Mr Farish's little plane up alongside, got on board, gave him the dog and flew back to the farm,” Cline remembered. “For some bumpkin like me, to do that kind of stuff? Working for the Farish family has been an unbelievable experience. I just think how lucky I was to run into this one guy who's enabled me to do this for all this time. I don't think either of us had an idea where it was going to go, back then. But I just felt I was around the right sort of person. And he and his family have been basically responsible for everything good that's ever happened to me.”

His measured, gritty Kentucky drawl thickens a little with that remark. But when you have learned as much about Thoroughbreds as the Lane's End manager, above all you know how much they can tell you about people. They show you people who are avaricious or impatient or vain; and they show you people with class.

And that candor, in the horses, is matched in this thickset guy sitting in a conference room at Keeneland, with his dark brows and silver hair. At 67, you can still see the college football player in there. But even the toughest, least sentimental of men should permit themselves a degree of pride approaching the 40th anniversary of what he has helped to make one of the premier Bluegrass institutions.

Because when he got to Lane's End in 1978, it was just a 140-acre cattle farm that promised to make a charming rural retreat for a successful Texas business and horseman.

“There was a beautiful old house, beautiful rolling land,” Cline recalled. “He lived in Houston, he came to Kentucky all the time but never really had a home here. And that was the cool part about it, so many people have farms that aren't really homes–but this place started out as a home. So we fixed up the house, and immediately started working on plans to build the broodmare barns.”

Cline was still in his twenties, but already had meaningful miles on the clock. He had been raised on a horse farm, indeed, one managed by his father for Herb Stevens.

“Herb was kind of a hardboot Kentuckian,” Cline remembered. “Just lower-end racehorses, but I guess that's where I learned to work with horses; I was surrounded by them the whole time.”

When he left the University of Kentucky, where he had a football scholarship, Cline made what he now regards as a pivotal move. He started at the top. That is to say, with top horses. Mack Miller was training for Charles Engelhard with a barn full of stakes winners in New York. So far as his own duties were concerned, of course, Cline had to start at the very bottom. But that brought him straight to the best of them all; straight to Halo, to be precise.

“Halo was a total renegade,” Cline said with a laugh. “An unbelievably nasty horse, his entire life. The only reason I got to rub him. When I went to Mack's barn, it was me and a bunch of hard-assed older guys who knew a whole lot more than me. I had to figure out a way to win them over or I'd have been lost. He was some bitch in the barn, and nobody wanted to fool with him. So that's how I got him. Take his halter off, it might take an hour to get it back on. We turned him out in South Carolina; you go in and try to catch him, he'd run you out of the paddock. He almost had too much pedigree: by Hail To Reason out of Cosmah, one of the deepest families there ever was. Maybe he was too hot-bred. But he was a really good racehorse.”

Distilled by Sunday Silence, of course, that hot blood has since proved some of the most potent on the planet. And nor were the lessons of that time lost on Cline.

“I always feel that was the most important thing that happened to me,” he explained. “Because I didn't start out at Turfway Park, or on some farm piecemealing stuff together. I was incredibly lucky to start out with all these unbelievable horses that ended up stallions. So I came away with an idea what a good horse looked like. If I didn't have a little background on the track, with the type of horses we wanted to raise, I might have not made it. And I learned to do things the right way. Mack was a hay, oats and water guy, so the formative years I had in the horse business were with someone who was straight, honest and loved his horses.”

Also in the barn was Neil Howard, who would himself play a significant role in the evolution of Lane's End as trainer of Mineshaft. Back then they were just grooms living in a tack-room. For a while Cline joined the starting gate on the New York circuit, and then he worked as assistant to Bob Dunham.

One of Dunham's patrons at the time was this gentleman named Farish, who would surface again when Cline was hired by E.V. Benjamin to manage the old Big Sink Farm. Curiously enough, Cline still didn't know a whole lot about mares.

“Maybe it was putting the cart before the horse a little bit,” he said. “But if I'd done the horse before the cart I might not have lasted. As it was, I'd figured out that was the end of the market I needed to be on. If I'd started out teasing mares and foaling–well, if they don't turn out to be racehorses, it doesn't matter how good you are.”

Farish had some mares boarding at Big Sink, and asked Cline to come with them when he bought the historic tract of land then known as Pleasant Lawn.

“I wasn't too sure what Mr Farish's vision was at the time,” Cline said. “But we decided early we should be in at the top end of the business.”

While there was as yet no talk of stallions, and surrounding lots were acquired in discreet parcels, his new boss kept Cline front and center as the project developed. Farish knew just what he wanted; where every tree should be planted. Everything was done along the margin between aesthetics and utility: roads and fences hugging the parkland contours; ventilation and grazing as important to each barn as cupolas or dormers.

“We didn't inherit anybody's bad layout,” Cline noted. “We were going to succeed or fail based on what we did, and were very methodical about it. The way we do it, they'll be out two-thirds of the time, so your pasture has to be really plush and balanced. That's where horses get their early development. Most everybody's got good hay, there's no secret formula, but I think you really improve your odds for raising good horses when the land's in your favor.”

One of the three founding fathers, when the stallion station opened in 1985, was Dixieland Band (Northern Dancer), who had raced for Farish's father-in-law Bayard Sharp. His son Dixie Union and now grandson Union Rags have established a Lane's End line as homely as three pots hanging over the range, while he also proved hugely influential as a broodmare sire. That's no less than you might expect of a farm that has achieved scarcely less resonance through its bedrock mares: Lassie Dear (Buckpasser) was one of the first on the site, and promptly delivered Weekend Surprise (Secretariat), subsequently dam of the signature Lane's End stallion, A.P. Indy.

“Both had amazing quality; they were pretty, they were feminine,” Cline recalled. “You knew, when you looked at them, that's a filly. Some of them, you look at them in the field, you can't tell the difference. There's been a lot of great racemares that flopped as broodmares. Everybody's looking for Grade I winners but a lot of them that are dominating racehorses on the track in some ways are masculine. Some of those make it too, of course. There's lots of different kinds of broodmares and I'm not saying one is better than the other. But if those two weren't the biggest, you might walk right past them, they had quality about them–and they had family.”

The result is not just a Lane's End sire-line–though everybody on the farm gets a kick out of Mineshaft being across the way from his venerable old sire, and now Honor Code looking at both of them–but a dynasty that has helped to shape the modern breed. In the meantime the farm cultivated partners, clients and families. Stallions brought boarders. Boarders came back, year after year. A sales division was developed.

“It all represents years of planning,” Cline emphasized. “There's a lot of different ways you can go, no one way to do it. There's some luck involved too. But we have a formula we feel raises good horses. We're very traditional that way. We feel horses need to be raised outside for the most part, so they don't get crowded up in a small pasture, they have room to move around and develop. Ideally, you get smarter as you go along. But you have to have stuff you can stick with, stuff you can count on. And you get a certain amount of confidence, over the years, as you see stuff work.”

Some of those principles: no crazy books of mares; find good partners and show them they can trust you; freshen your families; stand horses not just with good blood, but with good minds.

“You can keep horses quiet with all kinds of gimmicks, to get them to the races, but that stuff is going to rear its ugly head when they start having babies,” Cline explained. “A lot of the good horses we've been in contact with, that made good stallions, they could almost talk to you–that's how smart most of them are. A.P. Indy's so smart about taking care of himself, he doesn't ever make a bad move.

“Those headcases, they don't need to reproduce. You don't need to pass that down over the generations. Yes, there are some good bloodlines that have a reputation for horses a little tough to train. And those are the ones that are probably going to be challenged about distance, too. Because if you can't relax and get into the race you're not going to go very far. So while there have been sprinters or milers that made stallions, you do wonder whether some of them, if they were a little smarter, might have relaxed and got a distance.

“And you need to have pedigree. I would say the mistakes we made over the years, it was often just getting away from those types. There were freaks, they didn't have the family. Alysheba, I mean, what kind of racehorse was he? One of the most amazing there ever was. But a disappointment as a stallion. Manila. Spend A Buck. You can't have too many of those if you want to keep going.”

By the same token he is amazed at the money farms are nowadays throwing at promising 2-year-olds.

“It's a lot easier to figure out what they're worth at the end of their career than right before the Derby!” he said with a grin. “Lots of horses are sold on the day they're the most valuable they'll ever be. The stallions are harder than any of it because there are so many choices, and it's so expensive you only get to be wrong so many times. But Mr Farish has this amazing ability to sustain our stallion farm. We'll all say what about this one, or that one? But he knows what he wants. In the end, he decides and we all get behind it. And he finds one good one after another.”

As Cline said himself, Lane's End itself is still a relatively young farm; yet it has an air of longevity, a brand infused with old school values.

“We've people who come back year after year because they trust us,” Cline said. “They believe in what we believe in, in trying to do things the right way, and with the right sorts of people.

“There's no doubt the sport has gotten more difficult. It was easy in the old days. But luckily as it gets more difficult, you get a little more experienced, a little older and wiser. So you look out for those road blocks or stumbling points.

“This is Mr Farish's deal and we're happy to defer to him because what he says makes more sense. Plus it's based on a little something. It takes the patience of Job to raise Thoroughbreds. There's so much that can go wrong. Then you hear all these guys running their mouths: we did this, we did that. Because they buy some horse for five-million bucks that's already won four Grade Is and all of a sudden they got it all figured out.”

But there you have it. That's what the horses do: show you people with class, and people without it. Cline could not be more down-to-earth, less inflated by his own remarkable career.

He gives a shrug. Let the braggarts do their thing, he seems to say, and let his boss do it his way; the Lane's End way.

“There's lots of ways to get judged and I'm happy with being judged the way I will be,” he said. “I just really am grateful for the opportunity I got. There aren't many of those kind of jobs any more. For me to stay as long as I have is pretty unheard of, in this day and age. Especially when you're doing something that's your passion. I love what I do. Mostly because where I get to do it, and who I get to do it with.”