Cogburn's Dam a Welcome Surprise to Lockharts

It's the surprises that keep us interested in pedigrees, and that applies as much to people as to horses.

Cogburn, who recently sprinted to a world record in the GI Jaipur Stakes, is out of a mare by Saintly Look. Saintly Who? A son of Saint Ballado, and winner of the GIII Lecomte Stakes in 2003, Saintly Look covered a couple of small books in Indiana, in 2008 and 2009, and was then sold for $17,500 at the Keeneland November Sale. Cogburn's dam In a Jif was among nine named foals in his second crop. Eventually resurfacing at another farm in the state, Saintly Look seems to have had three named foals in 2014, another eight in 2015, and then disappeared from production altogether.

“Saintly Look!” exclaimed Sally Lockhart's husband Jimmie when she brought the mare home. “Saintly Look doesn't belong in our broodmare band!”

“I didn't know who the hell Saintly Look was,” admits Sally, looking back. “I'd love to tell you that we'd spent days researching In a Jif, but it wouldn't be true. I just saw this pretty mare walking up through the chute and when I looked at the catalogue page, she was in foal to Not This Time. And at the time, I just had an infatuation with that horse.”

At the start of the year, indeed, she had been proud that their Ballyrankin Farm had been the very first to deliver a foal by Not This Time. And now that his second crop was imminent, she was stretching to sweep up unwanted seasons at a bargain rate.

“But that's how we've made our money,” she explains. “That's been our livelihood, breeding nice-looking mares to cheaper horses. We can't afford expensive mares, so we try and buy ones that might have nice foals. That's the only way we can do it–and one of ours had the highest-priced Known Agenda last year, another the highest Modernist.”

It so happened that this pretty mare was being sold through James Keogh, with whom the Lockharts have a relationship going back over 20 years.

“In fact, I think it's fair to say that if James hadn't helped me out with boarders, we wouldn't even have the farm now,” Sally acknowledges.

They know him as few others. They even know a scruffy, sweating Keogh, who toils towards the immaculate presentation both of his horses and his own wardrobe, on sales day. And they know the horseman so respected that a couple of years ago, he judged at the Dublin Horse Show.

And there he was, watching this mare on the rostrum, scowling.

“James had a horrible face on him while she was up there,” Sally says with a chuckle. “So I walked up and said, 'What's wrong with her? Why isn't she making anything?' And he said, 'There's nothing wrong with her. I don't know why she's not bringing more.'”

So Sally just went right ahead and bought the mare for $26,000. After all, In a Jif had won seven of 18 starts, including a sprint stakes on the Turfway synthetic. Even before she had the docket in her hands, however, Sally was already worrying about what Jimmie was going to say.

“I thought, I'm going to be in so much trouble,” she recalls. “So I signed in some fake name. And I wasn't even at the vanning desk before Jimmie called me. And he was like, 'What the hell!? Did you just buy a mare?' And I looked around to see who had ratted me out.”

“Nobody,” confirms Jimmie. “I just recognized the fake name.”

Of course he did. Because if you think Cogburn's dam has a surprising sire, then how about the woman who found her? For when Sally signed the docket in the name of Bellary Bay Bloodstock, she was borrowing the title of a novel by her father John Brennan.

Never heard of him, maybe? A bit like Saintly Look? Except he's on many a bookshelf, especially back in Europe, under the nom de plume of John Welcome. Besides his occasional collaborations with Dick Francis, he wrote old-school thrillers, plus biographies of Fred Archer and, in the classic Neck Or Nothing, Sceptre's trainer Robert Sievier.

“He was a lawyer in Wexford, but always wrote books on the side,” Sally explains. “And he dedicated the one called Bellary Bay to me. It was about World War I in Kerry, where he had a house. He always wrote under a pseudonym because he thought that if anybody knew who was writing these books, he couldn't be a very good attorney. So he wanted to stay under the radar.”

But it was an incidental benefit of her upbringing by this remarkable man that ultimately determined the course of Sally's life.

“We always had animals at home,” she says. “I mean, we had 40 acres, and always had hunt horses, event horses, cattle, chickens. My sisters and I, we all rode growing up: Pony Club, hunting, all that sort of stuff.”

Their own place was called Hermitage and, by the time Sally was naming a Kentucky farm, that name was already taken! But one of her favorite Pony Club events as a child was held at a place called Ballyrankin, and it is the old Irish road-sign that hangs on their gate today.

There was a long and winding road to be followed first, of course. And probably things would never have played out the way they did but for the eventing fall in which the 18-year-old Sally injured her back. Told that she couldn't ride for six months, she went to muck stalls at Coolmore for a breeding season–and liked it so much that she returned the following year.

“I would have stayed riding event horses in Ireland, if I hadn't hurt my back,” she says. “But when Coolmore sent me over here, I just never went home. Life was good, I was making a bit of money, it was all a lark.”

For many years she worked in the office at Brookdale, right through the days of Deputy Minister, Silver Deputy and Forest Wildcat. In the meantime, she met Jimmie, who was running one of the broodmare barns at Airdrie. Later he spent three years at Ballindaggin Farm for John Williams, and also did a stint at Stonereath. But around the turn of the century, the Lockharts decided they had enough experience to start a place of their own. They leased a couple of other sites, before settling where they are now on the Georgetown Road.

“We own bits and pieces of 20 mares, and we're a commercial breeder,” Jimmie sums up. “Our plan is to have early foals that are strong and mature for November. That's our big sale.”

Keeneland November was duly on the agenda for the Not This Time foal delivered by In a Jif. And albeit Sally's own attempt to remain incognito had entirely failed with her husband, they maintained the “fiction” when the mare duly foaled the following March, registering the breeder as Bellary Bloodstock.

“I was so nervous until she had a colt,” Sally confesses. “But then I thought, 'Thank God, I'm off the hook.' That was just lucky, of course. But he was a really straightforward, easy keeper. And the mare the same: pleasant, sensible. I wish we could tell you we saw a champion coming. But there was nothing fancy about him.

“It's like Old Tom Cooper used to say. He was a friend of my father, and took me under his wing when I first came over here. 'Sally,' he told me. 'You just need to look them in the eye. That's really all you need to do, figure out what's going on in their head.' Stands to reason, doesn't it?”

Naturally selling through Keogh, the colt brought $52,000 from Clarmont Bloodstock before a topsy-turvy pinhook cycle. Ultimately, he ended up racing for a partnership of Clark Brewster with Corinne and William Heiligbrodt, who sent him into training with Steve Asmussen. As a juvenile, Cogburn impressed in a Churchill maiden just a couple of days before In a Jif's next foal, a Classic Empire filly, surfaced deep in the September sale and made $110,000. She, too, won a Churchill maiden the following June–by which time Cogburn had just finished second on his graded stakes debut.

“And Taylor Made came knocking on the door,” Sally says. “I mean, she was empty, and we weren't going to be able to afford to breed her back to Not This Time. So we agreed to a private sale.”

Obviously the price would be higher still, now that Cogburn has proved a revelation for the switch to turf. But the Lockharts' business is one that demands pragmatism, and a hunch won't always pay off the way it did with Not This Time.

“We have sometimes fallen victim to fashion,” Jimmie says. “Sometimes it can come back and bite you when you're in the wrong year. Stallions used to get two or three years, but now it's almost down to one cycle. Things have become very, very fashion-driven.”

Their three principal clients have usefully contrasting agendas: one joins them in selling weanlings at the November sale; another breeds strictly to race; another operates in between. On the whole, however, the Lockharts find that the same treatment benefits all young stock the same.

“Except that the clients who breed to race don't believe in corrective surgeries,” Jimmie notes. “Their horses are not manipulated. Other than that, we raise them all pretty much the same–they're wintered the same, housed the same–until the sale horses, at the appropriate time, go into their prep. The breeding to race, of course, gives you the luxury of breeding to whatever horse you want. But that's a long game, and an expensive one.”

The Lockharts believe sufficiently in their groundwork to have done well buying back fillies raised at Ballyrankin, off the racetrack, to breed. But they will also keep monitoring lesser fillies, to reserve them a home if in any way uncomfortable with where they have ended up.

The compassion remains, then, however tough the environment can sometimes be. Sally was one of the first women to join the Irish diaspora in the Bluegrass.

“The business was definitely male dominated in those days, though I'm not sure I ever really noticed,” she says. “I mean, it still is, or when you stop and think about. Maybe it was harder, as an employer, to get staff that respect you in this line of business. But I think that just takes time.”

Certainly she felt no sentimental disappointment when both their children embarked on different careers. It's a tough vocation, after all, especially in the foaling season when Sally and Jimmie take alternate nights on call.

“We foal out 50 to 60 every year,” Sally says. “I do enjoy that side. Obviously there's the tough ones that go wrong, and those wear on you. But those mares are my friends, and that's how I treat them. They work hard for you in that foaling barn. But I think the magic lasts longer for me than for Jimmie!”

“I won't lie,” he concurs. “It's magical in January, but come May, it's torture. I'm ready for it to be over.”

Both, however, share the sense of fulfilment when horses graduate from their program to excel on the track.

“We've had plenty of good racehorses come off the farm before this one,” notes Jimmie. “Ollie's Candy (Candy Ride {Arg}) won a Grade I, and ran at the Breeders' Cup twice, and we'd raised her for Paul and Karen Eggert. Turnerloose (Nyquist) won the [GII] Rachel Alexandra. And years ago, we had Square Eddie (Smart Strike) that won the [GI] Breeders' Futurity at Keeneland and ran second at the Breeders' Cup.”

The latter offered the Lockharts early reassurance that they knew what they were about, but will always particularly linger in Sally's memory as he kicked her in the head as a yearling. But even after cashing out the mare, nothing exceeds the pride the couple can justifiably take in having raised the four-legged lightning bolt who has already earned a place at WinStar on retirement.

“He's some kind of fast, isn't he?” says Sally. “Who would ever have thought? Maybe we won't ever get another Cogburn in our lifetime. But it was the right thing to do, to sell the mare at the time we did. And to have been riding on those coattails, it's nice.”

And while she has found herself a long way from “the tang of turf smoke that hung all about their homesteads great or small”–as her father wrote of nostalgia for the old country–then here, also, is exactly what he described in Bellary Bay: “good country for horse-rearers, too, with its rich pastures set on limestone.”

Home and away have transposed, by this stage, but the endeavor and the rewards remain the same.

“We're all just trying to make a living of it,” Sally says with a shrug. “It's long days, sometimes long nights. But that's just the way it is. It's a way of life.”

“And it's great when you feel you've accomplished something,” adds Jimmie. “Even if part of it was by luck. Because if you don't believe in yourself, believe that you can make a difference, you're in the wrong line of work. So, yes, something like this does give you a sense of pride.”