'Every Day Is A Good Day' For Poindexter

The previous time that he had neared rock bottom, it turned out that Allen Poindexter still had a ways to fall. Fell pretty hard, all the same: kept drinking all the way down from Missouri, in fact he bought a bottle of Dom Perignon after reaching Florida and drank it on a park bench outside the treatment center. Then he went into the bathroom, tripped, hit his head on a lavatory. He'll show you a scar over his eye.

In fairness, he lasted the 30 days inside, and afterwards actually stayed sober a couple of months. Then came the usual relapse, the usual binge. But this would prove the final cycle.

“I lived in a big house all by myself,” he recalls. “It was the party house. I had two 1,000-gallon aquariums, exotic birds, plants, it was like a jungle. And when the bars closed, everyone came to my house. I had pool tables, slot machines, pinball, shuffleboard.

“So everyone came over, kept going until daylight. And I hadn't slept or ate for seven days. I looked in the mirror and tears came to my eyes: 'What have you become?' I'll never forget walking down my driveway to this big tree. And I got on my knees, tears running down my cheeks, and said, 'God, please take this away from me. I can't do this on my own.'”

Next morning, he got on the plane back to Florida. October 15, 1998.

“And I have not put anything in my body stronger than ibuprofen since,” he says now. “Nothing. I didn't even use mouthwash for five years because it had alcohol in it. I'm serious. Went to all the AA meetings. NA, too, but mostly AA because alcohol was definitely my drug of choice. The other stuff was just to enable me to drink more.”

Like many recovering addicts, Poindexter is prepared to be candid about a humbling experience so that others, suffering similar trials, might find hope for a way out.

“I shouldn't even be alive,” he says. “That's why every day, for me, is a good day. It's a redemption story. I was about 50 when this happened, and I don't think I'd have lived another two years.”

He realizes now that it took longer to reach that turning point because he was flying so high in other ways.

“At that time I was making a tremendous amount of money,” he recalls. “I had my own jet. I'd go into a bar and take nine strangers to the Bahamas. 'Let's go. We'll be there in two hours.' They probably thought I was full of it. I called my pilot, 'Hey, meet me at the hangar.' Called ahead to the Crystal Palace Hotel and Casino, 'I need nine rooms.' They picked me up on the tarmac, straight through. Just crazy stuff.

“But money is not good sometimes. Rock bottom would have been if I lost everything. And I had everything. This girl told me one time, 'You have everything anyone could ever want. And you're the saddest person I ever met.' And that was true. People, afterwards, would say to me, 'At least you had a good time.' No, I didn't. That was the most miserable time in my life. I was just medicating myself.”

But let's remind ourselves of one thing here; of the reason we sought time with this zestful figure, equally lacking in airs and diffidence, with his shock of white hair and gleaming smile. For the chaos and indulgence of those years did yield one lasting boon. Poindexter has bred 30 stakes winners and, besides being perennial leading owner in Iowa, has been making an increasing impact as a breeder at the national level. And it all began back in those perilous, freewheeling years. Because when the money started coming in–he sold his share of a commercial plumbing business in 1991, and promptly overtook it with his own plumbing, heating and air start-up–he had been able to fulfil a longstanding ambition.

“About 20 years previously I was working at Helena, Arkansas, where they brought the oil barges in,” he recalls. “And there was a strike. So the foreman said he was going to Oaklawn, and that I ought to go too. I'm something like 20, 21 years old. And when I saw those horses, I just fell in love. And I said, 'Someday I'm going to own a racehorse.'”

That dream persisted until 1992, when he was taken into a field outside Springfield, Missouri.

“And there was this horse out there with cockleburs in his mane and tail,” Poindexter recalls. “I bought him for $10,000. Probably should have been $2,000. But I took him to Oaklawn and gave him to Scooter Dickey. And then Pat Day rides him wire-to-wire in a $10,000 claimer. So they jump him up to a $16,000 claimer: same thing. And I'm hooked. I'm thinking, 'Hey, this game's easy.'”

He knows better than that now, of course, albeit has made a useful habit of landing on his feet. When first experimenting with bloodstock, for instance, he decided to try pinhooking a couple of weanlings: one cost $37,000, the other $70,000. He sold them for a combined $800,000.

True, the purchase of a Kentucky farm in 2005 proved a brief adventure. Deciding that it was too horribly expensive to maintain, in 2008 Poindexter instead hooked up with Tim and Nancy Hamlin of Wynnstay Farm. Theirs has proved a spectacular partnership.

“After the 2008 crash, everyone was basically selling out,” he says. “And my philosophy is: when everyone else is getting out, get in. So I bought quite a few mares round that time.”

Skelly | Coady Media

Those included three from a Heiligbrodt dispersal at Fasig-Tipton: two for $8,000, one for $17,000. All became graded-stakes producers. Game for More (More Than Ready), most conspicuously, came up with Grade II winner Isotherm (Lonhro {Aus}); the Grade I-placed duo Gio Game (Gio Ponti) and Giant Game (Giant's Causeway); and the dam of another to have lately produced a good one in The Wine Steward (Vino Rosso). Meanwhile the Bwana Charlie filly she had carried into the ring would eventually produce the speedball Skelly (Practical Joke). Skelly and Giant Game sold as yearlings on the same day, clearing $750,000 between them. Not a bad day's work, from an $8,000 mare.

Poindexter's turf career is strewn with bargains of this kind. Take the stakes-placed Kid Majic (Lemon Drop Kid), a $3,000 juvenile, who produced Miss Mischief, one of the earliest graded stakes winners by a rookie named Into Mischief.

“Kid Majic was crooked as could be,” Poindexter recalls. “In fact, she was Z-legged. But you could see it wasn't nature, it was because of a screw. She's never had a crooked foal. And her family has just continued to grow. I mean, there's now three or four champions in there.”

Those include Letruska (Super Saver), out of Kid Majic's half-sister. And a similar scenario has developed around Clarendon Fancy, an unraced daughter of Malibu Moon bought with the Hamlins for $17,000 deep in the 2016 Keeneland November Sale. Her daughter Brightwork (Outwork) won the GI Spinaway Stakes last year, by which stage her page had already taken off, with Clarendon Fancy's sister Catch the Moon producing Girvin and Midnight Bourbon.

“The most expensive mare I ever bought was $140,000,” Poindexter says. “So these good mares I've got, as they've gotten older, I'm keeping the daughters. Because I can't buy mares like that, and never could. So this year I RNA'd an Authentic filly out of Kid Majic at Saratoga, for $475,000, and she's now in training. Same with Skelly's sister by Silver State, I'm keeping her to race.”

But for all the quality it has produced, the quantity tells in costs and Poindexter has lately streamlined a broodmare band that had rocketed from half a dozen to around 100. He's back down to 50, around a dozen in partnership.

“It had got out of control,” he says. “I'm getting ready to sell my business in the next two or three years. And with horse bills running at $200,000 a month, I'll have to go back and try to have only top-end.”

For now, Poindexter is working several regional programs, with mares covered in Kentucky before foaling out in Pennsylvania, New York, Iowa and Indiana–where he has been supporting Isotherm, sire of five winners from just 11 first-crop starters. (Poindexter reckons to have bred half a dozen current sires in all, including Captain Killybegs in New York–a graded stakes winner out of the $17,000 mare at that Heiligbrodt dispersal.) Different states have different registration criteria, but typically the regional foals are raised on Poindexter's home farm in Missouri. Only the elite mares stay at Wynnstay year-round.

Brightwork | Sarah Andrew

But it's the Iowa sport with which Poindexter has become synonymous. His endeavors there can be measured by $500,000 banked for an Iowa-bred son of Pioneerof The Nile at Saratoga in 2015. Lately he has a three-for-three juvenile at Prairie Meadows, Amorosa (Sky Mesa), whose Iowa Cradle Stakes qualifies him as the Iowa-bred crop champion. “He won second time by 9 3/4 lengths in 1:10-and-one,” Poindexter notes. “That's fast anywhere you go, for a 2-year-old.”

But his love of the state has prompted him to moderate a program that had nearly become too successful. “People were getting discouraged,” he admits. “I was winning basically every stakes race. It wasn't good for the industry there. So the last three years I've taken 12, 15 of my Iowa-breds to the sale, while keeping 50 percent. That gives others a chance to get into some of these better horses. So this year, because I have all these different partners, I have eight trainers at Prairie Meadows. Hopefully that's really helped. It's great to see how happy people are, winning their first race or their first stakes.

“I love the Iowa people. There's a lot of entrepreneurs there, like the Albaugh family who everyone knows in racing. People don't realize, but Iowa per capita is one of the richest states in the nation. But they're just friendly, Midwest people, and that's what I am. I mean, I get on an elevator, I speak to everyone. At the racetrack, I'll talk to housekeeping, the people picking up trash. I'm no better than anyone else. I'm just one of them. And they're easy to love because they're just the same way.”

And that humility is evidently key to Poindexter's business success, as well.

“It's all relationships,” he says. “That's what business is, relationships. Not how smart you are. If people like you, they'll find a way to help you. And if they don't, they'll find a way to screw you! I only have to bid on maybe 25 percent of the work given to me. And that's relationships, that's taking care of clients.”

But nothing keeps us humbler than the kind of human frailties that for years menaced Poindexter's very survival. And these have also maintained due perspectives on the trifling reverses of the Turf, however high the stakes. How fortunate that Poindexter, of all his addictions, was able to single out and preserve the one that could give lasting fulfilment.

“Horses, yes, they're an addiction too,” he reflects. “I've probably spent about the same amount of money on all of them! But this one has turned out a blessing. I mean, life's good. I wake up every morning with a smile on my face. And go to bed every night with a smile on my face. I pray every day for the sick and suffering alcoholics and addicts, that they may find the same peace that I did. Everything I went through, even the years of drinking, ended up making me a better person. I'm not afraid of hell. I've already been there. But if I hadn't gone through all that, I don't think I'd love life as much as I do now.”