Hardboot Values Have Lasting Impact Through Nuckols

He was 12 when he finally convinced his father that he was ready to work with the horses. Previously he had been baling, mowing, weed-hooking, stripping bluegrass. His father agreed, albeit at a cost to his pay from $7 a day to $5. But the company of horses has always been beyond price to Alfred H. Nuckols Jr.

Nor, to be fair, was that literal grounding–in the soil and pasture of the historic Hurstland Farm–lost on the youngster. To this day, in his stewardship of the portion that devolved to him, Nuckols still grows his own alfalfa and wheat; still round-bales bluegrass for bedding.

“Sometimes they'll rummage through that before the hay,” he says. “It just keeps something going through their gut all night. And I'd like to think maybe I haven't had quite as many colics, things like that, because they keep something going through their system: it's not just grain, stop; grain, stop.”

So often, the rest of society has to go round in circles to catch up with the guy who stands still; who perseveres in the ways of generations past. People have discovered the hard way the merits of raising livestock and their forage together, just as they have discovered the true cost of cheaply processed or imported foods for their own tables.

“It's like your farm-to-market restaurants in New York City now,” Nuckols says with a shrug. “If it works there, I guess it ought to work in rural Kentucky. When my father and uncles were alive, we'd run steers, and we'd raise the corn to feed them with. We'd sell the seed over at Weisenberger Mill, where they made flour out of it. We'd rotate the fields. Follow in behind the tobacco with the wheat; and then the clover; and then the bluegrass coming on behind that.”

And these principles of husbandry extend seamlessly to the horses themselves. Following the recent doping arrests, few voices in our community captured the sense of betrayal as authentically as did Nuckols in his “shocked and numbed” letter to TDN, urging the sport to embrace regulatory unity or face extinction.

He extolled the horses of his youth, Kelso and Forego and the farm-bred champion Typecast, who had no need of pharmacology; and asked how we are supposed to evaluate those genetic traits that validly flourish, through our breeding decisions, if ability is artificially distorted. Perhaps most resonant of all, he declared: “These animals are my life and have given me so much joy that I could never break the bond of trust one develops with an animal totally within my control.”

The tone was unmistakable. Its warmth and humility had pervaded an interview given to TDN, not long previously, and shared here today; and will be no less familiar to his peers at the Kentucky Thoroughbred Owners and Breeders, who have just saluted Nuckols with their Hardboot Breeders' Award. This “pays tribute to distinctive but unsung breeders that help make up the backbone of our industry”.

The awards lunch, along with so much else right now, has been postponed until fall. But his very surname serves to remind us that land and livestock will always summon the kind of stoical, patient reserves we all need to get through the lean times.

“Well, you breed, it takes 11 months to get your foal,” Nuckols says. “Then it takes another year to get to the sale. Another eight or nine months to get to the racetrack. You're looking at a three-year timetable, so you better have a little patience because you can't make these things happen overnight.

“It's fun, watching them develop. And yes, like all farming, it is a cyclical business. It's biorhythms, it's being outside, understanding what goes into the horse, raising the grain, learning things. Of course, I still foal all my own mares. The hours aren't the greatest, but there's nothing like pulling that new foal out of a mare. Or letting her push. I try not to pull too much! But to me, that's the most rewarding part of all. And watching them stand and nurse the first time.”

Every time, moreover, this gangly new foal might become the next to write a chapter in a family saga extending to the 19th Century. The 1931 Kentucky Oaks winner Cousin Jo saved the farm from the Depression, but it was under Nuckols's father and uncles that Hurstland entered its real heyday, at one point expanding past 1,000 acres.

“The only reason people recognize my name is because those Nuckols brothers were so dynamic,” he says. “People really respected them. My dad and Uncle Charlie were both directors at Keeneland, and very influential as horsemen.”

As young men, the brothers Charlie, “Hoss” (Alfred Sr.) and Hi (Hiram) became a fixture in the cocktail bar of the Phoenix Hotel in downtown Lexington. As Nuckols says: “When they couldn't find anybody else to fight, they'd fight each other just for something to do.” Their houses were all adjacent on the farm, and Nuckols and his cousins grew up together.

“It probably wasn't your most normal family, probably a little dysfunctional!” says Nuckols. “But that's the way I grew up. We were all very close. We'd go out on the farm and our grandmother would spread a blanket and we'd eat a picnic. In the summertime, we'd have iced tea on the porch. We'd make cookies and beaten biscuits. My aunts and my mother were all wonderful ladies. They put up with a lot with those three men, they really did. The older I got, the more I appreciated that!

“Those Nuckols brothers, they worked hard and they played hard. And they were tough task-masters. If your uncle caught you doing something wrong, you got whipped by him before you got home; and then your dad heard about it, and you got whipped by him! Justice was meted out very equally, and very quickly. But it taught you. I learned so much about respect, and manners. Boy, I'd get glared at, if I didn't add a 'sir' or 'ma'am'.”

In the 1960s, people still “kind of looked down their noses at commercial breeders”–but the market was just beginning to take off, and consecutive yearlings were led out of Hurstland's 1967 Keeneland consignment to make six figures. Charles Englehard bought them both. (Nuckols remembers the tycoon's little red flower wagon, a personal perk round the sales grounds, full of Coca-Cola.) The Sir Gaylord colt was sent to England, where he became Habitat; and the son of Hail To Reason to Mac Miller, who turned him into Mr. Leader.

Habitat was out of Little Hut, a daughter of wartime champion juvenile Occupy. The following spring she delivered a Northern Dancer colt, who went to Woody Stephens and won the Louisiana Derby as Northfields. Just like Habitat, he would become an important broodmare sire.

Little Hut's blood has percolated through the Nuckols broodmare band ever since. Her great-granddaughter Please Sign In (Doc's Leader) is dam of two elite winners in Cry And Catch Me (Street Cry {Ire}) and Certify (Elusive Quality), as well as a $1.45 million filly by Street Sense, who topped the 2013 January Sale as a short yearling. (She was Hurstland's sole offering in that catalog.)

“Little Hut was just a nice little red bay mare, and blessed us year after year with wonderful foals,” Nuckols says. “She had Shack by Mr. Leader when she was 24 years old, and he was a good horse too [Group-placed in Europe]. And the families have just carried on. Please Sign In has just filled up the page, and now her daughters are producing.”

Actually Please Sign In is herself now 24, and has been pensioned after delivering an American Pharoah colt Mar. 1.

“She's still the alpha female,” Nuckols reports. “She runs everybody else off of the gate every morning, when we're bringing them in. She'll pin her ears and fire at them. She was very, very tough as a racehorse, too. She would lead out of the gate and run as far as she could, as fast as she could. Pick up her hind foot, and she'd try to kick your eyeballs out. The vet said, 'Nuckols, you need to spay this bitch, she's going to kill somebody.' I said, 'Doc, I can't–she's the best female I've got on the farm.' And I'm glad I didn't.”

Her sire Doc's Leader was one of the first stakes winners Nuckols bred in his own right, by Mr. Leader out of a mare bred by Hurstland stalwart Russ Reineman. “He was a hickory racehorse,” says Nuckols. “Never tried the turf, though Mr. Leader still has his grass track record at Arlington. His owner [Dr. Frank Loccissano] wanted to send him back to me as a stallion. I said, 'Gee, Frank, I'm not sure a horse like this is going to make it, he's just graded stakes-placed, and there's so much competition.' And he said, 'Well, I want to try him.' I think he ended up with eight foals his first year, all were winners, and four were stakes horses.”

Please Sign In was among them. Sadly Doc's Leader's health deteriorated just as breeders were catching on, and Nuckols still grieves the day he had to be euthanized in 2001.

“He was such a neat old horse,” he says. “He was a chestnut, we had little games we'd play. He was syndicated, so when we had to put him down, I unfortunately had to do a necropsy on him. So I got him cremated and the day I picked him up was the first time I ever had a horse ride home with me in the front seat. It was kind of neat having Doc's Leader sitting there, I could talk to him. He's buried in my back yard. And all my Doc's Leader mares turned out to be great producers.”

Reineman, a Chicago steel man, was one of many cherished characters whose interaction has, for Nuckols, long complemented his love of the Thoroughbred.

“A wonderful, wonderful gentleman,” says Nuckols. “And he loved racing. He had a champion filly many years ago, Smart Deb, who became the linchpin to his families. When I was a kid we had so many good mares of his. He'd list us as the breeders. He said, 'I want you all to get the recognition.' [Distorted Humor a case in point.]

“That was back in the days when people bought to race. You had people like Mr. John A. Morris. Gosh, just pillars of the Turf. He was the most dapper gentleman, and always so nice to me as a youngster. A New York banker, he didn't have to talk to me. But showing horses at the sale, I got to meet so many people I would otherwise never, ever have met. The horses are the common denominator. But back then it was just a whole different school. It was a whole lot of fun.”

Though Hurstland was ahead of the curve with commercial breeding, nowadays Nuckols is dismayed to see the sales ring supplanting the racetrack as the governing priority–the “tail wagging the dog,” as he puts it. He was raised to believe that there was nothing more commercial than a family full of winners.

“Now, horses are treated just like stocks,” he laments. “Just as a different type of asset. A lot of people will buy a mare because she's in foal to a good stallion, they'll pull the foal, sell it and then breed the mare back, throw her back in the ring. I still like to try to breed a racehorse: without a racehorse, there's no family. But now I also have to be still looking in the rear-view mirror, trying to see what's going to be commercial or not. And that can change within a matter of days. They can hit with a 'TDN Rising Star', and all of a sudden everybody's on a horse.”

His father and uncles would seldom even contemplate a first-year stallion; just occasionally, perhaps, with a proven mare. Nowadays Nuckols is appalled to see them typically launched at the highest fee they will ever command.

“All those horses like Hail To Reason started at a very low fee,” Nuckols observes. “Even though he was champion 2-year-old. They'd have to get runners to the track to prove their value. Because you never, ever wanted to be backing off a stud fee.

“Of course, I remember when 32 mares was a full book. Yes, it's nice to be able to get to a really good sire today. But then you come to the sales, and find those horses have been breeding 175, 200 mares. So what used to be your late Book II, Book III horses have now been shoved back to Books V and VI.”

But whatever else changes, the magic of the Thoroughbred abides. As a young man, Nuckols was sent off to college: first to Pennsylvania, and then back to UK to qualify as a tax and business lawyer. Indeed, he practiced for a few years before returning to his roots. “It did teach me a lot,” Nuckols says. “I can appreciate red ink a lot better as a result. I'd like to see a lot more black, but I understand the 'blood' better!”

It is tough, clearly, to compete toe-to-toe with the industrial farms. But by keeping faith with principles learned in boyhood, Nuckols is entitled to keep producing another Certify; or another Rosalind (Broken Vow), who won the GI Ashland S. in 2014.

Same with his cousin Charles, who manages the other half of the original estate. The star graduate of Nuckols Farm was War Emblem, whose 2002 Kentucky Derby success in the silks of The Thoroughbred Corp. helped soften the blow of the near-miss of No Le Hace, bred by the Nuckols Brothers and runner-up to Riva Ridge 30 years previously.

War Emblem, who died Mar. 11, notoriously had fertility issues before being retired to Old Friends–an institution that actually started when Michael Blowen brought Sunshine Forever and Creator to Hurstland, and later the likes of Ogygian, until the project eventually outgrew the available site.

But if Nuckols worries that the whole industry is itself ageing, and worryingly vulnerable to disastrous recent publicity, then he should take comfort that his peers  still esteem the old school virtues that he embodies. He was named Kentucky Farm Manager of the Year in 2013, and now in his 69th year, there's that Hardboot Award.

“There are so many other people out there, doing the same thing you do every day,” he says. “So if they say this guy has done a fairly good job over the years, he's our pick this year, that means a lot. I have been looking at past recipients, and having a hard time figuring 'why me?'”

Times have changed since Hurstland was a pioneer commercial farm, selling alongside Warner Jones in the old Barns A and B at Keeneland–up at the top, behind the grandstand.

“It was a more social business back then,” Nuckols reflects. “I mean, it wasn't all about the money. You had the owners that raced for the sport. I've been very lucky. My father and uncles were pretty smart. They knew the real way to do it is to build your own family. Uncle Charlie knew everybody, and Dad was wonderful with the horses, the teasing and all that, and they'd both work on matings. It was very symbiotic. They worked very, very hard; and they were very successful.

“That was when Spendthrift was Leslie Combs and Claiborne was Bull Hancock. Everybody knew each other. We'd dove hunt in the fall, rotate around the different farms. They'd have cocktail parties at the shoots, or we'd sit around in the dove field and they'd set up a bar. It's an entirely different business now. But I couldn't have lived a better life.”