Minor Hoping Major Updates Will Yield November Profit

It was the old dilemma, really: heart versus head. Joe Minor adores the mare and it was always going to be a wrench to sell her. But sometimes fate just seems to be tapping you on the shoulder, giving you the kind of chance you really shouldn't have to think about.

The fact is that a mare as young as Akron Moon (Malibu Moon) was hardly entitled to expect another update, with her daughter Bellafina (Quality Road) having already added a second Grade I success in the Chandelier S. since Fasig-Tipton published their November Sale catalogue. Especially as Bellafina is set to line up for the GI Tito's Handmade Vodka Breeders' Cup Juvenile Fillies barely 48 hours before the auction.

Nonetheless Akron Moon somehow profited from another boost last weekend when her half-brother Have At It (Kitten's Joy) posted a breakout success in the GII Hill Prince S. at Belmont. And there's more. The very next day after Bellafina won the Chandelier, her 3-year-old brother Diamond King (Quality Road) gained his third graded stakes placing–when caught only in a three-way photo finish for the GIII Oklahoma Derby. Akron Moon, it scarcely needs stating, is carrying a sibling to the pair. And, as the icing on the cake, Lane's End this week announced that their sire's fee would be than doubled in 2019 to $150,000.

However conflicted, Minor's decision was made with a following wind. Even so, its strength won't really become apparent until Akron Moon is standing in the ring. She's only eight, and by a celebrated distaff sire. If someone else wants her as a foundation mare, then Minor will have to be satisfied that he is getting her full value. He did exactly that, after all, with the horse who has made Akron Moon such a valuable commodity–and was vindicated in spectacular fashion.

When bidding on the filly we now know as Bellafina stalled at the Keeneland September Sale last year, at $220,000, Minor took her home to try again in Florida in the spring. This time, after a bullet breeze, she made $800,000. And even that is looking a pretty good deal for owner Kaleem Shah, now that Bellafina has emerged as the leading filly of her generation on the West Coast, with dominant wins in the GII Sorrento S. and GI Del Mar Debutante S. before the Chandelier.

With Hip 208 on Nov. 4, then, Minor will again have to take a detached view of where sentiment ends and viability starts. At some point, you have to take chips to the counter.

“I'm in this business for it to be sustainable,” he said. “I was sitting at Keeneland a few years ago with John Greathouse [II] and bought a Malibu Moon filly for $775,000; and the very next hip, I paid $725,000 for a Smart Strike filly. When you start paying that kind of money for horses, you need to get rewarded. I'd love to see all Akron Moon's pretty babies come along, and lead them into the ring. But even to insure the mare, now that she's made herself so desirable, never mind the foal inside as well, is very expensive. Because if that foal comes out like her first three, it's going to be worth a lot of money.”

Besides Bellafina and Diamond King, Akron Moon's only other foal to date is the Verrazano (More Than Ready) filly Minor retained for $480,000 at Keeneland last month. That was another case of making a value call; of remembering, above all as a breeder, that there is more than one stage of a filly's life at which to optimize her value.

That said, Minor stresses that he means business every time he sends a horse into the ring. He recalls Bellafina's reserve, last September, as $250,000 or maybe even $225,000: one more bid. “That would have been okay, I'd have let her go,” he shrugged. “They're for sale. I don't lead them over there to get somebody's opinion.”

By overcoming sentiment with Akron Moon, however, Minor should not be viewed simply as some hard-headed businessman applying principles learned in his life away from the track. If anything, in fact, he owes his pragmatism to horses.

When he observed that the raising and selling of bloodstock is no different from any other kind of farming, Minor spoke advisedly.

“And when you farm, your crop can be wiped out any time,” he reflected. “By weather, by disease, by a lot of things. Same in the horse business. Things can go really, really right; and they can go really, really wrong. But that's true of all business, of life in general. Most worthwhile ventures come with risks attached.”

For Minor was himself raised on a small horse farm on the Paris Pike. Breezy Crest, they called it. A few good horses came out of there: Yellmantown was probably the best, a frontrunning grey who racked up 20 wins in the 1950s. But Minor's father died when he was 12, leaving his mother to eke a living for seven children out of those 27 acres.

“I guess the barn was maybe 16 stalls,” Minor said. “It was used for tobacco, too. We grew crops, we had cattle. A great place to grow up? Yeah. Riding horses since you were a kid, it's a good life. But sometimes a hard life, too. I remember mornings when the water was frozen in the troughs and having to get an iron digger to break it. There wasn't anything fun about that, I didn't think, before you went to school. But then it wasn't up for a vote, whether you did things or not! And when I went to school, none of those priests or nuns had much of a democracy either. You either did what you were supposed to do, or you suffered the consequences. Understanding the consequences was engrained in me pretty early.”

That grounding has sustained Minor through serial business successes in fields as diverse as automobiles, event planning and heavy equipment rental. These, in turn, gave him the resources to go back to his roots, initially with a few partnership horses. Along the way, he found people he could trust to help build something small on his own account; and, with time, something not quite so small.

In 2013 Minor, along with Greathouse, was looking for one or two fillies at Saratoga, to upgrade the seedcorn. Another valued counselor, Ciaran Dunne, came and found them. There was a horse they should see, in Peter O'Callaghan's draft.

“Trouble was, it was a colt,” recalled Minor. “Quality Road, first crop. But he was beautiful. Horse's name was Blofeld, and he went on to do what Blofeld went on to do.”

Which is to say, win three Grade II races and really put his sire on the map. Minor had got in on the ground floor with Quality Road. So the fact that she was carrying one of the emerging sire's foals was a major draw when, the following year, the stakes-placed Akron Moon came onto the market as a 4-year-old at the Keeneland November Sale, offered by Shel Evans through Timber Town. Minor bought her for $175,000.

“I think I purchased about half a dozen mares in foal to Quality Road at that sale!” laughed Minor.

The foal this one was carrying turned out to be Diamond King, who was put through Wavertree for Fasig-Tipton's Midatlantic 2-year-old sale.

“He was all there, a very athletic, well-balanced horse,” Minor said. “And Mr. Chuck Zacney [of Cash Is King] paid me $235,000 for him, which was a fair price at that time. But then she had Bellafina, and I absolutely loved her from the very beginning. She just had a presence about her.”

When Minor brought her back from Keeneland, he sent her on to Dunne too. Last Christmas, flying back to Lexington from his Florida home at Naples, Minor decided to drop into Ocala.

“Now Ciaran, like most people, keeps the colts and fillies in separate facilities,” Minor said. “We were looking at the colts first. And then I see this horse second or third in line. And I think: 'Hey, that's the Akron Moon!' So I said: 'Why the hell you got her in there with the colts?' And Ciaran said: 'I didn't think you'd pick her out!' But there she was, next to a lot of really nice colts–and she held her own, totally. Definitely an alpha female.”

That has evidently been the way with all three of the mare's foals. “They've all got great minds,” said Minor. “They try hard. In the field, 'little' John Greathouse [III] would tell you they've all been the leader of the pack.”

Only a very natural racehorse, certainly, would have breezed the way Bellafina did at Fasig-Tipton's Gulfstream sale. Ten flat, moreover, was the tip of the iceberg.

“At the beginning of her breeze she kind of threw her head, and the rider had to get her back on track,” Minor explains. “Had that not happened I don't know what she'd have breezed, something freakish, :9.4 maybe. As it was, she did really well. And I did really well. I mean, $800,000, that's a big number. And now she's rewarded Mr. Kaleem Shah, and his whole team, Simon Callaghan and Ben McElroy, for their belief. So yes, kudos to them. Obviously it's self-serving, because I have the mare, but I really couldn't be happier for them.”

Nor is Akron Moon the only seam of gold Minor has found as JSM Equine. His 9-year-old mare S S Pinafore (Street Sense), picked out for $77,000 at Fasig-Tipton's Kentucky Mixed Sale in February 2014, is also going places. Her 3-year-old Plainsman (Flatter) impressed in a Belmont allowance last month; her 2-year-old Achilles Warrior (Warrior's Reward) broke his maiden at Saratoga; and $450,000 for her yearling by Liam's Map (Unbridled's Song) was the top price for any colt in his debut crop at the Keeneland September Sale.

But Minor is hardly immune to the unluckier twists inevitable with Thoroughbreds: as co-owner, for instance, of Onlyforyou (Malibu Moon), four-for-four and heading to the Kentucky Oaks in 2014 when she took a bad step working one morning, suffering an irreparable condylar fracture.

To that extent, there is a limit to how far anyone can apply sound business principles to horses.

“But you try,” Minor said. “I'm fortunate to have a group of people I can always call upon, to bounce things off the wall: good quality people who do things the right way. I'm a capitalist. I believe in a society that's founded on those basic principles of hard work; and that if you have a good product and set a fair price and treat your clients right, then they'll come back. I think if you work hard, good things can happen.

“In the racing game, though, you do need a lot of luck. Sometimes, like with Onlyforyou, you're just one step away. But it's a fun business, and it's rewarding. I'm a born-and-raised Lexingtonian, I've been coming to Keeneland since I was way too young to bet. If you started in the center of downtown and drive three miles in any direction you'd almost run into a horse farm. No question, it gets in your blood.

“It's an adrenaline rush, whether you're betting two dollars or own the horse. But if I am in this to make a profit, I don't know that the stars can align a whole lot better than Bellafina's dam being in foal to Quality Road.”

He smiled and shook his head. “I don't know if anyone can get a whole lot luckier than that.”