Sale Reject Returns On The Crest Of A Wave

It has always been a small farm, and nowadays they're down to no more than half a dozen mares. Some of the more strenuous duties, moreover, have lately been contracted out. After all, Alfonso Mazzetti is not as young as he was. It's been a long and winding road since he used to ride a motorcycle, aged just 11, to the racetrack in Lima where he would shoot pool with the jockeys; never mind the many years in Colorado in between. Such a long and winding road, in fact, that he expects to be selling up his farm outside Paris, Kentucky, sooner rather than later.

But the sale of its principal asset is being expedited to just a few days from now, when a mare owned by Mazzetti and longstanding partner R.J. Winkler goes to the Keeneland November Sale. It's a poignant prospect for Mazzetti, especially when he recalls a snowy Sunday in February 2021.

“She was waxed, but acting normal,” he recalls. “I thought, 'Well, we're going to have a baby tonight.' We'd had a really big snowstorm. But I believe that a horse is better off outside than in, and decided to turn her out. So she's all by herself, in a field covered with snow. And about 11 o'clock in the morning I look out the window–and she's going to have the baby right there.”

In principle, that was okay. No matter how hard you work on your barns, Mazzetti reckons it will always be cleaner outdoors.

Al Mazzetti with The Nth Degree in retirement | courtesy of Al Mazzetti

“But when you have a foaling in the middle of the day, it's usually not good news,” he says. “And we never have any help on Sundays. So there's nobody to help me. I had heart surgery 17 years ago and my wife thought I was going to die, trying to pull this colt. My heart rate was 184 per minute. But the mare knew me, she was calm. It was a big first foal, huge really, so she needed plenty of help. But we got him out. And then I did get my neighbor to help bring him into the barn, I didn't want him to lie in the cold snow. They brought their Gator and we threw the baby in there.”

He gives a self-deprecating smile. “I know people won't think that's scientific enough,” he resumes. “But I think horses do great things in spite of us. We just need to get out of their way. And it was a wonderful baby.”

As the three protagonists–mare, foal and farmer–recovered from their trauma, Mazzetti thought back to 2000, when he and Winkler had bought a Dixieland Band mare named Coastal Wave for $32,000 at the OBS Fall Sale. She hadn't made the track until she was four but then won her first two starts, and she was in foal to Distorted Humor.

Mazzetti and Winkler took her back to Colorado to deliver her colt. They cut him, named him The Nth Degree. And in 2008, aged six, he became the first Colorado-bred to win a graded stakes in the GIII Shakertown Stakes.

“He was not very sound, but big and strong,” Mazzetti recalls. “I think he ended up around 17 hands. That was a great day at Keeneland. We'd realized a dream we never thought possible, and were getting so many calls from Colorado. I started breeding horses there in 1990, and we were used to running for, like, $3,000.”

Violent Wave in foal to Up to the Mark | courtesy of Al Mazzetti

Coastal Wave bred a few other winners, albeit none of the same caliber, and was already 22 when producing a filly by Violence. In fact, already the previous year a consignor had rebuked Mazzetti that the mare was too old to be commercial. “Doesn't matter,” he answered with a shrug. “Genes are genes.”

“And then this Violence filly was so beautiful they wanted to sell her for us,” Mazzetti recalls. “They weren't mad with me anymore! But she'd been too old for them the year before, so that was the end of that.”

She made $150,000 at the September Sale, and her purchasers named her Violent Wave. But after winning a maiden claimer she was thrown into a stake, and ran so poorly that she was next entered under a tag of just $6,250. Mazzetti got straight onto the phone to Winkler.

“Hey, she's worth a lot more than that,” he said. “And besides, we get to keep the $143,750!”

They tried her with the ageing Distorted Humor, who had clicked so well with her dam, but she did not conceive and in 2020 they went to the other end of the spectrum, to the commercial rookie Maximus Mischief.

“Because I'd been one of the few people that always believed Into Mischief was going to make it,” Mazzetti recalls. “I bought into the Share The Upside program when nobody was using him. And while I think we were the last to sell our share, it was probably my biggest mistake in the industry to sell at all! But it's a horse. A horse can always colic, anything can happen. Anyway we started working again, tried to find an Into Mischief that would fit. And Maximus Mischief really fitted her well. My only concern was that they're both a little big, but their baby was always very light-footed.”

Raging Torrent | Benoit

Starting that day in the snow. He was such an impressive specimen that his breeders now felt mightily relieved that nobody had met their reserve when they offered Violent Wave for sale, Winkler having decided that it was time to wrap up his bloodstock interests. She was led out unsold at $27,000 at Keeneland in January 2021, carrying the Maximus Mischief, and again at $145,000 last November. There will be rather more interest, you may be sure, when she returns to the same ring (in foal to Up to The Mark) as Hip 100 in the forthcoming November Sale.

For the colt who reddened the snow that morning is none other than Raging Torrent, whose breakout success in the GII Pat O'Brien Stakes in August produced one of the hottest numbers of any horse heading back to Del Mar for the Breeders' Cup.

“They wouldn't give us the money when we tried to sell her,” Mazzetti remarks. “But that is my story in the horse business. Even with her son, the same. At the September Sale he was a gorgeous colt, big and scopey, a lot like Maximus Mischief. A couple of little things on the X-rays, but nothing significant. Nobody paid him any attention: $27,000 RNA. So I said, 'Okay, let's fix him up, take that little flake off his ankle, and send him to the 2-year-old sales. We'll get our money there.'”

Randy Bradshaw breezed him at OBS the following April.

Maximus Mischief | Spendthrift Farm

“Al,” he said, “I don't know what we'll get for this colt-but he's the best Maximus Mischief I've seen.”

“Well, I feel that way too,” Mazzetti replied. “But I'm not a lucky man at the sales. Or rather I'm lucky when I buy, but not when I sell.”

Sure enough, though he breezed like he could make a couple of hundred, he ended up scraping his reserve at $75,000 to Mark Davis.

That has proved a rare bargain.

“That last race was a big ask for a 3-year-old,” Mazzetti says. “I believe he's only the third one to have won that race in a 59-year history. Even before, he had the best numbers of any horse on Derby Day, when he wasn't even running in a stake.”

And if nobody wanted him before, nor his dam either, then Mazzetti and Winkler can now hope to bring their odyssey together to a suitably rewarding conclusion.

“Rodney is 10 years older than me, to the day,” Mazzetti says. “I don't know, this might be his last horse. We have one more homebred between us. It's special because he has been my customer and friend since I started in Colorado.”

He had swapped the Andes for the Rockies when his father, an engineer, was transferred by his employers away from turmoil in their homeland in 1971. Within a couple of years Mazzetti was at Colorado State, a freshman at just 17, but he always missed the racetrack–an environment he had explored even more precociously.

“My father hated horseracing and gambling,” he recalls. “But my best friend's father would take us to the Jockey Club all the time, and I made friends with the doorman there. So I could go in and out, and he'd watch my motorcycle, and I'd hang around with the jockeys. I was already much taller than they were, tall enough to bet as well! It was a great youth.”

Having become a partner in his father's business, Mazzetti needed little persuasion when a customer approached him about partnering in a racehorse.

“We bought a 9-year-old Nebraska-bred gelding for $700 or $500, I can't remember,” Mazzetti recalls. “And the first weekend we had him, he made 700 bucks.”

Arapahoe Park | Coady Photography

That old horse made a total 181 starts–but the ones that meant most were at Arapahoe Park. Bringing the sport he loved to Colorado was Mazzetti's proudest achievement as president of the local breeders' association, the campaign having started “with four or five of us round a kitchen table.”

But in 1997, having sold his automobile transmission franchise, it was time to match an upgrade in his bloodstock with a farm in the Bluegrass. During Mazzetti's 27 years at Old Shadowlawn, Into Mischief has by no means been his only alert discovery. Curlin had only just got started, for instance, when Danette (co-bred with Alexandra and Peter Gross) was Grade I-placed as a juvenile in 2014.

“Then she was beaten under two lengths at the Breeders' Cup,” Mazzetti says. “Whenever I see Keith Desormeaux we agree that if they don't close the hole, she wins.”

At its peak, the farm had maybe 35 head of horse, including a dozen mares. But only two or three of those would typically be Mazzetti's. Of those still keeping Violent Wave company, Alta's Award (Tonalist) was co-bred with Ed and Susie Orr.

“She had enough points to go to the [GI Kentucky] Oaks,” Mazzetti recalls. “But then Covid hit, they changed the date and she wasn't ready in September. But this industry will give you blessings or take them away. You just thank God for those blessings, and make sure you enjoy every moment. Because it takes a lot. Ruins your fingers and your toes, you get run over every once in a while. Actually, it was Covid that made me realize how isolated my life was: lockdowns didn't make any difference!”

Nobody meeting this unassuming gentleman would guess all he has seen and done. But what he has achieved with this mare, even as he approaches the end of his career as a horse farmer, means he can no longer elude our attention.

“It's hard work,” he says. “Especially the way I've done it. If we get the farm sold, I might participate in the sales a little more, do some buying and selling. But they'll board somewhere else. When that alarm goes off, and a baby's coming, my wife follows me around thinking my heart's not going to make it through another one.

“This is one of the few industries where no matter how hard you work, there's no guarantee of success. Which is fine. It is what it is. The one certainty is that you will have to work hard, whatever the outcome. But I think I can pick good horses. My mares aren't expensive, but they could all run, and have good physiques. I can't always pick what people want. But I try to make the best racehorse I can.”