Timmy Hyde

KILLENARD, Ireland--The trick to living a mostly happy life is to spend as much time as possible doing what you love. Simple, right? That's not to say that people in the bloodstock industry don't work incredibly hard. There is no real let-up in the work either, with almost wall-to-wall sales these days, foals on the way, mares to be covered, mud to be scraped off almost everything and, some mornings, ice to be broken on water troughs and buckets.  But it's a wonderful life nonetheless, and every now and then...

Timmy Hyde was still a teenager when turning his first profit on a hunter. Even then, Demi O'Byrne--his partner in many a horse since--had an incidental role, their respective fathers being good pals. "I only had the horse two weeks before I sold him," Hyde recalls wryly. "I suppose I was 17 or 18. I'd been out hunting with Demi one day, and we came back in and his father said to me, 'Would you buy a horse, Tim?' I knew, in the back of my mind, there was going...