The “Pedal Down” Approach That Produced Accelerate

On the face of it, the way Mike Abraham came up with an Eclipse champion suggests only the futility of all the agonized judgement that typically consumes him–no less than any other breeder–in making plans and decisions.

After all, he bought the dam of Accelerate (Lookin at Lucky) more or less on a whim, an opportunist $25,000 impulse for a mare he hadn't even been to see in the back ring. And she was only sent to Lookin At Lucky, for the mating that produced a GI Breeders' Cup Classic winner, because she was jilted in an engagement with his studmate Scat Daddy.

It's only when you learn other chapters in Abraham's story, however, that you realize how apparently random blessings tend only to fall on those who are sufficiently receptive. Which means that they are earned, generically, no less than those that appear to result from the most specific and targeted of strategies.

So both in buying the mare, and in choosing a best man when the groom proved to be unavailable, Abraham showed the same spacious imagination that governed his turf career from the outset. Just hear what happened when he spelled the very first horse he ever owned, a Cal-bred filly he had claimed with a partner, on a farm near Albuquerque.

“Being my first horse I wanted to go up there and visit her about three times a week,” Abraham said. “But then I found out the guy who had the farm was in a little over his head. To make a long story short, I ended up buying a horse farm with one horse. And I then thought it my obligation to fill it up with other horses. So, I did. I learned the hard way that you don't do that. But I had a bunch of horses. At one time I think I had like 300 mares up there. It was crazy. I was going broke every month just trying to pay my feed bill.”

If that was the outcome of a chance encounter at a Quarter Horse fair meet-with an old sports coach, who infected him with the horseracing bug-then little wonder if Abraham proved so responsive to fate when Issues (Awesome Again) was led into the ring at the 2011 Keeneland November Sale. Here was a stakes-placed winner of four out of eight starts, from a terrific broodmare sire-line, in foal to the promising young sire Scat Daddy, and she was barely able to get a drizzle of interest as she stood up there on the dais.

“I had paged through the mares the night before,” Abraham recalled. “I liked Awesome Again mares and she was relatively young. But I had probably 40 pages turned back as possibilities. I didn't even go and look at her in the back, she wasn't really on my mind at all, but luckily I was there when she came in. I could have gone to eat or something. As it was, when I saw what she was bringing, well, I was certainly willing to go some more. Maybe not a whole lot more, but I was tickled to death to get her for that, for sure. For whatever reason there are always a bunch of them, later in that sale, that start falling through the cracks. I was just in the right place at the right time.”

Between that fateful day and his first, immoderate experiment in New Mexico, there had plainly been much trial and error as Abraham evolved the smarts required to make his new passion viable. As he got the numbers back to a manageable level on that first farm, he was fortunate to be introduced by his veterinarian to Carl Nafzger. They still have a strong rapport, and Nafzger trained winners for him at Keeneland and Arlington–albeit for a long time subsequently Abraham defected to Quarter Horses.

In fact, his very first one was Sparkling Moolah, who created a big buzz in California as an undefeated 2-year-old in 1980. Again, though, it was breeding that intrigued him most. And by the time he renewed a Thoroughbred stable, a decade or so ago, he knew what he was about.

The fact was that he had initially gone onto the turf with an urban upbringing and precious little in the way of an inherited disposition. True, his father did briefly race a couple of Quarter Horses in Oklahoma. More significantly, however, he passed on the kind of knack necessary to fund such an adventure, Abraham having followed him into oil, gas and above all real estate.

“My dad did a lot of different things,” he said. “He was an entrepreneur of sorts. He made tons of money and lost tons of money. He was a real gambler, so maybe I got that from him. All the way through, I made my own mistakes and pretty much worked my way out of those mistakes, because I really didn't listen to anybody. I figured: 'I got myself in this mess so I'm going to get myself out.' One time I traded about 150 mares for a building in El Paso. One building, and really wasn't much of one, but that was a good way of getting a bunch of mares off the feed bill. I did a lot of reading, educating myself. And tried to go to as good a quality as I could afford. And in the end it worked out very well.”

Because it's not as though Abraham's success with Issues was a flash in the pan.

“Yeah, we've had several good stories buying mares,” he acknowledged. “I bought a Storm Cat mare called One Stormy Mama for $23,000 and have sold over $1 million in babies out of her. They weren't all real sound, but they run. She had one called Thunder Moccasin (A.P. Warrior), who was an undefeated graded stakes winner. Another one was Funfair, a More Than Ready mare. She was a stakes winner, but we bought her for $19,000. I bred her to Malibu Moon, everybody told me I was crazy, but we sold the yearling for $250,000. And then I sold her for $350,000, because when he died it really made a premium on a mare in foal to Scat Daddy.”

Certainly Abraham made the most of the windfall that was Issues. The foal she was carrying at the time of her purchase turned out to be Daddy D T (Scat Daddy), who himself repaid 10 times their joint cost when sold as a yearling for $250,000. (Importantly, he had been spotted by the Ingordo/Hronis team, who subsequently came back for Accelerate.) Daddy D T's older full-brother Amarish, meanwhile, upgraded the page through a first graded stakes podium.

“And it just went up from there,” Abraham said. “Daddy D T placed in the [GI] Breeders' Cup [Juvenile Turf]. But when I booked her back to Scat Daddy, we got there and there was a problem that day. We'd known there might be, though, so I'd done some nicking homework. And I chose Lookin at Lucky. The nick looked good, the fit looked good, and I liked that horse a lot. She was late anyway, and I didn't want to wait for Scat Daddy to end up with a June baby.”

As it was, she delivered a chestnut colt May 10. Abraham lives in Las Vegas and only saw him on sporadic visits to Kentucky.

“He never looked a real late foal,” Abraham recalled of Accelerate. “And he grew up well, matured well, always seemed a good-natured colt. But nothing you would remember as just outstanding. I don't remember of any setbacks or anything. He just developed into a nice colt and I was very happy with the $380,000 we got for him.”

Abraham sensibly gave himself the chance of cashing in, offering Issues at Fasig-Tipton's Fall Sale in 2014 just after Daddy D T had run third at the Breeders' Cup. But the bidding stalled at $450,000 and luckily he held onto her.

“I was really thinking more than that, and I'd had second thoughts even about bringing her,” he remembered. “At the time I think it was probably going to take $750,000. I think Coolmore was the underbidder. But I wasn't going to sell her for that–even though you could say $450,000 was a lot of money already for a mare I paid $25,000 for. But it worked out.”

Issues is expecting a Curlin foal this spring, having missed out last year in what appears to have been fairly exasperating circumstances. Nor had it been especially plain sailing in the meantime, the two Bernardini sons she sent up to consecutive September Sales having both had one or two hold-ups. The second, in fact, didn't meet his reserve, as a late foal with immaturity issues, and Abraham will give him time and race him in his own stable.

Abraham still retains a foot in the Quarter Horse camp, with a farm in New Mexico, though he is now standing his first Thoroughbred stallion in [GI] Breeders' Cup Sprint runner-up Laugh Track, a half-brother to Commissioner (A.P. Indy) by Distorted Humor, at Double LL Farms in the same state. As a freshman last year, he had half a dozen winners from 16 starters.

“And I had a real nice bunch of mares bred to him the second year,” Abraham noted. “I own 25% of a Quarter Horse stallion called First Moonflash. He'd be in the top three or four in the world right now. But I do have probably 20, 25 Thoroughbred mares out there also, and about the same in Kentucky.”

That crossover qualifies Abraham as an informed witness to the remarkable transferability to Thoroughbreds of Quarter Horse lore, as practiced by the likes of D. Wayne Lukas and Bob Baffert.

“Basically, those guys are all real horsemen,” Abraham said. “I think that's the key. They know what a good horse looks like and they know how to train one. And they've been in it a long time, mostly they started very young. I don't know that they train them any differently. Baffert, for sure, is demanding in works. Those guys would pick out big Thoroughbreds that look like Quarter Horses. If you look at Justify (Scat Daddy), he's like a giant Quarter Horse. Big hip, good bone.”

Abraham's other great passion is art. Again, there are no half measures. The man who bought a whole farm for a single claimed horse is also the man who has assembled the world's largest LeRoy Nieman collection.

“I haven't been doing it that long, but I've bought a bunch,” he said. “I've sold a few just because I don't even have a place to put them, but I'm working on a deal to maybe get them displayed in a big venue. As a kid I remember watching him drawing the Olympics, drawing horse races: he was always a sports artist and was at all the big events.

“I was in Vegas one day walking by an art gallery and saw one of his paintings. Right away I said, 'Wow.' So I went in there and ended up buying it. And again, you learn by trial and error. I paid a fortune because you know, I went in and paid the store price. And so I started educating myself, ended up buying a lot privately or at auctions. But it's a lot of fun, something to blow off steam and a little different from the horses. They don't eat, and they don't die, so it's pretty good!”

Abraham only met Nieman once, when he was sketching a big basketball game at the University of New Mexico. He introduced himself and said: “You know, I have 50 of your originals.” And Nieman looked at him and replied, “You have a good eye.”

“That cracked me up,” recalled Abraham. “He was quite a guy. He lived a good life. Playboy hired him and he went all around the world and painted everybody. I've got Frank Sinatra, Mickey Mantle. Some I wouldn't part with for anything.”

And now Abraham has an equine masterpiece to his credit, too–one eligible to leave a lasting legacy in his new role at Lane's End. Accelerate couldn't quite round off his career as hoped in the GI Pegasus World Cup deluge, but Abraham will always have the memory of that Breeders' Cup Classic. He wasn't actually there, instead watching in his hotel room in Lexington prior to the November sales.

“I didn't want to go over there and jinx the horse,” he explained. “I've only seen him run once, when he broke his maiden, and so I thought, 'You know what? I'm just going to stay away and wish everybody a lot of luck.' And it turned out good. I'm surprised that they didn't call the bomb squad or something. I was screaming and hollering, they might have thought somebody was getting killed. It's been a ride. Hopefully there'll be more, but yeah, we've had a lot of fun.”