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Derby winning breeder tells a tale of horsemen gone wrong

Breeding discontent: Squires has lost his illusions about horse industry

By Linda B. Blackford lblackford@herald-leader.com

In a way, maybe it all happened too quickly.

There was Jim Squires, robust, rambunctious editor with his golden parachute from the Chicago Tribune and a nerve born of steering large newspapers and a presidential campaign. In the mid-1990s, he buys some broodmares, good ones, not great ones, given that the golden parachute is from a newspaper company rather than Goldman Sachs. One day, just a few years later, a grey colt is born and that grey colt, Monarchos, wins the 2001 Kentucky Derby.

So, just like that, a love affair is born and consummated under the steeples of Churchill Downs in a remarkably short amount of time. For Squires, breeder of Monarchos, Thoroughbred racing turns out to be even more exciting than winning Pulitzers or speaking for Ross Perot. Squires writes a book about it, Horse of a Different Color: A Tale of Breeding Geniuses, Dominant Females, and the Fastest Derby Winner Since Secretariat, and plunges deeper into the world of breeder, salesman and racehorse owner.

But then the relationship settles down into more familiar grooves. It's a little more work, with fewer fireworks. Disenchantment sets in, there's some ugliness and then it's pretty much over. But that rapture you can't forget, and the disillusionment, and so there has to be the long goodbye letter, which, because this is Jim Squires, turns into a book. You could call it a swan song, or you could call it a 250-page flip of the middle finger to his one-time love.

Squires calls it a chronicle of one of the worst years of his life, 2008, which happened to parallel one of the worst years in racing's history. Headless Horsemen: A Tale of Chemical Colts, Subprime Sales Agents, and the Last Kentucky Derby on Steroids, exposes all the warts of the racing industry, plenty of Squires' too.

"The Headless Horsemen are us," he says in an interview at his Two Bucks Farm in Versailles. "I'm the most headless of all."

Drugs and shady agents

Squires, 67, with his wife, Mary Anne, came to Kentucky in 1989, already a breeder of paint and quarter horses. He liked the Bluegrass, which reminded him of his native Carthage, Tenn. He bought a farm, named it Two Bucks and started to like racehorses and the intricate game of figuring out what dam and what sire might produce the fastest horse.

In 1993, Gov. Brereton Jones appointed him to the Horse Racing Commission, which gave him a close-up view of many of the problems that no one really liked to discuss in public. Those issues were numerous and complex: Were drugs weakening the Thoroughbred? Were sales tactics underhanded? Worst of all, was the famed Kentucky breeding industry just making too many horses?

Breeding a Derby winner granted Squires a respect it took many others years to gain. He kept on, bred some stakes winners, but also kept running into problems with his stance against some of racing's standard practices, such as too many pharmaceuticals and too many shady practices at the sales.

Those practices came under the spotlight in 2006, when a California billionaire named Jess Jackson filed a lawsuit aimed at preventing "dual agency," the practice that has an agent represent both the seller and the buyer of a horse, which Jackson contended made agents rich and novice owners poor.

Jackson also opposed performance-enhancing drugs and caused a stir when he ordered his 2007 Horse of the Year, Curlin, to be taken off the steroids he had been on during his championship year, according to news reports.

In early 2008, Squires was at Keeneland watching one of Curlin's workouts with John T. Ward, the trainer of Monarchos and a preacher of old-time ways.

"A couple of genetically engineered disturbers of the peace, we were imbued by our extraordinary good fortune with expertise on all matters involving the Kentucky Derby, which we seldom kept to ourselves," Squires writes in Headless Horsemen. "'You know,' Ward said, 'This might be the last Kentucky Derby on steroids.'"

This led Squires to post a piece on The New York Times racing blog, The Rail, about the prevalence of legal steroids in racing in most states. Whatever ripples that caused with racing insiders were forgotten a week later when several million racing outsiders watching the 2008 Kentucky Derby saw the valiant filly Eight Belles come in second to Big Brown, then break both front legs after she swept past the finish line.