Miss Macy Sue

Everybody knows Glennwood to be a paragon of its type yet somehow few farms seem able to treat it as a model. For one thing, John Gunther and his daughter Tanya have shown that ultimately there is nothing more commercial than putting winners under your mare, a rather inconvenient lesson for those who favor the just-add-water solution of remorselessly using one rookie sire after another. More fundamentally, however, it's pardonably difficult for anyone to emulate the sheer skill with which the Gunthers cultivate their families. When Scat Daddy disastrously dropped...

We know that the majority of stallions, in this day and age, get their biggest and best books precisely when we know least about their competence. But the other side of the same coin is that very few breeders stick around should a stallion fail to seize that first, fleeting opportunity. Just as well, then, that a historically underachieving group of rookies has got its act together with its maturing first crop, to the extent that four have managed to get a son into the GI Kentucky Derby gate. Collectively,...

11th-Churchill Downs, $122,025, Msw, 6-27, 3yo/up, 6 1/2f, 1:16.02, ft, 1 1/2 lengths. TAYLOR'S VERSION (c, 3, Into Mischief--Taylor S {SW & GSP, $121,519}, by Medaglia d'Oro) endured a wide trip from a high draw on his belated racetrack debut May 18 and retreated through the stretch to finish about a dozen lengths behind repeat winner Camp Hale (Mo Town) in eighth. Off right at his 8-1 morning line for this second go, the Albaugh homebred scratched down into the one hole and left there running, covering the opening quarter...

Whether you consider it just a random squeaking of the hamster wheel, or evidence of some latent order awaiting our discovery, these Thoroughbreds certainly know how to make us stop and think about the strange operation of life. Last Friday it was announced that Miss Macy Sue (Trippi) had died at 22. The very next day, her son Liam's Map produced a Derby contender in GIII Holy Bull Stakes winner Burnham Square. The 20 starting points banked there, moreover, matched those earned two weeks previously in the GIII Lecomte Stakes...

Graded winner Miss Macy Sue (Trippi), an accomplished racemare and the dam of 'TDN Rising Star' MGISW Liam's Map (Unbridled's Song) and GSW & GISP Not This Time (Giant's Causeway), has died at the age of 22, Taylor Made announced Friday afternoon. The 2007 winner of the GIII Winning Colors Stakes at Churchill Downs, and runner-up in her title defense a year later, competed in the Breeders' Cup Filly and Mare Sprint at Monmouth Park in 2007, finishing third when it was still a Listed stakes. Upon retirement, she left...

2nd-GP, $60K, Msw, 3yo/up, f/m, 6f, 12:52 p.m. ET. A pair of 3-year-olds from the shedrow of Todd Pletcher will make their debut with Lasix from the inside gates. Exiting the rail spot is RUMOURS HAVE IT (Tapit). The filly is a Whisper Hill homebred who is out of dual champion Songbird (Medaglia d'Oro). Mandy Pope went to $9.5 million to acquire this dam at the 2017 Fasig-Tipton Fall Mixed Sale. Rumours Have It is her third foal and second to make the races. Emanating from next door is Taylor...

About two-thirds of the way through Monday night's boutique Fasig-Tipton Saratoga sale, it was Robert and Lawana Low, through West Bloodstock, agent, who successfully bid $1.9 million for a bay Curlin filly from a power-packed family. Don Alberto Corporation bred hip 85 in Kentucky after purchasing her dam, MSW & GSP Matera (Tapit), for $1.4 million as a 2018 Keeneland September yearling. The filly is the first foal out of Matera, whose dam, Taylor Made-based blue hen Miss Macy Sue (Trippi), produced sires Liam's Map and Not This Time. The...

Celebrating 40 Years of the Breeders' Cup Can you imagine being a horse racing-crazy kid with a ringside seat to the creation of the Breeders' Cup? Mark Taylor can, because he was. Fast forward more than four decades and now he is president and CEO of the Central Kentucky farm that is believed to have raised and/or sold more Breeders' Cup winners than any other. There's also the matter of having stood the Breeders' Cup winner who currently holds the record for siring the most Breeders' Cup winners in turn....

A share in leading sire Not This Time figures to provide some fireworks when it kicks off the action Tuesday night at Saratoga. The sale of the share is scheduled for 6:30 p.m. Not This Time is the sire of five Grade I winners from three crops to race, and is the leading fourth-crop sire of 2023. The share includes all projected income from the 2023 breeding season. Shareholders receive one nomination annually, plus their proportional share of the excess book. (See complete details here.) Not This Time is governed...

A share in leading young sire Not This Time (Giant's Causeway) will be offered at Fasig-Tipton's upcoming Saratoga Sale. The share, consigned by Taylor Made Sales Agency, will be the first offering on Tuesday, Aug. 8. Online bidding and phone bidding on the Not This Time share will be available. Not This Time finished sixth in the general sire rankings in 2022, trailing only Into Mischief, Curlin, Gun Runner, Uncle Mo, and Tapit. "The Not This Time share is a very exciting addition to our Saratoga Sale this year," said...

The first thing that will strike most people about the emergence of Epicenter on the Derby trail is the way only his second crop of sophomores is putting up in neon lights the name of Not This Time. The GII Risen Star S. winner is lighting a path for several other sons of the Taylor Made stallion, notably fast-closing GIII Holy Bull runner-up Simplification and Saturday's GII Rebel S. fancy Chasing Time. Two others, Howling Time and In Due Time, are learning their scripts in readiness for forthcoming rehearsals in...

The adage reckons a picture to be worth 1,000 words. Of course, as has been remarked, that means 1,001 words must be worth more than a picture. (On which wiseguy basis, I will generously trade this column for that Rembrandt in your loft.) But then it might take something closer to 1,000 pages to record everything the owners of Thousand Words (Pioneerof the Nile) have experienced over the past year. This colt gave a literal quality to their topsy-turvy fortunes when rearing and toppling in the Derby preliminaries, sending Bob...