Hard Spun: Gifted son of breeder's beloved mare

Even before Turkish Tryst gave birth to this area's latest Kentucky Derby hopeful, Unionville's Michael Moran had gotten his money's worth from the redheaded mare he used to train.

"She was like the goose that laid the golden egg for me," Moran said recently.

Bought for $39,000, Turkish Tryst was good to him on the racetrack, and even better after retiring to the breeding shed. Now she is the mother of a colt foaled on a farm in Malvern who is trying to make it to Churchill Downs for the first Saturday in May.

Still undefeated after four races, that colt, Hard Spun, is slated to race in today's $250,000 Southwest Stakes at Oaklawn Park in Hot Springs, Ark.

For all his early promise - winning races at Delaware Park, Philadelphia Park and the Fair Grounds in New Orleans - Hard Spun, now owned by Rick Porter of Wilmington, remains basically untested. He hasn't had to look another Derby prospect in the eye or come up with a punishing final kick.

He's in the top 10 of most Derby watches, but his bandwagon will grow or shrink race to race and could even be empty by tonight. There are two more races scheduled for Oaklawn after the Southwest - the $300,000 Rebel on March 19 and the $1 million Arkansas Derby on April 14 - before Hard Spun's connections can be sure he will make it to the Kentucky Derby.

Officially, Hard Spun's breeder is listed as Michael Moran and Brushwood Stables, owned by Moran's mother, Betty. The breeding was the result of a foal-sharing arrangement. At the time, Moran owned Turkish Tryst and his mother had paid for a lifetime breeding right to Danzig, called "the most influential stallion during the past two decades" by The Blood-Horse magazine. That breeding right was worth $212,000 in 2003, which turned out to be Danzig's last breeding season. He died in January 2006 at age 29 after producing 188 stakes winners, a North American record.

If Hard Spun's reputation grows, Michael Moran has stories to tell. He can talk about why he is the former owner of the mare, and how that, too, worked out for him. But he also can talk about Turkish Tryst's early career, how she was "a little fiery" and "pretty useless on the dirt," how he took a chance, he said, entering her in a $25,000 claimer on the grass.

"A pretty big chance," said Moran, the owner of three-time Eclipse Award-winning steeplechase champion McDynamo. "Nobody took her." But her career hit another level. By the end, she had raced 15 times, with four wins, a second and two thirds, earning $84,362.

"She won a stake pregnant," said Moran, who also will point out that she won a 11/2-mile grass race at Pimlico, that her son has the distance to get the 11/4 Derby distance in his pedigree.

Turkish Tryst's sire was Turkoman, who was sired by Alydar. Most of her offspring - "big, solid, rangy-looking horses that mature with age," Michael Moran said - have been money winners. Wild Current earned $273,218. Another one, Grendel, has earned $176,099 for owner B. Wayne Hughes, but he earned even more for Moran.

He had sent him as a yearling to a farm in South Carolina, he said, and that turned out to be the same farm where Hughes sent his babies. Hughes happened to see Grendel. He liked the horse. The trainer down there called Moran, waking him from a nap. He mentioned that Hughes had taken a liking to the horse. Moran remembers saying, " 'Ask him what he says to a million bucks.' I was only kidding. The stud fee for him was like $5,000." The next morning, the phone rang again: "Will you take $500,000 for him?" The deal was done quickly.

Eventually, Betty Moran worked on her son, looking to buy Turkish Tryst, who had come to board at her farm in Malvern. Mother and son went back and forth, "for maybe two years," Betty Moran said. "He finally agreed, because Mama had to have her."

Michael Moran could easily justify that in his mind, he said, because he figured the $500,000 purchase price in 2005 helped pay for a conversion from wood chips to an artificial Tapeta surface for the half-mile training track on his farm in Unionville.

By that time, Hard Spun was a yearling, a lively one, with a protective mother. That's the description by Brushwood farm manager Brooks Adams, who foaled Hard Spun there, just off Sugartown Road, and has his own special memory of the horse.

"He kicked the hat off my head one day with a front foot - just raised up and smacked the hat," Adams said.

He recalls that near-miss without animosity. It's a hazard of his profession. A little excitability isn't a terrible thing in a racehorse, said Adams, who remembers that Hard Spun also got a little excited in the paddock before his second race at Delaware Park.

"You don't want him to just mosey on out there like Uncle Joe's plowhorse," Adams said. "You want him to have a little spunk."

In fact, Adams had suggested to Betty Moran that this yearling might have potential on the track.

"I sort of respect what they do at home [on her farm], whether they're a leader in the pack, whether they have a good stride in the field," Betty Moran said. "A lot of good horsemen taught me that years ago."

Her 260-acre farm, as well-appointed as the top Kentucky layouts, is full of impressive mares who breed to the most impressive stallions. Her most valuable mares had breeding dates last year with Storm Cat, Giant's Causeway, A.P. Indy, Distorted Humor and Kingmambo, stars of the breeding galaxy. Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai and owner of 2006 Preakness winner Bernardini, owns a 2-year-old by Storm Cat bought from Brushwood last year for $1 million. Turkish Tryst is due to foal a Kingmambo offspring in early March, then she is scheduled for a date this year with Storm Cat, the industry's most expensive stallion (2007 stud fee: $500,000).

Betty Moran sells most of the horses bred on her farm, but she keeps a number of them to race, domestically and in Europe. She owned 1985 Belmont Stakes winner Crème Fraiche, a portion of 1993 Belmont winner Colonial Affair, and, more recently, 2004 Arlington Million winner Kicken Kris, Michael Matz's best horse before Barbaro came along.

If she had known this one could be a Derby horse, would Betty Moran have kept it? Sure, but that's not how the breeding business works, and she knows better than anybody that breeding a good horse is good for business. Breeders of Derby horses take just as much pride in the achievement as the owners. If Hard Spun makes it to Churchill Downs, she'll be there, too.

There are times, Brushwood office manager Mona Phillips said, when Betty Moran will decide to keep a promising horse, saying, "Let's have a little fun." But Moran also said, "I'm in business to sell horses at Keeneland."

She was "very disappointed," Moran said, that Hard Spun didn't fetch his $500,000 reserve at the Keeneland sale. That was good news for Porter, who then bought him privately for $400,000, on the recommendation of his former trainer, John Servis. Moran remembers talking up the possibility of a big sale to her son, and going to Keeneland in anticipation of one.

"I was made [to be] a storyteller," she joked, fully knowing that the $400,000 has turned out to be a bargain, that Hard Spun is worth quite a bit more. As it happens, in addition to the $200,000 he earned from that sale, Michael Moran owns a three-quarter sister of Hard Spun, Treysta, a granddaughter of Danzig who was Turkish Tryst's first foal. Ordinarily, he would look for a stallion for her with a stud fee of $10,000 to $15,000, he said. But this year, he figures he needs to at least consider the possibility that he might own the sister of a Derby winner, that the golden goose will keep on giving.

"I better breed her up in speculation," Michael Moran said, "rather than breed her to some cheap horse."