When I was an up and coming rider working for a well known trainer, the best moments of learning for me was when he and all of his trainer friends would sit in the aisleway at the shows and shoot the breeze. Just guys sitting in the barn aisle after a long show day, chairs pulled out between the stalls, talking about horses they’d ridden, horses they’d bred, what they were looking for and what they wished they’d known earlier. I was just some kid sitting there quiet and listening. My ears were perked, and I learned so much more from being a fly on the wall of those conversations than I ever did while riding.
I just finished watching Episode 117 of Tom McCutcheon’s The Show and it felt like sitting on the aisle at a horse show again, and listening to the old timers and big trainers talk. Bob Lumis and Tim McQuay… If you’ve been around the reining world long enough to know what those names mean, you already understand why I felt like a kid again watching it.
That culture is kind of disappearing. Young trainers today have so many resources… clinics, YouTube, social media, all of it. But there’s something different about listening to someone who’s been doing this for 40 years just talk. No agenda. No product to sell. Just the real stuff. This episode felt like that, and I’m glad that Tom McCutcheon, Gunny, and Joe all started doing these podcasts.
The episode is one hour and fifty minutes, so here’s my take on it.
The training stuff
Tim McQuay said something early on that I’ve said myself a hundred times… he said that the horses he got along with best were horses he trained himself, because when you go into a hard run in the show pen, that horse has to trust you. And if you’ve been jerking on their face, the second you pick up those reins they’re going to leave you. But if they trust you… they relax. That contact means something different to them.
This is Mocha 100%. She had a whole history of grabbing the bit and taking off before she came to me, and the answer was never a stronger bit. The answer was slowing everything down, going back to softness, making the contact mean something safe. You can’t out-bit a training problem.
Bob’s story about Surprise Enterprise also resonated with me. He gets on this horse for the first time and the horse runs him straight to the fence. And Bob… gets off. Walks around. Thinks. He said “whenever I get in a wreck I go to thinking before I go to acting.” He eventually figured out it was the drop noseband bothering the horse. Took it off. Horse rode like a Cadillac.
That right there is the difference between a rider and a horseman. A lesser person spurs through it, calls the horse a problem, starts adding more equipment. Bob asked a question first.
He had a similar story about a horse named High Proof who was terrified of the center of the pen because a previous trainer had been spurring him at every lead change. By the time Bob got him, the horse was bolting to the fence every time a lead change came up. Bob didn’t fight it. He went out on a 640-acre path, took his spurs off, and loped D-shaped patterns and straight lines for weeks. Just changed leads over and over until the horse was bored and relaxed about it. Then went back to the show pen and the horse started winning again.
No gadgets. No escalation. Just time and patience and making the scary thing not scary anymore.
Tim’s story about fixing Shiner’s stop was the same kind of thinking. Shiner would throw his shoulders to the side on the stop. Tim didn’t punish it. He just held him up, balanced him, said whoa, and let go. Over and over until Shiner figured out how to organize himself. “You didn’t want to spank him or nothing. He didn’t need none of that. Just hold him and help him stay in the middle.”
Bob also talked about a mentor he had early on, not a reining trainer, a guy who trained six-horse hitches and bought horses his whole life. This man could just read a horse. He’d watch Bob ride and if Bob was getting too rough he’d call him over and say, “Come here. You need to just relax a little bit.” Bob said to be a horseman you have to be able to read a horse, know when to push and when to quit. He said he’d had a lot of talented young riders work for him over the years who thought it was all about stopping and spinning and loping circles… and they never quite got it.
The breeding stuff
I am actively making breeding decisions right now. I have Dakota, I have mares I’m evaluating, I have a direction I’m trying to build toward here at Big Rock. So when Bob and Tim started talking about how they approached breeding, I really paid attention.
Bob’s strategy early on was simple. When a great show mare’s career was over, the market basically forgot she existed. He was out there picking up top retired show mares for $1,000 to $2,500. He said if he saw a great show horse he’d call the AQHA, find out who the dam was, and try to buy her. “Even if you see a mare you like, call the AQHA, find out where her mother is, and see if you can buy her. That works just as good.”
He was building his program at a time when almost nobody else was seriously in the business of raising reining horses. (Willowbrook Farms and Bob Lumis. That was basically it.) He was getting extraordinary bloodlines for almost nothing because the rest of the industry wasn’t thinking that way yet. Obviously those days are gone. But the mindset isn’t. Look for quality where other people aren’t looking. And always trace it back to the dam.
He talked about a mare named Jeanie Whisbach, the dam of Top Sail Whiz. A young guy in Missouri trained her himself and was beating open professionals with her in the same day, youth and open. Bob said he first saw her score a 75 as a long two-year-old. She showed honestly until she was 10. Bob tried to buy her for years and the guy finally leased her and eventually sold her when he needed the money. What she did when crossed on certain bloodlines was remarkable. Bob said she changed the Joe Cody horses completely. All of a sudden they got quiet and had more style in the stop. And then one of her sons became Top Sail Whiz. So the mare matters.
Tim’s lesson about Surprise Enterprise in the breeding shed is the one I keep coming back to. He figured this sensitive, feely stallion needed to be bred to quiet, calm mares to balance the offspring. Tried it. The results were horses you couldn’t move off a leg. Dead. Didn’t work at all. So he switched and started breeding him to Topsail Cody mares and other mares with some life and feel. That’s where the good ones showed up. The best foal he ever got out of that horse was out of Spirit of Five, a really special mare.
Don’t try to cancel out the best qualities of a stallion with the mare. Find a mare who meets those qualities and amplifies them in the right direction. That’s a different kind of thinking than just trying to “balance” things out on paper.
And then Bob was actually talking about longhorns but this applies to horses as well. “Where the money is is clear blue sky. You need a horse that can spin faster, slide farther, win more. If you don’t have clear blue sky to sell, you’re not going to make any money.”
Commodity gets priced like a commodity. If you want to produce something valuable you have to produce something genuinely exceptional. That means intentional decisions, not just pairing two decent horses and hoping. It means tracing bloodlines. It means knowing what you’re building toward.
That’s what I’m trying to do at Big Rock. It’s a long game. But every decision I’m making is pointed in that direction.
Anyway. If you haven’t watched this episode yet, make the time. It’s a couple hours of the kind of conversation that used to happen in the aisleway when nobody had a phone out. The fact that we get to hear it at all is something.
