With horses like the undefeated GIII Victory
Ride S. heroine La Traviata (Johannesburg)
and Saturday’s GI Matron S. runner-up
Armonk (Mizzen Mast) as recent graduates
of its juvenile pinhooking program, Mike
and Britt Mulligan’s Leprechaun Racing
is enjoying a banner year. Or banner few
years, if you choose to employ the unscientific
method of listening to the Keeneland announcer
Kurt Becker as he trumpets a sire’s
accomplishments prior to a horse selling;
one hears the names of Grade I winners
Adieu when an El Corredor sells, champion
Fleet Indian for Indian Charlie, and Bishop
Court Hill for Holy Bull. All of those
runners got their early lessons on Leprechaun’s
Ocala, Florida farm, and Mike Mulligan
admits to getting a kick out of hearing
their names over Keeneland’s PA system.
There are, admittedly, probably better
ways to judge success. In its June 8 edition, The
Blood Horse’s Market Watch ranked
yearling buyers by number of stakes winners
purchased from 2000 to 2004. Leprechaun
Racing sat in a tie for first with 23 stakes
winners, equaling the figure of John Ferguson
Bloodstock, which typically buys for Sheikh
Mohammed’s Darley operation.
During that stretch, Leprechaun Racing
purchased 217 yearlings for an average
price of $61,729. All were offered at two-year-old
in training sales. A total of 191 made
the races, 150 won, 57 of them as juveniles,
which put Leprechaun at the top of the
Market Watch list ranking two-year-old
winners. Leprechaun’s 23 stakes winners
included six at the graded level and three
(Adieu, Bishop Court Hill and Fleet Indian)
in Grade I company. Only Demi O’Byrne
purchased more Grade I winners with five,
with Mike Ryan, Leprechaun and John Ferguson
Bloodstock tied in second.
Not bad for a guy who was a rental car
executive that followed his dream of becoming
a full-time horseman.
Only 15 years ago, the Brooklyn-born,
Arizona-raised Mulligan was the New England
regional general manager for Budget Rent
A Car. Based in Florida, he owned a few
race horses at the time at Tampa Bay Downs
and dabbled in pinhooking. One Britt Wadsworth,
a native of Florida who was working in
the horse business, sold him a horse that
went on to become a winner, and it wasn’t
long before the two fell in love. They
launched Leprechaun after marrying, and
today the husband-and-wife team run one
of the most respected pinhooking operations
in the business.
“We learned with cheap horses and
worked our way up,” Mulligan said
Saturday during a rare stretch of downtime. “We
were buying horses for $1,800 and selling
them for $25,000, and we were like, wow,
this is okay. And it’s just like
anything else: you do it long enough, and
you get better at it.”
Leprechaun has been busy reloading for
the 2008 juvenile season, and through Sunday
has purchased a total of six lots at Keeneland
September. That includes his sole buy yesterday,
a Smarty Jones--Xtreme Bid colt he nabbed
for $40,000.
Mulligan said he doesn’t have a
set number of yearlings he’ll wind
up taking back to Ocala with him, but does
expect to be busy examining prospects over
the next few days.
Talking about Leprechaun’s strategy,
he commented, “We don’t come
up here and say we’ve got to spend
$1.5 million or buy a certain number of
horses. It’s sort of flexible, and
we’ve got a really good group of
partners. We come up and look for really
good physical horses, evaluate them, vet
them, and if we feel like there’s
an opportunity to bring those horses to
the two-year-old sales and make money,
then we’re going to try and acquire
those horses.”
The process is an exhausting one that
begins with the inspection of nearly every
horse in the catalog.
“At the smaller sales, my wife and
I do it ourselves, but at a sale like this,
we’ve got an excellent short-list
crew,” Mulligan explained. “I’ve
got two guys for Books 1 and 2, and three
for Books 3 and 4. And that gives me enough
time to look at 30 or 40 horses myself
during the day for the next day’s
session.”
After coming up with a short list that’s
typically not so short, Mulligan has his
prospects vetted, which usually whittles
down the list by 20 percent, he estimates.
Then comes the sometimes frustrating job
of actually bidding on the horses, which
takes both patience and discipline.
“It depends on what sale we’re
at, but here, I’d say we probably
get one out of every 15,” said Mulligan. “So
if we buy 40 horses, we’ll have vetted
600.”
Mulligan added, “Some horses we
don’t even get our hands in the air.
We want to give $200,000, and the horse
brings $600,000. We’re trying to
look for opportunities in the market. Maybe
a horse that’s in the wrong book.
We got a really nice Came Home filly [hip 996,
purchased for $100,000] on the last day
of Book 2. She was blank under her first
two dams, but she was a really nice
physical. If she was in Book 3 or 4, she
would have brought more money than that.”
For Leprechaun, Mulligan explains, it
all comes down to how the horse in front
of him looks.
“Regardless of how good the page
is, if we don’t like the horse physically,
we’re not going to buy him,” he
said. “To me, the pedigree just denotes
how expensive it’s going to get.
I mean, if the mare’s had 12 foals
and three to the races, that’s going
to slow us down a little bit, but we don’t
have any process that overpowers the physical.”
It’s hard to argue with Leprechaun’s
success. In the summer of 2002, Leprechaun
purchased a big Indian Charlie filly later
named Fleet Indian out of the Fasig-Tipton’s
Selected New York-breds sale for $40,000.
They resold her as a juvenile in training
for $230,000, and watched her win an Eclipse
Award last season after capturing five
graded stakes, including a pair of Grade
Is.
While that filly represented a solid if
unspectacular pinhooking score, La Traviata
was a blockbuster coup that seems to have
worked out for everybody involved. Leprechaun
acquired the daughter of Johannesburg for
$112,000 at the 2005 Fasig-Tipton July
sale. Put through the following year’s
Calder sale, La Traviata realized $1.1
million on Demi O’Byrne’s bid,
and looks worth every penny in her three
starts this season. She broke her maiden
by 13 1/4 lengths at Churchill on debut
in June, captured Monmouth’s Post
Deb S. by five lengths in July and most
recently won the Victory Ride by 9 1/4
lengths.
In addition to juvenile pinhooking, Leprechaun
is expanding its scope a bit and yesterday
played the role of yearling seller. Leprechaun
purchased the winning Elusive Quality mare
Elusive Road, in foal to Lion Heart, for
$75,000 at the 2005 OBS Fall sale, and
saw that foal, now a handsome yearling,
sell for $170,000 to Roger Brookhouse during
Sunday’s sixth session.
“We’ve got a few mares, and
we’ll do some selling out of them,” explained
Mike Mulligan.
In the end, despite having a moniker that
suggests luck, Leprechaun can attribute
its success much more to hard work. By
another unscientific measure--walking ring
attendance--it’s unusual not to see
Mike Mulligan leaning against a rail in
the rear of a sales pavilion, making last-minute
judgements on prospects. His and Britt’s
perseverance is paying off, and two-year-old
buyers are taking notice.
