BH Interview: Wygods' Sweet History as Owner/Breeders

The late Marty Wygod's fascination with racehorses that took root while growing up in New York City would blossom into a family endeavor. Marty, his wife, Pam, and daughter Emily Bushnell together planned matings, chose horses to keep or sell out of their breeding program, helped craft the racing plans for their homebreds, and diligently found second careers and new homes for their horses that never made it to the track or have been retired from racing. "Horses have been the one thing that's been consistent throughout my life," Marty Wygod told the BloodHorse in an earlier interview. "Pam enjoys it so much, and Emily is totally addicted by the breeding and racing. It's something that we can do together and share." Marty Wygod, who bred 124 stakes winners, died April 12 at 84. The following includes excerpts from an interview with the Wygods and Bushnell in 2020 when they were campaigning graded stakes winner Modernist. This year, the Wygods' breeding program will be represented by Wood Memorial (G2) winner Resilience, a son of Into Mischief out of Meadowsweet, who is the only female produced by the Wygods' multiple graded stakes winner and multiple grade 1 producer Tranquility Lake. Into Mischief is a great-grandson of leading sire Storm Cat, with whom the Wygods had a lot of success. The Derby contender was gifted by the Wygods to Bushnell and longtime friend and bloodstock consultant Ric Waldman. BloodHorse: Marty, how did you get started in owning and breeding Thoroughbreds? Marty Wygod: My family never was involved in it but I always was very interested in it. I worked walking hots at Aqueduct and Belmont when I was a kid. I was friendly with and went to school with Bobby Frankel, and we both started going out to the track in the mornings and in the afternoons. I went into the banking field and he went into the training end of it. I think it was on my 23rd or 24th birthday, one of my major banking accounts in California was a person named Fletcher Jones. He was very active back in the '60s in Thoroughbred racing and built Westerly Stud. I got him interested in the game but I really couldn't afford to get into it, so he sent me two 2-year-olds for my birthday and I gave them to a trainer that's long gone called V.J. "Lefty" Nickerson. They both ran extremely well, both won, and I was hooked. Through Nickerson I got to know Ron McAnally and Allen Jerkens, so I learned from the best. BH: Pam, did your family own horses? Pam Wygod: I had nothing to do with horses until Marty and I met and he took me to a race at Aqueduct to watch one of his horses run and it won. So that was it for me; I was hooked. BH: Emily, you've grown up with this your whole life. Has the horse business always held a fascination for you? Emily Bushnell: I've always loved horses ever since I was a little girl, no matter what we were doing. And the racing has always been such a part of our family's life, and then as I got older, part of my own life. When I started doing the trips down to Kentucky, I really fell in love with the whole process—planning the breedings, learning about the foals and how they develop, how we choose what we keep, what we sell, and then also doing the right thing by the horses and finding them forever homes if we don't end up keeping them for breeding and trying to repurpose them for second careers. So I've really fallen in love with the whole cycle of the Thoroughbred horse. I love this sport, but I also love all the other aspects of it as well. BH: Marty, when did you branch out from owning and into breeding? MW: In the mid-1970s I built a small horse farm in the Santa Ynez valley (River Edge Farm) and bred a bunch of Cal-breds. There were no breakout bloodlines being developed, so we eventually moved our bloodstock to Kentucky. Most of our base mares were ones I bought or claimed, like Symbolically, who I claimed from Harbor View, lost her in a claiming race, and then claimed her back. She went on to produce four stakes winners for us, including Sweet Life, by Kris S., who ended up giving us two Breeders' Cup winners. BH: What was it about Symbolically that you liked? MW: I thought she was substantially better than her race career indicated because they were unable to breeze her except out of the gate. She was at a huge competitive disadvantage because of that, and she had exceptional conformation. I thought she'd make a great broodmare because she had a huge amount of speed going a distance, going around two turns. I think I ended up claiming her the last time for around $35,000. We won a few races with her, and then the breeding and the racing gods gave us one of our foundation mares out of her, which was Sweet Life. BH: Have you refined a breeding strategy in terms of selecting stallions or looking for other mares to add to the broodmare band? Do you have any sort of general rules that you follow? MW: We pretty much stick to the different families that we've developed, like Tranquility Lake and the progeny we had out of her. We only have one filly out of her for our broodmare band, but we have a lot of fillies out of the entire Sweet Life family that are beginning to fire a little bit now. We received a lot of good direction from (former farm manager) Mike Cline at Lane's End and other people in the industry. We were lucky we could get in early on to whatever stallions we wanted to get to. We started to breed to Storm Cat when he was standing for $50,000 or $75,000. Before he hit real big. We tend to go to proven sires … other than when we own the stallions ourselves, then we always commit a meaningful amount of our mares to them before they're proven. BH: You bred four grade 1 winners by Storm Cat, two out of Tranquility Lake—After Market and Courageous Cat—and two out of Sweet Life—Breeders' Cup winners Sweet Catomine and Life Is Sweet. Why was Storm Cat such an effective mate for these mares? EB: Sweet Life and then all of her daughters were substantial mares. Sweet Life was a very large mare. (To Marty) I remember you and (River Edge Farm manager) Russell (Drake) talking about when you saw Storm Cat in person and how small he was, and with the broodmares we had, he was a really good fit. MW: Yes, from a conformation point of view, we thought (the mares) would bring a huge amount of bone, substance, and size, both with Tranquility Lake and with Sweet Life. BH: Because you all work so closely together, do you usually agree on matings or horses to keep or sell? MW: Not really (laughs); part of the time, probably two-thirds of the time. We each look at different things and give different weight to different things. I'm most focused on what the mare's prior progeny have done and looked like as a weanling or as a yearling and try to decide which stallion to breed back to or to breed to something different. Emily lets me know which nicks are the best and from a conformation point of view, which she thinks will probably mix the best. Pam lets me know when I've forgotten something or gotten some of them confused since some of their names are quite similar. It's a group effort. Ric Waldman gives us a hand as well as Mike Cline. EB: Yeah, but Marty has the veto. MW: We usually get lucky more often than not, at least we've had some quiet spells, but there's probably not that many people left that basically only breed and race their own and go back quite a few generations. So when one of ours runs, it probably means more to us than anyone else because we have their entire families. BH: It is an accomplishment to breed and race a stakes winner, let alone breed multiple graded stakes winners over multiple generations. Can you put that experience into words? MW: Well, it gives me a good chance to think back over the last 60 years that I've been involved in this and put things into perspective, of which horses I was racing during different decades and what the different relationships were at that time. It's a very strange feeling when you think back on something that pops up like Modernist and it goes back all the way to Symbolically. It's about 40 years ago. Horses have been the one thing that's been consistent throughout my life. A lot of times when I was more active in business, I think it helped me stay sane so I didn't go over the edge from a business perspective. I always had the horses to fall back on as an escape and as a release. EB: When you walk down our hallway, it's like a museum of all the horses we've raced. I always think it's so cool to see who's in the photos. I remember when After Market won the Eddie Read Handicap the day of Mom's 60th birthday party. It's funny how these horses have peppered the most important parts of our lives, and we remember a lot of other things around certain horses. I remember when we found out Tranquility Lake was finally carrying a filly after all the colts she had. Her last foal was a filly. I called and woke my Dad up really early in the morning. It's just a really cool history to our family.