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Tales from the Crib: Stronghold

Apr 26, 2024 Kellie Reilly/Brisnet.com

Stronghold as a robust baby

Stronghold as a robust baby (Photo courtesy of Rick Waller)

As a fourth-generation homebred, Stronghold is essentially a member of Eric (“Rick”) and Sharon Waller’s family.

When the Murrieta, California, couple acquired the colt’s great-great grandmother more than a quarter-century ago, no one could have forecast the twists and turns of fate – triumph and tragedy – that would ultimately bring the small-scale owner/breeders to the Kentucky Derby (G1).

The Wallers’ love for Stronghold is evident as they describe their visits to the barn of trainer Phil D’Amato, who also conditioned Stronghold’s talented mom, Spectator.

“He’s got a personality about him,” Rick said of Stronghold. “He likes women. He’s a ladies’ man. He loves to be scratched around his jowls and under his chin. When you give him carrots, he wants the peeled baby carrots. He doesn’t like the big chunky ones.

“He’s one of those horses that sleeps a lot. When we visit, he would be lying flat, sleeping.”

Sharon added that Stronghold would be so still, that she was afraid something was wrong! But the colt was just in deep, contented slumber.

Rick recounts Stronghold’s pleasures in his routine of feeding, exercise, and spa treatments, as he’s treated like a king.

“He looks forward to his salt baths and acupuncture. He’s got the life of Riley!”

Stronghold isn’t one to expend any energy unnecessarily on the racetrack either. Some might cast doubt upon his Derby chances because his speed figures aren’t as fast as the other major prep winners – i.e., Stronghold’s Santa Anita Derby (G1) victory garnered a 98 Brisnet Speed rating. But Rick observes that the numbers don’t tell the whole story.

“He is the kind of horse that only uses enough energy; he saves his energy and only uses enough to get the job done,” Waller noted, adding that Stronghold has fired bullet works of late at his home base of Santa Anita.

“He worked five furlongs in :58 and change, inhaled two six-year-old gelding graded stakes winners,” Waller said of his March 25 move. Then on April 20, “he worked a half in :46 (and :60) – the rider thought he went in :48.

“He’s got the tactical speed if he wants to use it.”

Nor should pedigree pundits look askance at Stronghold’s stamina for the 1 1/4-mile Derby distance. Waller, who’s immersed himself in the study of bloodlines for the past three decades, explains why a superficial glance, or preconceived notion, isn’t enough to assess his staying capacity.

Now we come to Waller’s handiwork of thoughtful, well-crafted pedigrees over the generations, going back to the mare who started it all, One Stop.

Bred by the late Verne Winchell (whose family later campaigned supersire Tapit and newly-minted Hall of Famer Gun Runner), One Stop was offered at the 1998 Barretts January Sale, where she was led out unsold for $12,000. But she had a solid pedigree, coming from the family of Distorted Humor. Although Distorted Humor’s stellar stud career still lay in the future, he was already an impressive graded stakes winner, and he’d enhance his resume further during his 1998 campaign.

“When I bought that mare One Stop, Distorted Humor was on her page,” said Waller, who was doing “due diligence looking for a broodmare.

“I’d read enough to kind of know what I was looking for. I was looking for a broodmare that had raced and won, a broodmare that had black type no further back than the second generation, and that was by a nationally ranked broodmare sire.”

One Stop met all those criteria. A stakes-placed daughter of Mr. Leader, One Stop was out of a half-sister to multiple graded stakes victor Cassaleria, a participant in the 1982 Kentucky Derby.

“Once I saw that she had RNA’d (at the sale),” Waller said, “I called the people on the phone, and bought her privately. So began my breeding exploits!”

One Stop first visited Anziyan, a brother of Danehill who stood at the late “Jeopardy!” host Alex Trebek’s Creston Farm. Both offspring from their matings failed to achieve any results.

Waller then decided to breed One Stop to Swiss Yodeler, the 1996 Hollywood Futurity (G1) hero who was also a classy sprinter as an older horse.

“I saw Swiss Yodeler was bred by the Farish family (Will Farish and his aunt Martha Gerry),” Waller said. “I loved the fact that he was from the Damascus (sire) line. I loved the speed that Damascus brings.

“One Stop was a big, rangy mare, and she needed a speed horse. Swiss Yodeler looked like a big buffalo. He definitely put the meat on the bones.”

Their match proved far more successful, yielding Grade 3-placed stakes winner Swiss Diva.

“She didn’t look so much like her daddy, and didn’t look like her mother either; she was just a nice, balanced racehorse,” Waller said.

Swiss Diva had real talent and grit. Unbeaten in three starts as a juvenile in 2006, she romped by 8 1/2 lengths in the California Breeders’ Champion S. for state-breds at Santa Anita. Swiss Diva stretched out to two turns in the Las Virgenes (G1), where she finished fifth to future Belmont (G1)-winning champion Rags to Riches. Back to sprinting in the Santa Paula (G3), however, Swiss Diva proved that she was graded stakes-caliber when placing second, and she missed by a neck in the Fleet Treat S.

By the time Swiss Diva began her broodmare career, Waller wanted to shift to breeding in Kentucky. She was sent to multiple Grade 1 star Henny Hughes, and the resulting foal, a filly, was a chestnut like her parents.

Tragically, Swiss Diva died in giving birth. Waller gave her one and only foal the poignant name of Diva’s Tribute. Compounding the heartache of losing Swiss Diva, Diva’s Tribute sustained a broken hock as a foal and never raced.

“Diva’s Tribute ended up looking like Henny Hughes,” Waller said. “She was built like a bull dog. You could see the Swiss Yodeler in her, very muscular.”

With their sentimental attachment to Swiss Diva, the Wallers wanted to keep Diva’s Tribute as a broodmare. She started by visiting Into Mischief, an idea sparked by then-Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Fillies (G1) champion Beholder (who would later compile a glittering Hall of Fame career).

Since Beholder’s by Henny Hughes, and herself a half-sister to Into Mischief, Waller was employing the reverse pattern by breeding a Henny Hughes mare, Diva’s Tribute, to Into Mischief. A filly was happily born, only for a different sort of devastation to unfold.

“Diva’s Tribute savaged her, took a big chunk out of her withers,” said Waller, who made sure that every possible effort was made to repair the injuries and restore the foal to good health.

The foal responded well, leading the Wallers to give her another poignant name – Tenacious Heart. Although her early tragedy likewise prevented a racing career, she too was kept as a treasured family member, and she is currently the Wallers’ only broodmare.

Diva’s Tribute was bred back to Grade 1-winning sprinter Jimmy Creed, in hopes that things would go more smoothly with her second foal. The mating was once again well-designed, since Jimmy Creed is by Distorted Humor, and thus duplicating the female line of Swiss Diva.

“It worked out because we got Spectator,” Waller said of the Grade 2 heroine who would become the mother of Stronghold.

Unfortunately, Diva’s Tribute tried to savage Spectator as well, but disaster was averted this time, as the foal was whisked away. The Wallers ended up selling the mare only because of those anti-maternal issues fraught with peril, but there’s a happy ending.

Diva’s Tribute’s behavior was ultimately reformed. She reared a series of foals for Richard Barton’s Barton Thoroughbreds, including a filly that the Wallers were overjoyed to buy as a yearling for $200,000 last fall at the Fasig-Tipton Sale in Pomona, California. Now a juvenile by late champion Improbable, she has been named Pristine – a welcome re-entry to the family.

If Pristine is half as good as half-sister Spectator, she’ll be pretty smart. Spectator got her name because she had white tips on all four hooves as a youngster, and the appearance made Waller think of spectator shoes. She also had swaths of white on her neck and chest, which prompted Waller to discover that she has nine crosses of the gray “Flying Filly,” Mumtaz Mahal, a daughter of the gray “Spotted Wonder,” The Tetrarch.

Trained by D’Amato, like her son Stronghold, Spectator was a smashing two-year-old in the summer of 2017. A 5 1/4-length debut romper at Santa Anita, she dusted a better class of rival by the same margin in the Sorrento (G2) at Del Mar.

“After she broke her maiden the way she did,” D’Amato told Del Mar publicity following the Sorrento, “we just kind of let her grow up these past few weeks. This (race) has been on the radar from the get-go and we just let her mature and she sure did. She’s still trying to figure it out in some ways. She’s just a bunch of raw talent and she’s getting better and better.”

D’Amato was looking forward to getting Spectator over a route of ground in the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Fillies. But she needed time off in the wake of her third in the Del Mar Debutante (G1).

Spectator made a winning comeback in an allowance, gamely battling over older distaffers at Santa Anita on March 18, 2018.

“I was very happy with it,” D’Amato told Blood-Horse at the time. “She showed that she has that fight to her and a killer instinct.”

Wheeling back to face future champion Midnight Bisou in the Santa Anita Oaks (G1), Spectator was an honorable runner-up in her lone opportunity at 1 1/16 miles. It also turned out to be the last time she was able to do herself justice on the racetrack, leaving a sense of what might have been.

Spectator “was absolutely Grade 1 quality,” Waller said. “She never got an opportunity to win that Grade 1 for various reasons.”

Spectator’s campaign went awry when she shipped to New York for the Acorn (G1). From spiking a fever that forced her to miss that objective, to a mishap at the start of the Test (G1), when she banged her head on the gate and sustained a bad cut above her eye, the whole expedition was forgettable.

Spectator physically regrouped back home in Southern California, but she wasn’t the same filly when returning to action as a four-year-old. After two subpar starts in the spring of 2019, the Wallers retired her.

“I had been offered a lot of money for her as a graded stakes-winning filly,” Waller said, but he couldn’t part with her.

“I knew I had a nice mare. This was Swiss Diva’s granddaughter.”

As Spectator deserved to go to a top-flight stallion, Waller was weighing several logical options before he kept gravitating toward Hall of Famer Ghostzapper.

“Ghostzapper was the best cross for the mare. I always ask the trainer, you have Ghostzappers in the barn, what do you think of them?”

“If you breed to Ghostzapper,” D’Amato told him, “it doesn’t matter if you get a filly or a colt. You’ll get a runner.”

In so far as Waller needed any other validation, his trainer’s answer clinched it.

“He probably doesn’t even remember my asking him that,” Waller said.

Spectator foaled her bay colt by Ghostzapper on Jan. 24, 2021. Sadly, in an echo of her grandmother Swiss Diva’s passing, Spectator did not survive.

Stronghold as a foal at Mulholland Springs

Stronghold as a foal at Mulholland Springs (Photo courtesy of Rick Waller)

Her son was small, but hardy, and he thrived under the loving care of the Mulholland family’s Mulholland Springs Farm in the Bluegrass.

“When he was born, because he was a first foal, he was on the small side,” Waller recalled. “The farm said he weighed 96 pounds. But within 30 days, he was very robust.

“He started maturing, and he was extremely intelligent. He just had a presence about him. They could see that he was a quality horse. He had class already.

“As he grew, we would check in, and they would say he’s a man among boys.

“They used to tell me at the farm how strong he was,” added Waller, who was thereby inspired to name him Stronghold.

Stronghold as a five-month-old

Stronghold as a five-month-old (Photo courtesy of Rick Waller)

The youngster remained at Mulholland Springs through his earliest lessons. Over the winter when he turned from a yearling to two years old, Stronghold was shipped to J.R. and Katie Boyd’s Brick City Thoroughbreds in Ocala, Florida, to continue his education.

J.R. “knew that he was a special horse,” Waller revealed. “Horsemen just know. They talk to the rider about how he travels; they can see how much ground he covers. They knew right away he was going to be a good horse.”

Stronghold joined D’Amato’s Kentucky string last summer. Although he was runner-up in his Ellis Park unveiling to a $600,000 Brad Cox runner named Awesome Road, Stronghold gave that even-money favorite a tussle despite racing greenly in the six-furlong dash.

Stronghold moved forward next time out going a mile at Churchill Downs. Dispatched as the odds-on favorite, he drove to a convincing win in a time of 1:35.99. That maiden has worked out exceptionally well; the respective second and third were Resilience and Track Phantom, both Derby rivals who would score prep victories on the trail. Moreover, Stronghold’s time was faster than the other mile maiden on that Oct. 1 card, won by Derby foe Catching Freedom in 1:36.58.

While those Derby contenders have improved in the interim, so has Stronghold. He was second-best behind budding star Nysos when shortening up to seven furlongs in last November’s Bob Hope (G3), but missed by only a half-length in his two-turn debut in the Los Alamitos Futurity (G2). D’Amato’s belief in his routing ability was confirmed in the Sunland Park Derby (G3).

Stronghold passed a stiffer class test by toppling hot favorite Imagination in the Santa Anita Derby, where he showed an attractive combination of maneuverability in traffic and resolute determination.

As Stronghold heads into his date with Derby destiny, Waller sees the best of both parents coming out in his homebred pride and joy.

“The thing about Stronghold being by Ghostzapper, they’re better later, better at four than at three. His precocity comes from his mother.

“I don’t have any concerns about him getting 1 1/4 miles,” Waller said, citing that Spectator was a “double-dip with Distorted Humor’s family…

“Spectator ran second to Midnight Bisou. I knew his mother was good for a mile and a sixteenth, and Ghostzapper adds the extra distance.”

Stronghold’s stalking running style helps his chances. D’Amato and jockey Antonio Fresu “spent a lot of time teaching him to rate, find his target, and go get it. That’s how he’s been trained to run.”

What they can’t teach is heart, but Stronghold has that already, a gift handed down from great-grandma Swiss Diva.

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