With the 50th running of the All-American Futurity just days away, I thought it appropriate to revisit the first running of Quarter Horse racing’s most famous event.
Trainer Newt Keck spent Labor Day morning, 1959, with Hugh Huntley’s filly Galobar and a mountain of ice, on the backside of Ruidoso Downs. That afternoon, Galobar ran to immortality as the first winner of the All Amercian Futurity. In a span of five years, Keck would win the race two more times. Not bad for a man who grew up in the “stick country” around Nocona, Texas, baling hay for fifty cents a day.
“Work made me have a lot of luck in those big races,” said Keck, who was 78 in 1990, when I visited him at his home in Colleyville, Texas. “Nobody worked as hard at it as I did.”
Hard work, together with an eye for horseflesh and an understanding of a horse’s needs helped make Keck one of Quarter racing’s most successful trainers in the 1950s and 1960s. As a kid, he bought his first mount for $10.25. Later he worked for his uncle, John Hancock, breeder of match racing sensation Joe Hancock, who became a foundation sire for the famed Four Sixes Ranch. Before Keck was through, he had trained horses that broke records for earnings, as well as for speed.
None of them looked less likely than Galobar. The filly was a full sister to 1954 world champion Josie’s Bar, but her legs left much to be desired. “She walked like a bow-legged cowboy,” Keck recalled. “Everybody said, ‘You can’t do nothing with this damn horse. She’s broke down to start with.’ But her breeding was as good as you could get. I figured she could run a little bit even if you cut those legs off.”
Galobar ran fast enough on her bowed legs to tip out the popular picks Panama Ace and Miss Olene in the All American Futurity with a rally on the outside for a half-length win under jockey Cliff Lambert. Huntley, a wheat and cattle rancher from Washington State, gave Keck a $10,000 bonus for winning the race, which paid $65,000 to the victor.
Keck and Huntley connected in the early ’50s and began assembling a top band of broodmares, including Josephine R, dam of Josie’s Bar and Galobar, by Three Bars. Pokey Vandy, another purchase, produced 1961 All American Futurity winner Pokey Bar.
Pokey Bar set a new world record of 21.1 in the 400-yard All American Futurity and another record with $120,000 (his All American win paid $101,112), more than any Quarter Horse had ever earned in a season. As a three-year-old, he set a world record of :21.6 for the quarter-mile, outshining his dam, who had tied the world record for 440 yards in 1955.
“I’d been told a million times that I had an eye for a horse,” Keck said. “When I walk out to a corral, I don’t care how many horses are standing there, by the time I get there, I’ll know which one I like the best.”
In 1962, Keck purchased a yearling Go Man Go daughter named Goetta for Huntley at the California Mid-Winter Yearling Sale. The price was $18,000. More than any other horse, Goetta laid to rest Huntley’s fear that speed and an even temperament could not co-exist in a racehorse.
“She was a runner, but she was just as quiet as she could be,” Keck noted. “When she was high, she never jumped around her stall. She was just like a good saddle horse.
“When the gate flew open, she just left there with her ears pricked up. I’ve seen horses that could outrun her out of the gate, but there were very few that could outrun her at the end.”
Goetta lined up for the 1963 All American Futurity with an unblemished record, and that’s how she left it. With the win, she became the first mare to earn $100,000 in one year, and her freshman earnings of $189,000 set another single-season record. She took year-end champion honors at two, three and four, and set an all-time earnings record of $233,000.
“I was never much to run a horse unless I thought he was right,” said Keck. “A lot of trainers just grab a horse and run a race that fits him. Some horses need more training than others. A horse has to have condition, just like a footrunner or a tennis player. They’ve got to be dead fit.
“A tired horse will show it to you in the eye, just like a person. I always tried to study that more than anything. When a horse is in shape and ready to run, his eyes are just as bright as can be. They’re just popping. Anything that moves, he sees it. A little noise, he jumps. He’s not crazy, just sharp.”
When he was the hottest Quarter Horse trainer around, Keck turned down the inevitable offers to switch to Thoroughbreds. “I was a short horse man to start with,” he said. “They were my life and that’s what I stayed with.”
Cliff Lambert, Galobar’s rider in the first All American Futurity, will lead the post parade for the 50th renewel, on Monday, September 1 at Ruidoso Downs Ruidoso, NM.