Three fillies, two chestnut and one bay, stand in a corral in the center of a field which itself is in the center of a half-mile training track. They’d rather be out grazing or playing like they were all night, but they’re calm and happy. And waiting for something on a hot, sticky September morning.
Across the field walks a cowboy. He wears carpenter’s jeans, a black and gray tech T-shirt and boots. He left his hat in the house, but the belt buckle is real. So are the spurs, though the ends are covered in duct tape. He’s been up for hours tending horses in one form or another, and he carries a red nylon bridle with white reins.
“All right girls, let’s do this.”
The fillies – yearlings purchased less than a month earlier at Fasig-Tipton’s New York-bred sale in Saratoga and the Ocala Breeders Sales Company’s Florida auction –fidget to life and the cowboy opens the gate. In no hurry and without really making a choice, he picks a filly and gives her a pat on the neck. As her friends watch, she takes the bit and the bridle and gets guided in two tight circles – one right, one left –before the cowboy slides onto her back. A minute later, she’s walking, trotting, cantering as the other two retreat to a smaller gated pen off the corral. Bareback, the cowboy closes the gate without dismounting and continues the work. Left-handed trot, right-handed trot, halt, back up, walk on, step this way and that. His reins are long, his legs hang low. Despite the lack of a saddle and stirrups, he sits tight. For direction, he offers a light tap with his heel or a slight tug on the reins. The filly flits her ears, listens, processes, learns.
Satisfied for today, the filly’s fourth day being ridden, the cowboy slows her to a walk, makes her stand and slides off. With a pat between the eyes, he removes the bridle, chooses the next filly and repeats. He’ll do the same with the third – then open the corral and release them into the field. Ten minutes after that, he’ll begin the same process with four colts in a field on the other side of the driveway, then move on to the two barns full of other yearlings taking their early steps toward racing careers.
The cowboy – Pennsylvania horseman Clovis Crane – is in his element.
“I love that stuff,” he says later, about halfway through his morning of riding 15 yearlings. “I could do that all day. Well, I do that all day. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, I wouldn’t let anybody else ride them. I rode 26 or 27, from 7 in the morning until 4 o’clock in the afternoon. I love that. I got them going well enough that I could move some on to the couple of other guys who help with the riding.”
Far more than a cowboy, Crane and his wife Joanna own Crane Thoroughbreds, a 65-acre breaking/training operation seven miles north of Lebanon and 16 miles east of Penn National Race Course.
Clovis, who won 242 races in a three-year jockey career and was the national champion all-around cowboy at the National Circuit Finals Rodeo in 2009, does the hands-on stuff. His “boss” Joanna manages the business. Together, they raise a young family including 11-month-old daughter Rosey, 3-year-old son Coy, 5-year-old daughter Dalia, 14-year-old daughter Amara Underwood and a small squadron of farm dogs. The Cranes buy, sell, prep and train Thoroughbreds for themselves and clients, participate in most of the country’s top public auctions as buyers and consignors and have found a niche in the Retired Racehorse Project’s Thoroughbred Makeover with 2015 working ranch class winner Yo Koffy and 2016 contender Empire Road.
Three graded stakes horses have been sold by or prepped at the farm – Bluegrass Singer, Colonel Sharp and Alright Alright, the latter a $25,000 to $205,000 pinhook at California’s Barretts Sale in 2014. At Barretts in March this year, Crane Thoroughbreds sold a 2-year-old Majestic Warrior colt for $240,000 six months after an $82,000 purchase by client Harry Weisleder at Keeneland September. Named Downtowner, the Kentucky-bred is in training with Bob Baffert. Crane sold three others at the California sale, including a $60,000 Munnings filly to Perry Martin of California Chrome fame. At Fasig-Tipton Florida in March, Crane Thoroughbreds sold 2-year-olds for $150,000 and $290,000. Crane sold 18 juveniles at Fasig-Tipton Midlantic’s May sale to such buyers as Dennis O’Neill and EQB.
The sales success comes after a decision made last summer to concentrate more on breaking/training yearlings for clients and pinhooking young horses. Through Sept. 12, Crane had just 31 starts as a trainer – down from 100 in 2013 and 186 in 2007. Plenty of foals have been born at the farm, too, but that’s no longer on the job list either.
As part of the new focus, the Cranes added a half-mile stone-dust galloping track to go with a quarter-mile jogging oval and are working toward adding an indoor arena while continuing to improve on the model. And, of course, there are horses of every shape and size on the farm – yearlings, 2-year-olds, racetrack layups, Gunner the pony, several riding horses and three aiming for the Thoroughbred Makeover in Kentucky Oct. 27-30.
Start at the Beginning
Clovis Crane grew up at Penn National. Well, he could see it from his house anyway. His parents Joe and Cathy Crane worked for trainer Wayne Rice and could watch young Clovis get on the school bus without leaving the barn. Clovis learned to ride and was working horses at the Timonium sales at 14. At 16, he dropped out of Lower Dauphin High to become a jockey. He won 95 races in 1996, and was on his way. In 1997, he won 122 races while riding at Penn, Delaware Park, The Meadowlands, Belmont Park and Aqueduct.
As good as he was, Crane knew his jockey career wouldn’t be long.
“I was lucky enough that I got to ride for two or three years,” he said. “I was 16. That was before puberty. That’s the only reason I stayed small. That’s the truth. I was lucky enough to grow late.”
But he grew right out of a career. Making good on a promise he made to his parents, Crane went back to high school in 1998 and also went back to wrestling. He won a Pennsylvania sectional championship at 103 pounds as a senior and drew the attention of several college programs. Through family friend and veterinarian Dr. Eric Bruns, Crane wound up at Indiana’s Purdue University, wrestled at 157 and qualified for the NCAA Tournament in 2001 and 2003.
“My parents had moved to Indiana to raise bucking horses and bulls, and since they were there I could get in-state tuition,” Crane said. “Dr. Bruns wrestled at Purdue and told them about me. It was only 30 minutes from my parents, so I moved back to Indiana and went to Purdue. Mainly I wanted to wrestle, but I got to go to a good school.”
Crane started as a walk-on, redshirted one season, and missed another with a back injury, but finished on full scholarship. He also found time to ride in local rodeos, at least for a while. Crane’s father competed when the family lived in Pennsylvania, and hosted a weekly event at the farm in Indiana. Clovis, of course, played a role –first as a bullfighter, later as a bull rider. Then the wrestling coach found out.
Thanks to a bull horn to the face in a practice ride, Crane went back to school with stitches. Working out like normal in advance of wrestling season, Crane looked like he’d been in a fight.
“What the hell happened to you?” a coach asked.
“I just had a little accident bull riding,” Crane replied.
“Whoa, whoa, wait a second,” the coach said. “You’re here to go to school and wrestle, we’re not doing this so you can go play at the rodeo and get hurt.”
Crane stayed away from the rodeo, wrestled and graduated with a teaching degree.
The cowboy comes home
Too big to be a jockey and not really wanting to be a teacher Crane returned to Pennsylvania to work with his uncle, horseman Dean Crane, and map out a career path. Clovis had spent a summer in Saratoga with trainer Todd Pletcher and thought that might be a way forward in the racing industry, then thought like an investor. Pennsylvania was in the early stages of slots legislation and Crane had saved some money from his race-riding days. He figured he could buy a small farm, fix it up while he worked for his uncle and then sell it once the slots revenue kicked in and made the state attractive to breeders.
Crane bought a farm, with help from family friends and Thoroughbred owners Richard and Nancy Sinkler, in 2004 and waited for the slots.
“No banker in their right mind was going to loan a kid straight out of college $800,000 so Mr. Sinkler sold it to me on land contract and took a chance I was going to make it,” Crane said. “I was making $600 a week galloping horses and had a $5,000 a month mortgage so I did whatever I could to take in income and make it work.”
Crane’s uncle sent some horses, a few others came along, some clients sent some mares and pretty soon Crane Thoroughbreds became a business. Slots arrived, eventually, but Crane never sold. He built stalls on both levels of an old cow barn, added two free walkers, built turnout paddocks, added an outdoor ring, built two tracks and more, but it’s still the same place.
“Mr. and Mrs. Sinkler took a shot and gave me the opportunity,” Crane said. “Whether they really and truly believed I was going to make it or not, that’s yet to be discovered but one way or another that’s how it all started.”
Crane worked on the farm all day, riding horses, dealing with mares, fixing up barns and tending fences. But without wrestling, without riding races, he missed competition so he found time to go to Cowtown Rodeo in New Jersey – first as a bull rider, but he added other events. In 2008 on the First Frontier Circuit, one of a dozen geographic areas of the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association, he became the first rider to win four year-end titles – all-around, bareback, saddle bronc and bull riding – while wearing an air cast on a broken leg at the finals. The next year, he was the champion all-around cowboy at the National Circuit Finals Rodeo.
As most of his competitions were relatively local, rodeo didn’t take Crane away from his Thoroughbred business but it did compete for his time and attention. Clients fretted about him getting hurt, which he did periodically (broken leg, jaw, ankle, foot, torn abdominal and groin muscles and so on). After about 10 years, he quit, sold his gear, concentrated on his business.
“People saw it as too risky for someone to be doing, but I didn’t think so,” he said. “I did it for a long, long time but got sick of listening to people tell me it was too dangerous and this and that. I wasn’t a rodeo cowboy on the road all the time. I went to Cowtown, Fair Hill, places like that. I’d be gone for the afternoon, which is like somebody else going golfing.”
And cowboys don’t golf.
Crane didn’t attend a rodeo for two years until getting tugged back in this summer. At first, it was to help his nephew get started. Then it was a, ‘Well, while I’m here’ kind of thing. On Sept. 10, he won the saddle bronc competition at Cowtown and he’s qualified for the American Finals Rodeo at Atlantic City in November and could make the PRCA finals in Las Vegas in December.
“I’m really doing well, it’s just not what I had planned,” Crane said. “Honestly, I love it. It’s not bull riding, it’s not bareback riding and once you learn how to ride saddle broncs, the margin of me getting hurt is just about the margin of me getting hurt on the farm. I know how to ride real well and you only get hurt if they fall down or run into something or roll over on you.”
Making Racehorses
The farm won’t soon be compared to a manicured Lexington showplace, but Crane Thoroughbreds runs like any other training operation with a touch of western ranch utility. The horses come first. Some live out, some live in. They all either get turned out or spend an hour on the free walker before training.
“Our belief is you’ve got to let them get out and be happy and if I have a choice, I’m leaving them turned out,” Crane said. “But if you’re going to sell them, you have to pay attention. They might have a lump or a bump that’s completely inconsequential, and that made them a better horse because of it, but when you get to the sale, when it comes down to dollars and cents, nothing like that is inconsequential.”
In September, the string included yearlings by Mission Impazible, Pioneerof the Nile, Majestic Warrior, Midnight Lute, The Lumber Guy, Oxbow, Archarcharch, Sidney’s Candy and so on.
Some are pinhooking projects owned by Crane and/or Weisleder. Others belong to outside clients and are prepping for racing careers. The methods vary a little. The outside groups get ridden bareback in the fields where they live. The horses in the barn are fully tacked and work in a ring in front of the barn. Everything involves teaching.
Crane uses one horse to help another trot past the horse trailer parked in the driveway. A rammy colt gets a heavier hand. A nervous filly gets a reassuring pat on the neck. Each riding session finishes with some bending and stretching as the young horses learn to use their bodies.
In time, the sets will move on to trail riding around the farm, then work on the tracks, schooling in the starting gate, even a trip or two to Penn National to breeze for real. It’s all part of the process.
“We get our horses broke,” Crane said when asked what the team does well. “They’ve seen a lot of things, they’ve done a lot of things. They’re not just slam-bam, you have them riding. When they leave here they’re broke. It’s not like they’ve only been tacked up and zoomed down the stretch. Horses that have been started here, they’ve gone on trail rides, they’ve breezed here, they’ve breezed at Penn National. They go to the sales or the racetrack from here and they’re like, ‘So what.’ ”
Assistant Luis Delgado oversees the training barns and keeps other staffers on point – tacking horses, bathing horses, turning over the paddocks and walkers from one group to the next. Crane, whose home is mere steps from the barn, feeds at 5:30 in the morning and puts his eyes on each horse. The crew arrives at 7 and leaves at 3. Delgado runs the daily operation, chronicled with a “Daily Protocol” list on a whiteboard in the barn. Another staffer shows up at 7 for evening turnout and another check. Joanna Crane handles the business details, around all the responsibilities of motherhood.
And Clovis sometimes rides from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., but that’s his skillset.
“A lot of times, you’ll come here and there will be a hundred head of horses here and I won’t know who’s who,” he said. “Well, I know who the horse is but I won’t know who he or she belongs to or which guy owns how much of which one. I’m just looking at the horses. I have to look at my book to find out that other stuff. I’m doing what I’m supposed to do for each horse. It doesn’t matter who owns him.”
The horse population rises and falls with the seasons, and ideally Crane would like to see the business wane a bit in the summer so he can play with his kids, go to rodeos and maybe “go on vacation like a normal person once in awhile.” That didn’t happen much in 2016 as the inventory stayed around 70 all summer. There’s room to grow, and there’s always room to improve the quality. When buying horses to pinhook, Crane and Weisleder typically spend $20,000 to $50,000, though they’ll reach beyond that for the right individual.
Clients appreciate the hands-on aspects of the business, and the care their horses receive.
“I made a lot of mistakes starting out and I drove a lot of customers away,” Crane said. “I was green. I didn’t know. I got splints and shins and things and didn’t do a top-shelf job for my clients. Over the years, we’ve corrected that stuff but it took the mistakes to learn them. In the end, it’s probably better that I went through all that. I’ve made all those mistakes, not just been told about them.”
He also knows the operation takes far more than he alone can deliver.
“It’s not all about me,” he said. “Joanna is the workhorse of the deal. She has to do the stuff nobody likes, the books, the business, the stuff I can’t do. She does the books and takes care of the kids all day. She’s smarter than me, and she’ got more patience. And we couldn’t do it without Luis. He makes everything go in the barn.”
One More Thing
Like most Thoroughbred operations, Crane routinely repurposes racehorses. If they don’t pan out or somehow end up at the farm after their racing careers, they get put to work as lead ponies, rides for the kids, trail horses, saddle horses (that’s the cowboy term) and whatever else might be necessary.
Two years ago, Crane’s wife and daughter talked about entering the Thoroughbred Makeover and asked around for a prospect. Clovis thought of Yo Koffy, a horse he pinhooked racing near the bottom at Charles Town. He was smart, quiet and athletic at least. After trying to buy him, the Cranes wound up making a $4,500 claim. Taught to be everything but a racehorse, Yo Koffy made the finals of the 2015 Makeover’s “America’s Most Wanted Thoroughbred” competition after winning the working ranch category (with Clovis aboard) and also competing in show jumping (with Amara). Now 7, he lives in an oversized stall in the upper barn and babysits yearlings.
“The horses that are worth fiddling with, we’ve always tried to give them a second occupation,” said Crane. “I kind of got roped into the whole Makeover deal, but Koffy is great. He was a beautiful mover when we had him, pretty smart and sensible. I watched him run a bunch through his career and he never went with a pony. He ran short and he’d go to the front so he had a lot speed but he had to be real sensible to go without the pony. That’s a big sign. We won a shake for him so he was destined to come back here I guess.”
Crane may have found an even better prospect for this year’s Makeover, once again slated for the Kentucky Horse Park in late October.
Taking a rare break while blasting the air conditioner in the barn office after riding yearlings all morning, Crane leapt back into action in mid-sentence when the topic turned to Empire Road.
“You want to see him?” he asked. “Here, let me get a bridle.”
Crane took a western bridle, where the headpiece only slips over one ear, and headed to the lower barn. He emerged with a bright chestnut ideally suited for showing off – wide blaze, four white legs – and asked him to lie down in the grass. Empire Road, a 5-year-old son of Corinthian who raced in April, flopped to his knees and grazed. Crane climbed on and – when asked –the horse stood up.
Crane originally intended to defend Yo Koffy’s working ranch title, but may have to adjust the plan since Empire Road pretty much “hates” cows – not that he’s out of options. In a back field, Crane built a small cross-country course of log jumps. Empire Road and Crane flew every one, bareback and on a loose rein.
“This horse really likes to jump, he locks on to the jumps and goes right to it,” Crane said after pulling up. “That’s bareback and not even gathering him up and he’s been inside all day. And I’m obviously not the most accomplished jump rider that ever lived.”
Perhaps not, but there’s no mistaking Crane’s horsemanship. Empire Road can be ridden in Western or English tack. He can jump. He can lie down and stand up on command. He can slide stop and if he can figure out how to get along with the cows he can be a roping horse. And he looks like he should be in a movie.
“He’s the best, so smart,” said Crane. “I’m having so much stinking fun with him. It comes down to the same thing [as breaking yearlings], I like horses. I enjoy it. It’s one more thing to do with a horse.”
And he’s pretty much always looking for that.
Credits:
Anne Litz