NRHCA History (The Big Move and A Record Setting Stallion) | EP 143, Justin Wright

From Tom McCutcheon's THE SHOW · 01:07:02

Show by Tom McCutcheon Reining Horses

Justin Wright is an NRCHA Futurity champion and a Three Million Dollar Rider, and he grew up fifteen minutes from where the cow horse association held its first meeting. His dad sat on the original board. His brother won the Snaffle Bit in 1985. Two years ago he left California for Texas, and as he puts it, he did not want to be a Texan — and now he loves it.He joins Tom, Gunny, Joe, and Cade to talk about what the move meant, both his own and the association’s. He makes the case that bringing the Futurity to Fort Worth was the right call for the industry even though it was hard for California to swallow, and explains why the shows back home are still worth going to.Then the Scooter Cat story. The horse is the highest earning reined cow horse of all time — $678,796, the first and only one over $600,000 — but the part worth hearing is what happened after. His first foal crop was seven head. Justin bred a handful of his own mares just to find out whether the horse would produce anything at all, promoted him on nearly nothing, and watched him become a million dollar sire in a discipline that has historically bred to cutting horses instead of its own. He walks through how that happened, why the biggest crops are still only two-year-olds, and why he thinks the most interesting part is ahead of them. Scooter Cat is eleven and stands at Santa Lucia Farm in California.He also gets into judging, and he’s direct about it: he’d like to see the riders who don’t make the finals judge the finals, and he thinks the conflict-of-interest rules may work against the sport rather than for it. Tom has been making the same argument for years and gets into why nobody will do it.Plus: the one kind of cow that’s hardest to work and why, what the bridle horse market and ranch riding did to the value of every horse in the barn, the camaraderie at the American and the Run for a Million, how many horses is too many at a Futurity, and Tom's advice on buying a broodmare — which is shorter than you’d expect.And Joe comes home with a bronze medal from the jiu jitsu world league finals, which he mentions exactly as often as you’d think.

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