OBS Spotlight is an occasional series highlighting OBS sales graduates, consignors, buyers, and breeders
By Alicia Hughes, Director of Communications
One of the things the late businessman B. Wayne Hughes loved to remind people of when discussing the successes Spendthrift Farm achieved under his helm was the fact he was guided as much by hope and chance as he was by fact and reason.
For all the studying of pedigrees and nicks and past performance lines and conformation, Hughes knew that gut instinct and feeling could play just as crucial a role in finding the next standout Thoroughbred athlete. And at the 2007 Ocala Breeders’ Sales Co. March Sale of Two-Year-Olds in Training, the Spendthrift owner and his team saw something in a son of Harlan’s Holiday they decided was worth taking a chance on.
The colt’s pedigree at that moment in time was not of the commercial sort, nor did it scream obvious ability for on track success. He didn’t blow anyone out of the water with his presence on the end of the lead shank, but once the bay youngster got to stretching himself out during his under-tack showcase, a certain potential flashed itself and convinced Hughes there could be more to unearth.
“The one phrase Mr. Hughes loved to use when talking about the horse business and all its different aspects was, nobody knows,” Spendthrift Farm general manager Ned Toffey said of the man who purchased the farm in 2004 and established it as an industry leader prior to his passing 2021. “Which stallion is going to be the next big stallion? Which yearling is going to be the big racehorse? At the end of the day nobody knows.
“Into Mischief is the embodiment of that.”
Known then as Hip 22 in the OBS catalog, the horse who would become the manifestation of the Thoroughbred industry’s biggest aspirations sold to Hughes for $180,000 out of the M&H Training and Sales consignment. Seventeen years after teasing his ability on the OBS grounds, Into Mischief now stands as one of the great bargains in public auction history as well as the benchmark generations of stallions will be aiming to match.
Since entering the Spendthrift stud barn in 2009, Into Mischief has repeatedly forced the commercial industry to find higher stratospheres for him to exist in. With the 2024 racing season winding down, the bay stallion is poised to collect yet another milestone as he will lead the North American general sire list for a sixth consecutive year.
Coming into this season, Into Mischief was already breathing rarified air as he was tied with Bull Lea and Nasrullah for the second most general sire titles in the last century, trailing only Bold Ruler’s mark of eight. On the strength of the exploits of offspring like Laurel River, winner of this year’s $12 million Dubai World Cup (G1), 2024 saw Into Mischief become the first stallion to surpass $30 million in progeny earnings in a single year with more than $33.9 million as of Dec. 19.
He is set to have his sixth Eclipse Award champion in Citizen Bull as the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile (G1) winner is favored to take home divisional honors. With his triumph at Del Mar in November, Citizen Bull also became his sire’s eighth career Breeders’ Cup winner, putting Into Mischief in a four-way tie atop the World Championship’s all-time sire list by victories.
He became the first stallion to have consecutive Kentucky Derby (G1) winners with 2020 Horse of the Year and fellow Spendthrift sire, Authentic, and adjudicated 2021 Derby victor Mandaloun. And with the success of sons like Ashford Stud’s Practical Joke and fellow OBS graduate and Spendthrift stallion Goldencents – who currently rank 11th and 12th, respectively, on the general sire list – Into Mischief is also checking off the hallowed mark of becoming a sire of sires.
That his name would end up at or near the top of nearly every meaningful achievement in the stallion ranks is all the more remarkable when reflecting on his diamond-in-the-rough background. In the span of :10.2 seconds over the OBS track, a future game-changer was able to catch the eye of those astute enough to see beyond the surface.
“He was a good individual, but not a great individual from a conformation standpoint. His breeze is what stood out, just that he did it so well with a great gallop out,” Toffey recalled of Into Mischief’s pre-sale work. “He was bought really to a great deal on the strength of his breeze. If you turn back the clock and look at his pedigree, it didn’t look anything like it does today. It was a very different looking page than what it is today.
“So top and bottom it wasn’t a slam dunk pedigree, but again it was just the combination of the strength of his breeze that attracted us. And since that time, that pedigree has filled in pretty dramatically.”
Had his achievements ended with only his racing success, Into Mischief would have justified Hughes’ faith. In six career starts, he was never worse than second and earned his biggest victory when he annexed the 2007 Grade 1 CashCall Futurity in his third career outing.
Even with a top-level triumph on his resume, his path to greatness in the stud barn was something that had to be built brick by weighty brick. The stalwart reputation his sire Harlan’s Holiday would ultimately earn was still being established and his dam Leslie’s Lady was years out from her eventual distinction as a blue hen, the result of her going on to produce champion Beholder and Grade 1 winner Mendelssohn.
Hence, when the time came for Into Mischief to try and impress the buying public once more, he again found himself overlooked by a majority of those in the bloodstock game.
“People would ask in the beginning, you know, ‘What type of mares are you’re looking for, for Into Mischief?’, and we were like ‘One that would fog a mirror’,” said Spendthrift stallion sales manager Mark Toothaker, who joined the farm in 2012. “We weren’t looking for anything except just mares to try to get him as many foals out there as we possibly could.”
(Nicole Finch/Spendthrift photo)
Self-Made Man
A commonality many top racehorses share is an innate knowledge of when to get their proverbial game face on. With Into Mischief, Toffey recalls the bay runner would practically undergo a full-on transformation from the time he left the barn to the time he would enter the starting gate.
“Into Mischief was a horse who when it was time to go to a race, when it was time to get in the paddock, he knew what was coming and he would – like a lot of good horses do – he would blow himself up,” Toffey said. “If you saw him just on a Wednesday at the barn on the toe ring, you wouldn’t really think a heck of a lot, but he would look like a different animal in the paddock before the race and going out on the track.
“I saw that version of Into Mischief and I thought, man this horse is going to be a slam dunk, he’s going to be easy to sell seasons in when he gets to the farm. Well, a couple months later, he shows up at the farm and he gets off the van and I’m thinking ‘Where is the rest of him?’.”
Indeed, when Into Mischief was retired in December 2008 following his runner-up finish in the Grade 1 Malibu Stakes, attracting breeders to the first-year sire proved anything but straightforward. After struggling to get support during that initial season when he stood for $12,500, Hughes got creative and came with Spendthrift’s now signature innovative initiative known as “Share the Upside” in which breeders are offered a lifetime breeding right should they complete two “stands and nurses” contracts during his first two years at stud.
“Very much the origins of Share the Upside stemmed from the question of how are we going to get people to breed to Into Mischief the second year, a horse who we had limited success getting numbers to him in year one,” Toffey said. “It was like, if year one was this tough, what is year two going to be like? We had to come up with something. We came up with the idea out of a need. When you’re doing that sort of thing, you really are in a position where you are taking anything you can get.”
By 2012, Into Mischief’s fee had dipped to $7,500 and the notion he would one day stand for the $250,000 he currently commands seemed fantastical at best. Just as his quality showed itself when it counted on the track, so too did it bubble up when his first crop began flaunting their own competitive ability.
Despite the less-than-commercial nature of his early books, Into Mischief delivered a shot across the bow with his first runners. Months after selling at the 2012 OBS June auction, Goldencents became his sire’s first graded stakes winner when he took the Grade 3 Delta Downs Jackpot Stakes that November. When the future multiple Grade 1 winner prevailed again in the Grade 3 Sham Stakes to kick off his sophomore campaign on Jan. 5, 2013, another son of Into Mischief in Vyjack also notched a graded win when he annexed the Jerome Stakes (G2) that same afternoon.
He would end 2012 ranked third on the freshman sire list and filling his book began to become an issue of demand rather than desperation. Both Vyjack and Goldencents would go on to start in the 2013 edition of the Kentucky Derby (G1) and from there, the momentum in the Spendthrift stud barn never stopped.
Fittingly, Goldencents would again be the dutiful son by becoming the first Breeders’ Cup winner sired by Into Mischief when he took the Dirt Mile (G1) in both 2013 and 2014. By the time the brilliant filly Covfefe added to that total by winning the Breeders’ Cup Filly & Mare Sprint (G1) in 2019, she would help backstop her now indominable father to his first reign atop the general sire list.
“I remember when I first went over to Spendthrift, it was very much in the beginning days for him and every year, a little deal pops up on my Facebook page where I was trying to say anything good about Into Mischief,” Toothaker said. “It’s hilarious now, because what I had said was, ‘He had a maiden special weight winner, and he had one running in a stake this coming weekend’. That was my highlight of anything that I could say for him back then.
“It’s comical today because it’s just crazy the success that he’s had. It’s been amazing to watch, because I’ve been able to be there the whole time and to not only see his stud fee go up year after year, but to dominate the way he’s been doing. It’s unimaginable where he’s gone – from Book Seven to Book One basically in the mare quality – and his offspring have been productive citizens for a long time. There will never be another Into Mischief I don’t think during my lifetime.”
The Best is Yet to Come
Given he proved from the start he could move up any kind of mare, it is little wonder Into Mischief continued to raise the bar once he was bred to partners who are proven in bloodlines and produce records. With the quality of his books become more and more illustrious, it stands to reason that the best of his offspring is still coming down the pipeline and that his general sire title run may well be on record-setting course.
“He’s got some tremendous crops coming so it’s going to continue to be very, very strong,” Toffey said. “One of the exciting things for me is in recent years, we’ve starting to use him ourselves more and more. Some of these special mares that we’ve bought like (champion) Monomoy Girl have gone to Into Mischief a couple times. When he was breeding small books, his percentages were through the roof. No horse is going to be able to maintain those kinds of percentages when the books get much bigger but he’s doing a remarkable job of coming as close to that as a horse can. That’s why he’s going on six years in a row as leading sire because he’s such a high percentage horse and always has been.”
From a statistical standpoint, the odds were not in Spendthrift’s favor when they added Into Mischief to the list of juveniles they secured at that 2007 OBS sale. Among Hughes’ many hallmarks, however, were the fact he wasn’t afraid to take a chance and stand on his conviction.
And what he saw on the sales grounds from the son of Harlan’s Holiday has not only established unprecedented industry standards but also solidified why hope remains the vibrant heartbeat of the commercial marketplace.
“Wayne was such a positive thinker, and I can remember him saying at one point in (Into Mischief’s) career ‘We might have Bold Ruler on our hands’, and I was like ‘Yeah, that’s nice’. But that turned out to be the case,” Toffey said. “He has demonstrated his consistency, his brilliance, he can move mares up and he can take the top mares and have the same kind of results.
“He’s the horse a lifetime.”