Over the Fence and Into the Winner’s Circle

Bred from a mating nobody planned, between a stallion who wasn’t meant to be there and a trotting mare who couldn’t trot, Awesome Choice is living proof that the best nick is sometimes the one that jumps the fence.

Look away now, breeders.

If you spent the winter with the Stallion Register open on the kitchen table, scrolling through the Crosses of Gold in the NZSBA app and running test matings over your mare late into the night in search of the perfect nick, then the Jason Teaz trained Awesome Choice (Always B Charlie) is about to ruin your evening, because the cliché that a good horse can come from anywhere has rarely rung truer than it does with this fellow.

The Bill Hickey bred and owned pacer has torn up the rulebook and thrown caution to the wind, being the product of a mating so meticulously unplanned that it took place on the wrong side of a fence, between a young stallion who had no business being in that paddock and a trotting-bred mare who, by her own trainer’s account, couldn’t do much of anything at any gait, and you would have been a brave soul to even bother getting the result gaited and educated.

About the only thing in the whole story that makes any sense is the man behind it, because the longer you talk to Teaz the clearer it becomes that Awesome Choice exists for one reason alone, and that is Bill Hickey’s deep love of his horses and his stubborn refusal to give up on any of them.

The first son of Miki

At a glance you could be forgiven for mistaking Awesome Choice for one of the plentiful sons and daughters of Always B Miki gracing our tracks, and for thinking, as I did, that Perfect Sting was the first son of the American champion to stand at stud in New Zealand, when that honour actually belongs to Hickey’s own Always B Charlie, a horse whose story is one in itself.

“He broke a pastern as a yearling, then he did a tendon as a two-year-old, and then did a suspensory after a couple of starts. He’s had it all,” said Teaz.

The injuries kept Charlie sidelined for the best part of two years, and by the time he reached Teaz he was no spring chicken.

“I’ve always done a few for Bill,” Teaz explained. “I went to his to pick up some yearlings and he said, ‘well what about Charlie?’. When I went to look at him, I found this old stallion roaming with his mane down to his knees. I said to Bill that we would take him on and get him looked over by a vet and just see how we go.”

What followed was five wins and five placings for $35,322 across his five and six-year-old campaigns, the last of those wins coming at Alexandra Park on 9 October last year, and it says plenty about the horse that Teaz still talks about him like an old mate.

“He was an old stallion when he was racing still, and he was the most awesome, bloody gentleman of a horse you could ever deal with,” he said. “I was really hoping that I could race them both together, but Charlie was just too injured to carry on with, so I decided to retire him while he could still walk.”

Six weeks after that last win Charlie was on a plane to China as a stallion prospect, and whether it was good foresight or simply more of the Hickey luck, the deal has looked better with every passing month, because twelve months on his son was clearing maidens back home.

“They love him over there,” Teaz said. “He’s been serving up a storm. If Bill was a bit more well last year, we probably would have taken some straws off him or something, but we just never thought about it at the time, and of course Awesome Choice was battling as a trotter then, so we didn’t think, oh well, he’s going to start leaving them.”

A mare who couldn’t trot, pace or gallop

Teaz is wonderfully candid that Charlie could hardly have picked a less credentialed consort than That’s Where We’re At, a trotting-bred daughter of Imperial Count who joined the Hickey broodmare band at a time when the mares were, in Teaz’s words, “always sort of running in mobs up there”.

“Obviously Bill was at the accumulation stage at that point, so he took Lovely Blaze on and bred a few out of her, and every single one was useless,” Teaz said. “That’s Where We’re At in particular, she couldn’t trot, pace or gallop. It was just a total, total waste of time. Most people would have just tapped it on the head or just given it away as a hack, but Bill being Bill just kept trying.”

“Charlie was a young colt roaming up there and he managed to jump the fence, and he couldn’t have picked a worse one to get to,” he laughed. “But as it turned out, it didn’t turn out too bad.”

The pedigree on paper does little to argue with that assessment.

That’s Where We’re At is out of the unraced Armbro Invasion mare Lovely Blaze, who left three foals by trotting stallions without any of the trio showing enough to warrant perseverance, although she is a half-sister to the 2002 New Zealand Four-Year-Old Trotter of the Year Bunny’s Gold (Evander’s Gold), who for Robert Peat won eight races and took on the country’s best trotters in an injury-shortened career of just 28 starts. Their dam, the dual-gaited Power Bunny mare Lovely Bunny, produced five trotting-bred winners, and that is about the best of it going back through the tail line, unless you dig deep enough to find the smart pacers of the late 1960s and early 1970s in Bramble Hall and Stewart Hanover.

Teaz reckons the pacing was always lurking in there somewhere if you looked hard enough.

“Lovely Blaze came from John Robinson, who inherited the mare from Bob Peat, and of course Bob had that family,” he said. “So there’s always been that slight sort of pacing blood in it. Bunny’s Gold was a very, very good trotter, but if you go back far enough there’s pacing blood in there.”

What the bottom line lacks in pacing depth, the top line goes a fair way towards making up for, because while Always B Charlie may not carry the stud book standing of some of the sires represented in that Alexandra Park field last Friday night, he brings a tidy New Zealand maternal family of his own to the equation.

His dam Charleston Belle (Christian Cullen) won five races for James Stormont and was good enough to finish fifth behind Venus Serena in a Group 1 as a three-year-old filly, while her dam Elite Belle (Presidential Ball) was a mainstay of the age-group fillies’ classics in the early 2000s, running fifth behind Foreal in a Group 1 at three. Elite Belle raced for the Abernethy family, whose long association with the breed goes back to the Soky’s Atom mare Soky’s Belle, the foundation of a family that has thrown up a litany of nice pacers, headed by the former New Zealand Two-Year-Old of the Year and dual Group 1 winner Five Card Draw (American Ideal) and his New Zealand Oaks winning full sister Ideal Belle, both out of Soky’s Belle’s Butler BG daughter Blistering Belle.

Two years of trotting nowhere

As a youngster Awesome Choice was handed to Rodney Frampton, keeping a promise Hickey had made years earlier, and he was set for a career on the square gait that went, to put it kindly, nowhere in particular.

“He was given to Rodney Frampton to train, because Rodney worked for Mike Berger and he had Always B Charlie early on, and Bill always promised Rodney that he could have this fellow,” Teaz explained. “He was trotting him for about two years and getting very much nowhere, and he kept going sore in the feet, which is typical of any horse trained at Cambridge Raceway.”

“Bill was getting a bit frustrated, so he rang me and said, this horse is sore in the feet again, he’s got to go home, can you go and pick him up and just assess him for a week or two. The horse was very, very sore in the feet, so we had to get that right first, and I think just getting him off the Cambridge track sort of helped him.”

Then came the moment that changed everything, and it happened on the very first drive.

“I took him out the first day, put him in the cart, and thought, oh, how’s this thing trot, and he honestly couldn’t trot a step,” Teaz said.

“He was hopping and bouncing and he was switching to a bit of a three-legged pace, so I thought, oh, I’m going to pace this thing. I put the hobbles on him and six weeks later he qualified as a pacer. It was so unconventional, but he just took to the pacing, and I could tell pretty early on that he had a big motor, hence he qualified in six weeks, and qualified well.”

For anyone hoping to see a carbon copy of the old man, Teaz says the likeness pretty much begins and ends with the pedigree page.

“Charlie was a little bit smaller, quite nuggety, whereas this fellow is quite a big horse and he’s just grown,” he said. “He’s probably grown easily a hand this year and just strengthened up. He’s taken a while to come to it with his racing, because he bruised quick and he was quite weak, and he’s got big knees and big feet, like he’s got the biggest feet of any horse I’ve had, and he just got that big so quickly that he needed time to cope with racing.”

The personalities, it seems, are a different matter again.

“They’ve both got character, but his dad was certainly a lot easier to deal with,” Teaz said. “This fellow can be quite big and arrogant, and a few times I’ve said to him, your dad would be disgusted in you,” laughed Teaz

Could lightning strike twice?

Hickey, never one to leave a question unanswered, did try to find out whether That’s Where We’re At was simply a pacing producer in disguise, sending her to one of the best in the business to give her every chance.

“Bill did try and get the mare back in foal to Sweet Lou, he sort of thought maybe lightning would strike twice, and unfortunately the mare didn’t get in foal, so that was the end of that,” Teaz said. “That would have been quite interesting to see how it would have gone.”

As for her other trotters, the verdict remains brutally consistent.

“Useless, all useless,” Teaz said. “I had a Majestic Son one which I had quite high hopes for, but she was just a short, dumpy thing with little legs and just couldn’t trot me faster. So maybe the mare is going to throw back to the old side of the family that paced, I don’t know.”

The comparisons are already starting, too, and Teaz has heard one he quite likes.

“Peter said something the other night, he said he gave him Mi Muchacho vibes, which was quite interesting, because Mi Muchacho was a bit of an obscurely bred horse which came from nowhere,” he said. “So you never know.”

Leave the gate open

Teaz rates his charge highly, and while the reduced Harness 5000 stake means a trip south isn’t on the agenda just yet, he admits he wouldn’t be scared of anything at that level, and it appears Awesome Choice’s absence from the published eligibility list may simply be an oversight, which could give his connections something to think about if he keeps improving.

The saddest part of the story is that the man who made it all possible hasn’t been well, with Teaz saying Hickey is “probably going better than what he was over the last six months, but at least he’s at home”, and you would hope that every win from here gives him a lift, because if ever there was a breeder who deserved to see a long shot come in, it is the bloke who kept every useless trotter, kept trying, and was rewarded with a pacer he never meant to breed.

The Stallion Register will still be on the kitchen table next winter, of course, but somewhere in the back of every breeder’s mind there might now be a small voice wondering whether it’s worth leaving a gate open.