Black Mackee? What A Stud! Stallion Still Sires Good Winners Despite His Advanced Age

McDonald Glacier stares down from the nearby Mission Range at the solitary form of a stallion poking around at his leisure. Stroll through the sunlit expanse of green that is this horse’s front yard and you come to believe.

No other animal could have it this good.

Some people don’t live as well as the strapping black stallion with three white socks who greets you with a spirited whinny and a furious nod of his magnificent head.

This is Black Mackee, the sultan of Skylark Ranch and a legend in the thoroughbred industry.

At 21, he’s not only outlived some of his 259 sons and daughters, he’s still standing.

Standing is notable in itself for a horse born on April 12, 1976. Although horses occasionally last 30 years, 21 is a full life and then some.

But standing in the thoroughbred business means Black Mackee is still producing offspring, firing bullets with the precision of a biological marvel. His get have earned more than $3 million at race tracks from Canada to Louisiana.

Since his own promising career was cut short 18 years ago by a broken sesamoid, a small bone near the ankle, Black Mackee has thrown sons and grandsons, daughters and granddaughters, runner after runner.

Most made it or will make it to the racetrack. They are, or were, full of run and long on heart. Mackee babies continue to enrich an industry that suffers from a worldwide shortage of competitive runners.

Black Mackee’s owners, Bob and Susan Stuart, bought him 10 years ago for $20,000 from a Port Angeles, Wash., horseman named Mose McDonald.

If that were Stuart’s only transaction, his reputation as a horse trader would be secure.

And though he parted with the horse too early, and in hindsight far too generously, McDonald made out OK, too. McDonald picked Black Mackee out of a Spokane sale for $3,000, Stuart said.

The colt won seven of 10 races as a 2-year-old in 1978, including the Gottstein Futurity at Longacres and the Spokane Futurity, before breaking down on a frozen track at Yakima. Although he was never the same, he came back in 1980 to run in the money six times in his final 11 starts.

Away from the track as a 3-year-old in ‘79, Mackee filled in his time as a promising young sire.

“Mose told me he once bred him to a mare who hadn’t had a winner since the Civil War,” chuckles Stuart. “He’s had a lot of bad mares and gotten runners out of ‘em. Breed him to a fence post and you’ll get something that’ll win.”

Stuart had planned to retire when Black Mackee came into his life. “As soon as I bought him, his babies started running a hole in the wind,” he said. “It put me back in business.”

Black Mackee is a super stud.

In his business, covering is the operative word. Breeding season at the Stuart ranch runs from February to June 1. In that time, Black Mackee will cover 30-40 mares.

“He never loses his enthusiasm,” Stuart said. “He never goes and runs behind the barn, I’ll tell you that. He’ll do two mares a day if we need to. I think he’d do three, if I needed him to.”

He consistently performs despite an audience. Romance isn’t part of the rendezvous. There are no candles and moonlight to inspire mood.

When her cycle is right, when it has been determined that she’s fertile, a mare is led into Mackee’s breeding shed. She’s held, front feet on a ramp that makes it easier for Mackee to mount. The sire, also carefully watched, completes the job.

They bring in mares from Canada, Washington, Oregon, the Dakotas and California, Stuart said.

The fee is a flat $2,000. Eleven months and a couple of days later, another runner enters the world.

If it’s business, it’s a business of love. Stuart and his ranch manager, Randy Hovet, say they regard the prolific Mackee as family.

“He’s better looking than I am,” Stuart says. “He makes more money than I do. And he has more fun.”

Standing close to 17 hands and weighing some 1,350 pounds, Black Mackee is an imposing animal, a son of Captain Courageous and a great-great-great-great-grandson of the immortal Man o’ War.

“I think Captain Courageous influenced the breeding in Washington more than any other horse,” Stuart said. “His daddy - Black Mackee’s grandfather - was Sailor. He was really tough.”

Toughness with a gentle nature permeates the Mackee line. His progeny have 566 wins and 995 place finishes out of 3,669 starts. Washington Thoroughbred Breeders Association figures show they have won 15 so-called black-type races and have run second in 10 others. Black type designates significant stakes races.

The Mackee line’s winnings are approaching $4 million, remarkable in that many of his offspring run for modest purses at local tracks.

“They’ve made it a nickel at a time,” Stuart laughs.

Mackee’s offspring - the majority that get to the racetrack - have earned an average of $18,000. “Most of ‘em start,” Stuart said. “The people who breed their mares to him get their money back in a hurry.”

On the ranch, surrounded by horses of varying size, age and talent - 14 mares, six yearlings and nine babies - Stuart is proud and humbled by all that’s come out of his Skylark spread. He walks a piece of the nearly 1,000 acres of this thoroughbred heaven nestled between Ronan and Poulson, Mont., and says he feels lucky to be alive.

Diabetes cost him his kidneys. He had a transplant donated by his son, Scott, 37, who lives in Colorado Springs, Colo.

“He told me if I needed one, he had two,” Stuart said. “I was on dialysis for 4 hours every other day. Terrible, but it kept me alive. A while back I called him and said I might need that kidney. He never took a backward step. Looked on it as a big adventure.”

Surgery in Seattle was completed on May 30. Stuart, 61, has come back steadily since then.

As he walks among the horses, counting every day he feels good his “gift time,” Stuart draws distinctions between horse and rider.

“Take a mare, wean the colt and in a month she doesn’t recognize her colt,” he says. “If they thought ahead, they’d never poop on their hay, would they?

“First thing they’ll do when they see something way over there,” he says, waving a hand in the distance, “is jump up and run a half-mile, then turn around to look to see what it was. Their means of survival is speed. We’ve just sort of capitalized on that.”

Capitalized well.

The 29 horses, all owned by Stuart, grazing on a recent brilliant late-September afternoon make for a Mackee museum. You mingle with Northwest racing royalty. Tangle Tiger, mother of $171,290 winner Payday Mackee, is on the grounds.

A 14-year-old mare named Miss Lightning is here as well.

“Since she came here, her Mackee babies have made more than $250,000,” Stuart points out. Among her successful runners are Wildwood Mac, Mackee’s Express and Courville Trail.

Stuart raised and sold Payday Mackee before he became a multiple stakes-winner. Perhaps learning from that, Stuart campaigned Mackee’s Express himself. The horse earned $139,469. The Stuarts also raced Courville Trail under their own colors. He’s won $45,503. Wildwood Mac - a 4-year-old and another Stuart standard-bearer - is up to $67,103.

The Stuarts also maintained part interest in Guy Mackee, a 1985 foal colt whose earnings topped $132,000. Black Mackee colts and fillies have won stakes races at Billings, Great Falls, Spokane, Longacres, Yakima, various tracks in California and at Louisiana Downs, where a son of Black Mackee named Big Sturgeon won most of his $202,542.

“Big Sturgeon was named horse of the meeting there in ‘87 over Alysheba,” Stuart said.

An ‘83 colt, Big Sturgeon was foaled under the stewardship of McDonald in Port Angeles.

Hovet and his family now live in the ranch house with the sprawling yard set off by Hazeltime poplars. The Stuarts moved off the property to a 26-acre place on the Jocko River.

“Mackee won all that,” Stuart said.

This is Mackee’s off-season, when he “comes out in the evening for an hour, sleeps, eats and plays around during the day,” Stuart said.

He has a sandlot to kick around in. He naps in the afternoon, by summer in the shade, away from the flies, by winter in his stall, out of the elements. He has special shoes in winter to keep him from slipping on the ice.

He even has company outside in the winter. “I don’t put fillies out here (in the field behind his shed) but I’ll let the colts in,” Stuart said. “Toward spring, when he starts showing that this is his place, I move the colts out.”

So what stokes the great sire’s fire?

Equal parts nature and care.

“We’ve had him tested,” Stuart said. “He’s super fertile. Part of it’s due to nutrition. Part of it’s just being an athlete. He gets a lot of exercise.”

Come February, and another breeding season, the people at Skylark turn scientific.

“You’re never really sure when a mare is going to ovulate,” Stuart explained, “so we usually breed them every other day for three breedings. I have a teaser stud we use who’s very good. You can almost tell by him what the mare is doing. If he gets real interested, you know she’s about to breed.

“We also use a vet a lot … to see (if the mare is fertile) for sure.”

“We put mares under lights. They cycle according to how much light they get in their eyes. We start them on Dec. 1 with lights so they get 16 hours of daylight and 8 hours of dark. By February, they’ll be cycling with fertile follicles.”

The timing is good for the age of the colt. All thoroughbreds have an official Jan. 1 birthdate. The closer to New Year’s Day they’re actually born, the more developed they usually are as 2-year-olds.

“It also keeps down the board bills,” Stuart said. “Nobody wants to pay board bills. People want to bring their mares in, get them bred and take ‘em home. It’s cheaper than leaving them two or three months to get them bred.”

Stuart grew up with horses in Albuquerque. He won his first race at Ruidoso Downs in 1953.

“It was a quarterhorse race with a $1,000 purse,” he remembers. “I got $600 for the win. A lot of money in 1953. I won a trial the other day in Billings for a $1,000 purse. I got 55 percent for the win, $550.”

That says a lot about the shrinking horse-racing dollar.

Still, the economics in the long run have been good enough to encourage two of the Stuarts’ four children to pursue the game.

Their daughter, Jennifer, is married to Anthony Saavedera, who runs horses in southern California. Their older son, Clinton, is a leading trainer at Remington (Okla.) Park.

Sandra and Scott Stuart aren’t involved in the horse business.

Stuart surveys the young stock that rally to him affectionately when he opens their corral gate.

One is particularly well-bred.

“See that one?” he says. “Doesn’t have a name. Usually if you’re going to sell them, you let new owners name them. I think I’m going to name that one.

“I’ll call him Thank You Montana. I love Montana.”

After an hour in the sun, lazing around, Black Mackee is led back to his stall, possibly in complete agreement with Bob Stuart’s deep sentiment for the land.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 3 Color photos