Horse Racing Is McNall’s Other Side of the Coin

Like many a teen-ager, Bruce McNall collected coins. In 1974, when McNall was 24 and in the coin business, he bought a 2,000-year-old Greek coin for $420,000. He later sold it for almost $1 million.

Strictly by accident, McNall became one of the original owners of the Dallas Mavericks, a pro basketball team that set up shop in a football hotbed. Surprisingly, the team made money the four years McNall had an interest.

McNall got into the movie business, and among his first films were the financially successful “WarGames” and “Mr. Mom.”

It figured that if McNall got into horse racing, he would buy a colt and go right out and win the Kentucky Derby.

It didn’t work out that way. McNall’s first horse, a colt named Ruggedness, cost him $50,000 at a California auction. Soon after, serious knee problems reduced Ruggedness to a $10,000 claiming horse and he became a nonentity.

Short of a Derby winner, however, McNall has raced some impressive horses. Argument, whom he owned in partnership with record executive Berry Gordy, won the 1980 Washington D.C. International, and Track Robbery, whose purchase price was $10,000 less than Ruggedness, was the champion older filly or mare in ’82.

McNall is very much in the horse business with Nelson Bunker Hunt, the Dallas billionaire who sold him Ruggedness. Hunt, McNall and Allen Paulson, the airplane manufacturer from Encino, are the principal owners of Dahar, the Hunt-bred 4-year-old colt who will try for his third straight grass win at Santa Anita this season when he runs Monday in the $100,000 Sierra Nevada Handicap.

Hunt, like McNall, has collected coins since childhood and reportedly once bought a McNall collection for $16 million. They met through the coin business and now also have horses, motion-picture investments and a devotion to dieting as common ground.

Both men are well over 200 pounds, and McNall feels that the difference in their ages--he is 34 and Hunt is 58--is no obstacle. “Bunker enjoys fun, likes to race his horses and so do I,” McNall said. “I might be 34, going on 65, and he acts like he’s whatever he is, going on 34.”

In an inadvertent way, Hunt was responsible for McNall’s investment in the Mavericks. McNall was in Hunt’s Dallas home the day the oilman received a phone call asking him if he’d like to become a partner in the basketball franchise.

“I’ll never forget what Bunker said,” McNall said. “He said, ‘I might like to get in, but I’m afraid my horses would object.’ After he hung up, I asked him about the team, and bought in myself. I got out after four years because with the team being so far away from my Los Angeles operations, I couldn’t find the time to go to many of the games.”

It was McNall who indicated to Hunt how he could continue his expansive breeding operation in Kentucky and still retain an interest in all of the horses when they reached racing age. Hunt’s 1980 and ’81 yearling crops--more than 240 horses--were syndicated to about 20 partners, who bought shares totaling $48 million. The group includes basketball players Bill Walton and Kiki Vandeweghe, former U.S. Sen. John Tunney of California and television producer Alan Landsberg.

Hunt retained half of the shares, McNall has about a 20% interest and the horses run for McNall’s Summa Stable. Dahar, a major stakes winner in France before he was sent to trainer Charlie Whittingham in California, is from the ’81 crop. Estrapade, from the ’80 crop, is a classy filly who has made only two United States starts and may run on dirt for the first time in the $300,000 Santa Margarita Invitational Handicap at Santa Anita Feb. 24.

Although the Hunt family’s net worth has been said to be $8 billion and McNall’s wealth has been reported at $34 million, neither man wants to be part of those money shootouts that have occurred at the Keeneland yearling auctions in Kentucky in recent years. Robert Sangster of England and several oil sheiks have spent enough money there to drive Croesus to cover.

“If you have the staying power of a man like Sangster, I guess it’s all right,” McNall said. “But buying yearlings that cost that much is an awfully risky business. That Athens Decadrachm coin that I bought and sold when I was much younger, that’s my $10-million yearling.”

McNall prefers buying horses that already have a track record and continuing his relationship with Hunt. Recently, they hired financier Michael Walz, an experienced syndicator of stallions (Lyphard, Slew o’ Gold and, when he retires, Chief’s Crown) to operate a Louisville office.

“I have no farm back there,” McNall said, “and although Bunker has several farms, he’s still considered an outsider, a Texan. “This will give us an expertise and a presence there that we haven’t had before.”

Horse Racing Notes

Santa Anita has seven-horse fields for its weekend stakes, the $150,000 San Luis Obispo Handicap today and the $200,000 San Antonio Handicap Sunday. . . . Scruples has top weight of 121 pounds in the San Luis Obispo and two Charlie Whittingham-trained horses, Hail Bold King and Lord at War, share high weight of 122 in the San Antonio. . . . Other starters in the San Antonio are Al Mamoon, Tennessee Rite, Video Kid, My Habitony and American Standard.