Foolish? No, Still Pleasure for Fans

The old horse looked out of the stall and saw four wild turkeys pecking in his grain tub. In the paddock, there were deer.

“He must have been thinking, ‘What have these guys got me into?”’ said Ron Vanderhoef.

What the 21-year-old stallion had gotten into was a barn on Vanderhoef’s 7,200-acre ranch at Sheridan, Wyo., close to the Bighorn National Forest near the Montana border.

It was a long way from the Blue Grass for the horse called Foolish Pleasure.

There’s a joke about a stranded motorist walking past a horse in a field. The animal can talk, and says: “Nobody remembers me or cares about me, but it wasn’t this way when I won the Derby.”

The man goes to the main house, offers to buy the horse, and is shocked when the owner wants only $100.

He quickly produces the money and says, “You’ve just sold an amazing horse.”

“You think so,” the former owner replies. “Well, just don’t believe that baloney about the Kentucky Derby.”

No baloney! Foolish Pleasure won the Kentucky Derby in 1975--and some people remember.

“I get two or three letters a day about him,” said Vanderhoef, who purchased the horse privately in California and brought him to the ranch in October. “I call them Foolish Fans.”

Whatever happens to them, Derby winners become stitches in the fabric of American social history.

At every stop during Foolish Pleasure’s 26-hour trip from the Kerr Stock Farm to the Horseshoe Ranch, Vanderhoef would tell people about a Derby winner being in the trailer.

“They’re not interested in that,” Vanderhoef’s wife, Kathy, told him.

“They should be,” he said.

They were.

“People would say, ‘I’ve never touched a Kentucky Derby winner,’ and they would pet him. He was like a pussycat.”

That description might amuse people who have dealt with Foolish Pleasure over the years. One of them would be Lito, the stallion’s caretaker at Kerr Stock Farm at Riverside, Calif.

“Lito calls him The Warrior,” Vanderhoef said. “Foolish (Vanderhoef sometimes drops the “Pleasure”) just doesn’t want to be fooled with, not even in little things like brushing him and changing shoes.”

The night before he was taken to Wyoming, Foolish Pleasure got loose and had grooms climbing trees before he was caught.

“Dad is the only guy to handle him and feed him,” Vanderhoef said of his 73-year-old father, Lance, stallion manager at Horseshoe Ranch, a longtime breeder of ranch horses.

Foolish Pleasure was a fiery competitor. Racing in top-level competition in 1974-76, he won 16 of 26 starts, with four seconds and three thirds.

His wins included all seven of his starts at 2; the Derby, Flamingo and Wood Memorial at 3; and the Suburban and Brooklyn handicaps at 4. He finished second in the Preakness and Belmont Stakes.

One his victories in his Derby year of 1975 was in a match race against the great filly, Ruffian. She broke down and had to be put down.

As a stallion, Foolish Pleasure has sired 35 stakes winners. The plan is to pasture-breed him at Horseshoe Ranch. In other words, put him out with 10 to 15 mares and let nature take its course.

Vanderhoef, 50, became involved with thoroughbreds because “in the last four or five years we wanted to upgrade the athleticism and size of our quarterhorses for ranch work.”

He breeds quarterhorse sires to thoroughbred mares to produce ranch horses.

“We became aware of thoroughbreds through friends of ours in California”--Ken and Babe Schiffer of the Hat Ranch, Vanderhoef said.

“We suddenly switched from ranch horse to race horse,” added Vanderhoef, who breeds both quarterhorses and thoroughbreds.

One of three mares Vanderhoef bought from the Schiffers three years ago was Rosey Cloud.

It was when he took Rosey Cloud to Kerr Stock Farm to be bred last spring that Vanderhoef first saw Foolish Pleasure, who had been moved there from Kentucky in fall 1992

“I fell in love with him.” Vanderhoef said.

He found out later that Foolish Pleasure’s stock as a stallion was declining.

“I was told he was suffering from declining fertility and he was hard to handle,” recalled Vanderhoef.

He called his father and asked, “Do you think you can handle Foolish Pleasure? This stallion is mean.”

The old cowboy said he could, and so his son made the deal.

“It was an emotional reason to get him,” said Vanderhoef, the No. 1 Foolish Fan.

The first time he approached a mare in his new home she started kicking and he backed off. “Pretty soon they were nuzzling,” Vanderhoef said.

In March, Foolish Pleasure will be put in with a bunch of mares.

No matter what happens, however, Foolish Pleasure “will never be moved again. You feel flattered to have him around. That horse is never going to have another uncomfortable moment.”

For the rest of his days, the old horse can roll in the snow or stand belly deep in grass.