Club for ‘Girls’ Only Can’t Give Up Old Habits

They call themselves “the Girls.” Their racing silks are white and red. The red? It’s a big, smooching, red lip. Cliche? Maybe. Degrading? Absolutely not.

Ten women, some of them from the Los Angeles area and with some sort of tie to Los Alamitos Race Course, have formed a quarter horse-buying syndicate. They pool their money, they go to an annual quarter horse sale. They buy a horse. They race the horse. They win the money. At least this year.

Old Habits, a 2-year-old gelding who was purchased by the 10 women for $18,500, has earned almost $400,000 this racing season. Old Habits, with a coat the color of warm, roasted chestnuts and a perky flaxen mane, has charmed his owners with eyes that seem to wink in recognition more than his incredible will to win.

Off the horse’s performances this year, most notably a second-place finish at the All American Futurity in Ruidoso, N.M., a race for which Old Habits had the fastest qualifying time among nearly 200 horses and a race in which he was trapped in traffic and still lost by only a neck, Wayne Lukas asked to purchase Old Habits from the Girls for a quarter-million dollars.

Lukas, the trainer of Triple Crown race-winning thoroughbreds, was turned down.

“We’ll never sell Old Habits,” unofficial spokeswoman Melodie Knuchell of Los Alamitos said. “We love him too much.”

This partnership got its start about four years ago when Sue Hukari and Bonnie Vessels of Bonsall, Calif.; Janice Knorpp of Clarendon, Texas, and Mary Thread of Poway, Calif.--whose husbands had been involved with horses or the horse business--decided to buy a horse.

Since then they have been joined by Sharon Gordon of Orange, Cathy Monji of Newport Beach, Knuchell, Connie Cobb of Tidewater, Ore.; Glori Ekker of Hanksville, Utah, and Leslie Schwabacher of Daniel, Wyo.

“It started,” Knuchell said, “with Bonnie and some girlfriends going to the annual quarter horse sale at Bonnie and her husband Scoop’s farm in Bonsall. Bonnie and Sue fell in love with a horse. Scoop told Bonnie, ‘We’re here to sell horses, not buy them.’ It turned out the horse, a filly, did really well.

“So Bonnie said, ‘Maybe the girls should get together and pick a horse.’ ”

It’s not as if the women were totally naive about the horse business. Knuchell is the nominations director and simulcast administrator at Los Alamitos. Monji was married to a trainer and is now the secretary for Los Alamitos Chairman and CEO Ed Allred. Vessels lives on a horse farm, where Old Habits spends quality time.

Still, this was not a collection of horse flesh experts. “I got into this mostly to learn the business and not at all to make money,” Gordon says.

Gordon, Knuchell and Monji are seated in a dining room at Los Alamitos and talking about their passion, about this business of finding a horse and about their love of an animal that is clearly more than a winning ticket to cash.

“Old Habits nearly raced his heart out in New Mexico,” Knuchell says. “After the race, his whole body went into seizures because he had used every ounce of energy he had. We were all crying. He was close to dying.”

Knuchell will go down to the barns at Los Alamitos when Old Habits is on the ground and have lunch with her buddy. She will drive down to Bonsall once or twice a week when Old Habits is stabled there just to kiss his wet nose or rub his back.

And when Old Habits races, each of his 10 owners will kiss him smack on his white nose and leave 10 big lipstick prints. It was this habit, of kissing their horses and leaving the smudgy prints, that was the genesis of the idea for the racing silks. If people want to think it is too corny, too girlie, then that is just too bad.

Jockey Dusty Stimpson has taken some ribbing when he rides in the silks of the Girls. But that razzing “has stopped since Old Habits is winning,” Stimpson says. “Nobody says a thing now. These women are the greatest people to ride for. They have faith in me and they let me do my job.”

At first, Knuchell says, the women would get pointed at, whispered about, at the horse sales. Now men come to them asking advice. Or men shadow their every move at the sales, checking to see which horses the Girls are interested in. “Some have even asked to join us,” Knuchell says. “But that’s not going to happen.”

As far as the Girls know, they are the only all-female syndicate in the country. They have been compared to the Beardstown Ladies, an Illinois group who got together to pool money and invest in the stock market. Books have been written about and by the Beardstown Ladies, but the Girls have no such aspirations.

“But I think we will start advising other women,” Knuchell says. “I don’t think we can get much bigger ourselves, but people keep wanting to join. I think we’ll start telling people how to do this. But they’ll have to form their own groups.”

Says Ekker, who is an emergency room physician: “This is a good introduction to the business without the big expense.”

Adds Monji: “This is a way to make training costs reasonable and allows more people to take part in the excitement and joy of ownership.”

Most of all, though, it seems these women have made a friend.

Is there any way, any amount of money that could be offered that would prod the Girls to sell Old Habits?

“No,” Knuchell says without hesitation. Gordon and Monji are nodding. “No way.”