More Than Just Meat on the Hoof

If it weren’t for the dusty mountains in the backyards, and the cool spring pond, if it weren’t for the green and rolling hills and the bright red flowers everywhere, if it weren’t for men wearing cowboy hats and the cooks at the grill flipping burgers, grilling hot dogs and insisting you take plenty of salsa with it all, you might think this was the NFL combine.

For what we have here are hundreds of men and women scribbling notes on a crib sheet, paying $500 for X-rays of a prospective purchase and generally eyeing the athletes, trying to figure out if that little crooked bone will hurt the speed, if that tiny scar means there had been a serious injury somewhere in the past.

But no, this isn’t an NFL combine, even if fortunes can be made or wasted here. It’s the Vessels Schvaneveldt Sale of quarter horses Tuesday at the Vessels Stallion Farm here.

More than 200 horses are up for inspection. The babies, and they are babies, barely a year old most of them, are pulled from their stalls time and again, made to turn and pose, hold up their heads, raise up their tails. They must have their insides scoped and their bones X-rayed. Even their teeth are scrubbed, for who wants a horse with yellow teeth?

Denny Ekins, skin weathered but with a smile as soft as liquid soap, tips back his cowboy hat as he sits at a table. Ekins, 50, has been coming to these sales for nearly 30 years. He comes armed with checkbooks from other people, clients who trust his ability to judge the potential of a youngster whose routine of frolicking in some lovely pasture next to his mom has suddenly been disrupted by strangers who whisper as they poke and prod, then look around to make sure no one is watching.

“It gets your stomach going, it sure does,” Ekins says. Ekins is a trainer at Los Alamitos, head of Denny Ekins Racing Stables. A child of a Utah ranch, Ekins has been around horses his entire life. He moved to California about 25 years ago and never left. He lives in Cypress and his 15-year-old son, Robert, is with him on this day, evaluating horses and learning the business.

Ekins wears a big, brassy belt buckle with the word “Tolltac” on it, Tolltac being Ekins’ most successful quarter-horse runner and winner of $1.4 million. The idea today, of course, is to find another Tolltac--and on the cheap if possible.

The quarter-horse sales have always been for the smaller guys. That’s what Frank “Scoop” Vessels III, who owns the farm and who puts on the sale, says. This is not for the Saudi Arabian billionaires who jet into Keeneland in Kentucky or Saratoga in New York for the big thoroughbred sales.

Still, 211 quarter horses were sold Tuesday. The cumulative price was $6.5 million, up 34% from last year. Wayne Lukas and his wife, Laura, paid the highest price--$500,000 for a yearling filly named Corona Caper, so this isn’t all about the little man either.

Ekins is one of those little men, though. He has a client in Las Vegas and a client in Saudi Arabia. But the client in Saudi Arabia is an American engineer, not some golden sheik. Ekins will be looking at horses even cheaper than the average sale price of $30,817.

And when you compare this to the NFL combine, Ekins gently points out, “At least at the combines you can see the players run. And they’ve actually played football.”

These fragile animals have not begun to practice their profession. They have not been out on a track with a saddle and a rider on their backs. They have not run for stopwatches, only to keep up with their mothers. They have known only playful romps in the grass and loads of food and a warm tongue across their brows from mom.

And then they are brought to Vessels. Their eyes are wide and keep moving, left and right. They whinny and they sometimes look a little disgusted when their bridle is grabbed and they are brought out of the stall, again, so some stranger can feel their legs or look nosily at their rear end.

“We’ll be lucky to get out of here with one horse,” Ekins says early in the day, when only 20 of the 211 horses have been auctioned, “because of the [financial] limitations put on us, because of who we’re here for.”

Ekins pages through his sale guide, a 280-page bible filled with important information on all the horses. There is a page full of names and numbers that you’d need a special education to understand. Information about the breeding, about the sires, about the dams and the second and third dams, even the fourth dams, and about the races won and lost by those horses.

On the day before the sale, Ekins and his son visited the horses at their stalls. They had purchased the X-rays of the horses they were most interested in.

Ricky Overly, a vet for Los Alamitos, came with another Los Alamitos doctor to X-ray and scope all the horses. For about $500, prospective buyers could study the film and share Overly’s expertise. Is that little shadow something or nothing? What do you think? Should I spend $50,000?

The horse Ekins is aiming for, Indy Car, a brown colt by Rare Form and My Little Deuce Coup, is hip No. 264, meaning it won’t be on the auction block until late in the day. This is the horse his Saudi Arabian client would like. Ekins has been told to spend no more than $12,000, so he demurs when asked to walk back and show a visitor what it is about the horse he likes. “I don’t want to show too much interest now,” Ekins says.

But Ekins has plenty to do until No. 264 comes up.

He begins bidding on hip No. 39, Alpine Social, a pretty brown colt with bright eyes and certain pleasing stubbornness about being paraded in front of these men and women with money. For $12,000 Ekins wins. He gets Alpine Social for his Las Vegas client and rubs his hands, satisfied at the purchase.

It is not until nearly three hours later that Ekins is successful again in a bid for BCR Run Around Sue, a chestnut filly of some spirit and good breeding. The price for her was $7,500, a bargain Ekins thinks, and the horse will belong to a client in St. George, Utah.

By next year, Ekins expects both these horses to be racing at Los Alamitos. That is when it will be clear whether the money was well-spent or squandered. Ekins keeps waiting, though, for No. 264 to come up for bid and this time the process isn’t so satisfying. The horse is sold for $8,000, but only after Ekins learned that it would do him no good to keep bidding, that there is someone in the crowd willing to spend much more than Ekins’ limit of $12,000.

The bidding is done not only in person but by satellite. People all over the world can turn their satellite dishes to just the right frequencies, can dial a number that will ring on a special bank of red phones.

You might be able to picnic under umbrellas on grazing grass and buy jewelry shaped like horses and amateur paintings of horses and pastures, but there is also big business being conducted.

And there is still room for the little guy, for Denny Ekins and his son Robert, who quietly moves from horse to horse on his own, making his own judgments and whispering them to his dad. But the big boys have found quarter horses too. Wayne Lukas will put in a call from Saratoga.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com