Dell Hendricks chats about his horse Taris Little Whiz and the Kentucky Reining Cup competition at Rolex 2013.

Brought to you by Soft-Ride Equine Comfort Boots (www.softrideboots.com).

Brought to you by Soft Ride Equine Comfort Boots (www.softrideboots.com).

Brought to you by Soft-Ride Equine Comfort Boots (www.softrideboots.com).

When Californian Courtney Boesch stepped up and won the amateur reining class on Northwest Whiz at the AQHA World Show last November, we did a double take. It was the then 27-year-old's fist time competing at the American Quarter Horse Association's premier event, plus she'd prevailed in this super-tough venue without a trainer.

Yeah, we know. Wow!

Many factors made her extraordinary achievement possible, among them her own inborn talent and the rich experience of her youth, which included successful trips to the AQHA's Youth World Show. She was also riding an excellent horse, one that made the finals of the 2007 National Reining Horse Association Futurity with superstar Todd Bergen.

Still, when we asked her to name the most important factor in her World Show win, she said it was "probably the connection I have with this horse." It's a connection that seemed almost fated from the start, when she spotted the gelding

for sale online and traveled 1,000 miles to try him.

See page 56 of the May 2013 issue to continue reading.

Lesson Objective
If you compete: Master the basics of the first moments of a spin (turn-around) to ensure that you finish with a bang.

If you don’t: A solid turnaround is essential for control and enhancing a horse’s guidability, and can come in handy in tight spots on the trail.

How you start a spin sets the tone for the entire maneuver, whether it’s a single 360 or a group of four spins, as in a reining pattern. There are two essential components when starting this maneuver: 1. The turn must begin with forward motion (many people think of the spin as a maneuver on the hindquarters, but it actually starts with moving forward), and 2. The horse must be “between your reins,” which literally means that if im casino spielen you lay the right rein on, the feet move; same for the left rein. When your hand moves left or right, your horse should move his feet.

Here, I’ll show you an exercise to get your horse in a thinking frame of mind for turnarounds and show you how to correctly initiate a spin. I suggest working on this with your horse in a shanked bit and with one hand on the reins, because then you and your horse have less chance of developing crutches or bad habits that’ll get in the way when you compete.

Devin Warren, Franktown, Colorado. Devin has won numerous reining titles from APHA and NRHA events, as well as been a finalist at major NRHA events. He trains reining horses and coaches non-pro and youth riders.

Greg Ward with Fillinic, the unknown mare he bought in 1962 with $3,000 borrowed from his mother. Fillinic set the young trainer on a path to stardom.

When the call came, I wept. Greg Ward, four-time National Reined Cow Horse Association Snaffle Bit futurity winner, leading breeder of futurity winners, perennial supporter of the reined cow horse industry, had died December 6, 1998, of cancer. He was 63.

Just two months earlier, he’d claimed his fourth NRCHA Futurity world championship with the most inspirational performance I’d witnessed in 20 years of equine journalism. Visibly battling the illness that would kill him, he piloted his homebred stallion Reminics Pep, a fourth-generation futurity champion, to an astonishing 12-point victory.

The event he won has been called the triathlon of performance horses. It consists of herd work (similar to cutting), a reining pattern, and work with a single cow “down the fence.” It’s a grueling challenge for the hale and hearty. For Ward, whose medical treatments had included 17 hours of cancer surgery, then kidney stone removal, it was an ordeal. But he gutted it out, beating the likes of Bob Avila, Ted Robinson, Bobby Ingersoll, and Doug Williamson.

I thought of his hat, a battered straw Resistol, size 7 1⁄4, that I’d bought at an NRCHA fundraising auction in the ’80s. It was then and is still sweat-stained and dirty, with smudged strips of double-stick tape inside the crown. The brim dips down in the front and back, as all of Ward’s hats did, and so it reminds me of him.

I paid $40 for it, and would’ve gladly paid much, much more. Here’s why.

A Dynasty Begins
Greg Ward was born and raised in Bakersfield, California, the son of a real-estate broker father and schoolteacher mother. His first real contact with horses came in high school, when he packed during the summertime for the Yosemite Park and Curry Company. A gifted athlete, he also played varsity football, baseball, and basketball, but his hopes for an athletic scholarship were ruined when a tractor accident his senior year damaged his peripheral vision. He went on to study animal husbandry at California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo, where he competed on the rodeo team and began a lifelong love affair with roping.

In 1957, at the age of 21, he married his high-school sweetheart, Laura “Shorty” Odle. He then left college to earn a living as a ranch hand for Floyd Lamb in Alamo, Nevada, where he learned, to his chagrin, that “cowboying” had more to do with putting up hay than with riding horses. Later he returned to Bakersfield to work in the feedlots before landing a job as an apprentice with horse trainer Harry Rose. They became partners, and Ward was later fond of saying that he and the curmudgeonly horseman “split everything down the middle—Harry took the profits, and I took the losses.”

In 1960, Ward went out on his own, establishing the Greg Ward training Stable in Porterville, California. He and Laura also started their family. (Son John went on to attend college on a baseball scholarship, later joining his father in horse training. Daughters Wende and Amy, also talented athletes who rode horses, are now both married with children.)

In 1962, at age 26, Ward made a purchase that was to alter the course of his life. With $3,000 borrowed from his mother, he bought a 4-year-old Quarter Horse he had in training. A smallish mare, she’d arrived in California with a carload of horses from a Clovis, New Mexico, sale yard. By a sire Ward said “nobody’d ever heard of” and out of a half-Thoroughbred mare, Fillinic was hot-tempered, sensitive, and quick as a cat. It was that catty athleticism and a deerlike lightness that convinced Ward he had to have her.

After a sensational show career, including wins at the premier stock-horse events of the day—the Salinas Rodeo and the Grand National Horse Show at the cow palace in San Francisco—Fillinic became a broodmare. Her 10 foals and their offspring changed the face of the Western-performance horse world and established a dynasty for the Ward ranch that includes the likes of cow-horse supersire Reminic, National Reining Horse Association Futurity champion Boomernic, and scores of cow horse snaffle bit futurity winners. See Ward's complete dossier.

It was the get and grand-get and great-grand-get of Fillinic—the fruits of a breeding program cannily orchestrated by Ward—that the horseman rode to such renown over four decades, the 1960s through the ’90s.