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  • 2 days ago
The sales season looks a lot different these days for Dr. Barry Eisaman and his wife Shari. The husband-and-wife duo's Eisaman Equine was a fixture at the OBS sales for decades, but their shingle has been notably absent since 2023. With the pinhooking and consigning chapter closed, the Eisamans are now focusing on the other aspect of their business: breaking and training two-year-olds and rehabilitating older horses for some of the country's leading ownership groups. Follow along for a morning of training with Dr. Eisaman and get a look at a pair of Flightline colts, inluding a $1.8 million Fasig-Tipton graduate, and a promising youngster out of champion Songbird.
Transcript
00:01The TDN stopped in for a morning of training at Iseman Equine, where Dr. Barry Iseman spoke
00:07with us about his career in the industry and introduced us to a few two-year-olds who might
00:11just be stars in the making. The first flight line coming out is West Point and Vinny Viola,
00:21St. Elias. This is the flight line out of the Mayor Proud Emma. He was really good at three
00:27and four. People are thinking, well, this year they're not going to be much because he's
00:34not meant to sire two-year-olds. But many of those that I have are in the bridle and they're
00:39precocious and they're forward. My undergrad was in Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh,
00:48and then vet school at UPenn. I moved to this area. When I first came here, there were a lot
00:54of practitioners in the greater Ocala area that did a lot of broodmare work, but there
00:58weren't really that many that did sports medicine type stuff. Then when I came into town, I quickly
01:05was the go-to guy for lamenesses and difficult sports medicine stuff. I practiced probably
01:12for 20 years or so here. Then when Sherry and I got married, she had been doing pin hooking
01:20her whole life and we just sort of transitioned to doing this. Now, there's 250 horses here.
01:27As far as the veterinary stuff, I become a thinker and a finger pointer and work out the problems.
01:36So this next horse that's going to come out, he's by Into Mischief out of KP Dreamin. He'll
01:41be trained by Baffert. He's owned by the Ownership Group, which is a long list, but Stone Street
01:47and Starlight and Matacat, SF Bloodstock. They've named all their horses. There's 21 here. This colt,
01:57they just named Hughes, which is after the two brothers, you know, Jack Hughes, who lost his teeth
02:02and scored the goal. We must have three or four or five horses on the Derby Trail, one being Iron
02:11Honor
02:12that just won the Gotham the other day. We broke him for St. Elias and Glassman Racing. He was our
02:19sixth winner of the Gotham. Golden Tempo for Sherry DeVoe is one that, uh, two wins and a third. And,
02:27you know, the Louisiana Derby will be his next big test. We've had one Derby winner that we sold,
02:34uh, I'll have another, who was about that close to being a triple crown. You know, he had an injury
02:40that precluded him from running in the Belmont. But over the years, I don't know, we probably had
02:4610, 12, 15 Derby starters, which is hard to do in its own right. So this next colt is another
02:55flight
02:56line, and he's by out of Park Avenue. He was 1.8 million. And he's West Point, John Oxley, Lane's
03:04Inn, Summerwind Farm. He's got a whole laundry list of folks in the ownership column. A very,
03:11very good prospect.
03:16I mean, we broke, in the current group of stallions that are out there, we broke Mineframe,
03:21who's very current. And Mackenzie, we broke for Baffert. Olympiad, we broke for, uh, that
03:29ownership group. So we're doing pretty good in the stallions. The last grade one winner that
03:36Bill trained, that came through here to be broken, was, uh, Arthur's Ride. He's his first
03:41crop sire. He stands at, uh, TaylorMade. Arthur's even probably more white than Tappet
03:47ever was, because Arthur. I mean, young thoroughbred horses, their minds aren't adjusted to a white
03:53horse. And he would come on the track, and they would think that something just landed
03:59from a spaceship. It's really pretty funny. This next one's by Gunrunner, and he's out of Songbird.
04:09And they'd named him Mendoza, who is named after the, uh, Heisman Trophy winning quarterback.
04:18We decided very early on that we were not gonna have a racing stable. There's too many people,
04:25many people, that sell horses and also have a racing stable. And the knee-jerk reaction is,
04:31so you've set the five you like best, aside, and you're offering for sale what you don't want.
04:37So we never wanted to be in that mousetrap, so we sell everything. As they go off and do well,
04:42it just makes the snowball get bigger. You know, those are happy people. They're coming back.
04:47They feel they were well-treated. And you sell them a second horse and a third and fourth horse.
04:53Okay, ready to move on to a golf cart?
04:57So there's probably 80 or so turnout paddocks, and they're all in semi-circles around all the barn.
05:06Early on, early breaking process, everything is out alive.
05:11And I usually start breaking horses that come in from a breeder or the yearling sales about two days after
05:20they arrive.
05:20And they get a couple days of making sure the temperature's okay and they're not ill.
05:27I find that when you start early like that, they're a little bit disoriented or a little bit tired from
05:34the sale.
05:35If you give them two or three weeks to get their feet on the ground, you're producing fire-breathing dragons
05:41to start working with.
05:43So it works well for me just to get going.
05:46When we start to break them, they're going to be coming to the track for their first appearance in pairs
05:51in four to five weeks.
05:53Their first, second or third day on the track, they start to go through this gate.
05:57That just teaches them not to be afraid to go into a confined area.
06:02So they'll walk through that gate until they're sick and tired of doing it.
06:06And that gate's made out of PVC pipe.
06:09So if they get in there and stop and they lean against it, it'll creak.
06:13You know, like a PVC pipe would do.
06:17And that begins to teach them that the gate can talk to you.
06:20It can make noise. Don't be afraid of the noise.
06:24I come up here once in a while, sit and watch training because it gives you like a different three
06:30-dimensional view of what's going on.
06:33I've been doing it for a long time.
06:35So the people, the customers that send horses here, I've known for a long time.
06:40And they don't have a need to or try to micromanage anything.
06:44They want the horses when they're ready.
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