Strike Two

By Arnold Kirkpatrick
First Published: 16 July 2009 - Issue Number: 13

Bill Young Jr. is a nice man – quiet, smart, private to the point of being very shy, honest and practical. On June 9, he shocked the Thoroughbred world with the announcement that he was dispersing almost all of the horses who are owned by Overbrook Farm, which had become one of the major success stories in the U.S. Thoroughbred business over the past quarter century.

“I simply don’t have the passion for the Thoroughbred sport that my father did, despite my respect for the business,” Young explained.
Passion is an essential component to participation in the Thoroughbred business – always has been; always will be. Further, it must be the sort of consuming passion that characterizes new, young love, the sort of passion that allows one to dispense totally with reality, to accept repeated rejection in pursuit of one’s goal, to pursue that goal with a single-mindedness that enables one to totally annihilate any extraneous factors that deter its pursuit.
Bill’s father, W. T. Young Sr., had the passion. It came from a drive that propelled him from an average upbringing to one of the most compelling success stories in history – a story that would cause palpitations in the heart of Horatio Alger.
About halfway through his remarkable life, he bought a piece of property on the south side of Lexington and began to build Overbrook Farm, which has grown from about 435 acres in 1972 to approximately 2,400 acres today. The enormous success that was ...

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