Ned Toffey on the Impact and Talents of B. Wayne Hughes

Ned Toffey leaned against a wall in the back ring at Keeneland in 2003 watching a yearling he'd raised get ready go through the ring when owner/breeder B. Wayne Hughes approached him with a proposition that would change his life.

Toffey knew Hughes because he was a broodmare manager at Three Chimneys Farm, where Hughes boarded his mares. Hughes wanted to buy a farm in Central Kentucky and asked Toffey if he would manage it.

"He didn't have a particular farm in mind at the time," Toffey recalled. "We even went and looked at a few farms but nothing was really quite what he was looking for. One day, he came into town and let me know he had found a place I might have heard of—it was Spendthrift Farm."

Hughes bought the iconic farm that been the home to Triple Crown winners Seattle Slew and Affirmed, dual classic winner Nashua, and breed-shaping sire Raise a Native in 2004. The founder of the self-storage giant Public Storage, which he grew from a $50,000 investment into a publicly traded company worth $3.6 billion, according to Forbes.com, was backing off of his day-to-day involvement in the company and needed another project.

"This seemed to be the perfect next step for him," said Toffey. "He always wants to have a project. He had been a breed-to-race guy, but with the farm his profile changed 180 degrees. Now we were selling yearlings and restoring the farm. One day, he said to me, 'We've got this great stallion complex; I guess we ought to do something with it.'

"The stallion game was something he could really sink his teeth into because it involved so many of the things he liked—negotiating in terms of buying a horse, marketing and finding the best ways to package a stallion, and the whole sales aspect."

Hughes loved mining for ideas or ways to improve on practices already in place.

"His mind never shut off and he loved the idea of working," said Toffey. "There were very few occasions, whether you were at dinner, at a football game, whether you were traveling—no matter what—that he wouldn't bring up an idea or a variation on an idea.

"He once told me, 'I have 100 ideas a day and 99 of them are bad. I need you to tell me which ones are bad.' And by 'you,' I mean everybody at Spendthrift and, quite frankly, anyone he was in contact with. He was constantly seeking other people's opinions to learn from their perspective."

One idea led to the innovative "Share the Upside" program, which allowed breeders the opportunity to earn lifetime breeding rights to a young stallion if they committed to breeding to the horse during his first two seasons. If a breeder owned a lifetime breeding right by the third season, Hughes knew it would be used. Getting mares during the second and third seasons are particularly tough for young stallions so the program helped keep mares on the books. Then if a stallion became successful, the breeder was rewarded for supporting the horse early on.

Other Kentucky farms soon adopted the program. Toffey recalled Hughes being contacted by John Phillips, owner of Darby Dan Farm, who said he loved the program and wanted to use it. Phillips added that he would be happy to call it something else as to not confuse it with Spendthrift's.

"Wayne told him, 'Why would you do that? Then you've got to explain it all over again,'" Toffey recalled of the conversation. "That was so typical of Wayne. So often conventional wisdom had everyone thinking one way and Wayne was thinking the complete opposite. He wanted everybody to use it."

Toffey said Hughes was a huge influence on him particularly in challenging traditional ways of doing things, in pushing himself to see things from different perspectives, and to never be satisfied with the status quo.

After Hughes acquired Spendthrift, he and Toffey walked "darn near every inch" of the 800-acre property, tracking through woods, crossing creeks, and inspected every field and barn while talking through what was good and what wasn't.

"Talking with him I began to realize he was seeing everything completely different than I was," Toffey recalled. "He was totally unfazed by the scope of the project and not afraid to think big. As a matter of fact, he appreciated doing things on a grand scale. He had a great combination of being willing to spend money to do things that needed to be done and done right, and also he had tremendous respect for the value of a dollar."

Toffey admired, too, Hughes' ability to quickly distill any project or agreement to its essence and to seal a deal with this word.

In 2003, he sold a piece of grade 2-placed 3-year-old Atswhatimtalknbout to director Steven Spielberg prior to the Kentucky Derby (G1). Spielberg showed up at Santa Anita Park with a contract that Hughes described at the time as "a small phone book." According to Toffey, Hughes said he ripped off the last page of the contract and wrote out that Spielberg agreed to buy X percent and that Hughes agreed to sell him X percent, that the director agreed to pay X percent of the bills, and he would receive X percent of the earnings. Then they both signed the page.

"Certainly all our agreements are not like that but it shows you how in a minute or two, Wayne could boil down the heart of any contract," Toffey recalled. "He was very, very savvy and could sort through all the extraneous information and get it right."

Besides his creative and busy mind, Toffey also admired Hughes' generosity. In particular, his devotion and low-profile commitment to funding research into treating children's leukemia. Hughes lost his youngest son, Parker, to leukemia in 1997.

"He donated huge amounts of money, but more importantly, he devoted his time, his expertise, and his business acumen to the challenge of solving children's cancer," Toffey said. "And, he never wanted to talk about it because he felt if he did, it would diminish what he was doing. So he might be kind of ticked off at me right now, but I feel people really need to understand the kind of person he was. There are a lot of people that will never know how he affected their lives."

Toffey said he knows all too well how much Hughes affected him personally.

"I couldn't never think off the top of my head all of the things that I've learned working for him," he said. "The way he challenges ideas and doesn't just accept conventional thinking, and that once you have a good idea, that doesn't mean game over. It means you're going to constantly continue to try to make that idea better. I think all of us at Spendthrift would say that he's rubbed off on all of us, and we're all the better for it."

Hughes was a forward-thinker, too. While many may anticipate a dispersal sale on the horizon, nothing of the sort will happen. A year ago, Hughes already began the transition. His son-in-law Eric Gustavson, who is married to Hughes' daughter Tamara, is listed as the farm's owner.

"The gates are open, and we are moving forward," Toffey said. "This is a transition that has already happened. His family is full of high quality people that are committed to the future."