Kevin Plank tries to play it cool, but sometimes he just can't maintain the facade.
"We were, like, jumping out of our skins," the Under Armour founder says, sounding like a teenager as he recalls the scene after his filly Shared Account won a $2 million Breeder's Cup race in November as a 46-1 long shot. "They were lucky I didn't take off my shirt and run across the finish line myself."
Such wins are just what Plank expected when he bought historic Sagamore Farm four years ago with dreams of re-creating a world-class racing operation in northern Baltimore County. But the payoff came a touch sooner than anyone expected.
"It's validation of what we've been doing here," Plank said on a spring afternoon from a cozy chair in the farm office. "We're more than pretty white fences and beautiful green fields. We want to be a farm to be considered. We want people to say, 'Uh-oh, a Sagamore horse is in this field.'"
Initially, the Sagamore story was that of a bold new player on the Maryland horse scene, polishing a faded gem of a farm — where Alfred G. Vanderbilt bred a line of champions led by Native Dancer, winner of the Preakness and Belmont Stakes in 1953. But in the past year, Plank's stable has matured into a more formidable racing operation.
Shared Account's win at the Breeder's Cup was the sharpest note of validation, but not the only one. On New Year's Day, Monzon, a gelding born on the farm, won a stakes race that fueled dreams of a start in the Kentucky Derby. A bad run early this year derailed the Derby hopes, but Monzon will run Saturday in the Belmont Stakes, the first entry in a Triple Crown race for Plank's Sagamore.
On Preakness Day, Plank ran two of hishorses before the home folks. Shared Account, who stables with Derby winnerAnimal Kingdom under trainer Graham Motion, finished fourth in the Gallorette. Three-year-old colt Humble and Hungry finished second in the James W. Murphy Stakes.
"A couple years ago, this didn't feel like a functional farm," says Tom Mullikin, the high school buddy whom Plank coaxed from Kentucky to run Sagamore, on Belmont Avenue in Glyndon. "Now it does. With our facilities, we can do what we want to do."
Plank, who built Under Armour into a billion-dollar sports apparel empire, is not a patient guy. He was thinking Triple Crown before he even bought a farm to house the horses. But Mullikin and other advisers helped him understand the vagaries of horse racing, where even the wisest trainers and richest owners may go decades without winning the Kentucky Derby.
Plank says he has learned to appreciate the victories as they come, but there's no question his mind races to the biggest possible goals.
"We didn't get into this to run only in local races," he says. "We want to run in Dubai and Hong Kong. That's a powerful message about Maryland racing."
"That's the mindset he lives by and we live by," Mullikin says. "If you're going to set goals, you might as well set them high."
Rebuilding Sagamore
Longtime members of the Maryland racing community root for Plank's quest at Sagamore.
"It's wonderful to see an establishment with such rich history regenerated and brought back to promise," says longtime trainer Bill Boniface of Bonita Farm in Darlington. "They've done it right. I think we're going to see [Plank] not just here in Maryland but in the national spotlight for years to come."
The farm had fallen into disrepair under previous owners, but Plank and company have restored it to a lovely vision. Driving north on Greenspring Avenue, you cruise down a hill, shrouded in leafy trees, and emerge through a sunlit portal. There it is, laid out before you, 530 acres of gleaming white fences, lush fields and red-roofed barns.
"It's a place where people can come to get away from reality," Plank says. "Almost like a fantasy."
As an ardent booster of his home state, he had fumed at talk in recent years that the Preakness could move elsewhere. So he resolved to do something about it the best way he knew how — by creating a Maryland racing story so great that naysayers would have to shut up.
He would buy one of the state's greatest horse farms, restore it to its former majesty and breed a Triple Crown winner there.
For the first two years after Plank bought Sagamore in February 2007, the farm's physical rehabilitation received more attention than the horses produced there. Mullikin and his crews replaced six miles of fencing, converted cornfields to grazing pastures, overhauled two barns and regraded the three-quarter-mile training track.
With the initial work mostly done by fall 2009, the racing operation took center stage. Ignacio Correas, a wise-cracking Argentine who had worked in racing hotbeds across the country, arrived to train Plank's horses.
Plank has devoted his life to building brands, and that inclination is apparent in the tiniest details at Sagamore. Everything from the roadside mailbox to the Under Armour shirts worn by workers incorporates the red and off-white color scheme of the barns. The synthetic surface of the training track includes recycled scraps of Under Armour gear. The horse blankets from big races are used as cushions on office chairs.
Plank hopes Marylanders will someday view Sagamore horses as their team in the world of racing, an equine version of the Ravens or Orioles. He envisions playing host to an annual event, early in the racing season, when he would invite the public to the farm so fans could be introduced to that year's horses.
Plank and Mullikin believe Shared Account, who will likely retire from racing after this year, could be the genetic base for their line of champions.
"It's not too far out there," Mullikin says. "You hear about 'blue hens,' the mares who become foundations on which you build a farm."
Both men hope the farm can be a place where champions are born, raised and trained to greatness. Monzon, the gelding scheduled to run in the Belmont Stakes, inspires special emotion, because he was born at Sagamore and grew up under their watch.
Mullikin talks about Monzon like he talks about his five children, who are also growing up on the farm. Of Monzon's rough winter trip to Tampa, he says, "He came out of that not the same horse as he went in. But now he's on his toes. His personality is back."
A world away
At 8 a.m. on a spring day, Mullikin ambles toward the training track, flanked by his black lab, Gator, talking racing as the horses gallop past. Life doesn't get much cooler than this for Plank's trusted aide. The outside world, represented by cars rolling along Tufton Road, seems as distant as the moon.
"I think these horses feel relaxed here," Mullikin says. "Listen, all you can hear is some fans and the leaves on the trees. If I was a horse, I wouldn't mind being here."
He sometimes worries that the farm is too much of an equine country club, one at which his racers are spoiled by the same handful of trainers and riders every day. This year, he sent horses to stable at Pimlico Race Course, just so they would get used to being around unfamiliar faces in a less relaxed setting.
"We need to get them downtown to get them some street cred," he says.
Correas, for one, loves that he can adjust the Sagamore track to his liking every day and that he doesn't have to wedge workouts between the schedules of other trainers.
"I think the quality of life for the horses is always better," the trainer says. "There's a [saying] that you can't win shipping horses from a farm. But the Derby winner just proved that you can."
Mullikin and Plank spent the previous weekend cheering Motion's victory in the Kentucky Derby. The trainer at Fair Hill in Cecil County has nurtured their first star, Shared Account, to excellence, so they regard him as an extended member of the Sagamore family.
"He's a gentleman, and he does right by his horses," Mullikin says. "How can you not root for a guy like that?"
He'll send Motion all of Shared Account's foals, fearing that to do otherwise would invite bad karma.
Correas grins as he clicks off workout times on his stopwatch for a filly named All Mettle.
"She's kind of a squirrel, mentally," Mullikin says, meaning the horse's composure was in question. But the filly endured a frightful thunderstorm before her April debut at Keeneland Race Course in Kentucky and still managed to finish third.
A few workers who man the starting gates at Pimlico arrive to help the Sagamore horses practice entering the tight boxes.
"Man, this is living," says Edmund Benson, who has worked the gates for 13 years and been around horses his whole life. "I could just throw a grill out there."
He expertly coddles a feisty 3-year-old filly, Don't Play With Matches, into the practice gate. She has good genes and gallops beautifully but hasn't developed enough composure to start a race.
"Oh, mama. Oh, mama," Correas says soothingly as she bounces in the gate.
"If she wants to be a racehorse," Mullikin says, "she has to figure this out."
childs.walker@baltsun.com