Hollywood Dun It

Reining is the western discipline I find hardest to explain, because the short version sounds like dressage with a cowboy hat on, and the long version involves a horse sliding thirty feet on its hind legs while the rider does nothing visible at all. I wrote about it in the reining post and I did not entirely make peace with it there. But the sport has one thing I love without reservation, and it is the same thing cutting has: a family tree you can read off the names.

Reining’s tree has a trunk, and the trunk is a horse called Hollywood Dun It.

Sixty Years of Sliding

The National Reining Horse Association was formed in 1966, and it held its first Futurity that same year in Columbus, Ohio, which is not where you would expect the cowboys to be. It stayed in Ohio for twenty years. In 1986 the Futurity moved to Oklahoma City, where it still is, and the association set up a Hall of Fame in the same year, presumably because by then it had enough history to put in one.

The reserve champion at that first Oklahoma City Futurity was a three-year-old bred in Illinois by a woman called Gwen Steif, ridden by a young trainer called Tim McQuay, and named Hollywood Dun It. The Hollywood came from his father, Hollywood Jac 86, who a few years later would become the first sire in the sport’s history to have offspring earn a million dollars. The Dun It came from his colour.

Or so you would think.

The Colour in the Name

Here is a thing I enjoy more than I probably should. When Hollywood Dun It died in 2005, the American national federation put out an obituary that called him, in its first sentence, a buckskin stallion. Wikipedia calls him dun. His name says dun. His mother was called Blossom Berry and her father was called Dun Berry, so the family clearly thought they knew.

If you have read my colour post you will know that dun and buckskin are the same yellow body with a black mane and tail, and that the whole difference is a dark stripe down the spine. Dun has it. Buckskin does not. The most influential reining horse who ever lived, named for a colour, and the people who wrote his obituary and the people who named him could not agree whether he had a stripe down his back.

I would give a great deal to have seen his back.

The Short Career and the Long One

His own showing lasted two seasons. Reserve at the Futurity in 1986, then in 1987 he won the Derby and the Superstakes, and that was it. He retired to stud in 1988 at five years old with $65,808 in reining earnings, which is a decent year’s work and not remotely the point.

The point was the thirteen foal crops that followed. The reining association keeps a list of what it calls Million Dollar Sires, ranked by the year a stallion’s offspring cross each million, and Hollywood Dun It went up it like a man taking stairs. A million in 1997. Two million in 2000. He was the sport’s first Three Million Dollar Sire in 2002 and its first Four Million in 2004, by which time McQuay and his wife Colleen had stood him at their place in Tioga, Texas for the best part of two decades.

He died on 30 March 2005, aged 22, after a long battle with testicular cancer. And then he kept getting promoted. His offspring made him the first Five Million Dollar Sire in 2007, two years after his death, and in July 2010 they carried him past six million dollars, five years after anyone had last seen him. There is something wonderful about a horse whose career was still going up while he was lying under a field. Every one of those dollars was won by a son or daughter with a rider in the saddle, sliding to a stop in an arena he never saw.

The McQuays put up a page for him that says he had been a part of their family and their lives for a lot of years, and that what they were most grateful for was the friends they had met through him. It is the plainest thing anyone in this story says, and it is the truest.

He was also, in 1998, the first reining horse turned into a Breyer model. If you have a nine-year-old in the house you will understand that this is the honour that actually counts.

The Horse in the Next Grave

Hollywood Dun It is buried on the McQuays’ farm. In July 2013 they buried a second stallion beside him, and if the first was named for a colour he may not have had, the second was a horse the breed registry did not want at all.

Colonels Smoking Gun, known to everyone as Gunner, was foaled in 1993 with a bald white face, four white legs, a white tail and blue eyes. He had far too much white for the Quarter Horse registry, so he was registered as a Paint, and he did not get his AQHA papers until 2004, when he was eleven and had already been in the reining Hall of Fame for a year. If you want the whole story of why a white horse gets turned away at the door, it is in the post about the horses that were too white.

He was also deaf. Completely. He could not hear his rider say whoa going into a sliding stop, which is the one word a reining horse is supposed to live by, and some of his offspring cannot hear it either. He was reserve champion at the 1996 Futurity anyway, and then he went on to become, in 2024, eleven years after his death, the sport’s first Fifteen Million Dollar Sire. His son Gunnatrashya passed sixteen million the following year. Between them, the two of them have rather taken over.

Tim McQuay said, the week Gunner died, that he would be laid to rest next to Hollywood Dun It on the farm. So there they are, in Texas, side by side. The trunk of the tree and the biggest branch on it.

Why I Keep Coming Back to Him

I said in the reining post that the sport has travelled a long way from the ranch work it came out of, and I still think so. But the horses did not travel anywhere. Hollywood Dun It was a five-year-old with a modest record who turned out to carry something worth six million dollars in his blood, and nobody could have told you that by looking. Gunner was a deaf Paint horse with the wrong markings who turned out to carry twice as much. The registry, the judges, the colour charts and the obituary writers all got to have their say, and the horses simply went on being what they were.

Two stallions in a field in Texas. One named for a colour he might not have been, and one who never heard a single word anybody said to him. I know couples like that, and they seem very happy.