Bred to It
The name is Welsh, and it reached Virginia early. Watkins kin were among the settlers who came in 1608; my own direct ancestor, Henry Watkins, followed around 1621, bringing breeding stock across with him — at a moment when a good horse was the difference between a colony that held and one that failed. From tidewater Virginia the family followed the horse west, through the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky, settling near Elizabethtown in the 1700s, and on to Menard County, Illinois, by the 1820s.
It was in Menard County that my great-great-grandfather, Samuel Watkins, ran the Little Grove Stock Farm — and there, in 1895, that he bred a horse named Peter McCue. Peter McCue was a Quarter Horse of such blinding speed that he became one of the foundation sires of the American Quarter Horse breed. More than a century later, his blood is nearly everywhere the breed runs: a great many of the Quarter Horses racing in this country today — champions among them — carry his line.
The line came down to me through Samuel’s daughter, my great-grandmother Ella Watkins, and the family held onto a piece of that Illinois ground for generations — the Sand Farm, named for exactly what it was. The inheritance ran through both sides. My father served as an Illinois racing commissioner in the 1960s and early ’70s — the sport seen from the side of its stewardship and its integrity. My mother’s father raced harness horses, the standardbred and the sulky, so I grew up inside a second tradition as well.
I was on horseback by the age of five, on Tennessee Walkers, and by thirteen I had talked my way into a string of twenty Shetland ponies — which I financed by selling my ITT stock, back when there was still an International Telephone & Telegraph. Probably not my finest investment. But it tells you where my head already was.
Keeneland
I have since spent a lifetime at the great American racetracks, traveling to the storied ones the way other people make pilgrimages. But Keeneland, in Lexington, is the track that formed me. It was there, young, that I had an early and formative encounter with Secretariat that I have honestly never gotten over. Some things mark a person and never quite let go.
I was trained in philosophy, which turns out to be very nearly the ideal preparation for a life spent separating what people believe from what is actually true: define your terms, distrust the received wisdom, and follow the evidence past the point where it stops being comfortable. And I have always been as much builder as spectator — back in the 1980s I wrote handicapping software that was sold through the Daily Racing Form, an early sign of where all of this was finally headed.
For more than three decades I have studied these races the way a scholar studies a difficult text. Where others saw chaos, I began to see pattern — categories of races that behaved, again and again, in ways the conventional wisdom insisted were impossible. The method that became 12 Horses Racing grew out of that patient looking. I will not tell you how it works. I will tell you it took a lifetime to build, and that it rests on far more data, and far more discipline, than any tip sheet has ever dreamed of.
The record speaks where I would rather not boast
Every year for fourteen years, I have published a Preakness call before the race is run — timestamped, distributed in advance, and beyond revision. In 2026, in a full field at Laurel Park, that call named the first three finishers in exact order: Napoleon Solo, Iron Honor, Chip Honcho.
12 Horses Racing is the distillation of all of it — the Welsh name and the horses Henry brought over, the Cumberland Gap and the Illinois champion, the commissioner and the harness driver, the philosophy and the decades of patient study — poured into a single disciplined product, for people who would rather invest than gamble.
