Fun for the Entire Family

by Brian Mulligan

What do you get when you put a mortgage broker, a commercial printer and a racetrack president together?

You get three guys who thoroughly enjoy the experience of horse ownership.

Randy Fozzard is the president, general manager and chief executive officer of Turf Paradise racetrack in Phoenix, Arizona. He calls the shots for his racing partnership and keeps the group abreast of what is going on with their horses.

When asked to find a local owner who would be able to expound on the merits of Thoroughbred ownership, Fozzard didn’t need to reach far.

You have to talk to my partners,” he said. “They are both great guys. They love the game and their families are involved.”

Partner Mike Mazella runs a mortgage company, so you already know he is good with figures. He has been following the horses for the better part of two decades and decided to get into the game with his two friends, Fozzard and Eddie Giannina. He has been a Thoroughbred owner for about a year now and takes a laid back approach.

“With the day-to-day operations, the partners don’t do much.” Mazella said. “We leave it up to the trainer. It’s just really exciting being an owner. I bring my wife and kids to the track. It kind of gets everybody involved. We go to the races at least once or twice a week. Owning a racehorse is just something I always wanted to do.”

“I have three kids, nine, five and four,” Mazella shared. “They are all into it. My daughter, hit a $147 quinella with our horse and right now she is kind of addicted to racing.”

“My main advice is, unless you are a horse person, a horseman, just leave it up to your trainer. Find a trainer that you can trust and let him guide you. I’ve been playing horses for 20 years and there is so much that I don’t know.”

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

“Some people buy a yearling for $20,000 and have to wait a year or two before their horse can start racing and earn purse money,” theorized Mazella. “We’ve never put a dime in after the purchase of a horse. They have paid for themselves.”

Costs can be realistic especially with partners.

“I think it costs us about $1,200 a month at Turf Paradise,” Mazella said. “That’s only 40 bucks a day.”

Eddie Giannina has been in the printing business for about 14 years and decided finally to fulfill a life long dream.

“Our group has had a couple of other horses, but we just purchased Sleep Time,” he offered. “They shipped her over from Bay Meadows. I saw her the other day and she looks like a nice horse.”

“We owned Storm Captain, who we had for about a year,” Giannina said. “And I loved him, my kids loved him. The kids showed up at the track with banners when he ran and people would laugh at us. The banners had big letters, ‘Go Storm Captain’. They took pictures and had a great time.”

“I’ve got twin girls that are ten-years-old and my son is seven. We were all getting ready to watch the replay the first time that Storm Captain ran for us, when he had finished second. Mike’s little girl looks up to him and says, ‘Maybe he’ll win this time daddy.’ That was great.”

There are generations of love for the game involved here.

“My dad played the horses for years and I’ve been playing them for 20 to 25 years,” Giannina said. “My son now is looking at odds, and the kids are getting into it. The first time our horse won, my daughter Jessica is next to me and we are just jumping, cheering, I look down and I thought I hit her with an elbow or something because Jessica is crying. She said she was just so happy. I’ll never forget that as long as I live.”

Even at a lower end claiming scale, this partnership has been a success story and it didn’t take a big initial layout.

Storm Captain raced at the $2,500 to $3,000 claiming level, but he did cash a lot of checks. In the period between April of 2001 and March of 2002, Storm Captain raced 24 times and he collected 15 checks. That’s action.

“You know,” Giannina said. “If you run in-the-money here and there, you can have a lot of fun. We all originally kicked in $1,500. We had Storm Captain for over a year and maybe we put in another $800 during that time. We ran him quite a bit and had a lot of fun.”

If you haven’t owned a racehorse, you are missing out on some key ingredients to really enjoy the game.

“We love having the family involved in racing,” Giannina stated. “But every once in awhile the boys will get together, go out to the track, have a couple of beers, smoke some cigars and watch our horse run.”

“It’s just so exciting,” he continued. “And it has nothing to do with the gambling aspect. It’s just being in the game and the feeling you get from the pride of ownership. You go back and look at the horses in the stalls and whether you like animals or you like gambling, it’s just the pride of ownership, man. You own a horse. Who would have thunk it? When I first bought a horse, my friends were asking, ‘Are you going to run in the Derby?’ but they don’t really understand the game.”

Who said it’s the sport of kings? Giannina says he feels like a king.

“It’s a sport where you don’t have to be rich and all that. You can get involved, especially with some partners, for a small amount of money. I’ve got a love for horse racing and for the horses and it’s a great feeling. I’m learning more and more about the game. We have been fortunate.”

The men are hoping that their new purchase, Sleep Time, will wake up. She has had limited success so far in 4 starts so she basically has one way to go and that is up. Sleep Time’s dam dropped 2 other winners and one was the Louisiana Downs stakes winner Outofnowhere, who won five races in 20 career starts while banking nearly $80,000.

Fozzard, Mazella and Giannina are not out of nowhere, but they are certainly going somewhere and are definitely having fun in the process.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 10th, 2002 at 7:07 pm and is filed under Featured Articles. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.