Fipke’s Bee Jersey gets sixth stakes winner
Beeline won the Hutcheson yesterday
By Sid Fernando
After Beeline’s win Saturday in the $100,000 Hutcheson at Gulfstream, his sire, Bee Jersey, is now represented by six individual black-type winners from two crops of racing age (4-year-olds and 3-year-olds). And it’s only mid-March and there’s a lot of racing still left for his sophomores to add to the already-impressive totals. So far, four of the six are from Bee Jersey’s first crop of 38 named foals, and two are from his second crop of 44.
Going with another commonly used metric, Bee Jersey’s percentage of black-type winners to starters is 12.5%, a ratio that’s higher than those for Justify (9.72%), Good Magic (10.06%), Bolt d’Oro (5.35%), Mendelssohn (2.67%), City of Light (5.04%), Army Mule (8.93%), Girvin (8.7%), and Oscar Performance (5.26%), among other higher-profile third-crop stallions. [Note: The publication that lists these percentages has erroneously labeled them as percentage of black-type winners to named foals. We have alerted the publication.]
That’s quite a feat, any way it’s sliced.
Bee Jersey stands at Darby Dan for $5,000 and was bred and raced by WTC client Chuck Fipke, a unique figure in racing because he only races his homebreds, eschewing auction purchases of racing stock, and he stands his own stallions without syndicating them. This means that he has to support them himself, which he does with gusto.
“I’m breeding thirty-five to forty mares to Bee Jersey this year,” he said minutes after Beeline won.
Fipke bred Beeline, a son of his Distorted Humor mare Secretariat Humor. The latter’s second dam is the Secretariat mare Ball Chairman, a foundation mare for Fipke. She was sent to Coolmore and boarded there to be bred to Sadler’s Wells, and produced, among others, the Grade 1-winning champion and Fipke foundation sire Perfect Soul, an Irish-bred.
Secretariat Humor’s dam, Secretariat’s Soul, is a Sadler’s Wells Irish-bred sister to Perfect Soul.
Fipke sold Beeline, now two-for-two, for $70,000 as a 2-year-old in training at OBS with Eddie Woods, primarily to get the offspring of his sire into other hands. Fipke has done this with others as well.
BEE JERSEY (2014 Jersey Town – Bees, by Rahy)
B: Charles Fipke
O: Charles Fipke
T: Doug Watson, Steve Asmussen
Record: 10-5-3-1 $976,293
Highest achievement: Grade 1 winner
Last Auction Price: none
Bee Jersey’s other stakes winners are Topsy, Beeline’s older sister that Fipke sold as a Keeneland September yearling for $42,000 and who was subsequently pinhooked for $225,000 at OBS; Infinite Diamond, who Fipke sold for $10,000 as a Fasig-Tipton October yearling and was pinhooked for $120,000 at two at OBS; Jersey Pearl, who Fipke sold for $12,000 as a yearling at Keeneland; Sweet Soddy J, a 3-year-old, like Beeline, who was bred by Built Wright Stables; and My Happiness, who was bred by Dr. Christine A. Hicklin DVM.
Fipke, to add it up, is the breeder of four of Bee Jersey’s six stakes winners to date. That’s how much Fipke believed in the stallion and why he rejected a $3.5 million offer from Japan when the horse first retired.
Bee Jersey is a son of the Fipke-bred Grade 1 winner Jersey Town, a son of Speightstown that Fipke still stands, in California now after stints in Kentucky and Canada. This fact alone disqualified Bee Jersey as a commercial horse when he went to stud, and the Japanese offer, let’s face it, would have been taken with both hands by most everyone else, but not Fipke, who is determined to make him a stallion.
“I want to give my stallions the best chances to succeed, eh,” he said. “And I want to breed to my stallions. If they had agreed to stand him one year in Japan, one year in Kentucky, I’d have considered it, but they weren’t interested in an arrangement like that.”
Supporting your own homebred stallion is an old-school approach to matters—think Marcel Boussac—and it’s yet another wrinkle that separates the owner/breeder from everyone else in the business these days. But Fipke has been successful against the odds in this regard: he got the G1 Breeders’ Cup Filly and Mare Turf winner Perfect Shirl and Grade 1 winner Seeking the Soul, among others, with Perfect Soul; and Queen’s Plate winner Not Bourbon, along with others, with Perfect Soul’s unraced brother Not Impossible, in addition to Bee Jersey with Jersey Town.
Bee Jersey, like all Fipke-breds, has a strong female family behind him—his third dam is a half-sister to Broodmare of the Year Weekend Surprise, the dam of A.P. Indy—and he’s a G1 Metropolitan Mile winner and an outstanding physical specimen. All told, Bee Jersey won five of 10 starts and almost a million, and he’s the type of stallion that could potentially become the prototype for what I described in “Sire-line detours.”
Fipke’s passion is planning matings—click here to read an in-depth piece by Frances J. Karon on Fipke from “Trainer” magazine—and he works on his mares every day of the year, matching this one with that stallion and that one with another until he comes up with his solution to the puzzle of a pedigree. He has his own complex system that incorporates family clusters, nicks, and dosage; he has bold views and is not above experimenting to get a filly to breed to another one of his stallions down the road; and he will frequently inbreed closely to superior mares. Jersey Pearl, for instance, is 3x2 to Fipke’s Jersey Girl—the dam of Jersey Town.
Bee Jersey’s 3-year-olds were conceived on complimentary fees during the Covid year of 2020, because Fipke wanted smaller breeders to have access to his stallions during harsh economic times. Stakes winner Sweet Soddy J, who is campaigned by his breeder, is so far one of the beneficiaries of this magnanimous gesture.
Even before Beeline won the Hutcheson, John Phillips of Darby Dan had sent me a note, saying: “Bee Jersey is gaining respect and will have his largest book ever—with paying customers no less!”
Fipke should enjoy a bigger bump in interest for his stallion after the Hutcheson. Why not? He’s excellent value in Kentucky for a young horse at $5,000, and breeders should be queuing up to get to him at that price.
Excelente Mr Sid.
I am one of those who benefitted from Mr. Fipke's generosity to small breeders during the COViD crisis. I am extremely grateful to Mr. Fipke and I wish him all the best. I will continue to root for Mr. Fipke and Bee Jersey and I look forward to our Bee Jerseys adding another successful chapter to the story.