HOT SPRINGS, Ark. — As purses and prize money at Oaklawn have ballooned in the last 15 years, the idea has been to attract big time horses and their owners to Arkansas. In recent years, those big time horses and their owners are more and more from Arkansas.
“When the local people win and it stays right here here, we all - all Arkansans - we all benefit from that,” said Dwight Pruett of Texarkana and owner of Gray Attempt, one of the favorites for the $500,000 Southwest Stakes. He’s living the dream that his friends in the neighboring box seats, Bob and Val Yagos did in 2011.
“It’s progressing in the right direction,” Bob Yagos said, referring to the opportunities that are there in the eight years since Archarcharch won the Arkansas Derby, punching his ticket into the Kentucky Derby. “We started out with probably two or three, and progressed to where we have thirty. It's enabled us to get a lot more horses.”
Pruett has gone from zero horses to multiple stakes wins in just six years.
“This is kind of our second time around from 2016,” he said. “We won the Smarty Jones and had the horse Discreetness, so we've had this excitement before.”
But with the Southwest this year part of a trio of events worth $1.2 million dollars, this year seems like the stage is bigger, and Pruett is just enjoying the ride.
“I think we've got something a little bit different here this time,” he said a few hours before a troubled trip left Gray Attempt falling back to last after holding the lead until the quarter-pole. “You'd never anything like this because really it's not supposed to happen, but I've been very, very blessed and I'm very happy because of it.”
Super Steed upset the Southwest at 62-1 under jockey Terry Thompson before a holiday crowd of 19,500.