Tom McCutcheon's THE SHOW

Andi Paul is an NRHA Judge and has been a friend of this show since long before there was a show. She’s in town scribing the NRCHA Futurity, so Tom, Gunny, Joe and Cade got to talk to her while she’s here.Our conversation touches on what the job actually looks like from the judge’s seat. How you separate a class when thirty horses are all good. Why the the rollback has become such a seperating point. What it’s like to sit on a crew of five people who see things differently — and why the system still lands in the right place. Then the eligibility and leveling debate: whether a rider should only be able to move up one level at a time, what happens to the young trainer who has the night of his life and gets bumped out of the divisions he can actually compete in, and Cade’s idea.She also tells the story of Darlins Not Painted — a mare she bought for $25,000, rehabbed for a year, and won the INT NRBC. Tom purchased the mare who has become a very successful producer, and took to her Sweden to compete for the US team. She now sits just shy of a million dollars in offspring earnings, and Andi says she was the most fun she’s ever had showing a horse.Plus: growing up showing in Illinois, landing in Arizona in 1980, how the Congress has changed, what a 216 used to be worth at the Futurity, Joe’s jiu jitsu career, and a Mavericks conversation that gets personal.

Oswood Stallion Station laid out $603,000 of incentive money at the All American Quarter Horse Congress this year — paid out to horses by Oswood stallions across every division. Brock Malson, owner of OSS, gives credit to the people behind the paychecks.He joins Tom, Gunny, Joe and Cade fresh off the Congress to explain how it came together: the stallion owners who asked for it years ago, the $500 per contract that funded it, why he sat on the idea for a couple of years before he had the nerve to ask, and why the Congress turned out to be the right place to do it instead of the Futurity. Next year the plan is to pay five holes deep instead of three.Brock also walks through how he got there. He showed up at Oswood in 2015, two weeks after graduating from the University of Findlay. He started as a mare shagger. By the end of 2020 he’d bought the business.From there the conversation gets into the Congress itself — what’s gotten better, what hasn’t, and Tom’s take on why a horse show with that much history should be further along than it is. Plus the Friends Of Reining group that made the Congress relevant again after a decade of nothing, what the All Star money added on top, where all this added money across the industry is actually coming from, and the Designer Sale.And a fair amount of time on Congress bathrooms, a forgotten show shirt, and an Airbnb hot tub nobody should think too hard about.Hosted by Tom McCutcheon. New episodes weekly.

Dun Deja — a yearling colt by Gunner out of Dun Its Deja Vu, consigned by Toyon Ranch — was the high seller of the 1st Annual Designer Sale at $270,000. The man holding the card was Pepe Briseño.Pepe joins Tom, Gunny, Joe and Cade to talk about how that deal came together. He came to the sale looking for prospects to compete in Mexico; this colt wasn't the plan. He walks through what changed his mind, where Dun Deja is headed and who's training him, why his client overruled the recommendation to leave the colt in the States, and why people were calling about breedings before the horse ever left Texas.From there, the sale itself. Friday night's Designer Sale averaged nearly $87,000 on 30 head and reset what a yearling sale is supposed to feel like — Pepe's read is that the quality brought buyers who came to buy, not to watch, and that Friday night pulled Saturday's average up roughly $7,000 over past years right along with it.Then a look at the reining business south of the border: the Cala and what it takes to win one, why more than 400 three-year-olds enter every year, how Mexican-bred horses went from a handful in the finals to the majority of them, what it actually costs to raise and train a horse in Mexico, and why Pepe is hunting an outcross now that half the country is breeding to Gunner sons.Plus: The Gladstone days and the old World Equestrian Games qualifiers, and a nod to Jose Vasquez — a self-made million-dollar rider and Hall of Fame member who did it on horses he bred and raised himself.And yes, there's a plan forming to put Tom in a charro suit and enter him in the Cala.

The Legacy Sale is this weekend, and this year there's something new: the Designer Sale on Friday night.Mandy McCutcheon joins Tom, Cade, Gunny, and Joe to walk through the whole weekend — what the Designer Sale is, why she limited it to 31 yearlings, and what she's trying to build with it. Instead of an all-day marathon, Friday is a red carpet & cocktails at 5, dinner at 6, and the sale starting at 7, with a band, open bar, champagne and pictures for buyers, and enough time to actually let every horse have its moment.She also gets into how self-regulated the consignors were on this one — good X-rays, bred right, beautiful and well-fit across the board — why she thinks this year's catalog is the best group she's seen, and why Saturday's sale might be the strongest in years in its own right.The schedule:Friday, September 18th — red carpet & cocktails 5:00pm, dinner 6:00, Designer Sale 7:00Saturday, September 19th — breakfast at 10:00, Legacy Sale starts at 11:00Held at: Thor Sport Ranch, 4100 Reining RoadNo dress code — Can't make it? Everything is online with videos posted, and you can bid from anywhere. Questions about a ANYTHING, call Mandy or Jennifer Anderson!Mandy: 940-453-7543Jennifer: 405-401-4759Plus: 26 years of this sale at the same facility, the first-year stories, the Tulsa recap, Congress plans, and the Waco championship that Gunny would like everyone to acknowledge.Shop this year's horses & view the catalog: https://legacysale.com/

John Tague was a part of the team who turned United Airlines around after one of the largest bankruptcy filings in the industry's history, helped run Hertz Rental Car, and sat in rooms with a hundred creditors — but many only know him as a successful breeder, owner, and board member in the reining world. Today, you get to hear his whole story...John and his wife Nancy own Toyon Ranch, where they stand a group of very successful reining stallions, and keep roughly 160 head on the property to produce a foal crop each year. John came up in the hunter/jumper world as a working student at 13, left school early, took an entry-level analyst job in aviation at 21, and was an officer of a public company by 25. He and Nancy moved into western performance around 2011.In this one, John walks Tom and the boys through how he got involved with United, the hardest decision he ever had to make there, and why he now spends his time on the NRHA Executive Committee instead of corporate boards. The group gets into the association's financial turnaround, why sponsorship dollars follow purse money, the push to invest in affiliates and regional futurities, whether the sport is getting too hard to compete in, the amateur division question, and what rising horse prices mean for the person breeding at home.Plus: the Tulsa recap, Nancy's $600 Calcutta steal, and Tom's ongoing problem with the paper towel trap door on airplanes.BE SURE TO LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE!#reining #podcast #horses #equine #talkshow #tommccutcheon