Welcome to Diamond Creek. We will peel back the layers and take you to various points on this journey from relative unknown and newcomer to the forefront of the stallion and racing game. Sit back and enjoy.
The summer after I turned 16 I remember sitting in a large factory rewinding Tony Robbins’ Personal Power motivational cassette tapes for $5/hr. Picture the scene in your mind. A wiry, hyper kid sitting in a folding chair behind an eight foot table with not one but 5 tape decks in front of me, unpacking returned and listened to tapes for 40+ hours a week for the entire summer. Not sure why it took me until mid-July before I realized this but I couldn’t do this or a normal job. A job that required you to be there from 9 to 5. A job like most of America. I was not wired that way. I needed to be able to be free to think on my own, problem solve and not be stuck watching a clock. It took another 8 years; 2 years of high school, 5 years of college and a year spent delivering pizzas, working for my father, and learning to be a farrier and a mess of trials and tribulations before I got where I wanted.
I got some of what I wanted on September 20th, 2005. I signed on the dotted line on more than a fair share of legal documents at a small Lexington real estate office, giving us/me the rights to 180 acres in Paris Ky.
No horses, no equipment, no staff, no idea what I was doing. Jumping into the deep end, blindfolded and barely knowing how to swim. What I did know was how to trim a mare and how to care for a horse. The rest I would figure out on the fly.
Over the course of the next 6 weeks, I purchased 5 yearling fillies with the hope that one of them would/could become the future of the newly minted Diamond Creek Farm. Purchased originally as Melanie Hall (renamed Pop Or Tonic), Yes Maam, Kentucky Sunshine, Allamerican Ingrid (renamed Western Montana) and Travertine Hanover (renamed London Eye), only Western Montana remains an active broodmare while Yes Ma’am is retired and the other 3 are broodmares we sold over the years.
Not only did Western Montana tease us with greatness on the track but she has become our foundation broodmare thus far producing the great Pure Country, $500k earner Grand Teton and a few daughters who are now producing the next generation of stars to wear the colors of Diamond Creek.
From the desk of Adam Bowden
Diamond Creek President