September 2022 Member of the Month: Patrick O’Keefe

 Patrick O’Keefe, of Kentucky West, Inc, is the featured TOBA Member this month.

atrick O’Keefe isn’t afraid to take risks—and they often pay off. One such came with Classic Causeway, who captured the $1 million Caesars Belmont Derby Invitational Stakes (G1T) in his turf debut. Bred by O’Keefe’s Kentucky West Racing and the Clarke M. Cooper Family Living Trust, the three-year-old colt races for Kentucky West and Cooper.

Speaking from his Idaho ranch, O’Keefe recalled his corporate beginnings. “I developed a golf course country club, sold one thousand lots, and then went out on the golf tour for about ten years and played the money tour for a long time,” he said. The “money tour,” in which “captains of industry” hit the links and play for substantial sums, is competitive. O’Keefe went on to build several successful corporations and is now semi-retired.

His involvement in racing began after longtime friend Wayne Call praised O’Keefe’s ranch as ideal for raising horses. Call talked O’Keefe into buying a mare, and they visited an OTB. “He sat me down,” O’Keefe said of Call. “I didn’t know anything about these Thoroughbreds. He said, ‘Look for a mare that’s won a lot of races, made quite a bit of money, and we can claim.’”

O’Keefe spotted a hard-knocking mare called Rita Rucker, whom Call liked because she was a granddaughter of Danzig. In 72 starts, Rita Rucker won 21 races, four of which were stakes, and earned $249,767, then O’Keefe scooped her up. He bred her to Thunder Gulch, resulting in a chestnut filly named Private World.

“Now we got Private World,” O’Keefe said, “and I knew something was very, very special about this horse. Every time I’d drive up the top of the farm and park, she’d run the fence line; she’d look at me and run the fence line.” A two-time stakes winner, Private World suffered a major injury in the Hollywood Starlet Stakes (G1). “I’m bawling my eyes out for a month,” O’Keefe remembered, “and I promise[d] the horse that as long as that horse is alive, that I’ll never give up on her.”

Private World is currently O’Keefe’s sole broodmare. Boarded at Margaux Farm in Midway, Ky., she produced a Justify filly this year and is in foal to Maximum Security. Among O’Keefe’s runners in training is Private World’s son Classic Causeway, one of three colts from the final crop of “Iron Horse” Giant’s Causeway. O’Keefe enthused, “He’s got his mama all over him and his daddy. He has the best of it.”

In September 2021, trainer Brian Lynch sent out Classic Causeway against talented competition in his first start; his charge romped home by 6 ½ lengths. This spring, Classic Causeway won the Sam F. Davis Stakes (G3) and Lambholm South Tampa Bay Derby (G2). After an off-the-board finish in the Curlin Florida Derby Presented by Hill ‘n’ Dale Farms at Xalapa (G1), Classic Causeway competed in this year’s Kentucky Derby presented by Woodford Reserve (G1). Despite running eleventh, he defeated the likes of Cyberknife and Taiba, one-two in the recent TVG.com Haskell Invitational Stakes (G1).

O’Keefe decided to send Classic Causeway to a new barn, landing on Kenny McPeek after seeing the conditioner’s face in a TOBA ad. In his first start with McPeek, the colt ran third in the Ohio Derby (G3). “So we go to dinner and I got several people there,” O’Keefe recalled, saying of McPeek, “He reached over, looks me in the eye; he says, ‘Patrick, I want to take this horse around the world.’” O’Keefe added, “He says he’s got feet as big as a plate and he says this horse would do fantastic on grass.’ Well, hell, his daddy was one of the best grass horses in the world; what’s not to like, you know?”

Going off at 26-1 in the Belmont Derby, the colt wired an international field, covering ten furlongs in 1:59.99. “I got to lead the horse into the winner’s circle,” O’Keefe enthused. “It was fantastic.” He added, “This ain’t been a labor of love at all; this has been a man that is so dedicated to one horse that he’s spent half his life trying to get it to where it should be, get its legacy, and I did finally. It cost me a lot of time; it’s cost me a lot of money; it’s cost a lot of people a lot of time and money. But it finally happened. It finally happened.”