TDN Weekend December 2016 Issue 9
Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1066556
of me that wanted to prove something— to myself and to everybody else. I guess you'd say I wanted to make my mark. So it's amazing how it all unfolded." If Gato Del Sol had secured a personal redemption, Sunday Silence offered a far more literal reprieve. "When he won that Breeders' Cup, all the bankers were around," Hancock recalls. "Because I owed so much money. And I heard Alex Campbell say, 'My God, this could save Arthur!' And it did." Not that it was easy, even then. Hancock hoped to stand the horse himself, just as he had his sire Halo. But by the time Seth had 50 mares booked to Easy Goer, just three people wanted a share in Sun- day Silence. Everyone was saying he was a freak. Great runner, obviously, but no pedi- gree. Then the Japanese came in with $10 million. And Sullivan, an attorney as well as a mathematician, told Hancock, "If you don't sell, I'm going to get Staci and have your ass committed." Hancock hated to do it, but there was no alternative. "I went to Louie's Restau- rant one morning for breakfast," he recalls. "Interest rates had gone over 10 percent. And the thought dawned on me: I wonder how much I'll owe in interest this day? And I took 10 percent of $15 million—because that's what I owed—and divided it by 365. And I figured that my breakfast cost me $3,200 and some."