In recognition of their long career our readers elected NRCHA Hall of Famer Les Vogt and AQHA World Champion Chex A Nic as one of the greatest teams of all time.

 By Breanne Hill

 As they waited for their turn in the arena at San Francisco’s Cow Palace, a few of the bull riders used their gloves to wipe their eyes. They, like the audience, were finding themselves emotionally affected by the ceremony that was holding up their event—the retirement of a reined cow horse named Chex A Nic.

Chex A Nic, a two-time American Quarter Horse Association World Champion who had earned more than $37,000 during a nine-year-long career, was being retired that night in 1994 per the request of his trainer, Les Vogt. Vogt had wanted the 12-year-old bay gelding to go out while he was still on top of his game, still a champion.
        “I never wanted the day to come when someone sits on the fence or in the grandstand and says, ‘I remember when that horse was great,’ ” says Vogt. “I felt that he deserved to be put out to pasture while he was still respected for what he was.”
        While Run for the Roses rang through the Cow Palace’s speakers, Vogt and Chex A Nic, featured in a lone spotlight, went through their paces one last time. Vogt even took a chance and removed the bridle from his frequently jumpy gelding’s head.
        “I’d never done that before with him,” Vogt admits.
        The lack of headgear made no difference. Chex A Nic did what he’d always done in the arena—his job. Spins, stops and lead changes; they were executed with the 150 percent effort that had become one of the bay’s strongest traits.
        After the pattern was completed, a farrier was called in and Chex A Nic’s shoes were removed. Then, as they’d begun their career together, the gelding and Vogt exited the arena side-by-side.
        Chex A Nic and Vogt would easily pass as the horse and rider version of a fine bourbon. They started out simply, possessing only a few ingredients that had the possibility of making them good. Then, they aged into a rich combination of talent and tenacity, one that the public loved experiencing again and again.
        Theirs was a human/horse success story that was the result of years of hard work. They had no big-money futurity titles to their joint name. Chex A Nic had not been ready for that as a 3-year-old. But in the end, the gelding became much more to Vogt than a paycheck and press coverage. He became an example of what an “all-or-nothing” equine partner could be.
        “He was a fairy tale,” says Vogt. “ ‘The Little Horse that No One Wanted.’ And what happens in a fairy tale? Well, the little horse turns into magic.”

Nothing to Like

In the 1970s, Vogt showed a mare named Bueno Chex Bonita. Sired by Bueno Chex and a granddaughter of the great King Fritz (whom Vogt had owned), Bueno Chex Bonita was one of the trainer’s favorites.
        “She was really smart, really stoppy and really cowy,” says Vogt. “She was super.”
        Vogt was so taken with the mare that in 1984, when the opportunity came up to buy her 2-year-old colt, he couldn’t get to breeder Jack Casner’s Clovis, California, farm fast enough.
        The colt, whose name was Chex A Nic, had a lot going for him on paper. In addition to being out of Bueno Chex Bonita, he was sired by Reminic, a son of Vogt’s friend Greg Ward’s famous mare, Fillinic. And the young horse was cheap. Casner was asking less than $2,000 for him. With all of these positives to Chex A Nic’s credit, Vogt was ready to buy him sight unseen.

Unfortunately, however, he did see the horse before filling out the check.
        “He wasn’t impressive in any way to me,” remembers Vogt of his first look at Chex A Nic. “He stood with this posture where his neck was pretty high. He sort of looked like a gazelle. And his back was way down because of his neck. He had a high tail set. He had low hocks, but the rest of him looked like a deer.”
        Despite the colt’s disappointing appearance, Vogt decided to give him a chance and took him to a round pen where he could see him move.
        “I was trying really hard to be impressed,” says Vogt, “because I really liked his mother.”
        But in keeping with his conformation, Chex A Nic loped around the pen with his tail straight in he air and in an extended stride that Vogt describes as the “opposite of collection.”
        “I turned him on the fence and turned him on the fence, and it just didn’t work,” says Vogt. “I couldn’t see myself riding him and winning anything, so I turned him down.”
        And that was that—or so Vogt thought.
        The trainer soon received a phone call from two of his clients, Lisa Blumenthal and Pat Pinkard of Summerland, California. The women had a unexpected announcement. They wanted to buy a colt named Chex A Nic.
        “They told me they liked him and thought he was cute,” says Vogt. “And I thought to myself, ‘Well, cute doesn’t win, but okay.’ ”
        Vogt made the trip back out to Casner’s farm, and tried in vain to find something in the colt that he hadn’t seen before.
        “I was equally unimpressed with him,” says Vogt of the experience.
        But this time the decision to buy didn’t rest with Vogt, and Blumenthal and Pinkard bought Chex A Nic in spite of their trainer’s reservations.
        With his clients picking their own poison, Vogt thought that he could at least ride the horse without the complete burden of failure on his shoulders. He had made his opinions of the colt known. So, he set out to train Chex A Nic with a clear conscience. His one hope was that the gelding would come into his own under saddle and maybe show some natural performance ability.
        Again, Vogt was let down.
        “When I rode him, he was really snorty,” says Vogt. “He wasn’t broncy, but he was right on the edge of it. And he was tricky, very touchy. He was really nervous about everything.
        “I thought, ‘He is going to be a heck of a lot of work,’ which he was.”
        The trainer claims that every day during those early sessions, he struggled to feel something about Chex A Nic that he liked. But all that developed was the sense of dread about having to go out and spar with the colt.
        “I didn’t look forward to the work I had to put into him,” says Vogt.
        Chex A Nic was also difficult to deal with outside of the arena. In the spirit of his granddam Fillinic, who was known for being explosive on the ground, Chex A Nic wasn’t what one would call a “people horse.”
        “You couldn’t catch him in a stall,” says Vogt. “I knew all the time that he had the energy to put me under in a heartbeat.”
        As Chex A Nic’s early training drew to a close, Vogt came to a conclusion he’d been loping toward since day one—the gelding was no future National Reined Cow Horse Association Snaffle Bit Futurity superstar.
        But with the hopeful owners still standing by their pick, Vogt knew his Chex A Nic experience wasn’t about to come to an early conclusion. It was still up to him to try to carve out some sort of career for the unsettled young horse.


Three’s a Charm

According to Vogt, trainers in the 1980s had yet to establish the horsemanship techniques that are today a part of almost every program.
        “We didn’t know a whole lot about establishing that connection with a horse,” he says. “We definitely hadn’t thought about the concept of form to function. We used to more or less just train for the function. You teach a horse to stop by stopping. You teach him to turn by turning. You teach him to work a cow by working a cow. There was no foundation form that went along with it.”
        By the time 3-year-old Chex A Nic should have been beginning his career, it become apparent to Vogt that the gelding was not responding positively to this traditional way of training.
        “I was having an incredible amount of trouble with him,” says Vogt. “He was giving me a lot of resistance. I tried riding him outside and he was scared of everything. I tried riding him inside and he was just a nightmare. He just had too much energy, way too much energy.”
        To combat these problems, Vogt began, for the first time, to think about training from the horse’s point of view. His key words with Chex A Nic became “reverse psychology” and “patience.”
        “I didn’t know a whole lot about form to function, but I knew that I would have a problem I wouldn’t be able to repair if I pushed him,” says Vogt. “He saw things his way, and if I hurt him by spurring him or jerking him or pulling him too much, he would have been like a nervous person. He would have had a nervous breakdown.”
        As the trainer and horse began to evolve in their relationship, so did Chex A Nic’s show career. Opting to skip the prestigious NRCHA Snaffle Bit Futurity, Vogt entered Chex A Nic in a smaller futurity in Medford, Oregon, for his first show.

The experience would forever change the way Vogt felt about the gelding.
        Chex A Nic remained skittish, but he tried his best to do everything Vogt asked of him in the arena. The result was a reserve championship and a moment of enlightenment for the trainer.
        “He showed true,” says Vogt. “And he was exciting.
        “I made up my mind then and there that it was my responsibility to bond with him.”
        In their subsequent training sessions, Vogt came to several conclusions about Chex A Nic. For example, what he’d before seen as nervousness and fear was actually misguided intelligence and an incredible ability to comprehend what he was being taught. Energetic and eager to please, Chex A Nic seemed to only miss his marks when he was trying to overshoot them.

Using some of the techniques he’d seen Ward use with Fillinic, Vogt eased the pressure on the gelding. And the more he did so, the more the gelding eased the pressure on himself and responded with a positive performance.
        “I was actually asking less of this horse and getting more,” says Vogt. “I thought, ‘I’ve never ridden anything like this.’
        “He was over-responsive. And my job was to distill my request to the point where he understood, but did not over-respond.”
        With this new way of working in place, Vogt and Chex A Nic began to make a name for themselves on the weekend circuit. Little by little, their earnings increased, and, without the huge purses from major futurities and derbies on hand to pay for his future, Chex A Nic was literally performing for his hay and oats.
        “I rarely got money for training or hauling him,” says Vogt. “This horse had to pay for himself.
        “Nowadays, we have horses that win major events and they get $50,000 or $100,000 for their future. But as far as the weekend warrior goes, money like that for future investment hardly ever happens. When you’re doing the weekend thing, you have to keep going or you don’t get to keep going.”
        And so Chex A Nic became the industry’s ultimate weekend show performer. For Vogt, who was no stranger to the big-time futurity and derby circuit, this made the gelding even more outstanding.
        “To me, a long career on the weekend circuit has a lot more steam off of it,” he says. “It just takes a better horse to keep going and be really, really good at it.
        “Chex A Nic had a bank account because of weekend showing. He had more money in those days than I did.”
        In time, it came to be that the trainer who had once dreaded working with Chex A Nic, came to adore him. Vogt was pleased that the gelding wanted to give him everything he could in the show pen. He was also acutely aware of the fact that his horse was only getting better as a performer. His stops had become huge, his turns fast, and his cattle work superior.
        Though his 3-year-old futurity time was far behind him, Chex A Nic was now good enough to enter the big events and do well, and he did. He won NRCHA world championship open bridle classes and open stock horse classes, as well as titles from events such as the Blue Ribbon Saddle Circuit and the Hollywood Reining Royal.

In 1992, Vogt, who had never before concentrated on association events, even decided to enter Chex A Nic in the AQHA World Championships

“He’d won just about everything in the Western United States,” says Vogt, “so I thought, ‘why not?’ ”
        The gamble paid off in a big way for both trainer and horse. In what would be an unparalleled double win, Chex A Nic became the first horse ever to win both a reining and cow horse AQHA world championship in the same year.
        Finally, at age 10, Chex A Nic had found his place in history.
        “I still couldn’t catch him in a stall,” says Vogt, “but I felt like showing him was one of the greatest experiences ever. I always felt like the wins and the accomplishments were because he deserved them.
        “He had become so dedicated to responding and being a good student. He was an incredible individual.”

Beyond Winning