By Vinnie Perrone

The additions to Bill Boniface’s office walls tell you things he’s done. The devil-red silks of Calumet Farm hang old and framed, a reminder of the prized racetrack job he got by lying. A glass case displays a bottle of 2010 Chateau Bonita merlot, Boniface’s second vintage, its neck draped with a Governor’s Cup gold medal.

A huge color caricature touches the feat that changed it all, Deputed Testamony’s 1983 Preakness splash, a toothy-glad Boniface hoisting a money bag with two more at his feet and the unlikely bay hero at his side.

The additions to Bill Boniface’s work clothes tell you things he’s done. Muddy blots on worn denim knees speak of earthy chores in Bonita Farm’s hilly fields. Worn white sneakers flecked with dirt mark shedrow passages within the property’s white-and-red-trimmed barns. A leather cellphone holster, weathered and frayed at the snap, reveals a man in demand.

Boniface works a phone as he works a room, with ease, panache and homespun charm, which explains in part how the stallion Etched made his way from Kentucky to become Bonita’s newest stallion. Etched’s first creations stand eligible for the juvenile stakes this upcoming 30th Maryland Million Day, the racing novelty Boniface helped birth with friend and program namesake Jim McKay.

By landing Etched, Boniface added a dash of royalty to Maryland’s stallion ranks through partnership with global Thoroughbred racing/breeding empire Darley Stud, owned by Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. “I like to say that I’m partners with one of the wealthiest guys in the world,” Boniface says, half-grinning behind an office desk bearing the wood-paneled advisory THE BUCK STOPS HERE.

When the 2011 retirement of Derby-winning stud Go for Gin left Bonita standing only Mojave Moon, sire of 2009 Maryland Million Classic winner Sumacha’hot, Boniface tapped a spring to his vast Thoroughbred reservoir. He reached former Bonita staffer Nicole Schab, who married trainer Al Stall Jr., whose clients include the fashionable Claiborne Farm in Kentucky. Boniface’s message: “Let me know of any stallion prospects Claiborne doesn’t want.”

Word found then-Darley stallion manager Charlie Boden, best man at the Stall-Schab wedding, and soon Boniface was walking down the aisle of Darley’s Lexington, Ky., Thoroughbred division.

“This horse, he caught my fancy,” he says of Etched, both in the flesh and in the books.

A Kentucky-bred son of Grade 1 winners Forestry and Unbridled Elaine, Etched won seven of 11 races through age 6 and, by Boniface’s tabbing, earned passes for three of the four misses. Boniface guides a workman’s hand along Etched’s past-performance lines, excusing the hiccups: “Never acclimated to Dubai. . . Broke down in the Clark.”

Etched’s only honest loss, he says, happened in the 2010 Breeders’ Cup Classic that starred Blame and Zenyatta – hardly a demerit.

“If he’d have won that race, he’d have been standing for a hundred thousand [dollars] in Kentucky,” Boniface says. “But he didn’t, and that’s why I wanted to get him here. Because this is a very serious racehorse. A very, very serious racehorse.”

Sporting a $3,500 stud fee, Etched covered 34 mares each of his first two years at Bonita, Boniface says, maybe half that in 2015. Ever ready to strum the chords of history, he quickly plays a caveat.

“I’ve gotta remind ya: Northern Dancer only had 24 foals in his first crop. He never bred more than 40 mares because Mr. [E.P.] Taylor didn’t believe in it. And he’s the best stallion there ever was.”

Forty years after he sent a $500 mare (Proof Requested) to a $500 stallion (Traffic Cop), got a classic winner in Deputed Testamony, stallion-syndicated him for $5.2 million and used the haul to relocate Bonita Farm on 400 acres in Darlington, Harford County, Boniface coaxed Etched as part of a grander plan.

Purse-money levels muscled by slot-machine gains, Maryland’s Thoroughbred tracks offer 30 percent bonuses to breeders and owners of the top three state-bred finishers in everyday races. The program that brings fresh incentives to horsemen, Boniface says, might entice Darley to establish a more formidable stallion string in Maryland.

Those coals were stoked when an Etched filly out of the Rakeen mare Bay of Bengal and granddaughter of Grade 2 Black-Eyed Susan Stakes winner Calipha was reserve champion at the 2015 MHBA yearling show.

“It shows that he gets a good-lookin’ horse, and a good-lookin’ horse’ll usually run good,” Boniface says. “And I love his 2-year-olds – they are so powerful and strong, got bone like him, got good minds like him. I think he’s gonna prove to be a stallion.”

Time and circumstance have certified Boniface’s horse-making vision. He leads all breeders with seven Maryland Million victories and, in effect, made a score before the first Million race unfolded.

Wife Joan typing on a desk across from his, Boniface engages the tale, the accepted one: McKay (born McManus), the acclaimed TV sports journalist who bred horses with wife Margaret on their Monkton farm, returned from the inaugural 1984 Breeders’ Cup in California with the sudden revelation that Maryland might concoct a state-sired equivalent.

“We were at the old farm,” Boniface says. “And Jim came down, was standin’ by the startin’ gate. He had just been to the Breeders’ Cup, and he said . . .”

Joan, not appearing to listen, suddenly stops typing: “It was Margaret who said it, comin’ back on the plane, said, ‘Jim, we should do somethin’ like that in Maryland.’ ”

Boniface, not at all derailed: “And I said, ‘Jim, well, why not?’ And so I ran it by [then-Maryland Horse editor] Snowden Carter, and Snowden was very pessimistic, said, ‘That’ll never fly, Bill.’ So, of course, in those days, when somebody said that to me, I got to makin’ it fly. So I called up a dozen stallion managers and said, ‘Would you put up the stud fee?’ because we needed the seed money to start. And all said yes. Most of ’em didn’t write a check, but they said yes.

“So I went back to Jim and said, ‘I’m tellin’ ya, we’re gonna get X dollars to start the kitty, and then if we can get sponsorships to the tune of payin’ the purses, we’ll be in business. And, of course, the key to getting the sponsorship money was Jim, and – boom! – before you knew it, we had these commitments.

“We went to the kitchen over at Jim’s place. Margaret made some soup and some sandwiches. It was [then-Pimlico general manager] Chick Lang and Jim and I. And I had this notepad made out. . . I had nine races written up, a hundred thousand [dollars] each. And so Chick Lang turned to me and he said, ‘Billy, all of these races are just figments of your imagination.’ He said, ‘Why don’t you imagine one more and we can call it the Maryland Million.’ And that’s where the name was born.”

Through clouds of skepticism, the Maryland Million launched in 1986, and one year later Boniface reached heights unseen. On Million Day 1987 at Pimlico, he became the first trainer to win three $100,000 races on a card.

To embellish the upstart Maryland Million in general and his horses’ prospects in particular, Boniface had enticed Hall of Fame jockey Laffit Pincay Jr. from California for that second running. Pincay rode two of Boniface’s winners, Gold Glove in the First National Bank of Maryland Ladies, and Sean’s Ferrari in the Business Express Nursery.

Of all the electric Maryland Million moments the past three decades, few glowed like Sean’s Ferrari’s, the colt Margaret McManus had bred and named for an inside joke. Sean McManus, then in his early 20s and not yet president of CBS Sports, had been pestering his parents for a Ferrari, whereupon Jim and Margaret walked him to a paddock at their Bellefield Farm. Margaret pointed to a blaze-faced bay weanling and told Sean, “There’s your Ferrari.”

No favorite won on Million Day 1987, a truth punctuated by Sean’s Ferrari’s 16-1 upset of King’s Snow, at 2-5 the day’s strongest favorite.

“A part of the story behind the story,” Boniface says. “Jim McKay’s real name was Jim McManus. And up in Connecticut somewhere, he’d go there in the summer, and at the post office where he got his mail, there was another guy by the name of McManus. So they meet; they become friends. This guy McManus has a big corporation, and he also started a commuter service from Boston to Baltimore.

“So we’re down at Jim’s house for dinner one night; the other McManus was there. So I said, ‘Jim, why don’t we get him to sponsor a race? We’ll call it the Business Express Nursery.’ The guy said, ‘Okay, I’ll sponsor it.’ So after dinner and a couple bottles of wine, I said, ‘If he’s gonna put up the money, why don’t we sell him part of that horse, and he can win back the money he’s puttin’ up.’ Now, what were the odds that was gonna happen, right? I mean, that’s a zillion to one. But by a nose it did.”

So he had a piece of Sean’s Ferrari?

“He had a piece,” Boniface says.

“They each had a third,” Joan says from her desk, meaning her husband and the two McManuses.

McKay and Boniface shared other horses, the co-bred Please Mong among them. The Deputed Testamony mare a retired maiden, she’s managed to produce winners from most of her offspring. One of them, a 2-year-old Etched filly, got her gate card in mid-August and moved closer to her racing debut – for Sean McManus and nephew James Fontelieu. Their prime objective: the Lassie. Her name: Mong’s Million.

For more than a half-century, Boniface has tempted adventure. With a nudge from his dad, horseman and The Evening Sun turf editor William Boniface, young Bill quit school at 15, left home, exaggerated his age and started galloping horses for vaunted Calumet Farm in Kentucky and Florida. Back in Maryland as a 17-year-old jockey, he fought weight and perceived recklessness until an epiphany unveiled itself at Timonium. Disqualified once on the card, he drew the stewards’ attention again that very afternoon.

“So I’m ridin’ a horse for my father; she flips goin’ in the gate,” Boniface says. “The starter says, ‘Billy, you all right?’ ‘Sure I’m all right.’ I coulda been half-dead, you know?’ So he put me back on her, and goin’ into the first turn, Ray Mikkonen’s on the inside, screamin’ – he always was screamin’ for room – and I come over on him just enough. And I won the race. And here I go back before the stewards. They left me up. No disqualification.

“I get dressed, but I say, ‘I know I’m gonna get another 10 days.’ So I go up on the midway, and the guy’s sellin’ pizzas. I get a pizza pie and a pitcher of beer – in those days, they weren’t checkin’ cards like today. Drank that whole pitcher o’ beer, ate the pizza pie. . . and next to that was a Marine Corps recruitin’ stand.”

Tacking 107 pounds at 5-foot-11, Boniface boarded a train to Parris Island days later. Four years in the Corps, he returned home 140 pounds (his weight today), changed but not altogether regimented. His father had a seven-acre spread not far from Timonium’s north gate. Bill, training off the farm, contends he would ride his racehorse across York Road, gallop him on the Timonium strip and ride him home.

Senior years scarcely corked his zeal. Long a wine aficionado, Boniface bought 2,500 merlot vines from Northern California and planted them across two acres. The Governor’s Cup gold medal for the 2010 vintage, he says, was one of 10 accorded 500 entries.
Connoisseurs raved beyond the tasting room: Boniface sold more than 2,000 bottles of the 2010 merlot at $30 each. But the last two savage winters sapped the vines, and he sold them.

“Most Maryland wines, people plant hybrids that will stand the winter, but they won’t make great wine,” he says. “I got great wine, but it didn’t survive the winters.”

At 73, Boniface allows much of the hands-on horse work to two of his three sons: Kevin does the training, and John oversees the breeding operation, yearlings and turnouts. (Billy had had a role too until he became Harford County’s director of administration.) But their dad still occupies the horse barns and the five-eighths-mile training track, and, as always, any of Bonita’s hilly fields. He’d spent the day before unloading three hay wagons, with no stated muscle soreness; not so, apparently, a young stablehand.

“This boy that was helpin’ me unload yesterday called my son and said his back was killin’ him and he couldn’t come in,” Boniface says, steering a pickup across the farm’s blacktop drive. “I said ‘Lemme tell you somethin’, you 25-year-old. I’ll be there in the mornin’; you be in too.” He points to a Jeep parked stable-side. “You see he came.”

The second hay cutting proved formidable, but Boniface puts Bonita’s 2015 yield down by half for spring’s incessant rains. You need four dry days to bring the hay in, cut it, fluff and re-fluff it, rake and bale it, he says; from mid-May through most of June, those four-day windows never opened. Hay and straw prices, he reckons, could spike this winter.

But across the field, down the slope, up the hill, broodmares graze with watchful sucklings. Over in the training barn, unraced horses relish breakfast and a chance to embody human dreams. Across the roadway, in the stallion barn, Etched and Mojave Moon await a romance that might change history.

Whatever the cash crops might bring, it’s prime growing season for Thoroughbreds along Maryland’s newly fertile landscape. Ever hopeful, Bill Boniface has space on his office walls and working clothes to add mementoes.