Arthur B. Hancock III, the owner of Stone Farm in Paris, Kentucky, died at his home on Friday after a long battle with pancreatic cancer according to his wife Staci. He was 83 years old.In later years, Arthur Hancock would often cast his mind back to a spring day long ago, swinging on a seat outside the little house at the 100-acre parcel where he began his life away from Claiborne. He was 25, solitary and troubled. But the first warm day of the year was drawing the sap of renewal all around him.“Hell,” he resolved, listening to the birdsong and hum of instincts. “I'll breed some horses, maybe race some. And if it doesn't work out, I'll just take that guitar and drive a truck. And just live my life, whatever time I've got.”That time has now been measured, and that cherished guitar has finally fallen mute. But what a life he had led, in the meantime; and what horses he gave us. Now the rest really is Silence, to use a fateful word in his story; as it must eventually be, even for a man so suffused with vital forces. But the music will live on-not merely in the songs Arthur loved to compose and perform, many of them recorded, but in that deeper register where he reconciled the discords of his youth with the harmonies he had always discerned, even in his most turbulent years, in the undertones of life.Especially in the decades after he had renounced drink, this sense of the world around us, and how it all fits together, qualified Arthur as a profound influence on all those fortunate to have found in him the best of companions.Though he leaves a dismal void in their lives, the recollection of his stories and songs, his quotations and aphorisms, will remain inseparable from the slow, measured tones in which he shared them. For while his ability to connect most obviously deserved the name of genius in his dealings with horses, and while human empathy in Arthur was as selective as for anyone else, those who found the right wavelength were rewarded to a degree they will seldom experience on their own journey through life.Unique as he was, Arthur's redemption tale has a universal resonance–and secures for his idiosyncrasies a currency that will endure far beyond his large, loving family. That has become especially true since the publication of his memoirs, which happily distilled his qualities not only as a raconteur but as a man of unflinching honesty and profound reflection.Arthur Hancock | EquisportArthur was an imposing man, standing tall and strong against advancing age, but as a character he loomed larger yet. There were notoriously times, in his wild years, when he made some enemies in the deployment of his physique and dismayed even those who loved him. In straightening himself out, however, he showed where the true force of his nature had always abided.And it was this bedrock of courage–a large word, but one that fairly combines his fierce determination with his indifference to the odds that often steepled dauntingly against him-that sustained him as the central protagonist in perhaps the single greatest story of the American Turf.Arthur Boyd Hancock III was born on February 22, 1943, the first of four children to “Bull” Hancock and his wife Waddell. Arthur's father was the colossus bestriding the Kentucky bloodstock industry, having inherited Claiborne from his own father, who had come from Virginia to found the farm in 1910. Bull imported Nasrullah from Europe to become sire of Claiborne's eight-time champion stallion, Bold Ruler. But Bold Ruler's greatest son, Secretariat, was still only a juvenile when Bull died himself from pancreatic cancer at just the age of 62.His memoirs bravely detail Arthur's volatile relationship with his father, whose approach to discipline could sometimes become quite violent, seemingly without proving terribly effective. Their clashes were such that it could be surprising, later in his life, to hear Arthur insisting with unmistakable warmth on his deep love for his father. Even at the time, however, Arthur never imagined that his various provocations would affect his eligibility someday to become the fourth bearer of his name to preside over the great farm. Yes, Bull had always scoffed at the way Arthur endlessly picked out tunes on his guitar; and while his physical prowess found wholesome purpose in swimming for Vanderbilt University, Arthur also had a worrying propensity for getting into scrapes, often fueled by drink. There had been bar fights, car wrecks, nights in jail. But Arthur remained a diligent and attentive student of the family trade, including in a backstretch stint with Eddie Neloy in New York, and detected beneath his father's irritation a core of confidence that when the time came, he would have what it took. Indeed, Bull had already leased him that 100-acre parcel, down the road from Claiborne, for Arthur to test himself through the annual cycles of a horse farm.But the premature loss of Bull Hancock brought that crossroads abruptly forward. And after a meeting with the bereaved family and its advisers, the executors of Bull's estate instead appointed Arthur's younger brother as president. Seth was just 23, his junior by six years-yet Arthur was being asked to take a subordinate role. He was not going to stand for that. If that was how it was going to be, the farm could manage without him. Arthur said later that he had already confided that decision to his mother, simply after sampling the kind of interference he might expect from their advisors. But it obtained a melodramatic intensity when he walked out of that meeting and shook the dust of Claiborne from his feet.That night, drowning his sorrows with his dear friend Paul Sullivan, he tearfully declared that he was not only going to end up bigger than Claiborne; in the process, he was finally going to nail the one race that had tormented Bull Hancock: the Kentucky Derby. Sullivan knew the only prescription for such delusions: “Waitress, bring this fool another Budweiser!”The way the narrative unfolded from here had a dramatic coherence we seldom experience in life, as inexorably neat as Greek drama. Little wonder Arthur always believed that our lives obey some latent choreography.First he requited that dynastic craving for the Derby. His pride goaded by a transformation in his reception by horsemen at the Keeneland sales, between November (high fives) and January (cold shoulder), he started building up Stone Farm with ferocious ambition: he bought land, bought breeding stock, even stood stallions. And in 1982 Gato Del Sol, co-bred and co-owned with Leone Peters but emphatically a Stone Farm production, overcame the outside post to win on the first Saturday in May. There was something symbolic in the way Arthur and his wife Staci were barred from the winner's circle by a security guard, who then turned around and saw the Governor beckoning them with a smile: here was the Kentucky Establishment recognizing and saluting the rebel's accession to a summit that had ever been denied his father. A few days later, indeed, Arthur was moved to receive a generous letter of congratulation from Phipps, who said how proud Bull would have been.In his ardor to prove himself, however, Arthur had recklessly overstretched. Stone Farm had absorbed 18 farms and reached 4,600 acres. Just bigger than Claiborne, then, only without the same foundations. Interest rates were soaring and one morning, over breakfast at Louie's restaurant, he shocked himself by calculating the daily interest he was accumulating on debts of $15 million. He couldn't quite remember the figure-once he said $3,200, in his memoirs it was over $4,000-but the point was the same. Even before paying for his breakfast, it was another impossibly expensive day.He was still drinking, too. There were times when serving alcohol to this strapping man (two ready fists attached) at a wedding or party amounted to taking the pin from a grenade. Some of the episodes Arthur bravely recounts in his autobiography make your heart go out to Staci as she raised their expanding family.The pressures he was under reached such a nadir that he caught himself calculating that his life assurance policy would make him more use to his children if he drove into an oak. He would never forget a night when he went walking round the farm at 2.30 a.m. Every detail stayed with him: the Milky Way, the fireflies, a fox barking. And he implored whatever benign force might preside among the stars above to offer him a less desperate way out. Immediately he had a powerful sense of epiphany, a conviction that his prayer had been heard.Arthur Hancock | HorsephotosBecause he needed a miracle-and that, in his view, is exactly what he was granted.As a weanling, Sunday Silence had such a bad colitis on Thanksgiving that Arthur remembered the vet, having given him 23 liters of fluid, looking at his watch impatiently and telling the horse to hurry up and die if that was what he was going to do, as he was late for lunch. Unsurprising, then, that the horse should have remained such a weedy specimen, repeatedly failing to sell at auction. He then had another reprieve, surviving a terrible van wreck, before Arthur sold a half-share to Charlie Whittingham (who in turn divided his stake with Ernest Gaillard).But somehow the two rejects-the horse that nobody wanted, the heir who felt robbed off his birthright-combined to thwart the very man Arthur always held most responsible for his humiliation at Claiborne, Ogden Phipps. While Seth had meanwhile finally exorcised Claiborne's Kentucky Derby curse, with Swale two years after Gato Del Sol, Phipps himself had never won the race. And from the same crop as Sunday Silence, just down the road, Claiborne had raised for him the regal Easy Goer.No other horse would intrude on the gladiatorial rivalry between the two colts in 1989. Sunday Silence won their first showdown, in the Derby itself; and again denied Easy Goer in an epic duel for the Preakness. The rival camp had the satisfaction of denying Sunday Silence the Triple Crown, together with a $5 million bonus, by a comprehensive turnaround in the Belmont-but it was Sunday Silence who settled matters, sealing his status as Horse of the Year, by holding Easy Goer's challenge for the Breeders' Cup Classic.True, his unfashionable pedigree and appearance meant that Sunday Silence was still not embraced in Kentucky. By the time Seth had booked 50 mares to Easy Goer, Arthur had found three people who wanted a share in his horse. Instead it was Zenya Yoshida who prized his genetic potential, buying a leg for $2.5 million after his sophomore season and then buying out his partners to stand the horse at Shadai Farm in Hokkaido. Sunday Silence proceeded to revolutionize the Japanese breed, his sons including another great patriarch in Deep Impact. Arthur never let his community forget what it had passed up. But the most important thing, naturally, was that Stone Farm had been saved.As a result Arthur could keep raising champions. Having meanwhile produced two Derby runners-up, Menifee and Strodes Creek, in 1998 he sold a Mr. Prospector colt-co-bred with Stonerside Stables-to Fusao Sekiguchi for $4 million at the Keeneland July Sale. As Fusaichi Pegasus, he became the third Derby winner off Stone Farm. Years previously Arthur had very nearly added an Epsom Derby to its roll of honor, Hawaiian Sound being caught by a head in 1978, and other resonant Stone Farm graduates meanwhile include Harlan, Risen Star, Air Force Blue, Bricks and Mortar, Tiffany Lass, Skywalker, Goodbye Halo, Rainbow View and Pizza Bianca. They all benefited from the huge, undulating fields that Arthur considered pivotal to their development.“Good land, good water,” he said. “And great big trees. My grandfather always said that land with big trees will raise good cattle, good tobacco, and good horses. Some of the fields are 90, 100 acres. Because say you're going to raise a trout to be the fastest damned trout there is. He's going to be a lot better off raised in a lake than in a little aquarium. Or maybe just a little bit better, but that's all it takes sometimes. I don't know, maybe that nose in the Preakness was because Sunday Silence was raised in a great big field.”First and foremost, however, Arthur's success was rooted in that intangible connection with the horse itself. And, happily, the same blend of nature and nurture that had applied in his own case has plainly endowed his daughter Lynn with a similar aptitude. In recent years she has assumed increasing responsibility, any differences in style between the generations effaced, when it comes to standards, by seamless quality.Lynn's siblings-sisters Walker, Hutchi, Kate and Alex; and brother Arthur IV-similarly proved a source of pride and fulfilment for Arthur. His son, indeed, has inherited his father's talent as a Bluegrass musician. The joys Arthur found in his family ever reiterated how blessed he was, the day he saw a beautiful blonde leading up a yearling in Hermitage Farm's July consignment at Keeneland. He asked Warner Jones who she was. “Her name is Staci Worthington, and you leave her alone!” Jones replied sternly. “She's a nice girl!”On their first date Staci was thrown off a motor scooter and Arthur took her to hospital with a broken wrist and blood pouring from her mouth. Nor was that the only bumpy landing in store, as Arthur was on a break from the bottle through their courtship. But Staci lasted the course, raised a marvelous family, and gained her reward as Arthur prevailed in perhaps the hardest of his many battles. He last took a drink in the early hours of New Year's Day, 1989, the day Sunday Silence turned three.In the years since Arthur consolidated his position as the doyen of modern Kentucky horsemen, a status he used as a tireless campaigner for the cleansing of our sport.Arthur Hancock | EquisportThose of us who only gained the privilege of Arthur's friendship in the years after his storms had abated knew a mellow, sage observer of life and its mysteries. Just to have perceived how special a person lurked beyond the chaos was a remarkable credit to the young Staci; to help draw that person out, still more so. But the fact is that the unique, brilliant Arthur had always been there, much closer to the surface than seemed apparent in his tearaway years; and that he drew upon his own, abiding strengths to become one of the greatest of all horsemen, and an inspiration to many who find themselves fighting demons of their own.In this regard he was taken aback, and greatly touched, by the public response to his autobiography. Before its release he said that if it could help even one reader, facing similar battles, then he would consider the long toil of its composition to have been worthwhile. In the event, the many messages of gratitude that he immediately began to receive would reciprocally fortify Arthur himself, as he underwent grueling treatment for the same illness that had claimed his father.“I've always been crazy,” he would say, borrowing from Waylon Jennings. “But it's kept me from going insane.” It feels superficial merely to say that Arthur was one of the biggest characters our community has ever relished. More pertinently, perhaps, we can remind ourselves that his whole saga was founded in, well, character-in the sense of substance, backbone, personal resource.In the same way, another word of dual application is “legacy.” On the one hand, we're talking about horses that have contributed massively to the breed; plus a farm that not only matched the ambition that earned Arthur such derision, when leaving Claiborne, but also secured by a succession so much smoother than the one he never had. But we're also talking about a legacy we can all share: as a model of dauntless human spirit, and for the way we can turn the swords of our passion into ploughshares.For what first drove Arthur to the brink was also what ultimately brought him back: a poetic sense that there is always more within our mortal reach. By the same token, now that his mortal span is over, some part of him will live on-whether somehow blending in the karma he always perceived in the world around us; or in the example he has bequeathed to anyone whose dreams depend on the courage to see them through.The post Arthur Hancock, Owner Of Stone Farm, Dies At 83 appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions.