PrintThe talented but quirky gray Welsh won the hearts of the many children he carried to championship honors.
Most people wouldn’t look twice at a 12-hand pony whose standout traits included ducking out at green rolltops, colicking at inconvenient times and running away with small children.
But that tough character packed an awful lot of talent and the heart of a teacher into his undersized frame. And over the past decade Buzz Light Year turned a generation of children into riders, becoming one of the most successful and sought-after small ponies.
On paper, ”Buzz” seemed destined for greatness from birth. Sired by the legendary Cymraeg Rain Beau (by Farnley Lustre), he’s out of the three-time USEF Pony Finals champion Snowgoose, who helped start the careers of Greg Best and Laura Chapot. Snowgoose’s owner, Richard Prant, bred Buzz, originally named Millbrook’s Monarch, and opted to leave him a stallion for a few years.
“People didn’t breed to him because he was the most beautiful pony in the world—he wasn’t as pretty as his mother—they chose him because he had beautiful breeding,” said Prant.
After he was gelded, Buzz went to trainer Mindy Minetto. “He was a devil,” recalled Minetto. “When the vet would come to deworm him he’d say, ‘Is that little white pony still here?’ No one could stop him—he ran away with Evan Coluccio, and when Andrea Manafort bought him he ran away with her too.”
At one show, while on the longe line, he broke free, took off and jumped a four-foot fence on his way back to the barn. Eventually, he settled into a routine and started to turn heads in the show ring, finding his way to trainer Ron Esposito who recruited top pony jocks like Charlie Jayne to get him in form. Despite his small stature he ate up the lines and jumped spectacularly. But he wasn’t a point-and-shoot pony, and he never lost his trademark attitude.
His delicate constitution demanded he only eat a specially prepared Dengie soup rather than hay, and he suffered two major injuries late in his career. After his second injury, owner Ashley Burlingame opted to let him retire from a full-time show career. Buzz’s former owner, Cindy Hennessey, told her about Sarah Doyle’s farm in Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., where the pony could live out his years in light work receiving show-quality care.
“What’s amazing to me is the relationships from my life that have come from having Buzz,” said Doyle, whose daughter Ava Stearns dominated the local short stirrup divisions aboard Buzz during the last years of his life. “The Burlingames and I are very close now, and [Hennessey’s daughter] Molly Sullivan came to work for me and taught Ava on him. That team was amazing, and they won everything.
“He was so loved by everyone who had him,” she continued. “The Burlingames could have leased him out until the end of his life, and he could have gone to a hundred fancy barns. Instead, he got to come here and stand at the edge of the ocean, watch the swans and get dressed up on Halloween like a regular pony. It’s one of the kindest things I’ve ever seen, just a testament to an owner doing the right thing by [her] horse.”
Buzz Light Year died last fall after a bout with colitis at 23, but his legacy lives on. Buzz’s first career as a breeding stallion yielded at least two get who also made a mark in the hunter ring: Light Up The Year and Touch
Of Silver.
Jill Betuker
(Showed Buzz Light Year in 1994)
