The 5-year-old stallion Pride And Joyy now has $313,423 in QData earnings, with his latest win at the 2024 AQHA World Show in the Junior Heeling with the Relentless Remuda’s Miles Baker Nov. 4, 2024.
The win—worth $25,703 for their final score of 231.5—was Baker’s first AQHA World Championship, and it was Pride And Joyy’s second heeling globe, having won the Bronze Globe in 2023 for third with Trevor Brazile.
“(What sets him apart) is his ability and being hooked up to a cow and then obviously training is a big part of it, but if you don’t have the right tools or the right horse, you can’t train a fish to climb a tree,” Baker said. “And that horse, with the training stacked on his ability and his mind and everything, it just makes him elite. I was telling Ty and Melanie (Smith), I said I could literally have somebody could get on him the week before the NFR, have the arena set up, make five or six runs a day and take him out there and have a legit chance to win a gold buckle on him. And he’s a 5-year-old. And he’s just that good of a horse, and I’ll be the first to say it.”
Pride And Joyy’s Origin Story
The stallion is by Stevie Rey Von out of Fun N Fancy Free by Peptoboonsmal. Solo Select CEO Ty Smith bred the horse, then sold him to customers on the East Coast as a colt.
“Those owners sent him to Chris Dawson to start in the cow horse,” Baker explained. “Chris showed him at the Snaffle Bit, and we went to watch—we weren’t watching for the horse, but I noticed him right away. I went home and told Trevor, ‘Chris Dawson had the rope horse down there. He had one he could fly and was just quick.'”
But nothing came of it that fall, and Baker just tucked his affinity for the stud in the back of his brain.
“Then sometime after the first of that next year—2023—Ty and Melanie called and were like, ‘Hey, there’s a stud that we need to go look at. He did pretty good down at the Snaffle Bit Futurity.’ And I was like, ‘Which horse was it?’ And they said, ‘The one that Chris Dawson rode, his name was Pride And Joyy, and I got so excited because that was the horse that I picked out.”
Baker didn’t need to go try the horse, he told Ty Smith. He’d already picked the horse out, and he knew he wanted to own and ride him.
“I knew what it was going to feel like. And Ty was like, ‘No, go get on him and ride him.’ And so I went over there and I was on him for maybe two minutes tops, and I just knew that I knew what he was, and so that’s how we got him.”
Show Time
Baker has won big money on the stud over the last two years at the Riata and at jackpots, but Brazile has done most of the piloting at the futurities. When Brazile had shoulder surgery after Christmas 2023, PRCA World Champion Heeler Jeremy Buhler jump rode Pride And Joyy to wins at the Royal Crown in Buckeye, Arizona, and the ARHFA in Houston.
“I mean, if you stuck any of the top heelers in the world on him, they could back him in the box at the BFI and win on him that day without ever running one at home,” Baker said. “That’s what I think is one of the things that makes that horse so good.”
But Brazile had been back on Pride And Joyy since his mid-year comeback, and Baker hadn’t ridden the horse at home in months before the week of the World Show. Brazile prioritized his daughter Style’s high school basketball game over showing the team roping horses in Oklahoma City, and he gave Baker a few day’s notice to get ready.
“I got on them about four days before the World Show,” Baker said. “I’d run two or three on Kilo before or every day leading up to it. And I went down and roped with JohnRyon the day before we went up there to run some way from home and make sure that I still knew how to set ’em up and show ’em. But they were good. It was definitely not a tough transition.”
Full story on Pride And Joyy? We’re dropping it on The Score with Miles Baker next week. You won’t want to miss it.
