Twenty years into his retirement from a Hall of Fame career in college basketball, Denny Crum was at the Keeneland sales pavilion shopping for a stakes winner with trainer Dallas Stewart.

This was no new venture for Crum, who had been a racehorse owner since the mid-1970s and bred nearly a dozen winners through the late 1980s and ‘90s. Thoroughbred racing was yet another outlet for the man who loved to compete, whether it was basketball, golf, fishing, horse racing, or poker.

When Sir Barton became the first horse to win the Kentucky Derby, Preakness Stakes, and Belmont Stakes in 1919, he created an elite standard that only 12 other horses have matched since.