11.8.24

Shocker English graduates share Thoroughbred pedigrees

Roger Lyons ’69/73, left, and Bill Oppenheim ’71/74 have more in common than holding multiple degrees in English from Wichita State. They’ve both also fielded successful careers as consultants and analysts in the competitive world of Thoroughbred breeding and racing.

In late October, the two got together for a campus tour with WSUFAE staffers Lynette Murphy ’95/14, senior director of development for the Fairmount College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and Matt Fisher ’21. While Lyons lives in Wichita, Oppenheim was in town on business from Scotland, where he has lived since 1993 with his wife, Lou, a British native. He hadn’t been back on campus for decades.

“It was great to host Bill and Roger for a tour of WSU’s campus – especially since Bill hadn’t seen it in decades,” says Fisher, WSUFAE associate director of development. “They were impressed by how much the university has grown since they were students and enjoyed reminiscing about their time as teaching assistants in the English department. They talked about how much they value their liberal arts education at Wichita State.”

Both Oppenheim and Lyons parlayed their bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English into notable careers in the Thoroughbred business.

“I discovered back when I was in fifth grade that diagramming sentences was the one thing I could do better than anybody else in the class,” Lyons says. “Based on an admittedly small sample, that seems to be the most common experience of people who majored in English. For me, that central tendency was a straight line between fifth grade and a career in the thoroughbred racing and breeding industry. I didn’t know about that straight line until I met Bill in late August 1972. That’s when I got my first look at it. Until Bill lured me onto that same line 10 years later, I had assumed it was the only one of its kind. No, nearly everyone who managed to establish a career in the information side of the racing and breeding industry had passed through a college of liberal arts and sciences. BA, MA and Phd degrees in English are prominently represented.”

Oppenheim began as a racing journalist, working for the Independent Newspapers Limited stable of publications in New Zealand (1974-75) and then, after returning to the United States, as editor of the bimonthly Louisiana Horse magazine (1976-79). He is the co-founder of the Lexington, Kentucky-based newsletter Racing Update and served as the paper’s editor until 1993.

During his years in Lexington, Oppenheim not only developed a reputation as an independent observer of the sales scene in the 1980s, he and the staff of Racing Update — which included Lyons from 1983 to 1989 — originated a number of methods of stallion and sales analysis that have been adopted throughout the industry. Oppenheim sold Racing Update in 1995, and Lyons went on to develop and market Thoroughbred pedigree software for Werk Thoroughbred Consultants.

After joining WTC and moving to Fremont, California, Lyons co-founded the well-respected CompuSire pedigree software with Jack Werk and, in 1996, returned to Lexington, where he served WTC in an advisory capacity and assisted with the development of eNicks, an online site that offers a way for breeders to select enrolled stallions as prospective crosses for their mares.

From 2000 to 2017, Oppenheim was a weekly columnist for Thoroughbred Daily News, authoring more than 800 columns. As a consultant, his private matings clients have bred 19 Classic winners, including two winners of the G1 Epsom Derby and two winners of the G1 Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe. Active with the Breeders’ Cup, one of horse racing’s most celebrated events, he served on the racing and nominations committee that helped originate the International Stallion Nominations program in 2011 and was a member of the board of directors from 2013 to 2017.

In 2004, Lyons moved his operation from Lexington to Wichita, where he continues private consulting for a select number of clients and shares Thoroughbred insights via the blog site Pedigree Matters.