John Grott and The Mighty Quinn (CT)
Team #978: John Grott and The Mighty Quinn
From: Ledyard, Connecticut
Ages: 83 & 25
Combined Age: 108
Test: First Level Test 1
A few years after I retired from the Navy, my wife started riding. I soon found that if I wanted to see her, I needed to get involved with riding. That was over 41 years ago, and over the years, I have had three horses before we got The Mighty Quinn.
We had a friend who kept encouraging us to go see Quinn. He was big, black, and ten years old with little training. He was in a situation where if we didn’t take him, he would end up going to the state game warden. We took him to one of our trainers, Herb Robe, a dressage instructor who found Quinn didn’t understand leg and didn’t have a canter, but Herb told us Quinn was smart and willing. That was fifteen years ago when he started learning dressage and jumping.
We have had so much fun over the years. We have shown in dressage tests, three-foot jump courses, gone swimming in the ocean, done hunter paces, and fox hunting. We were asked if we would like to be in a movie, The Life and Legend of J Goule, as an eighteenth-century oil millionaire. I galloped Quinn while carrying rifles, which didn’t faze him. It was so much fun, and many years later, another friend recommended that we join a troupe doing a live rendition of the opera, The Passion of Carmen, with live horses. Quinn behaved like he had been doing it for years.
Quinn and I have now been training with Jordan LaPlaca and Frederick Magazzeni in dressage for the last fifteen years, always having fun together.
