Honest Pleasure
American-bred Thoroughbred racehorse
Honest Pleasure (1973 – August 17, 1992) was an American thoroughbred racehorse.
Background
Bred in Florida by Waldemar Farms, he was sired by leading American sire What A Pleasure, out of the mare Tularia, whose sire, Tulyar, was owned and bred by The Aga Khan IV and was a stakes winner in Ireland and England. He was purchased at the Saratoga yearling sales for $45,000 by Bertram and Diana Firestone in 1974.
He was trained by Hall of Fame trainer LeRoy Jolley,
Racing career
Honest Pleasure was a precocious two-year-old and dominated his division. Headstrong like his grandsire, Bold Ruler, he liked to run in front and easily won the Champagne Stakes, Laurel Futurity Stakes, Arlington-Washington Futurity Stakes, and the Cowdin Stakes. At the end of the year, he was named American Champion Two-Year-Old Colt.
1976 brought a rival in Bold Forbes, another colt with a similar ancestry in grandsire Bold Ruler and running style. Bold Forbes had raced mostly in Puerto Rico as a two-year-old but challenged Honest Pleasure at three.
Honest Pleasure won the Flamingo Stakes by 11 lengths in February, and went on to win the Florida Derby and the Blue Grass Stakes as the favorite.
In the Kentucky Derby Jolley had Honest Pleasure sit off the pace and but he made his move too late and was beaten to the wire by Bold Forbes.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Honest Pleasure” is american-bred Thoroughbred racehorse. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Honest, Pleasure and American-bred, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “american-bred Thoroughbred racehorse” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5893268. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1973, 1992, 1974 and 1976.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Honest Pleasure” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.