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Dena Tanner Lopez
By
Joan Fry
Temecula, California, a scenic expanse of breezy, rolling hills northeast of
San Diego, is old enough to have a history. In the not too-distant past it
was a frontier town, filled with slow-moving cowboys and thousand-acre
cattle ranches. Today, Temecula is filled with tourists and custom-built
homes, orange groves, Thoroughbred breeding farms, and wine vineyards. It
even boasts an “old town,” several blocks of unpainted wooden store-fronts
(most house antique shops) that resemble an Old West movie set. One of the
town’s best Mexican restaurants is located here, in a bank dating from the
mid-1800s.
Even Dena Tanner Lopez, who moved to Temecula three years ago
with her husband Dave to open her own Saddlebred training barn, has a
history, although hers doesn’t go back that far: Dena is only 27 years old.
But Dena, who is Rob Tanner’s daughter, is one of the few women
trainers in a business still dominated (except for equitation instructors,
who are nearly all female) by men. She’s certainly one of the few women
trainers in America (only Tom Moore’s daughters come to mind) who learned
the business from her father. She is one of the very few women to win at
Louisville as a juvenile, on the gaited mare Special Love Song, who went on
to turn professional. And Dena has been very successful, especially with
developing young horses like Black Mountain Buck (for Michele Macfarlane)
and Eleanor Rigby (for 15-year-old Andrea Nelson). Just last year, Swept
Away, a horse Dena started that’s out of Special Love Song by Oak Hills Dear
Sir (the Jean McLean Davis stud Rob was standing at the time) swept the
juvenile 15-17 championship at Louisville for Bobby Gatlin. “That’s what I
basically like to do, the young horses,” Dena admits. “And so I dwell on
them.”
She jokes about living “in the country,” far, far away from the
traditional Southern California Saddlebred centers of Los Angeles and Rancho
Santa Fe. “I really like Temecula, It’s so horsy out here. It’s like when I
was a little kid and my dad lived in Carlsbad--there’s a ton of kids riding
on trails, and everybody knows each other. During the fire, we all helped
each other out. People are real friendly.” Dena has a full barn as
well as horses in paddocks out back, “on vacation.” (She gives many of her
horses, especially the young ones, time off during the winter months-- pulls their shoes, lets their winter coat grow, and just lets them be
horses.) Right now she has 19 head in training. She would like to build an
extension on the barn to accommodate more young horses, but that’s still in
the planning stage. The barn is clean and very functional: no clutter
anywhere, with a long, wide barn aisle, and, unlike her father’s barn in
nearby San Luis Rey Downs, full of sunlight. That’s because the horses
facing the main road have windows.
Dena explains that she bought the barn from a Western trainer
and reassembled it, windows and all. “At first I wondered if it would dull
my horses’ performance, but I think it makes them better. I think it makes
them brighter. Caravelle, the year she won the World’s Championship, she had
two windows in her stall. I like them. I wish the stalls on the other side
had them. Living out here, as hot as it gets, there’s such a great breeze
right through the windows all the time.” She grins. “We’re in the country,
you know?”
Some of her training horses are owned by customers, others she owns
herself. Most of hers are sired either by Periaptor, the stud her father
currently stands, or by one of Michele Macfarlane’s three World’s Champion
stallions: Buck Rogers, Chubasco, or Sky Watch. Like her father, Dena
loves a good gaited horse, but has all kinds, in all divisions, in training
(including a three-year-old long-tail pony for Bill Johnson named Celine’s
Kiss that “can flat wave his legs.”) She has won in all divisions, too,
both as an amateur riding for her father, and as a professional in her own
right: fine harness, pleasure, park, walk-trot, gaited, and Western. It
was a young Dena Tanner who brought out a young, extravagantly-motioned
black-bay mare at Del Mar one year, where they tied second to Going Big Time
in the pleasure class. The mare was snatched up by Jackie Couch (now Jackie
Tanner, Rob’s wife), who turned around and sold her to Michele to replace
Going Big Time. The mare was Naranda, and she went on to dominate the
pleasure division for years, winning title after national title. (The
mare’s oldest colt just turned three.) Right now Dena has a pleasure
prospect or two of her own as well as one Shatner horse, although “I started
out with five or six Shatner horses last year and sold all of them before
the season even started!”
The only thing Dona doesn’t have is a road horse. Reminded that
her brother Kenny, two years her junior, seems to have a lock on the road
horse division out here (Kenny Lawson has his own pool business but drives
roadsters for Rob), Dena laughs. “I’m working on that one. I’ve been looking
for a road horse for quite a while.” The two were in their early teens when
Ken and Mickey Lawson divorced. Young Kenny Lawson went to live with his
mother while Dena elected to stay with her father, even changing her name to
Tanner when Ken Lawson got interested in numerology and changed his. “He had
me starting colts when I was 12,” Dena says proudly. “Horses were my
projects, my getaway. My father’s a very quiet rider, and he knows how to
get the most out of a horse without looking like he’s trying to get it. He
makes it look easy.” By the time she was 13, Dona already knew she wanted to
follow in his footsteps. She has never studied under anyone else or ridden
with anyone else, and says it’s all the horses her father let her ride and
show that have developed her ability and educated her eye. Whether she’s in
the market for a prospect for herself or is filling a special order for a
client, Dena looks for a horse with quality and athletic ability, and
whether they’re capable of pulling the two together. But even if the horse
has just one of the two attributes, “he can usually go ahead and do
something.”
For Dena, the horse that epitomizes what a Saddlebred should be
is Shadow Run, the brilliant but ill-fated junior World’s Champion belonging
to Steve Macfarlane. “He had the talent, and he had the kindest heart. I
know, I was the one who went out every morning to give him his shots and
medication. We did everything we could for him, even flew out one of the top
veterinarians from back East-- he had a disease that was eating his coffin bone away. The day we put
him down was such a sad day it even got to my dad. You know, there’s not too
many times you see him going down the barn aisle with carrots. If Shadow Run
had lived, he could have done it all.”
Married to shoer Dave Lopez since 1987, Dena admits to having a
life outside the horse business, one that allows her to garden (she’s trying
to find plants for her front yard that the rabbits won’t eat), tend to her
guinea fowl, and--most important--spend time with Dave and Allysa, her three
and a half-year-old daughter. Blond, brown-eyed Allysa has her own pony and
won her first class, a leadline class, last year.
Dena’s workday starts at eight because she has to drop Allysa off at school
first, and runs until two or three in the afternoon. In her spare time she
plays with her new project, a two-year-old reining prospect that’s ready to
go into professional training. (Dena’s mother trained Quarter Horses, and
Dena actually started her horse career riding Western. “We call her Angel,
I don’t know what her fancy name is,” Dena laughs, pointing out that while
the mare stands barely 15 hands, Dena herself “isn’t very tall.” Her goal
is to show Angel at the Non-Pro Reining futurity this coming November.
And
considering Dena Tanner Lopez’s history, it wouldn’t be at all surprising if
she becomes the only Saddlebred trainer in America to win at Louisville and the Reining Futurity.
(Reprinted from Saddle & Bridle, February 1994.)
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