WHAT a way to earn the first piece of blacktype with an offspring. Liam’s Map, the record-breaking Grade 1 winning son of Unbridled’s Song (Unbridled), sired this week’s Grade 1 winner Basin, a two-year-old from his first crop. The juvenile colt is just one of a pair of winners from that crop for the Lane’s End stallion who has just completed his latest season at a fee of $20,000, down from the $25,000 he commanded for his first three years.

Liam’s Map’s first crop of yearlings sold for up to $500,000 last year, and they averaged $158,490 for a total of 68 sold. Unraced himself at two, Liam’s Map was only defeated twice in eight career starts at three and four. An improver with time, he won an eight and a half furlong stakes at three, but at four his career exploded.

In his second season racing he won the Grade 1 Woodward Stakes at Saratoga over nine furlongs by almost five lengths on the way to rounding off his career with a new track record and winning the Breeders’ Cup Dirt Mile at Keeneland. He was runner-up that same year to Honor Code in the Grade 1 Whitney Stakes.

Bred in Kentucky by Cottonwood Stables, Basin sold as a yearling at Keeneland last September for $150,000. This was just weeks before Cottonwood’s owner Tommy Ligon died at the age of 69. A lifelong trucking executive and owner, Ligon was involved in the thoroughbred industry for over 45 years, and won many awards including Ohio Breeder and Owner of the Year. At this year’s Keeneland September Sale his estate is consigning an Orb (Malibu Moon) half-brother to Basin. However, the colt is hiding in the latter stages of the sale, Lot 3,583 to be precise.

Given that he is by a Grade 1 sire who won the Kentucky Derby, this might seem a strange place to have him catalogued. After all, the colt’s dam Appenzall (Johannesburg) was a winner at two and she has a perfect record of seven runners and seven winners. Prior to Basin she produced the Grade 3 winner and $1.2 million earner Rise Up (Rockport Harbor). This year Appenzall visited Darley’s Nyquist (Uncle Mo), another Kentucky Derby winner.

This is a solid family that every generation produces a good horse. The best may just have appeared and pinhookers will be eyeing the later stages of the Keeneland Sale with more interest than usual.