Impressive

When someone breaks virtually every record doing whatever he or she does, that person is the GOAT–the Greatest Of All Time. When it’s a halter stallion, it’s Impressive.

Foaled April 15, 1969, Impressive was a sorrel colt that had horse people talking from coast to coast while standing 20 grand championships and earning 48 points in the show ring. Topping his career in the ring, Impressive was the AQHA world champion aged stallion at the first AQHA World Championship Show in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1974.

Impressive followed with unprecedented success at stud. He sired a total of 2,251 American Quarter Horses from 24 crops, represented by Conclusive, The Graduate, Tardy Impressive, Impressive Dandy, Zip To Impress, Noble Tradition and noted halter and performance sire Mr Impressive. The sons and daughters of Impressive earned 19,249 halter points and 5,628.5 performance points, and include 23 open world champions, two amateur world champions and four youth world champions that won 38 world championships, and finally, 25 horses that won 28 reserve world championships.

Bred by Perry Cotton of Pleasanton, California, Impressive was by Lucky Bar (TB) and was out of the Lightning Bar mare Glamour Bars. The colt first was registered with AQHA as Tripple Bars, in recognition of his tracing to Three Bars (TB) three times. Blair and Nancy Folck of Springfield, Ohio, brought the colt home as a weanling and transferred the papers in January 1970.

“My father purchased the colt for $3,500 from Nick McNair of Pryor, Oklahoma,” says Tim Folck. “He was a fuzzball, but even as a fuzzy, winter-haired weanling, he had perfect-sculpted conformation, more on the side of his dam, Glamour Bars. My parents and I kept saying the colt was so impressive, and said we should register him with that unique and fitting name.”

Updated papers in hand, Impressive and the Folcks hit the show circuit, striking gold everywhere they went. When the colt stood champion yearling stallion at the Indiana State Fair in August 1970, Dean Landers and Jerry Wells bought him for $20,000, which at the time was a huge sum for a yearling Quarter Horse. In October that same year, Fennel Brown paid $40,000 for him at the All American Quarter Horse Congress in Ohio and reportedly later turned down an offer of $300,000 for him.

“By the time he was a 2-year-old, word had gotten out at the Quarter Horse Congress as to what a great-looking colt he was,” recalled Blair Folck, who died in 2006. “So when he was pulled out to win the class, he received a standing ovation from the huge crowd, something I had never seen happen at a horse show.”

At the height of his popularity, Impressive’s stud fee was advertised as $15,000.

Impressive’s popularity was phenomenal. However, because of his tie to the genetic disease hyperkalemic periodic paralysis, he is one of the most controversial horses to ever reach the Hall of Fame. That said, the study of HYPP improved the understanding of muscle biology and other inheritable variants. This was a stallion legendary in his own time, nearly unbeatable in the show ring, with progeny and later descendants dominating the halter horse world for more than four decades now.

Impressive died at age 26 in March 1995. He was inducted into the American Quarter Horse Hall of Fame in 2022.

Biography updated as of August 2022.