From helping the careers of many professional trainers, including his daughter Jackie Krshka and his nephew Pete Kyle, to teaching the basics to newcomers to the Quarter Horse industry, Jack Kyle was a distinguished role model and has been described as “a legend in his own time.”
Kyle was born in 1925 on a ranch 40 miles from Brownfield, Texas. When he was old enough to start first grade, he and his brothers saddled up before sunrise to ride 14 miles to school, never being tardy. His family later moved closer to civilization, to a cow outfit near Fort Sumner, New Mexico.
Kyle began breeding Quarter Horses in 1949 when he purchased Skip A Barb from Hank Wiescamp. The stallion became his program’s foundation sire. Skip A Barb sired 18 AQHA Champions, four world champions and three honor-roll titlists.
From Skip A Barb, Kyle bred a stallion called Skip’N Stage, who won the 1978 Honor Roll titles in working cow horse and steer roping and became an AQHA Champion at the age of 4. Skip’N Stage continued Kyle’s breeding legacy, siring the 1982 AQHA Superhorse Sweet And Innocent, two AQHA Champions and three world champions. The produce of Skip’N Stage’s daughters have won several world championships and more than $450,000 in National Reining Horse Association earnings.
In 1996, Kyle earned AQHA’s five-year continuous breeder award and the 40-year cumulative breeders award in 1998.
Kyle was a founder of the New Mexico Quarter Horse Association, and served as a director for more than 30 years and one term as president. He also served as an AQHA judge for 24 years, assisting with seminars and helping to define the rules for judged roping events. He officiated the first AQHA World Championship Show and the first NRHA Futurity, and he won the first western riding class held at the New Mexico State Fair in the early 1950s.
Kyle was inducted into the American Quarter Horse Hall of Fame in 1999, and died in February 2006.
Biography updated as of December 2006.