By night, she’s one of Charlotte’s biggest TV names. By day? Look for her on the farm.
Morgan Fogarty is standing in a wash stall inside the main barn at Kibler Shamrock Farms, using her fingers to fashion the flaxen forelock atop the head of her pony — who was named Macaroni when she bought him two Februarys ago but whom she usually just calls Mac — into a French braid.
When someone points out the stark contrast between the neatness of that stylistic flourish and the punk-rock mohawk lining the back of his neck, she laughs.
“If you cut their mane off entirely, it’s called roaching it,” Fogarty says. “But I didn’t want to roach Mac’s. I just wanted to tame it. ... He has the wildest hair you’ve ever seen.”
As she continues to twist gently at the locks, she drifts from the topic of hair and segues into explaining, rather excitedly, how and why Mac will eventually become her young daughter’s horse. The explanation is as lengthy as it is passionate.
“I’m sorry,” she says, finally. “You can tell me to shut up.”
“I could talk about this stuff all day long,” she adds, and if you spend a couple of hours with her — and with Mac, and with her newest horse, the much larger Saint, a gray Thoroughbred she bought in October — you’ll realize she’s not exaggerating.
Let’s call it making up for lost time.
Though she spent most of her childhood around horses, in the decade and a half after she graduated with a broadcast journalism degree from Penn State, in 2003, Fogarty had almost nothing to do with them; she focused mainly on raising her kids and on her career, the bulk of it as WCCB Charlotte’s best-known news personality.
But since getting Mac in 2018, the spark has returned, and these days — particularly as the pandemic has worn on — she is spending more and more time in what she calls “my happy place”: on this horse farm in this middle-of-nowhere section of Union County, where there’s not a television or a camera in sight.
Waiting for her second chance
Fogarty was bitten by the horse bug when she was 7 years old, not long after her parents moved from Ohio to Lancaster, Pa., where they bought a farm and introduced her to riding.
She competed as an equestrian up through high school, then took her two horses with her to college, where she continued to ride for pleasure while working on her degree.
Upon graduating, though, her parents told her they weren’t footing the bill for the animals anymore, that it was time for her to focus on her career, so one of Fogarty’s horses wound up back on her parents’ farm and the other was sold.
In the TV news business, her star rose quickly.
Twenty months after landing her first job — at WHAG, the NBC affiliate in Hagerstown, Md., straight out of college — Charlotte’s WCCB lured her down South to be the main hard-news reporter for its morning show, “Fox News Rising.” (Until 2013, the station was the area’s Fox affiliate. It now airs The CW programming.)
In 2007, she became co-host of “Fox News Edge,” the station’s evening magazine show. In 2011, she moved up to permanent duty on the 10 p.m. anchor desk at WCCB. Since then, except for a very brief stint at the now-defunct Al Jazeera news network in 2013, Fogarty has been a fixture at WCCB and is under contract with the station into 2022.
Meanwhile, Fogarty and her husband Jeremy were also busy raising their children — son Sawyer, born in 2012, and daughter Sadie, who arrived in 2015.
She dabbled in other hobbies, from running to art to gardening. But none stuck, and she continued to daydream about returning to riding.
“I’ve known my husband since I was 10,” Fogarty says. “He attended some of my horse shows when I was in high school, and when we got married, he knew that horses were eventually gonna come back into the picture. ... And I knew, once my kids were old enough, that I would try to see if they were interested.”
Sawyer, it turned out, was. So she signed him up for lessons, and he liked them.
At that point, “my husband I think kind of just knew where it was headed,” Fogarty recalls, laughing. So when he asked if she thought they should get Sawyer a pony, the answer came as no surprise:
“Yes!” she replied, probably before her husband even finished his sentence. “Of course I do!”
‘I want to compete again’
“Come on! I have a carrot for you!” Fogarty calls out, as she trudges across the muddy pasture toward Mac, a chestnut-colored Haflinger so round that she sometimes calls him Meatball.
At first, the carrot doesn’t work. Mac picks his face up out of the grass, turns his tail toward his owner, and trots off in the opposite direction.
But after Fogarty realizes he’s going to play stubborn, she starts sweet-talking to one of his grazing companions, and the gambit pays off: When Mac realizes she might give it away, he suddenly gallops over, not willing to let another horse get teeth on the snack he knows is rightfully his.
Fogarty says she knew he was a little bit of a gamble when she bought him from a woman in South Carolina almost three years ago now — not just because “he looked like a scraggly pound puppy,” but because “ponies have that reputation as being sort of like little dogs.”
“Little dogs get into trouble,” she explains. “They have big personalities. They are typically yappier than a big old Labrador. That’s Mac.”
His personality, in fact, turned out to be a bit too big for her kids. And along the way, her son lost interest in riding. So, for most of the time she’s had him, Mac has been ridden almost exclusively by her.
For the first two years, she was basically just happy to be around horses again. She says it was her trainer, Logan Harris, who persuaded her to return to competition, about a year ago.
“I thought to myself, ‘Am I gonna remember this?’ ” Fogarty recalls. “ ’Is it gonna come back to me? Am I gonna be afraid, now that I’m almost 40?’ And then I was like, ‘No, yeah, I want to compete again.’ So here we are.”
It’s different than what she was doing in high school, though.
Back then, she rode what are called hunter/jumpers, a sport very similar to showjumping, in which riders take their horses one at a time over a set course of obstacles in a stadium setting, with competitors judged on both ability and speed. What she’s doing now is eventing, which involves showjumping as well as dressage (kind of like ballet for horses) and cross-country (think of it as showjumping but over varied terrain instead of in a stadium setting).
Another key difference? “I do schooling shows right now, which means they’re not rated,” Fogarty says. “I am schooling over like 2-3 (2-foot 3-inch jumps), and then when we compete, we do around 2 foot. Which, in the horse world, that’s like, ‘Oh, that’s cute.’ ”
Translation: “I’m very low-level.”
But she soon may be moving up, at least a little bit, in the horse-competition world.
A plan coming together?
Her newer horse, Saint, is on the complete opposite end of the spectrum from Mac.
Mac is 11, by the way, which in equine years is very close to middle-aged. Saint, meanwhile, is 3-1/2, and so not quite yet out of his “teenage” years. But while Fogarty says, only half-jokingly, that Mac is “the naughtiest pony around,” she calls Saint “very sensible” and “a good boy.”
She explains, for instance, how Saint has taken to looking out for a senior horse on the farm who is going blind; Saint leads him around the pasture, quietly and calmly, with the patience of a horse three or four times his age.
“I was very nervous about naming a horse Saint,” she says. “That he would not live up to the name. It’s a lot of pressure. But so far, he has.”
Fogarty bought him in October after he retired from his racing career, which she says, with a laugh, included a reputation at his home track of Presque Isle Downs in Erie, Pa., for finishing dead-last in every race.
But what he lacks in speed he makes up for in smarts — and in pedigree: Saint’s grandfather is a late champion Thoroughbred named Holy Bull, who was the sire of 2005 Kentucky Derby winner Giacomo.
“Whereas racehorses are just sort of wide-open galloping as fast as they can,” Fogarty says, for eventing, “we want them rounded through their back and coming off their haunches and using their muscles in different ways, finding spots before the jump, so that they can clear it, number one, and in correct form, number two. We look for impulsion and strength, but not necessarily speed. It’s just a different set of muscles that they use. So a slow racehorse, for what we do, is perfectly fine.”
Do you see where this is headed?
Yes, Fogarty has plans for her and this horse. She’s applied for a spot in The Thoroughbred Makeover, an annual weeklong event featuring competitions aimed at showcasing racehorses that are transitioning to second careers. She also hopes that, down the road, she’ll graduate from doing schooling shows with Mac — who is limited in terms of the height of jumps he can handle due to his shorter, squatter stature — to competing in shows sanctioned by the United States Eventing Association with Saint (who she says could eventually clear 3-foot jumps).
When that happens, she hopes, her daughter Sadie — who has been on and around horses since she was 3 and who started taking lessons earlier this year — will be able to move up from smaller ponies to Mac.
And at that point, who knows? Maybe Fogarty will pick up her family and leave Charlotte.
‘I would like to live on a farm’
OK, calm down now, if you’re a fan of her shows on WCCB. She hasn’t said a word about wanting to leave her current job.
She has, however, said this: “I would like to have more and more and more,” she says, and by that she means horses. “I would like to live on a farm in Union County.”
“I think it could happen,” she continues. “Probably not in the immediate future. But maybe seven, eight, nine years down the road. I think my husband would love it even though he says, ‘Absolutely not.’ ”
It certainly could save her some time and energy. Right now, she makes the 50-minute round-trip drive from her home in south Charlotte to the farm roughly five days a week, usually coming on multiple weekdays for two or three hours before work and then spending as many as eight or nine hours out here at Kibler Shamrock Farms over the course of the weekend.
For a long time, she kept this other side of her life pretty private. But that’s shifted dramatically, particularly during the pandemic.
All you have to do is scroll through her Instagram to see it: In the first two-plus years after she returned to horse ownership and riding, she posted 205 photos, just 14 of which featured a horse. Since COVID started, almost exactly one out of every three photos she’s posted has had a horse in the frame.
In a way, it’s a virtual tribute to one key thing that has helped her stay centered in the midst of a whole lot of craziness in the world — a craziness amplified by the nature of her job.
“There’s just no stress involved in it,” Fogarty says of her time spent on the farm, as she brushes Saint’s gray coat to remove the mud he got on it while scratching an itch. “I mean, there’s stress. But it’s different. We don’t have TVs on out here. Nobody’s looking at Twitter. Cell service isn’t that great anyway. ... You can get into such a pattern with consuming the news all the time that it’s hard to break away from it. This sort of gives me a mandatory break from it. Just for a few hours.”
“And my daughter is obsessed with it,” she continues. “She loves coming out here for hours and hours and hours. So it’s become something that she and I do together. Especially with the pandemic. There’s nothing else to do. We’re outside. There’s not a lot of people.”
She could go on about this all day long — it’s true, she’s a talker, and she’s not afraid to admit it — but she stops herself here and gets to the point, a point that wraps up this story in a bow as neat as Mac’s French braid:
“I probably would have lost my mind,” Fogarty says, “without these horses.”
This story was originally published December 30, 2020 at 10:57 AM.
