By Dick Jerardi
Mark Reid has been buying and selling horses for a lifetime. He ended his training career in March 2022, but it was a yearling filly purchase he made for Mike Milam six months before that has become a legacy moment.
“I went down (to Timonium) the day before the sale, looked at her, vetted her, no pedigree to speak of,” Reid said Sunday morning from the Nashville Airport. “I liked her (physically). I told Mike, go $25,000, no more than that. We got lucky and got her for 25 (thousand).”
They took the filly back to Mark and Barbara Reid’s Walnut Green Farm in Chester County. Milam named her after his late wife, Denise Marie. They called her Neecie Marie.
She made her first start on April 4, 2023 at Parx for Reid’s brother, trainer Butch Reid who had also liked her at the sale. She was an undistinguished fifth in a maiden $25,000 claimer. She then broke her maiden in another race where she could have been claimed for $25,000.
“It didn’t look like she was going anywhere,” Mark Reid remembered. “Mike and I went to watch her after she had run twice. We were looking at a ($25,000 claimer) never won two (races), let them take her and we did fine with her.”
Providentially, the man who broke the filly after the sale, told Reid: “don’t let this filly go anywhere until you try her on the grass.”
When Reid returned to training a few years back after years running his farm, managing Bill Warren’s stable for a time and buying high end horses for Ed Gann, his assistant was Nesvil H. (Hernan) Bailon.
It was Bailon who had ridden Neecie Marie over the turf courses at Sharp Farm in Delaware. He told Reid she was just different on grass, absolutely loved it.
Butch Reid was game for the grass so they ran her in an optional claimer on turf at Parx. And she won it. They ran her in the Mrs. Penny at Parx for Pennsylvania Breds. And she won it like she could win an open stakes.
She lost a photo in the Grade 3 Jockey Club Oaks Invitational. She was a very close second again in the Grade 3 Sands Point. This May, she got that first open stakes when she won the Grade 3 Beaugay. She then finished a terrific second in the Grade 1 New York and a rallying third in the Grade 2 Beverly D.
And then on Saturday, Neecie Marie came from last and casually overwhelmed the field in the $1.3 million Ladies Marathon at Kentucky Downs a minute before the Bailon-trained Sevens Eleven came out of the starting gate to win the seventh race at Laurel.
You can’t make this stuff up. Nor can you make up that Neecie Marie’s dam Lode Lady is out of Gold Strike who just happens to be the dam of 2022 Kentucky Derby winner Rich Strike. Or that Neecie Marie has a full brother stabled at Parx who is 0-for-17.
Making it make sense is the ultimate paradox of horse racing. You never really know.
After Neecie Marie finished third in the Beverly D. jockey Frankie Dettori told Butch Reid: “run her as long as you like. She galloped out past the field.”
He was certainly prophetic.
“There is one thing about her,” Mark Reid said. “You can’t run far enough where she is not able to go. She’ll run as far as they run races.”
The Marathon was on that curving, undulating grass course at Kentucky Downs over 1 5/16 miles. And Reid gave major credit to his brother who had her in such peak condition that she looked as if she could have kept right on going after she hit the wire.
“Butch has done a tremendous job with her,” Reid said. “She’s been all over the place. I always get worried when you have a different jock every race, a different course every time. You should have seen her down here. They gave her best turned out in the paddock.”
Neecie has raced at Aqueduct, Saratoga, Colonial and Kentucky Downs since May. She has been ridden by four jockeys this year, but the right jockey was on her Saturday, Joel Rosario is as good on closers as any rider this century. He has proved it again on Neecie with two wins and a second.
Neecie was back in her stall at Parx before the brothers Reid and Milam had left Tennessee. All in all, it was a day to savor at a track seemingly in the middle of nowhere, but actually just a 40-minute drive from Nashville.
“It was like a fair down there, everything in tents and people wandering around in loud jackets smoking cigars, they have bourbon stands, little places where they sold t-shirts and stuff like Saratoga,” Reid said. “You just wander around. There’s nothing like it. There are no stands, just tents with tables in them and guys playing banjos and guitars and singing country music. You stand on like a front lawn that kind of slopes down to the outer rail.”
And you watch the filly you bought for an old friend win a race with a first prize of $595,200. It was the second biggest of Butch Reid’s career to the $1,040,000 Vequist got for her owners for winning the 2020 Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Fillies.
There will be no Breeders’ Cup for Neecie Marie, but there are still some big grass races she can run in before she is entered in the Night in the Stars sale right after the Breeders’ Cup.
Whatever she brings, it will be some significant multiple of the $25,000 purchase price, possibly more than the $1,160,150 she has earned with her record of 14-6-3-1.
That is for November. Today is for a celebration of a filly from Parx that has raced against the best of her division and come out the other side just about as accomplished as any of them.
