Mad Mary carries a proud old family back towards the light

Some families reward you only if you are willing to wait. For Brian and Mary Hill, a little of that patience paid off at Cambridge Raceway last Friday night, where Mad Mary (Muscle Mass) proved too good in the second heat of the North Island Silk Road Series for trotting fillies and mares. It was the third win of a tidy career that now reads three victories and four placings from just 15 starts for $39,855, and it has earned her a shot at the $30,000 Silk Road Final next week.

The four year old is prepared at the beach by Bernie Hackett and Michelle Wallis, a stable that has long known how to coax the best from a trotter, and patience has been the watchword there too. "They liked her from the start, they said she was above average and should go well, and she's proven that," Brian said. Like a lot of her gait, she looks the type to keep getting better. "Trotters sometimes get better with age," he said. "I think you'll probably see the best of her from now on." He puts plenty of that down to where she is trained. "The horses enjoy the beach, they get out and do their fast work rather than just going round a track," he said. "Horses like something different."

As for the name, that was a domestic decision Brian was wise enough not to query. "I didn't name her, my wife did, and her name happens to be Mary," he said, and left the rest hanging in the air.

Mad Mary is the first foal of the Great Success mare That Girl Of Mine, a lightly raced sort the Hills campaigned with their friends Chris and Nicola Walker. She showed enough to win one of only two starts for James Stormont before a bad back cut the story short. "Jimmy was the one who told us she had a crook back," Brian said. "So we didn't race on, we took her out and bred with her. She was a young mare, and I think it was the best thing, because the cost of the vets trying to correct a back just goes on and on." The name, for the record, came from a song that both Brian and Chris were fond of.

What the record books do not tell you is that the Hills bred That Girl Of Mine themselves, and the how of it traces back to a good friendship. Brian once owned a block of land that bordered the property of Frank Weaver, the horseman who developed the celebrated Petite family and the trotting icon Pride of Petite, still the only Australasian trotter ever to qualify for the Elitloppet final. "I've known Frank for years," Brian said. "We had a bit of success together, part owned a little horse in Agent Smart that we sold to Australia, and bred a couple more. He's still a good friend, still boxing away with a young one." Somewhere along the way the Hills came to hold a precious thread of one of the country's blue blood trotting families.

And it is a family worth holding onto. Mad Mary is a great granddaughter of Pride of Petite, tracing through the unraced Sundon mare Petite Sunshine, a daughter of the great mare and the dam of the smart 15 race winner and $200,000 earner Lord Popinjay (Majestic Son). Down the years the line has kept turning out good ones, the Group Three winner Regal Petite, the New Zealand 2YO Filly of the Year Petite Sunrise, the Greenlane Cup winner Petite Sunset and a long parade of honest trotters besides. What it has not done, in the two decades since Pride of Petite bowed off into retirement, is unearth another genuine flagbearer. Much of the female tail line now sits in outside hands, and the sense is of a family lying coiled and dormant, waiting only for the right one to come along and set it alight all over again. The Hills would happily nominate Mad Mary for the task.

They are certainly giving the branch every chance. That Girl Of Mine had a spell after a rough foaling with Mad Mary, who arrived a big foal, and rather than risk the mare the Hills gave her a full year to come right. "She's back in cycle now, and I reckon she'll throw some winners down the track," Brian said. There is already a weanling colt by Dancinginthedark M on the ground, and the mare is back in foal to E L Titan.

The Hills are building a second string as well, having brought the grey mare Emma Frost (Monkey Bones) home to breed from. A seven race winner who took out the Group Three Northern Breeders Stakes in 2001, she has left a Dancinginthedark M yearling colt named Jack Frost, now with Bernie Hackett, and a grey Royal Aspirations yearling filly cut very much in her mother's image, with the mare back in foal to All Cashed Up. "She was white, grey, and I remember her well," Brian said. "The filly's grey too, so hopefully she'll have her traits and go well."

The interest, for Brian, goes right back to the beginning. His father Lyle Hill was in the game in the early days, and a young Brian would lend a hand on the farm and out among the horses. "We used to ride them and actually swim them, way back, down in Otahuhu in the Tamaki River," he recalled. He had a brief dart at amateur driving too, "for five minutes," before fishing laid claim to his spare hours. The breeding, though, has never once let him go.

At home in their 70s, Brian and Mary are as likely to watch the big nights from the couch, by the fire and clear of the Auckland traffic, as they are to front up trackside. The Silk Road Final, though, might just be worth an exception. "We're thinking of going to Cambridge," Brian said. "We've got friends over the hill, Ival and Lorraine Brownlee, who have one in the same race, so we might go down with them and hope like hell." After the road this family has travelled, and the long wait for one to carry it forward, nobody could begrudge them the trip.