Perrys Pirouette into Keeneland September with Uncle Mo Half-Brother to Ballerina Winner Hope Road

[Wandering Eyes]

The bargain purchase of a Blame filly 10 years ago has yielded Ron and Barbara Perry's Cicero Farms a pair of GI Ballerina Stakes victories, but when Marley's Freedom produced a colt in 2024, the Perrys made the decision to go to market. The yearling by Uncle Mo (hip 34) will go through the sales ring during the first session of the Keeneland September Sale Monday with the VanMeter Sales consignment.

“I want to be sure he has the best opportunity to be a superstar,” Barbara Perry said of the decision to put the colt in the sale. “Plus, it's what I promised my husband I would do. I did tell him, if he let me keep Marley, I would sell the first boy. I should probably couch that with, 'But it has to be at the price I want.'”

Cicero Farms purchased Marley's Freedom for $35,000 at the 2015 Keeneland September sale, but Perry admitted she hadn't been shopping for a dirt sprinter when she made the final bid on the Blame filly.

“I had wanted a Blame filly for a while,” she explained. “The Blame fillies were running very, very well on the turf. And I love turf racing. I am learning to love dirt racing, as well. But from the time I was young, I've always been fascinated by the turf races. When I was very young, my dad took me back East. I don't remember where we went–I think it was Belmont–and I remember standing on the rail and hearing the horses run by. The grass was six or seven inches long and they were just swooshing through it. It was so amazing. I thought I want one of them.”

In 18 lifetime starts, Marley's Freedom never raced on the turf, but she was a six-time graded stakes winner while sprinting on the main track. Her biggest victory came in the 2018 GI Ballerina Stakes.

“It was very, very cool,” Perry said of the couple's first top-level victory. “It was amazing. And I remember saying to [trainer] Bob [Baffert], 'I don't know how to pick a horse.' And he said, 'What are you talking about?' I said, 'I bought a turf router that became a dirt sprinter. People shouldn't ask me what I think.'”

Marley's Freedom attracted her share of admirers, forcing the Perrys to decide whether to add her to their fledgling breeding operation or sell the future broodmare to the highest bidder. It was an easy decision for Barbara, but it took a little convincing for Ron.

“My husband was very excited about having people talk about our horse and selling her at auction,” Perry recalled. “And I had a meltdown on him. I said, 'I am going to tell you what. You need to prove to me that whatever we would sell that filly for, it would make a difference in your daily life. And if you can't do that, then you need to shut up and let me have my filly. I did all the research. Most dirt sprinters sell for around a million and a half dollars and they go to Japan. And at a million and a half, you are not going to buy a new house, nothing is going to change in your daily life, Ron. We were already breeders. So why would we sell the best broodmare prospect we have. That doesn't make any sense.”

Marley's Freedom | Sarah Andrew

Perry chose Quality Road for Marley's Freedom's first mating.

“I asked Bob to critique Marley and he said, 'If she had more leg, she'd be perfect,'” Perry said. “So one of the reasons I picked Quality Road was because he was slightly taller than her and had a nice leg underneath him. And I thought if he can put that leg under the baby, then I would get a horse that would be built similarly to Marley with some leg.”

The resulting foal was the now 4-year-old filly Hope Road and, with help from a global pandemic, the Perrys had a very close bond with the filly.

“During COVID, we drove across country in our SUV with the cat,” Perry said. “We stayed in a bed and breakfast where we would have them deliver our meals to the porch and then bring it in our little room. We spent a whole month there so we could be with Marley and her baby. I have pictures of my husband sleeping with Hope in the stall as a foal. I held her in my lap when she was born.”

Despite the connection, the couple decided they should test the market–and do a trial run for future sales offerings–with their Grade I-winning mare's first foal.

“The idea of selling her was not high on my list, but I also thought we had to see what it was like,” Perry admitted. “We really hadn't tried to sell. We had always in the past bred to race. We had some here and there that we would sell, but we really didn't have the experience of selling a quality horse. So in a way, it was putting our training wheels on and seeing what it was like. Even though you have a trusted group that you are working with in your sales guy and prep people, until you experience it and go through it, you really don't know.”

The test run failed to result in a sale when Hope Road RNA'd for $575,000 at the 2022 Fasig-Tipton Saratoga Sale.

“She didn't ship well to Saratoga, so I didn't think she showed that well,” Perry said. “She was thin–she had lost weight. It happens with some fillies, they don't handle that Saratoga trip. And everyone had told me, 'If you don't get what you think she's worth as a broodmare out of a Grade I winner, you shouldn't undersell her.'”

Hope Road joined the Cicero Farms racing stable and soon proved the decision to keep her was a sound one. She won a pair of graded races last year and hit the board in three straight graded races this winter and spring before retracing her dam's hoofsteps to Saratoga to earn her own Ballerina Stakes victory by two lengths Aug. 23. The filly was the third daughter of a Ballerina winner to take the Saratoga event.

“I am normally a super statistical person and if I would have looked at the fact that Marley is the third mare in 47 years that's produced a filly to win the Ballerina, and the first one in 20 years, I am pretty sure I would have said, 'Oh no. Let's not do that. That's just a dumb idea.' But because I didn't have the opportunity to do that, it really didn't dawn on me how special it was. Then I really started to look at the statistics when I got home. And to have it be the same trainer and same owner, that didn't happen with the other two. That's unbelievable.”

Marley's Freedom's daughter Freedom Song (Medaglia d'Oro), now three, was injured as a yearling and will join the Cicero broodmare band next year. The 11-year-old mare produced a colt by Violence this year and was bred back to Not This Time, but all eyes will be on her yearling colt next Monday at Keeneland.

“He is, I think, well put together,” Perry said of the yearling. “A lot of Uncle Mos are really big bodied. He has a big body, but he has substantial bone underneath him. He's got really nice legs on him. He's a typical Uncle Mo. He moves very, very well. He's not super big. He's a nice medium sized horse. To me, he looks like a lot of the nice Uncle Mos that I see that are good, quality racehorses. When I am talking about quality racehorses, I am talking about graded stakes racehorses.”

Hip 35 | Amy Lanigan

Perry admitted it won't be easy to watch Marley's Freedom's colt go through the sales ring next week.

“Ron might have to lock me in the women's restroom,” she said with a laugh. “It's going to be pretty difficult because it's going to be like selling part of the family. But we have already told [consignor] Headley [VanMeter] that we would be happy to stay in for a leg. So if that happens, we wouldn't lose.”

While Cicero Farms is now old hat at campaigning Grade I-winning fillies, Perry said the prospect of orchestrating the career of a potential stallion was intimidating.

“What happens after he wins that first big race? I don't know all of the things that those guys who consistently go to the Derby know,” she said. “Like WinStar, Spendthrift, Starlight, SF Racing, Zedan, all of those. They have been doing it a long time. They know how to handle a stallion and know when to make that deal. These guys do this for a living. I am not competition for them.”

Perry, a student of Federico Tesio, is content to continue to cultivate the success she sees possible with Marley's Freedom and her daughters.

“I am breeding Marley to make her a blue-hen mare,” Perry said. “That has been my goal since the day I got her.”

Pointing to Blame's blue-hen dam Liable, Perry added, “If you take a look at the big blue-hen mares, in time, thank you Mr. Tesio, you will find they end up being the ones that produce more blue hen mares.”

So, while still spending long hours at the couple's Commercial Energy, Perry has developed her own detailed system of determining matings.

“I spend hours, days, of obsessing over female family pedigree and how it matches up,” Perry said. “And what the female family produced and what did those lineages look like and if I can find those same lineages that are prominent in the sire. And then I look for that sire and have it match up physically with the horse. So, yes. I go down a massive rabbit hole. My goal is always to breed a good racehorse, a graded stakes racehorse.”

While the Perrys might be about to part with Marley's Freedom's first colt, Barbara said there are two mares she has no plans to part with. Ever.

“I don't think I could ever sell Hope,” she said. “Hope, Marley and I might be in the same little nursing home together.”

The Keeneland September sale begins with the first of two Book 1 sessions Monday starting at 1 p.m. Book 2 sessions Wednesday and Thursday begin at 11 a.m. Following a dark day Friday, the auction continues through Sept. 20 with sessions beginning daily at 10 a.m.

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