OBS April: The Legacy of Lady Be Good
This taproot mare's influence is strong in multiple OBS April entrants
The OBS Spring sale will take place April 16th through April 19th this year, and while I’ll be giving my selections for this year’s edition on the 15th, I wanted to tie the sale into my recent series of posts on elite sire families. You can read part one here and part two here. For today’s post, I’d like to discuss the family of the brilliant mare Lady Be Good, whose daughters Discipline, Impish, and Bold Example are each the taproot mares of elite sire families, and who has multiple descendants entered in the upcoming OBS sale.
Lady Be Good was a homebred for Wheatley Stable and was a precocious runner who won the Colleen and National Stallion Stakes as a two-year-old. She started twelve times as a two-year-old, but raced only once at three before retirement. A daughter of the stallion Better Self, himself a product of the potent cross of War Admiral with La Troienne, she was a full sister to the multiple stakes winner Time Tested. Better Self’s sire, Bimelech, was a son of La Troienne, who has five tail-female descendants in this study, and was out of a mare by War Admiral. She was linebred to family 11g via War Admiral and her damsire Eight Thirty, who shared their third dam, Bathing Girl (a different branch of family 11g is represented in this study by Bebopper). These two stallions also created inbreeding to Man O’ War in the pedigree of Lady Be Good, as War Admiral was a son and Eight Thirty’s second dam was a daughter of Man O’ War.
As a broodmare, Lady Be Good produced nine winners from eleven starts, including three stakes winners and a stakes placed runner. Her best son was the talented stakes winner Disciplinarian, by Bold Ruler, whose victories included the 1967 Swaps Handicap and who was the sire of two stakes winners. Also by Bold Ruler, she got stakes winner Full of Hope, who finished second in the 1973 Test Stakes, and graded stakes winner In Hot Pursuit.
Lady Be Good produced Bold Example by Bold Ruler’s son Bold Lad, and while her best performances were a pair of stakes placings, her greatest contribution to the breed has been as a broodmare. She’s a designated Reine-de-Course, with G1 winning descendants such as Polish Precedent, a three-time G1 winner in France, including the 1989 Prix Du Moulin De Longchamp; Culture Vulture, a three-time G1 winner in Europe whose top wins include the 1991 Fillies Mile; Zilzal, a two-time G1 winner of races such as the 1989 Queen Elizabeth II Stakes; Australian G1 winner Fifty Stars, 2020 Australian Cup victor; G1 Matriarch Stakes winner Fifty Stars; Brazilian G1 winner Olympic Jolteon; and G1 Alcibiades Stakes winner Negligee. She is the tail-female ancestor of six unique stakes producing sires, including Polish Precedent and Zilzal, both G1-producing sires, and G1-producing sire Intikhab.
In 1962, Lady Be Good produced a bay filly by Princequillo named Discipline. Discipline was a talented racehorse, with wins in the 1964 Demoiselle Stakes, a division of the 1965 Test Stakes, and the 1966 Molly Pitcher Handicap and multiple stakes placings in races such as the Alabama Stakes and Delaware Handicap. As a broodmare, she produced G1 Sorority Stakes winner Squander (by Buckpasser, a great-grandson of Bimelech’s dam La Troienne) and multiple graded stakes winner Duty Dance (by Nijinsky), as well as black type placed winner Probation (by Bold Ruler - making her bred on the same Bold Ruler/Princequillo cross as Secretariat). Discipline’s branch of the Lady Be Good clan has produced the most individual stakes producing stallions, with ten, including four G1 sires. She’s the fourth dam of Japanese G1 winner King Halo, the sire of two G1 winners among his 16 stakes winners; the fourth dam of graded stakes winner Sightseeing, the sire of G1 Spinaway Stakes winner So Many Ways and two other stakes winners; the third dam of Burning Roma, a 12-time stakes winner who got a G1 win in the 2000 Futurity Stakes and was the sire of three-time G1 winner Sheer Drama and four other stakes winners; and the second dam of stakes winner Russian Roubles, the sire of Japanese G1 winner Yu Yu Sunboy (notably out of a mare by Personality, a member of La Troienne’s family 1x) and three other stakes winners.
Before getting to the final daughter of Lady Be Good who qualified for this sample, I’d like to briefly mention Uncommitted, a daughter of Buckpasser who, though she has only two stakes producing sire descendants and thus didn’t make the cut to be considered the foundation mare of an elite sire family, was the dam of the excellent sire Wavering Monarch and the third dam of Motivator, the sire of 35 stakes winners including the legendary two-time Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe winner Treve.
The final daughter of Lady Be Good who qualified for this sample is Impish, whose descendants have seen the most success on the racetrack in recent years. Impish was a daughter of Majestic Prince, and is prominently represented in this country by Maclean’s Music, whom she is the fifth dam of. Maclean’s Music also brings in the elite sire families of Incantation and Tamerett via his first two damsires, Unbridled’s Song and Gone West (his sire, Distorted Humor, comes from family 9f, which boasts five members in this group of mares). In addition to Maclean’s Music, Impish is the second dam of Mining, the sire of two-time G1 winner Roaming Rachel; the fifth dam of Invader, a G1-producing sire in Australia; the second dam of Trappe Shot, a graded stakes winner and sire of 12 stakes winners. She is the tail-female ancestor of 45 stakes winners, and 34 of the 315 starters from the family since January of 2011 have been stakes winners (10.8%).
The influence of Lady Be Good in this year’s OBS April sale is noteworthy. In addition to the 33 sons or daughters of Maclean’s Music cataloged, there are five two-year-olds out of mares by Trappe Shot (including one by a son of Maclean’s Music), and multiple entrants from the direct female family of Lady Be Good. This family continues to produce racehorses into the modern era, with 85 stakes winners in the 1,523 starters (5.6%) since January of 2011, according to G1 Goldmine. Here is a trio of horses that I believe have the potential to add to the legacy of this elite family:
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