Fair Grounds: Mating clicks again for Flint

NEW ORLEANS – Winning the Keith Gee Memorial last Sunday on turf, the 3-year-old colt One Mean Man, trained by Bernie Flint, provided the most recent success stemming from the mating of the stallion Mizzen Mast and the mare Abbeyville Miss.

Flint and partner Ron Hillerich own and bred One Mean Man, who has won 2 of 8 starts and earned $80,705. He’ll race next in the Black Gold Stakes on Feb. 27, Flint said.

The name is misleading, Flint said, because One Mean Man isn’t mean.

Hillerich, a father of boy and girl twins, said he was waiting to use the name for a colt. “My wife always said, ‘I have two sweet babies and one mean man,’ ” Hillerich said. “Me.”

The partners also own and bred One Mean Man’s 4-year-old full sister, Mizz Money, who has won 4 of 15 starts and earned $199,988. She won the Grade 3 Pucker Up last year at Arlington Park and the Allen LaCombe at Fair Grounds. Coming off a runner-up finish behind Street of Gold in the Marie G. Krantz Memorial on Jan. 16, Mizz Money is entered for the Mardi Gras Stakes on Tuesday.

Another full sister, 5-year-old Mizzen Miss, won 3 of 7 starts and earned $96,220 in a career that ended in 2015. She’s the only one of the three siblings without a stakes victory.

“The first one was a little small,” Flint said of Mizzen Miss. “That’s what hurt her.”

Abbeyville Miss, now 11, never raced. “She was hurt in a training accident in Texas while they were breaking her,” Flint said. Because of health issues, she hasn’t been in foal for three years, but she might be bred this year, he said.

It’s easy to guess the stallion. “If she gets the okay, she’s going to Mizzen Mast,” Flint said. “Hopefully, we’ll get her in foal. I had a lot of faith in that stallion. I always liked that horse because he’s very durable.”