Metzie Hobby dies unexpectedly in her sleep at age 66

Metzie Hobby, a beloved fixture on the Midwest racing circuit as an owner and the assistant trainer to husband Steve Hobby, died Friday in Kentucky. She was 66.

Steve Hobby, who is racing at Churchill Downs, said his wife of 47 years had what was labeled a “cardiac event.”

“She just went to bed and never woke up,” he said. “It happened in her sleep.

“She was my best friend.”

Metzie Hobby was born in Wray, Colo., and grew up in a racing family as her uncle is the New Mexico-based trainer Gary Cross. Steve Hobby said horses were the means by which he met his wife.

“I was a jockey when we first met,” he said. “A young jockey and a young girl. It’s just the way it goes.”

The couple would have celebrated their 48th anniversary in August.

“We made an agreement in the very beginning that she could be the boss of the house and I could be the boss of the barn,” Steve Hobby said. “And we stuck with that all the way through.”

Metzie Hobby played a “huge” role in her husband’s public racing stable, he said, a barn that has won Grade 1 races with Telling and Tiz Miz Sue and served as the home of the wildly popular millionaire turned pony, Chindi.

“Telling was all her,” Hobby said, noting his wife was around the horse first at a time when his stable was split in divisions. “I give her 100 percent of the credit for him. When we first got him, she just kept telling me how good a horse he was. ‘This is a good horse, a good horse.’ She just kept it up. She wouldn’t stop. She was right.”

Telling became a two-time winner of the Grade 1 Sword Dancer Invitational.

Steve Hobby said services for his wife are scheduled for 1 p.m. next Tuesday, May 28, in the Oaklawn chapel just outside the stable gate of Oaklawn Park in Hot Springs, Ark. The services will be led by Rev. Scott Gallimore.

In addition to her husband, Metzie Hobby is survived by the couple's daughter, Karie, who is a food and beverage executive.

The Hobbys have homes in both Arkansas and Kentucky. The couple long have raced at Oaklawn and Churchill Downs and also spent time based in Illinois and Oklahoma.

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