The Canadian Sportsman
December 20, 2010
In the fall of 1994, I had the worst stable of horses in my career. One horse was racing well, but the rest were complete horror shows. To add to the misery, I was holed up at a farm in northwestern New Jersey being stalked by coyotes, UFO aliens and an owner who paid his bill with eggplant sandwiches. Another owner had recently dumped his horses in my lap and left me with nothing but a box of Dunkin Donuts. What was I supposed to do with donuts? This is why I always tell young trainers to be wary of owners who bring gifts of food to the barn. They often have something up their sleeve, and in my experience, it’s usually not a cheque for services rendered.
If an owner wants to be liked around the barn, it’s always best to take the gang to a restaurant — especially during the Holiday Season. Cookies wrapped in red ribbons and green cellophane are nice, but harness folks like steak and beer and camaraderie.
Anyway, my stable was terrible and I had to make a move. I heard from a friend he’d stabled at a farm that was downright ramshackle, but his horses had done really well in spite of it. I decided to check out the place and I didn’t let the fact that people called it “poor man’s farm” sway me because my friend also told me that Genghis Khan and Alaskan Strike had raced off that farm in their heyday.
So I drove to the poor man’s farm where I was greeted by the 85-year-old grandmotherly lady who owned it. As she showed me around, she apologized for her slight limp and the bandage on her head. It seems that the tiny car she had been driving earlier in the week had been broadsided by a semi when she ran a stop sign and she had to be extricated from the wreckage with the jaws of life.
“And you know, I almost made it through that damned stop sign,” she fumed. “I shouldn’t even be alive. My car was pulverized — flat as a pancake. Here, let me show you the barn.”
The place was an absolute dump, but to the trained eye there were some horse-worthy things that would have gone otherwise unnoticed by uppity folks who go for all the pomp and ceremony. For example, the place had oversized stalls, clean town water, an excellent half-mile track, and quite a few large, grassy paddocks. It’s hard to find real paddocks at training farms in New Jersey. Most places let you share or rent a postage stamp sized square of dirt and weeds, but this place had real grass and clover paddocks — and they were big, too. Of course the fencing left a little to be desired but it wasn’t dangerous or anything like that.
Another bonus was that the farm had a manager who took care of everything — and I mean everything.
“Frank the manager waters and feeds at five,” said the old, crash-test dummy grandma. “Just set your feed out for dinner and breakfast and Frank will take care of it. If you want your horse turned out in the morning, just put a note on its door and Frank will turn it out about an hour after morning feed.”
Then, with a disdainful roll of the eyes, which may or may not have been caused by the car accident, granny introduced me to the two old cranks who would be my neighbours; an old guy named Charlie and his unlovable sidekick, Kelly. These two endlessly gossiping relics were watching a weanling pace alongside its mother, and they offered their expert opinions on the gait of the four-month-old colt.
“He wings out his left front,” said Kelly as he spit out his tobacco juice. “Nah, he’s sore in his hind end,” snarled Charlie. “Anybody can see that.”
Yes, Charlie and Kelly were experts at being really bad experts. Later, I found out that Frank the farm manager referred to these two geniuses as, “fountains of misinformation.” This proved to be a very appropriate title because, in a conversation months later, Kelly referred to Artsplace as, “a crippled rat.”
So I moved into the barn the next day. It couldn’t have been a better deal. I had cheap stall rent, grassy paddocks, plenty of cute, crusty-eyed kittens, a farm manager who did everything, and two old “experts” who would gladly jog your horses rain, snow, sleet or hail, provided you let them prattle on about what they thought was wrong with your horse — and there was always something wrong. It was paradise, and the really cool house I rented was only seven miles away.
I set up shop on a cold October afternoon and drove home, secure in the knowledge that my horses, their shabby new digs notwithstanding, were safe and sound under the watchful eyes of Frank — the guy who did everything.
An abandoned coal-car railroad underpass that led to an old country road made my morning commute a breeze. A roundtrip was just shy of 14 miles, but on the first day of my commute, I noticed a man putting up traffic cones along my route. When I returned later that afternoon, the railroad bridge was being taken down and the road was no longer accessible. My quick commute, on the very first day, turned into a 20-mile one-way trek onto the New Jersey Turnpike where I was in constant traffic and always 15 miles out of my way.
That cursed railroad underpass was there for well over a 100 years, yet it held up just long enough to mock me. I believe that it was built for that very devious reason. Despite the fact that a million trains had passed over it since the 1890s, its sole purpose in the universe was to fail a safety test on the day when I’d finally found a remarkably quick and easy way to work.
Annoyed, I arrived that morning for my first day at poor man’s farm. Charlie, the resident expert-on-everything grouch was the first to greet me. He had an annoying penchant, or perhaps some kind of mental tic, for using the word “there” wherever he could or couldn’t insert it into a sentence. He was already aware of my opening day detour.
“I saw there that the railroad bridge there is coming down there and now you gotta take the turnpike the long way around the back end there,” said Charlie. “That underpass there isn’t going to be fixed there. They’re making it into an overpass there for the that there golf course there.”
There, there, Charlie. Everything will be fine… there.
Anyway, my horses loved that farm and, after a few weeks of getting myself organized, they all started to race much better. Of course, it was rumoured that I was following all the advice I was getting from Charlie and Kelly, and of course I made them think that they were indeed my key to success. I knew that they talked behind my back every chance they got, but I think they actually liked me. Even Frank the farm manager who steered clear of the dynamic duo as much as he could, enjoyed having me around and we had a lot of interesting conversations.
Frank lived in a small house adjacent to the barn. Each morning he would walk up the road to the 7-11 and get strong coffee, strong cigarettes, a donut and a copy of the New York Times. Frank was a genuine New York City intellectual who had somehow gotten lost in harness racing. Brilliant minds sometimes find a kind of tranquility in harness racing. That happens a lot more times than one would think — look at me, for example.
In any event, winter came howling in late that November, but the grass in the paddocks stayed green and crash test dummy grandma still came by twice a week to make sure we were all happy. Kelly spent each day tirelessly working in the cold on the engine of a raggedy boat that looked like it had washed up on Gilligan’s Island. Charlie jogged his two horses and then drove off with Kelly to spend the day bothering people at other farms.
Allow me to describe a typical thing Charlie would do in his subconscious quest to be a hero and an expert and an annoyance. One day he and Kelly were headed to Atlantic City for a day of gambling. Before he left, Charlie handed me $1,000 and said, “Hold this money for me. If I take that there money there to Atlantic City there, I know I will lose it.” So I tucked the thousand bucks in my wallet and went about my business.
The next morning, when I was in the Freehold paddock for qualifiers, Charlie came storming in shouting like a lunatic, “Where the hell is that there thousand dollars I gave you there yesterday there?” I reached into my wallet and gave it to him. He wasn’t sure that everybody in the paddock had heard him so he added, “I had to go all over the darn state there to find you, dummy. When I let you have my money there, I expect to get it back there.” He made it sound like I had borrowed the money from him and he made sure everybody heard him.
With my first poor man’s farm Christmas only a month away, I had already become a fixture at the farm, but at the same time I started to get annoyed at Charlie. The incident in the paddock had really irked me, but there were other little things that got on my nerves in a creeping kind of way. To me he was now just the annoying old coot I assumed he was from the very first day, and if Kelly slid out from underneath that boat one more time and scared my horses, I was going to hitch that shipwreck to my truck and take it to a junk yard. But the place would have been a total bore without them and they actually did help me when I asked.
I never expressed my feelings outwardly, but I did tell Frank the manager how I felt.
“Why do you think I keep my distance from that buffoon and his trained seal Kelly,” he fumed as he angrily shook his long, thin fingers and their eternal cigarette in my face. “You let him jog your horse one day and a week later the horse won. Now he’s going all over New Jersey telling anybody who doesn’t run away from him that he fixed all your horses. He does that to any spineless person who stables here and he’s been doing it for 25 years. The minute I saw you pull into this place I said to myself, ‘Here comes Charlie’s next victim.’”
I have to admit that Frank’s lecture was a bit menacing in a spooky, and smoky-filled room kind of way, but I certainly knew what he meant and it shook me up. Charlie had crept into my life, and while most of the time he helped me in one way or another, there was always a hidden price to be paid. I mean, I didn’t really need him to do anything for me, but he had lulled me into a kind of hypnotic laziness. Why should I suit up to jog five miles in the rain when Charlie was perfectly willing to do it for nothing? Why should I sit around until eight at night to wait for the vet when Charlie was perfectly content to stay at the farm all night for no reason other than he had nowhere else to go?
I tried to steer clear of Charlie and he was aware of it. He started to be extra nice to me by shipping my horses wherever they had to go. He charged me less than he charged others and he was a very dependable, albeit maniacally reckless, driver. With Charlie behind the wheel you were never late for the paddock. If he saw traffic he would drive on the shoulder or even onto the grass — whatever he had to do to get around the snarl, he’d do it. It was pretty frightening and hardly worth the price of a $50 late-to-the-paddock fine.
Anyway, one night — and this is the greatest harness racing/shipping story ever — we were on our way back from Yonkers Raceway. I raced at Yonkers at least twice a week and Charlie had somehow become my regular shipper. Our routine — and it never varied — was that we would stop at the gas station as soon as we crossed over homeward bound into New Jersey from New York. Charlie would buy a cup of coffee and make small talk with the Hindu owner while I would get an iced tea and a scratch-off lottery ticket. Then we would get back in the truck and I’d toss my losing lottery ticket on the floor.
“You know who buys them there scratch-offs there?” Charlie said. “Suckers buy them there things there and you’re a sucker there. Lottery tickets there are for suckers there.”
The following week Charlie won a few bucks betting on my mare while he was sitting in the grandstand waiting for me to be done. On the way home, we made our usual stop. Charlie bought his coffee and I bought one Frosty The Snowman scratch-off. Just as we were about to leave, Charlie turned back to the Hindu man and said, “What the heck. Gimme one of them there Frosty The Snowman tickets there.”
As we drove away Charlie handed me the ticket and told me to scratch it off because he couldn’t do it while he was driving. Can you smell the foreshadowing? I hope so because I’m laying it on pretty thick.
Okay, Charlie’s ticket was a winner to the tune of $5,000 dollars. In the glare of his trucks dome light I checked and rechecked and sure enough he had won $5,000.
Charlie whooped it up and then started to rib me that if I hadn’t been such a cheapskate that winning ticket would have been mine. He was right. Why didn’t I spring for the extra dollar and buy two tickets? Why did this old pain in the butt have to win the $5,000 and not me?
By noon the next day, everyone in harness racing knew that Charlie had won big on a scratch-off, and later that day Charlie’s two horses had new halters and winter blankets — the cheapest brands to be sure, but shiny and new just the same.
The following day, I realized that Kelly was not working on his boat and hadn’t been doing much of anything but moping around for several days. Just as I was leaving, Charlie pulled me aside. “I gotta take Kelly to that there Veterans Administration Hospital there,” he said quietly. “Something’s not right with him.”
The next day, a week before Christmas, Charlie drove in and Kelly was nowhere to be found. He had been admitted immediately to the hospital when it was quickly determined that he was terminally ill with an advanced brain tumour.
Charlie tried to be tough as nails about his friend’s illness and the first thing he did was haul Kelly’s boat to an auction where it fetched a few dollars. Then he sold Kelly’s horse and equipment. Seems that Kelly was alone in the world and all he had was a U.S. Navy pension and a Social Security cheque that didn’t amount to much.
On Christmas Eve I found Charlie sitting alone in his truck. He said that he was waiting for his wife to get out of work and they were going to have dinner at Red Lobster. He added, almost as an aside, that Kelly had died that afternoon.
“All he wanted there was to get that there boat there back in the water,” Charlie said. “Now he doesn’t have to worry about nothing. I have to get permission there from the county there to spread his ashes on the track there.”
Despite Frank the farm manager’s insistence that I not come to the farm on Christmas Day, I took a swing by and came upon something amazing. Charlie had decorated the entire barn, inside and out. Somehow he had made that junkyard of a farm look like a winter wonderland. Every horse had a wreath on it’s door and each door was rimmed with twinkling white lights. The outside of the barn was a sea of red lights and metallic green garland. It may have been the poor man’s farm, but on that otherwise sad Christmas afternoon, it looked pretty rich.
I walked up to Charlie and I didn’t quite know what to say. So I just stood next to him and looked at the twinkling lights and said nothing.
“What’s the matter there,” he barked. “Don’t you got none of that there Christmas spirit there, grouchy?”
Charlie and I continued our love-hate relationship for another 10 years, but more recently we had drifted apart. A few years ago, I got a call from Charlie and he sounded terrible. He said that the doctors had given him only few months to live, and he asked me if I could come to his barn and help him with his two horses.
When I arrived at the little place where Charlie was now keeping his horses, he looked really old and frail and sick. He was walking with a cane and he really couldn’t do anything. For one month, I got up extra early and went to his barn to clean his stalls, jog his horses and feed them lunch. Then I would come back in the evening and put his horses away and feed up. I did that until a week before he closed up shop and passed away.
Not so long ago, on a Christmas Eve returning home from Congress Hill Farm, I drove past the poor man’s farm and it was gone. They’d turned it into a development of look-alike homes for the swanky senior set. Kelly’s big old boat was gone and in its place was a guard shack where visitors signed in to get onto the property. What used to be the infield of the track was now a clubhouse and a small parking lot.
I watched as the “over 55” folks walked to their cars, oblivious to the ghosts of all the old time horses and horsemen who had passed through the poor man’s farm. The new folks couldn’t see Charlie’s twinkling Christmas lights; the little stars that had expressed so much more meaning than the perfectly landscaped holiday lights that were now displayed only to remind people that it was time to shop. They were walking in the hoof prints of Genghis Khan and the footprints of Eddie Cobb, and Charlie and poor old Kelly. Of course, they had no idea, but I did.
And as I sat in my truck remembering, I thought about the morning, halfway into my fifth week of helping a fast-fading Charlie, when I asked if I could borrow his trailer to take my horse to the Meadowlands. “Sure you can,” he said. “I’ll only charge you $20.” As much as it pained me to say it, I told him that he shouldn’t charge me anything because I’d been doing all his work for no pay for over a month.
He snapped back angrily, “You doing my work? I could get a chimpanzee to do what you do for me.”
That there was Charlie there.
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October 27, 2010
Long before THE WEATHER BOMB fizzled faster than a soggy sparkler, I was suspicious.
Yesterday, as a huge line of serious-looking storms ripped through the Midwest (you know they’re serious by the dark, angry colours on the radar image), the fine folks at Environment Canada were tripping over themselves to tell all of Ontario, literally, to take cover. THE WEATHER BOMB was coming, didn’t you know?
Thank goodness, their dire predictions — as with many of their predictions — proved false. Lots of rain. A little windy. A long way from Mother Nature’s version of 10 tons of explosives.
Sure, it’s better to over-warn and over-prepare in the event of potential disaster than the alternative, but it still got me thinking a few things:
(1) Was THE WEATHER BOMB brought to us by the same folks who tried to scare the bejesus out of us with the 2009 apocalyptic death bug pandemic-that-wasn’t known as the Piggy Flu? And, if so, how would a giant pharmaceutical company benefit from THE WEATHER BOMB?
(2) Who came up with the super scary, super awesome name THE WEATHER BOMB, what does it mean, exactly — besides impending doom — and are they same person who came up with SNOWMAGEDDON?
(3) Did whoever came up with THE WEATHER BOMB name and well-coordinated campaign of fear get called on the carpet this morning? I ask despite assuming it’s not bloody likely.
(4) Is THE WEATHER BOMB, in name at least, simply the product of a weather dork’s addled mind? The kind of mind constantly numbed by the sheer boredom of trying to track and guess the ferocity of cold fronts? (Which is also why I’m convinced they came up with Doppler 3D radar, which is practically Halo for weather geeks — to keep them entertained)
(5) Is THE WEATHER BOMB exactly the kind of thing that five days a year allows the meteorologists to sit at the cool kids’ table? Until, that is, the cool kids find out the meteorologist is the nimrod they always thought he was and atomic wedgies ensue.
June 14, 2010
For the record, I have not, yet, seen Invictus. Apart from Morgan Freeman botching Nelson Mandela’s accent, I hear it’s a grand, uplifting film about the hopes and dreams of a reborn rainbow nation as realized through the South African rugby team.
I am, however, fervently cheering for Bafana Bafana (Zulu for: The Boys, The Boys), South Africa’s soccer team, despite the improbable odds against them and despite the fact watching soccer is about as much fun as airline travel.
My mother is South African. I have two aunts, two uncles and three cousins and their families that have lived there all their lives. Despite what you may have heard about white South Africans of English origin, my relatives are wonderful people who happen to live in a magical and troubled land. We are all quite close despite the distance.
The World Cup has rarely interested me, but I’ve been surprised with how captivated I’ve been by this one on a cultural level. Likely, my interest has been piqued by the fact South Africa is the host nation. But there’s also something to be said for finding a rooting interest in a country or two, mostly on the grounds of family heritage.
Here lies the real value of the World Cup, particularly when your own country isn’t in it — finding something within yourself with which to identify.
In our house, with Canada about as proficient at soccer as Brazilians are at hockey, that means South Africa comes first — with a myriad of “second teams” claimed by my wife and three children for a host of plausible and inexplicable reasons.
Surely, we could do without those annoying plastic horns, the vuvuzelas, which sound like an incessant swarm of bees. Yet, despite talk of them being banned, there’s something to admire about mirthful South Africans winking as they claim them as part of their cultural heritage, basically telling the rest of the world to shove it.
An old Marxist professor or two or mine would say all this sports stuff is an opiate for the masses. But I believe sports have the power to unify, to transcend. If so, few places need victory more than South Africa in the post-Apartheid era, which has been plagued by crime, AIDS, political scandal and socio-economic upheaval of the highest order.
Vuvuzelas or not, I would love to see them celebrating in the streets of Cape Town, Johannesburg, Durban, Soweto. I can’t begin to comprehend what winning the World Cup might do to unify a divided nation, though I’m not naïve enough to believe it will cure serious ills.
For the moment, anyone who roots for the underdog, for the best storyline, surely appreciates the implication of an unlikely victory by the South African side.
For me, it goes much deeper. Bafana Bafana is part of my tribe.
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