Gil Rowntree: Fishin’ Without Bait

Gil Rowntree is racing’s best yarn. A man who made something out of nothing at all.

Now 92 years old, and a member of the Canadian Horse Racing Hall of Fame for 29 years, Rowntree still holds historical punch: a four-time winner of the Queen’s Plate (Royal Chocolate, Amber Herod, Sound Reason, Key to the Moon).

He was also the guiding hand behind a  feisty little red colt called Overskate, the best of them all who finished second in the Plate on a fluky day. And to boot, Rowntree won a Sovereign Award winner as leading trainer in the country in 1975, the first year the award was established.

Nobody has been able to figure out how Rowntree became such a heavyweight horse trainer with his desperate past, but he was good at it. All he did was beat you. And make you smile while he was doing it.

“He was the funniest guy I ever met,” said Jim Bannon, who rubbed horses eventually in the same barn as Rowntree. “He was as irreverent as could be. Short quips. Cutting remarks that still stay with you.”

Rowntree was born in west Toronto of parents who knew as much about horse racing as boxers know about floral arrangements. Rowntree was in a situation when he was young: His parents had separated, his father eventually remarried and moved to Port Perry.

Rowntree was 14 when he started working at the track. He had been in “first form” at high school. He didn’t like it. “I was doing all right until they threw that French at me and I couldn’t see any reason why I would need French, so I’m going to quit this school.”

Gilmore Rowntree Sr. , looking for a way to deal with it, found an ad in a newspaper for a boy that weighted 95 pounds willing to train to become a jockey. “I think you can do this,” Rowntree Sr., said and sent the kid on his way and out of his hair. Rowntree never had a lasting relationship with his father.

The kid first found work as a hotwalker, which is how everybody started back then. “It was a good-paying job,” Rowntree said wryly. He earned 50 cents a day for trainer Jim McAlmurray.

In truth, Rowntree had been dropped squarely into a nightmarish existence. Rowntree says McAlmurray might have been the “cruelest man since Scrooge.”

It was a hard introduction to the sport for Rowntree, who had come from a world of nice clean sheets. At the time, Woodbine Racetrack did not exist. His new home was a collection of tracks nicknamed the Leaky Roof Circuit.

Rowntree ended up sleeping at Dufferin Park in a stall with rats running under the bed. McAlmurray didn’t care, Rowntree said.

The stories were legion around the track about McAlmurray. One of his horses broke a leg at Dufferin while breezing, fell down and rolled over his rider. McAlmurray ran out, retrieved the horse, and just left the jockey lying there splat on the track. “There were no ambulances on the racetrack in those days,” Rowntree said.” Somebody had to scrape him up. It was a different world.

“Guys that are around now want showers and washrooms and everything. We didn’t have any of that.”

Rowntree weighed 95 pounds when he went to work for McAlmurray. After six weeks with him, Rowntree weighed eightysomething.

“This ain’t going the right way,” Rowntree told himself. “Fifty cents even in 1948 wouldn’t carry you too far. You might be able to eat once a week if you saved a dime a day or something.”

Rowntree had to get away from him. He was hungry. ‘You like to eat,” he said.

He was sitting in the tack room where he had been sleeping and guys from down the shed row who worked for another trainer found Rowntree in tears.  They wanted to know what was wrong.

“Next thing I knew, they got me a job with their outfit,” Rowntree said. “I was getting $2 a day and thought I was a millionaire. I could eat three times a week.”

However, McAlmurray threatened to run Rowntree off the track, thundering at him that the skinny kid would never be able to work at the track again. He would make sure of it.

“When you are 14, those kind of threats scare you,” Rowntree said. ”He was something else.”

Rowntree doesn’t even know if McAlmurray was considered a top trainer. He didn’t even know what a top trainer was. He just knew he was his boss. He had no idea what was going on.

So Rowntree kept going down the shed row and found another employer, Tom Clough, who owned a car dealership in Weston, Ont., He can’t remember the listed trainer’s name. Clough put Rowntree under contract, which was the system in those days. Rowntree describes it as kind of a slavery, a kind of bondage. “Once you were under contract, you couldn’t do nothing except what they said,” he said.

But he needed to be under contract to become a jockey. The contract holders could run you off the track, but you could not quit.

Rowntree signed a five-year contract.  He spent a couple of years under Clough , but then owner Art Halliwell bought out his contract. Halliwell had 40 horses.

Clough always named some trainer or other in the racing program, but really Clough trained the horses himself, while he also ran a wrecking yard on Bloor St. in Toronto. He also might have been a bit of a bookmaker, not legal in those days if it was outside a racetrack.

However, Rowntree couldn’t get ahead on this contract. It called for him to earn $15 a week the first year, $20 a week the second year and the highest pay you could get in five years was about $35.

The contract also stipulated the owner had to buy your clothes and feed you.  But that often didn’t happen. “What I got was a meal ticket for $5 for the kitchen,” Rowntree said. “And I think somewhere along the way, I might have had one pair of rubber boots.

“It wasn’t luxury living.”

But it all worked out, depending on your gauge of success. Rowntree still lived in a tack room, but felt they were better than stalls. They were like cabins. “Four walls and a bunk bed and you always had to share them with somebody which wasn’t all that exciting either,” he said.

In recent decades, backstretch workers can’t live in tack rooms any more for insurance purposes.

‘But there was nothing wrong with a tack room,” Rowntree said. “It was a place to sleep and if you kept it clean, there were worse places to be. Like under a bridge.”

He became a jockey.

When Rowntree rode his first race, the horse carried 97 pounds. Rowntree had to use a heavy saddle to make the weight. The last horse he rode carried 122 pounds, and he had to drop 20 pounds to ride him. And that was only two years later in 1952.

It was “very treacherous” for him to lose weight, Rowntree said. “There was no way I didn’t use.  There were no steam baths. You hit the road in a rubber suit and long underwear. I was running around the racetrack.”

Rowntree’s very first ride was at Fort Erie. He was in against a rider called Bobby Keene. “He was notorious in his day,” Rowntree said.  “He was a born thief. He was ruled off everywhere but the grocery store. “

His name was on a dubious list at Addison Cadillac: “This man is not to be sold a car.”

He was a good rider, though. “If he had been honest, he could have been a millionaire,” Rowntree said.

The assistance starter at the Fort said everybody called this jock “Sam” for short; his full nickname was “Lyin’ Sam.”

“He just couldn’t tell the truth,” Rowntree said.

With the horses lined up at the start, the assistant started  had looked over at Keene and said: ‘Hey Sam, give this kid a break,” nodding toward Kid Rowntree.

He did not give Rowntree a break. But he did give him directions when he got to the turn.

In the race, Keene sat to Rowntree’s outside.  Rowntree’s mount was a great big old lanky horse, and Rowntree figures he was kind of confused. Or maybe Rowntree was confused. “I was almost forgetting to make a left-hand turn when I came to the turn,” he said. “[Keene] came up on the outside and said to me: ‘Take hold of that sonofabee [ or something similar.]”

Rowntree’s first riding lesson. Thank you.

It took a year before Rowntree won his first race.  “They didn’t put me on much,” he said. “The odd one. I might have rode two a week,” he said.

The magic happened aboard Red Vulca at Fort Erie. Red Vulca was 13 years old, almost as old as Rowntree. Rowntree was 15 when he scored the win, too young to get a license. He always lied about his age. “Nobody ever really bothered to check,” he said.

Red Vulca went to the front and stayed there. This was a new experience for Rowntree. “I just remember that the wire was a long ways away and I was running out of horse,” he said.

Red Vulca had been a classy old horse. He knew more about where he was going than Rowntree did.

Once, Rowntree was confronted with a weight issue when he was to ride a horse for an American who had brought a jockey with him. “They were kind of a shady outfit,” Rowntree said. The [stewards] thought the rider did something, but didn’t rule him off. They told him: ‘Best for you to leave.’”

So the outfit needed a rider.  Rowntree was sitting on a pail doing his laundry one day (don’t ask) when a guy came up to him and said: “You got a license?”

Rowntree had taken out a license in the spring with visions of reducing – and had lost.

“Yeah,” Rowntree said.

“Do you want to ride a horse for us on Monday?”

“Monday!” Rowntree exclaimed. “Do you know how big I am?”

“How big?”

Rowntree had to admit that he weighed 140 pounds.

That didn’t seem to deter this group. “Well, if we get the weight off you, will you ride the horse?” the determined man said,.

“I was stupid enough to say yeah,” Rowntree said.

First thing, the man snatched Rowntree off the bucket he had been sitting on, and they started. He got Rowntree dressed in a rubber suit and sent him running around Long Branch racetrack. There were three or four men in the group, and Rowntree was dealing with the assistant. “They were gangsters, really,” he said.

The man followed Rowntree while driving an old Oldsmobile with the heater on. He wore a bathing suit. Rowntree ran in front of him. Then he had to get into the car, and the man drove him around for a while, with the heater on.

“That was a little weakening,” Rowntree said.

They had a room in Mimico and Rowntree had to sleep there in the same room with one of the guys. They gave him a box of 40 Ex-Lax and made him down them. At least some of them. Adult dose.

“So you know the results of that,” Rowntree said. He ran into the bathroom in one of those ancient hotels with one bathroom on the entire floor. Then he sat in the tub with about 20 pounds of Epsom salts. “I looked like a dried prune by Monday, and I couldn’t walk,” Rowntree said. “I was so weak.”

The race was in Hamilton, Ont.

Rowntree caught a ride with another jockey, and wore the rubber suit all the way there. This was in July.

Before they left for Hamilton, his bosses told him they were in the sixth race, so when the horses were in the gate for the fifth race, he was to take two blue pills. “They weren’t Viagra, I can tell you that,” Rowntree said. “I never did know what they were.”

He put them in his pocket. While Rowntree was waiting for the race, he lay down in a cot on the balcony of the jock’s room, dressed in his colours. He told his valet to wake him up when the horses went to the gate for the fifth race.

The valet woke him up. But when the valet left, Rowntree couldn’t pull himself off the bed. He was too weak. He had to tell somebody else to fetch the valet and get the pills from his shirt pocket.

He took them. In the time it took for the horses in the post parade to get to the gate, Rowntree couldn’t sit still. “I was walking like a soldier,” he said. “I never rode so hard in my life. And the horse got beat. Finished second.”

These men that he rode the horse for were gamblers. They would leap into action after a horse had been bet at 20 to 1 four starts in a row, then plunge the next start and drive the odds down to 2 to 1. They bet races all over the country.

Rowntree rode long enough to earn his way out of that profession. Or to escape from it. He won his first race in 1950. He ended up being second-leading rider at Dufferin at the very last meet. His good fortune didn’t carry over to the next track, Thorncliffe Park.

“I wasn’t really doing enough to get myself excited so I left,” he said. “I had better ideas. When you are 15 or 16 years old, you have good ideas.”

His idea was to go out west. So he did. However, he quickly found out he couldn’t ride out there because he was still under contract and the owner of the contract wasn’t turning him loose. There was actually a man at Polo Park in Winnipeg who wanted to buy Rowntree’s contract but the Toronto owner was so angry with Rowntree, he wouldn’t sell.

Rowntree was basically up a creek without a paddle.

He hung around Winnipeg until he ran out of money. Then he hitchhiked from Winnipeg, hopped aboard a freight train, or any sort of (free) available transportation  to get to Calgary.

“I don’t know why. I guess I thought things would be different in Calgary,” Rowntree said. “I didn’t have any money. When I got to Calgary, I chewed a piece of gum for two weeks.”

He reasoned: the Calgary Stampede was coming and it wouldn’t matter if he had no money, because they serve pancakes on the street when the Stampede is on. But he arrived in Calgary a week early.

When he realized that piece of gum wouldn’t last another week, he went to the unemployment office, which was basically an open auditorium.

It was almost empty. There was only one guy looking for a hired hand. And only one guy looking for a job. Rowntree quickly got an interview.

An employer was looking for somebody to work on a farm.  “They call it a farm, but I think I have been in smaller countries,” Rowntree said.

“Can you drive a truck?” the man asked.

Rowntree figured that he could drive a car, so he must be able to drive a truck. He said yes. How hard could it be?

“Can you drive a tractor?”

“Oh yeah,” Rowntree replied.  What could go wrong?

“Do you milk cows?”

“Certainly,” Rowntree said. “I came from a farm.”

He had never milked a cow, though. He had watched his father do it, so Rowntree thought: “You just have to keep pulling the pipes.”

At any rate, there was nobody else for this farmer to interview. Rowntree was it. The employer didn’t have much to choose from. So he hired Rowntree for the job.

“He took me farther out than I knew people lived,” Rowntree said. “Out in a place called Milo, Alta. But that was only the closest town. He was a lot further out than that.”

Money had not been discussed. “The only thing I knew when I got there was that I was going to eat,” Rowntree said.

Doubts reigned. Every day he worked for the farmer, Rowntree marked the days off. “Every time I see one of those prison pictures, you see guys marking off the days,” Rowntree said. “I was there for 25 days.”

It was the most horrible, dreadful, awful, direful, grim  25 days he spent in his life.

The farmer woke Rowntree up at 4 a.m. every morning. He had two cows for his own use. After he first got there, Rowntree was supposed to milk these cows.

“So I went down to the barn,” said the eventual Hall of Famer, in training for future glory. “I got the pail. I sat down and I started to pull on the pipes and nothing was coming out. It was probably a 15 to 20-minute job, but it took me an hour and a half. Finally I got it.”

The next morning, when he woke up, he couldn’t move his wrists.

“I thought I was a paraplegic, for Chrissake,” he said.

Along came the boss who told him to get his breakfast, because his next job was to take the truck down to the field.

The field, said Rowntree, was “almost in another country.”

As he hauled himself over to the ranch house for breakfast, the farmer’s wife was already hanging a never-ending line of laundry. “Some people get up in the middle of the night,” Rowntree thought.

It was a sight: the laundry was blowing and flapping in the wind. But the truck was parked in the wrong place. According to Rowntree.

It was a honking big truck. Rowntree didn’t have the foggiest idea how to drive it. So he started shifting gears.

“I put it in this gear and let it out a little bit,” he said. “Another gear, let it out a little bit. Finally I figure I had gone through them all. I found a new gear. I said: ‘That’s got to be reverse.’ I needed to back up.”

But it wasn’t reverse. The whole line of laundry came down on Rowntree’s first day on the job.

(Later in life, it seemed that Rowntree didn’t get any better at driving vehicles. “He put us at risk when we used to go out for dinner,” Bannon said. Ask the Platts brothers about Rowntree’s driving ability and Fenton will say, on a scale of 1 to 10, – 10 being a need for prayer – that Rowntree rated an 11.)

Back at the farm many years ago, Rowntree finally got the truck turned around and got it down to the field.

Said the rancher when he got there: “Okay, you drive the tractor.”

It was the biggest mother-of-all tractors with a cab on it. Rowntree had never seen one before, so he had to tell his boss: ‘This looks a little different than the one I drove. You better show me just how to do it.”

Rowntree drove that giant tractor until noon. The farmer told him to take the truck back to the house for lunch. That grub downed, Rowntree returned and got right back on that tractor.

“It was just tractor all day,” Rowntree said. “Plowing or harrowing or something.”

Day after day, there was tractor. And more tractor. “I’m trying to figure out how am I going to get out of this trip I’m in?” Rowntree said. “I’m used to the racetrack. You think the racetrack is bad. You get up in the morning, but there was quitting time.”

Finally one day, the farmer said to Rowntree: “Well harvest starts next week. And it’s going to get tough.”

Going to get tough? Rowntree thought it was already tough enough. What kind of tough could this guy possibly be talking about?

That’s when Rowntree decided he had to bail.

Rowntree was never a writer of letters or big on communications. But he started writing letters to people that he barely knew in Toronto.

He got a letter back one day and he started to cry. “I didn’t have any trouble crying,” Rowntree said. “I was a good crier.”

“What’s the matter?” the farmer asked.

Said Rowntree: “My father is dying. He’s sick and he’s in the hospital and he’s dying.”

“Oh you’ve got to go,” the farmer said. “You’ve got to go back east.”

Rowntree replied: “Well, yes, I guess I HAVE to.”

Rowntree hadn’t talked to his father in a couple of years.

So at the urging of his understanding boss, Rowntree packed up all his life’s possessions in a shopping bag and the farmer drove him to a spot in the middle of nowhere where a bus picks up passengers.

It was about a five or six mile drive, out to a highway. It was the first paved road that Rowntree had seen in a long time.

The farmer dropped him off. “The bus will be coming by here,” he said.

“Okay,” Rowntree said.

When Rowntree saw the man drive away, he exhaled: “Oh this is over. I’m going home. I’m going back to Toronto.”

But then, Rowntree overthought it. Sometimes young folk just have too many good ideas. He figured he didn’t need to wait for the bus. He’d just stick out his thumb and hitchhike to save money.

His total pay for 25 days had been $75. (At least he had been fed.) No sense wasting it.

There wasn’t a whole lot of traffic on that road.

A car finally approached. Rowntree stuck out his thumb. It was the sheriff.

“What are you doing out here – because you couldn’t possibly have walked it,” the sheriff said.

“Well, I’m going to Toronto,” Rowntree told him, truthfully.

“Where did you come from?” the sheriff asked.

Rowntree told him.

“Get in the car,” the cop said.

He took him back to the farm.

Rowntree figured the cop thought he had caught a slave escaping.

The farmer looked at Rowntree, puzzled. “You told me you were waiting for the bus.”

“I was in such a hurry to get to Toronto, I thought I would hitchhike,” Rowntree told him.

So the farmer had to drive Rowntree back out to the highway again to catch the bus.

Rowntree did get back to Toronto. By this time, Woodbine Racetrack had been built in all its finery. He worked for a time as a valet. And he worked as an assistant for trainer Lou Cavalaris, not the easiest of bosses.

“He wasn’t a chummy chap,” Rowntree said. “He ruled the roost, but I guess he had to.”

Rowntree said he worked for him for only one summer, but it was the year Cavalaris had the brilliant colt Cool Reception. Rowntree galloped him.

He ran in the 1967 Derby Trial at Churchill Downs and finished second. And because of that, Cavalaris wouldn’t enter him in the Kentucky Derby.

“He was the best horse that came down the road,” Rowntree said. “He was a good horse. “

Cavalaris didn’t run him in the Preakness either. “Cavalaris didn’t like to lose,” Rowntree said. .

But one day owner Larkin Maloney showed up at the barn and told Cavalaris he was going to enter him in the Belmont Stakes, whether he liked it or not.

At Belmont Park in New York, Rowntree watched the race from where the grooms stand. Cool Reception had the lead in the stretch. “He was going to win that race,” Rowntree said. Damascus loomed up alongside, and Rowntree saw that suddenly his jockey stood up just for a second in his irons.

Rowntree told the groom next to him that there was going to be a disqualification.

But the guy replied and pointed: “Is that your horse there?”

Ten jumps past the wire, Cool Reception was pulled up. He was standing on three legs.

Surgeons fixed the fractured leg but he rebroke it when he tried to stand up in the stall overnight. So they had to euthanize him. Cavalaris found out just before he was to go on television in Toronto and talk about the horse. He was in tears.

“He had a brilliant future,” Rowntree said of the horse.

Rowntree still has a large beautiful photo of him galloping Cool Reception at Churchill Downs, with the twin spires in the mist in the background.

He keeps few photos of horses.

Rowntree didn’t want to follow in the footsteps of others. He was always an original. “I never was one for hanging horse pictures in the house,” he said.” I think they belong in an office or rec room. I went into Frank Merrill’s house one day and I couldn’t believe it. It looked like he wallpapered his place with pictures. And when you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.”

Rowntree got his trainer’s license in 1959 and he was working for Cavalaris when Jack Stafford hired him to train his string for $25 a week more. Had he learned a lot from Cavalaris? He had been the leading trainer in North America by wins in 1966.

“The knowledge I went in with was the knowledge I left with,” Rowntree said.

In Cavalaris’ camp, Rowntree worked with Robin Platts, Richard Grubb and Jim Bannon, who worked on and off as a groom, while being schooled at a seminary to become a priest.

Rowntree started working for Stafford in 1967 and he trained for the jam-and-jelly company man until he died in 1981. Stafford was a country boy from Port Elgin, Ont. Stafford had been born in a log cabin in Bruce County and had to leave school early because his mother had died in childbirth when he was 12. Stafford was the oldest of seven siblings and it was up to him to help financially. He worked for some neighbouring farmers , and then at a local brush factory.

He attended business school in nearby Owen Sound, the largest town in the area, for a time and then hopped off to Western Canada, much like Rowntree, but not really like Rowntree. He started work in a bank in Winnipeg and then on nights and weekends, worked with his wife, Florence, to make jams and jellies to sell. The business took off.

Rowntree didn’t follow exactly the same path.  But while working for Cavalaris, he “was very efficient,” Bannon said. “He always had a very confident opinion of himself. I think that was important. The rest of us were learning as we went.”

There was never a dull moment when Stafford and Rowntree joined forces.  “Jack was a good guy and he’d give you anything in his pocket,” Rowntree said.

Before they teamed up, they had dismal luck in the Queen’s Plate. And things didn’t start picking up immediately.

Rowntree had two last-place finishes. One of them was Stafford’s Bees Wax, who finished last in 1970 behind Almoner. And although Stafford had had horses with other trainers for many years before that, he had made few appearances in the Plate, overall.

Then the racing careers of both Stafford and Rowntree took off. Along came Stafford’s Royal Chocolate in 1973. Everybody called him Chuckle on the backside. He didn’t start out as one of Stafford’s stars. His stall was at the far end of the shed row, sort of in afterthought territory. Stafford named him after one of his syrups. He was a 23 to 1 shot in the Plate, the least favoured of Stafford’s good 3-year-olds. At the time, the most exciting thing about Royal Chocolate was that he had a sibling called Kid Chocolate, named after a legendary Cuban boxer from the 1920s and ‘30s. But on Plate day, Chuckle had the last laugh. He won the 50 guineas.

“Royal Chocolate was just a utility horse,” Rowntree said. “He as a good horse, but I don’t think he would cut it in this day of age. But he tried.”

Surprisingly, Rowntree had given Italian native Ted Colangelo the mount, even though when he first worked in Rowntree’s employ, he kept falling off horses. Rowntree had fired him four years earlier, telling the kid that he’d never make it.

Colangelo’s father had emigrated first to Edmonton and worked in the construction business. Ted went to school but at age 17, unable to speak English, he quit. He became a waiter in an Edmonton restaurant. He encountered a guy who owned a couple of race horses. He finally talked Ted into working at the track because of his small size. After working in Edmonton a couple of years, he headed for Toronto.

Rowntree hired him as an exercise boy and asked him to ride Clem’s Flicka every day. This horse often didn’t finish a workout with Colangelo aboard. He kept falling off. Rowntree suggested he find another occupation.

But Colangelo was back the next summer, working for Glen Magnusson before Rowntree gave him a second chance.

“I had a nutty horse called Amber Vase,” Rowntree said. He gave him to Colangelo to ride in a race. When he finished second with him, Rowntree gave him another nutbar. And he did well with him, too.

Rowntree had to admit Colangelo gave Royal Chocolate the perfect ride. “He couldn’t have done better if I had been beside him telling him what to do.”

Rowntree had a friend who liked to bet, and he wagered successfully on Royal Chocolate in the Plate Trial. Royal Chocolate had won his division two seconds faster than the other. He paid big, so the friend was gung ho to bet on him in the Plate, too.

On Plate day, Rowntree watched the drama unfold from the backside with him. “I never went to the races unless I was running something,” Rowntree said. “And even if I was running something, I’d sit on the backside until it was time to go to the races. I didn’t sit at the races.’

The man tried to make an early bet on Royal Chocolate with a $1,000 bill at the backside window.  But the guy at the wicket wouldn’t take the money. Said they didn’t take $1,000 bills.

There was no sign saying he didn’t take $1,000 bills. Desperate, as a last resort, the man saw somebody he knew who lent him $200 to bet on Royal Chocolate. So he bet $200 but wanted to bet $1,000. Royal Chocolate paid $48 for a $2 win ticket.

“The horse just galloped,” Rowntree said. He won by 5 ½ lengths with Queen Elizabeth II in the stands watching. Rowntree does have the photo of him with the Queen in the winner’s circle. He thinks it’s the only photo he has of a Plate winner. He might have one of Sound Reason kicking around somewhere.

Royal Chocolate was special in that he was Rowntree’s first Plate win. “Like your first girlfriend,” he said. Stafford had waited for 25 years for the Plate win and he had gone through many trainers. But Rowntree stuck. He had been with Stafford for six years before the Royal Chocolate win.

Despite what Rowntree says, Royal Chocolate was quite a useful horse and raced until he was six, winning and placing in many of the major stakes for older horses. He won the Connaught Cup in his final start in 1976.

Stafford was a big personality and couldn’t help himself in the winner’s circle. He lit it up, country boy Port Elgin style. When Her Majesty remarked she was surprised to see such a large winning margin in such an important race, Stafford blurted: “Your Majesty, we just slewed them all, that’s all.”

In the second jewel of the Canadian Triple Crown, Rowntree broke records with his charges finishing one-two-three in the Prince of Wales. Royal Chocolate finished third behind Tara Road and Good Port.

The Stafford-Rowntree alliance also won the Plate the following year when the track was a sea of slop. Amber Herod, an 8 to 1 shot, won by 1 ½ lengths. He seemed fine with the track conditions. The horse rolled in the slop on the march over from the backstretch, arriving in the paddock with a muddy blanket. His sign of approval. By this time, a young Robin Platts was regularly riding for the Stafford Stable.

Before the race, he walked “like an old cow,” but when saddled and the crowd began to applaud and cheer, Amber Herod began to buck. And again, it was in front of a member of the Royal family, the Queen Mother this time.  At this Plate, Stafford was 79 years old. When he went to the winner’s circle again, he reminded the Queen Mum that her daughter had been there the previous year. “Real nice girl you have there,” Stafford told her.

Sound Reason came along in 1977, again running in the slop, one eye covered in mud as he charged down the stretch to win by half a length over favoured filly Northernette. Rowntree said he had actually trained the horse to win the Plate in 1977, whereas the other two years, he got lucky with mediocre horses. This time, he knew what Sound Reason – a yearling purchase rather than a homebred, – could do. Rowntree’s job was to get him to relax.

After the death of Stafford, Rowntree scratched out another Queen’s Plate win with Key To the Moon in 1984, but only after claims of foul and interference in the stretch. The result stood for owner Bahnam Yoursif and his BKY Stable.

As a trainer, Rowntree always had many aces in his back pocket. One of them was Ralph, a barn cat that helped him win three Plates in five years, obviously providing rain-soaked tracks on cue. Ralph was a lazy cat with attitude, battle scars around his ears. A fighter too. He owned the place. The thing is, Rowntree had several cats. He named them all Ralph.

And if he encountered a human he didn’t know, Rowntree would call him Ralph, too.

“Everybody was a Ralph,” Platts said. “He had two or three of them in Fort Erie. I’d go: “Who is this one?”

“Ralph,” Rowntree would say.

“That ain’t the Ralph I know.”

“The other one got hit by a car, so this one’s Ralph,” Rowntree said.

“Ralph Jr?” Platts would ask.

“No,” Rowntree would reply with deadpan expression. “Ralph.”

They didn’t look alike, any of them.

This according to Larry Millson, who wrote many Ralph stories for The Globe and Mail, detailing the cat that could be found asleep in the top desk drawer of Rowntree’s backstretch office, resting on top of his condition book, or asleep on his stopwatch. Rowntree would try to retrieve the watch without waking him and incurring his disdain.

Millson wrote that Rowntree also had a goat called Barbie Q, (for obvious reasons)  a rooster and a quirky hen. The hen would lay eggs nonchalantly on the shed row, and then abandon them. On any given day, a couple of them might sit on Rowntree’s desk along with a golf ball.  “That hen keeps laying eggs,” Millson quoted Rowntree as saying. “One of these days, I’m going to tee one up by mistake  and squish.”

The goat? The skinny, ivory-coloured goat?  “Goats aren’t easy to get,” Rowntree said. He paid $30 for this one at a sale in Stouffville. “Guy told me he’s a champion. Of course he was selling it,” he told Milt Dunnell of the Toronto Star.

He has used goats as mascots in the past. He had one for a nervous filly. Even so, he put this goat in the stall with another filly because he had no place else to put him. The next morning, the filly “raised hell. Doesn’t want the goat to leave,” Rowntree said.

But he didn’t buy the goat for the filly. “Naw, I really bought this goat for the barbecue in the fall,” he told Dunnell. “…They’re good barbecued.”

Get attached to the goat? Dunnell asked.

“I been attached to my appetite a lot longer than I’ve had this goat,” Rowntree said.

Some Ralph or other was still around when Rowntree trained the best horse of his career: Overskate. The Plate that sticks most in Rowntree’s mind to this day is the one he did not win: with favoured Overskate in 1978. Overskate was a Stafford homebred by Nodouble, born on Stafford’s farm in Port Elgin, On. When Rowntree broke him as a yearling, “he was stupid,” the trainer said.

“He’d trip over himself and nobody ever really wanted to get on him because he was clumsy. And stupid.”

 

Platts was often the one aboard Overskate, in the early days, but Richard Grubb was the one who told Rowntree that the colt was a runner, he said.

Grubb, who ended up being leading apprentice and jockey in Canada in 1967, remembers working Overskate from the gate at Greenwood Racetrack early in 1977. “I remember it well,” he said. “He was with the other Stafford 2-year-olds working out of the gate in the chute.”

“He walked out of the gate, but by the time we hit the wire, he was easily in front,” Grubb said.

Rowntree had another 2-year-old called Bold and Swift, who looked and trained the part. Said Rowntree of this colt: “If he’s not a runner, there is not a steer in Texas,”

But Overskate was the impressive one that day out of the gate.

Grubb rode Overskate in his first start and to a maiden win at Greenwood when Platts was out of town.

But Overskate was just beginning to impress. He won the Coronation Futurity as a 2-year-old (lost the Cup and Saucer by disqualification) and was the favourite to win the Queen’s Plate the following year. “He was probably the best horse I ever run in the Plate and he didn’t win,” Rowntree said. “It was just a little pilot error.”

Rowntree said the loss came from overconfidence on Platt’s part.

“He came to the head of the lane,” Rowntree said. “He was in behind that Mac Benson horse [Regal Embrace] and was within a length and Platts hadn’t moved on him.

“It’s a case of let him run, he’s going to win. [Sandy] Hawley was on the other horse and he showered down on that [horse] – (Hawley whipped Regal Embrace 11 times in the stretch] – and instead of being a length in front, he opened up a quick two. Now Platts woke up but he got beat a neck. He was going to make a show of it or something.’

In descriptions of the race written at the time, Overskate was sitting fifth early in the race, but appeared to be rank, giving Platts trouble. He saved ground around the clubhouse turn, so Platts tried to back off horses because he knew they were rolling on the front end. Then he noticed Regal Embrace running so easily, he thought he’d better get moving.

Instead of just taking Overskate to the outside, Platts went inside,  where room was a little tight. And then the hole closed. Then Regal Embrace started to open up on the final turn. Overskate made a huge charge but fell short by a neck. Regal Embrace won in 2:02, equaling the stakes record set by Victoria Park in 1960.

Rowntree never got mad at Platts for it because when he rode Amber Herod in the Plate, Platts made a move at the five-eighths pole, where you wouldn’t be looking for a jock to make a move. But that move scored the win.  There was a hole and he went through it and everybody else was getting that slop.

“You win some and you lose some,” Rowntree said.

Platts made a mistake that day, but “we all make mistakes,” Rowntree said.

Still, he admitted a few weeks afterward that “I still wake up screaming in the middle of the night” over it.

Overskate got his revenge in later races. After the Plate, he defeated Regal Embrace in the International Stakes at Woodbine by a head after Hawley, riding Regal Embrace, lost his whip before the wire, which some thought might have cost him the race. But Overskate won the race in a record 1:41 4/5 over 1 1/16^th miles, taking four-fifths off the previous mark.

Overskate set the pace in this one and Regal Embrace had to chase him. Regal Embrace actually put his neck in front just inside the eighth pole, but Overskate fought back.  “He’s a game little guy,” Platts said at the time.

When they went to Fort Erie for the Prince of Wales (Round three with Regal Embrace), Platts said to Rowntree: “You know what? They made Regal Embrace favourite over Overskate. And I said : ‘Gil, I’m not a gambler but this horse will never ever get close to him again.’ And he win by nine lengths, just off the track record. And then got better and better.”

Regal Embrace was fourth, although elevated to third after a disqualification. Regal Embrace had been the 13 to 10 favourite in this race.

Platts said it was the easiest race Overskate had ever run. The two colts met once more that year and the verdict was the same.

Two weeks later, Overskate won the Manitoba Derby at 1 1/8 miles, set a track and Canadian record and won by 13 ½ lengths. Rowntree doubted the record because officials had used a stopwatch to time it, but he was happy to take it. Platts had a hard time pulling him up.

After that race, in the post-race celebrations with top officials, a man approached Rowntree and said he had read about Overskate  and couldn’t wait to see him.  Off he had gone to the paddock. “I looked at him and I was never so disappointed in my life,” he said. “I’m expecting this big strapping horse and here comes this midget.”

Overskate was  a hardy horse too. Indeed horses back in 1978 raced more often than today, sometimes spacing races two weeks apart.  The Breeders’ Stakes, third jewel of the Canadian Triple Crown, was next, and Rowntree figured it would be “a good race for the non-believers.” He won that one, too, this time by 3 ½ lengths. Overskate had Regal Embrace put away by the final turn.

“Any horse who can run those fractions (six furlongs in 1:10 2/5) under a hold like he was under and go a mile and a half and keep running like that could be any kind of horse,” Rowntree said. “He just keeps getting better.”

Overskate was “everybody’s dream horse,” Rowntree said. “Sound as a dollar. If you put him up for sale as a yearling, he wouldn’t have got one bid. He toed out. He was this big [950 pounds] and he was narrow.

“But he had a stride twice the length of his body.”

Sometimes, Overskate was called the Little Big Horse.

Overskate won an unprecedented nine Sovereign Awards and was Horse of the Year twice in Canada. (1978 and 1979).  When he retired at the end of the 1980 season, he was Canada’s richest earner with $791,634. “If he was around today, he’d have millions beside his name, not hundreds of thousands,” Rowntree said.

Rowntree can’t think of a bad race. Overskate won everywhere Rowntree took him.

David Stevenson figured in some of Overskate’s most triumphant moments in the United States. Stevenson was a jockey who had ridden Canadian Champ to win the 1956 Queen’s Plate, the year that Woodbine opened. In the win photo, there is valet Gil Rowntree in the background

Eventually Stevenson would become a vice president of the New York Racing Association after he had been in a similar position in Ontario. His story is legion.

But Rowntree and Stevenson knew each other very well through the tougher days. Stevenson used to sleep in Rowntree’s car when they were at Fort Erie. Rowntree would sleep in the front seat, Stevenson in the back. Stevenson was working for trainer Gord Huntley at the time while Rowntree can’t even remember what he was doing: “working for somebody and fiddling with a broke-down horse.

“I wouldn’t say we were really close friends, but we were pals,” Rowntree said.

Later on, when Rowntree was taking Overskate to New York tracks like Belmont and Saratoga, he says he became really disappointed in Stevenson, who was running things there.

Rowntree recalls legendary Daily Racing Form columnist Joe Hirsch interviewing Stevenson, because Stevenson was Canadian and there were two Canadian horses in the Bowling Green Stakes at Belmont. Regal Embrace was the other.

Stevenson said neither one of them belonged in the race.

“You don’t have to say that,” Rowntree said. “Anyhow, that didn’t mean nothing to me.”

Others were not impressed at the sight of Overskate either. Trainer John Veitch (Alydar) looked at him  and said: “What’s this little thing doing here in this race?”

“Who the hell does he think he is?” Rowntree said.

When Overskate won the Bowling Green, he defeated horses like Waya and broke a track record that had stood for 40 years.

“Now he belongs, right?” Rowntree said. “And Stevenson wouldn’t come near me. You go up to a room and they give you free booze and everybody is congratulating you and the executives are shaking your hand and he didn’t show up.”

Overskate went off to win the Stars and Stripes Stakes at Arlington Park in Chicago, then took a dip back home to win the Canadian Maturity before heading to the Bernard Baruch Stakes at Saratoga, Stevenson’s turf again. He was to carry top weight of 128 pounds.

Rowntree expected that Overskate would be well treated, considering his successful exploits. “If he’s a nice horse, you do everything you can do,” he said. But when Overskate shipped to Saratoga, instead of being put in the stakes barn with the rest, he was sent over to the Oklahoma track, the backside of the track, across a street.

Overskate was housed in a one-sided barn with no shed. And this is where they parked the buses in the afternoon. “And they run them all afternoon,” Rowntree said. “Diesel buses. Fumes just constant.”

They overcame that, but when it came time for the race, rain began to pour. They had never taken the Bernard Baruch off the turf in 52 years, but this time, Saratoga took the race off the grass. Overskate had been shipped there expressly to run on grass.

“The one thing he really didn’t like was slop or mud,” Rowntree said. “When he turned for home, he was last. And I kind of gave up on him.”

All of a sudden, there was Overskate, charging down the centre of the track. A blur.

“Just before the wire, from here to that fence there, the wire in front, you just see Whoosh. There is this blur. It was Overskate and he win it.”

Afterwards going to the room for the “freebies,” Rowntree rounded a corner and bumped right into Stevenson. “You horse ran good, Gil,” he said.

Rowntree replied: “Yeah, in spite of you.”

Rowntree never spoke to Stevenson again. “He did everything to not be nice to that horse,” Rowntree said. “But [Overskate] proved himself wherever he went. He went to Chicago and defeated Frank Stronach’s good filly, Glorious Song, in the Laurence Amour Stakes [when he was five years old.]  She was second. He just marched. He embarrassed her that day.”

“He win everywhere I took him. I would have liked to have had him in this day and age for the money that they are running for. You could run for more money in one race than he made in his career.

(Photo by Tibor Kolley/The Globe and Mail)

And therein lies a tale of Rowntree’s ingenuity. He took Overskate to Arlington Park for the Laurence Amour, but he shipped there with another of Stafford’s steeds, Mr. Joe Morgan, recalls Woodbine publicity chief at the time Bruce Walker.

Mr. Joe Morgan, named for a crusty, outspoken radio personality in Toronto, according to Walker –  wasn’t going just for company. He had just come off a long layoff due to injury and he needed a start and a win to make him eligible for a series of starter allowances back home at Woodbine in early fall. Rowntree had targeted a claiming race earlier on the card before the Laurence Amour.

But he was also worried that Chicago horsemen would claim him. After all, he had been a fairly good allowance and stakes performer at home in Ontario.

So Rowntree hatched a plan.

Overskate wasn’t much of a looker. Nobody would even think of claiming him, had he been in that class. And nobody expected a top-class horse to look like a puny runt. Meanwhile Mr. Joe Morgan was well-muscled and a flashy chestnut. There was no confusing the two of them.

When the horses arrived in the stable area, Overskate was wearing Mr. Joe Morgan’s halter. And Mr. Joe Morgan was modelling Overskate’s halter, name plate and all.

It worked. When Mr. Joe Morgan showed up in the racing paddock, nobody had put a claim in on him. He won with authority at large odds, with Robin Platts riding.

And of course, Overskate won the Laurence Amour, showing his heels to Glorious Song. And in doing so, he became the leading money-winning Canadian thoroughbred of all time.

Walker, who had been on the trip, said he will never forget it. That little group of Canadians there bet “with both hands” on Mr. Joe Morgan, then parlayed the winnings onto Overskate, who had been at higher odds than expected.

“Those winnings went toward a beautiful antique clock,” Walker said.

Canadian horsemen sometimes found they weren’t quite welcome at some tracks south of the border. The Americans wouldn’t always make it easy for the northern  intruders to take money out of their hands.

Rowntree trained a crack sprinter, Royal North,  an Ohio-bred daughter of Reviewer (sire of the great filly Ruffian) that Stafford bought for $100,000 at auction. In her second start, she had won the My Dear Stakes by 9 ½ lengths, running five furlongs in 57 4/5 seconds, two-fifths of a second off the Woodbine track record.

“She was a great sprinter,” Platts said. She didn’t like an off track, but in an allowance race at Woodbine, she defeated Canadian Oaks winner La Voyageuse with ease while running a distance not usual to her: one mile, 70 yards. Then off to Beulah Park in Ohio she went to contest a stakes race.

She was to be housed in a stall that was “so bad,” Platts said. “They didn’t want her there, because she was going to be the favourite by many And I get there and I said: ‘What the hell happened?’ Because she had been on the van all night. They stayed with her on the van because the stall was so bad.

“And sure enough, she was 1 to 9. The story was, they don’t want her to win.

“Royal North was probably the fastest horse I ever rode out of the gate,” Platts said. “She was a fast sprinter, coming out of that gate. Nobody could beat her. She was so quick.”

When Platts got to the start, he was met by a big guy on the gate who said to him: “Hey jock. I got her.”

Platts replied. “She don’t need nobody with her. She’s fine.”

“I was told to take her,” the gate man said.

“No, no, no, Platts said. “You don’t touch her. Leave her alone.”

When the gate opened, Royal North broke so quickly, she ran over top of the guy. “She still galloped.” Platts said. “She was champion Ohio-bred. But they tried to get her beat, every time.”

Now to honour her, Woodbine stages the Royal North Stakes, but it’s run on the grass. Royal North never set foot on the grass.  Both Platts and Rowntree get a kick out of that.

There were always lessons to learn for a trainer that dominated racing in the 1970s. Rowntree never stopped learning. Ambassador B., a roan by Al Hattab, taught him a few more.

Not all of Stafford’s horses were nice animals, personality-wise.  Ambassador B. was quite a good 2-year-old that won three stakes, including the Summer Stakes. Platts crossed the wire with him in first, then Ambassador B dumped him. And then he wheeled on him. “He was so common,” Platts said. “He was an ignorant horse.”

At three he won the Plate Trial even though he got loose before the race. “He got loose a couple of times.” Platts said. “He came into the paddock, blowing his guts, out, right?”

The vet says: “You can’t run him, Gil,”

Rowntree didn’t buy that. “The common rat is going to run,” Rowntree insisted.

He just galloped in the Plate Trial. Won easily.

Because of the horse’s bad pre-race behaviour, Rowntree began to van Ambassador B from the backstretch stables to the racing paddock next to the grandstand. The horse had always reared up and tried to get away. “I hate the horse,” Platts said. “Rowntree hated the horse. We all hated the horse. He was a well-bred horse, too.”

Before the Queen’s Plate, Ambassador B decided to roll in the mud, too. He came into the paddock, a rather rebellious sight.

In the 1976 Plate, won by Norcliffe, Ambassador B finished ninth. “He didn’t run a jump,” Platts, who rode him, said. “Wouldn’t get off a gallop. He wasn’t excited enough.”

They all wondered what they were going to do with this horse. Platts told his agent, Allan Dunn: “Al, don’t let me ride that friggin’ horse. I can’t stand him.”

Yet he had defeated Norcliffe in the Summer Stakes the year before, when he was a 2-year-old

One day, when Ambassador B was a 4-year-old a, along came a message to the barn from Stafford, who announced they had sold him to Australia as a stallion.

“Gil was happy,” Platts said. “I’m happy. Dunn’s real happy. “

A week or two went by when Rowntree got another call from Stafford.

”Hey Gil,” Stafford said. “It’s the old man, Stafford. We’re still eligible for the Eclipse Stakes.”

“What?” Rowntree said.

“We’re nominated,” Stafford said. “We’re eligible. We’re going to run him.”

But Rowntree hadn’t trained him since he had been sold. They had only walked him. “We can’t run this frickin’ horse,” Rowntree said. “He hasn’t trained. “

To run, Ambassador B had to have a workout at 3/8ths of a mile. He did. He was in.

Platts did not want to ride Ambassador B. He had already ridden another horse that had been entered in the Eclipse, Brilliant Sandy, to two stakes wins. But Dunn called Platts and told him he had to ride Ambassador B instead. “We’re riding all Staffords, so what are you going to do?” Dunn said,

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Platts said.

“Sure enough, [in the race]  I went by Brilliant Sandy like nothing,” Platts said. “As if he was standing still. Breaks the track record.”

Said Rowntree: “Guess what, Rob? You got the last laugh.”

“The friggin’ horse,” Platts said. “All you had to do was not train him.

“Dougie Anderson was galloping him [in the mornings],” Platts said. “He galloped him three miles, until he began to settle down. He was an ignorant horse.”

“We didn’t have to train him at all.” Rowntree said. He learned that lesson at the horse’s final race.

The Rowntree road trips were legion. Many times, Platts would fly to racetracks instead.  He knew what would happen if he travelled with the trainer and his friends. And he knew about Rowntree’s driving.

Once when Rowntree took three nice horses to Hazel Park in Michigan, he took several of his closest buddies: Dunn, who was Platt’s agent, Crank the Carpet Man, who installed all of Platts’ carpets in his house, Ronnie the Fireman, who never put out a fire and John Ferguson, not to be confused with the hockey great.

“They were his running mates,” Platts said. “That’s how he never had to pay for anything. They all said: “We’re going.’”

Platts told Dunn that he was not going to drive with those guys. “I’ll pay my own ticket.” He knew they were going to win big at Hazel Park in early spring, when nobody knew what the Canadians had to offer. Platts wanted to arrive in one piece. Platts did intend to drive back with them.

All of the horses won. They all made bundles of money. And they celebrated. “They had been drinking all day,” Platts said. He realized he would have to drive them all home. They were all passed out.

He had to drop Ferguson off at an exit on the 401. Somebody was to pick him up. And when he did, the rest of them were still passed out.

“Oh look at this,” Platts said.

Platts drove back to the barn on the Woodbine backstretch, where his car was. He had been driving all night. All of his passengers suddenly woke up.

Said Rowntree to Platts: “We got a bunch of workers today.”

Platts had wanted to go home and sleep, but ended up having a nap in his car for an hour to be ready to work Rowntree’s horses.

“That was Gil,” Platts said. “That’s the way he was.”

As for the stable star, Overskate, he retired perfectly sound. And if Stafford ever suffered any losses in the horse business, Overskate made up for it. He was purchased to stand at stud in New York State for $5-million or $20-million in today’s dollars.

Rowntree trained other top horses too; Tudor Queen, which won the 1969  Frizette Stakes in New York and was chosen top 2-year-old filly in the United States. And he trained Canadian champions Deceit Dancer, Proud Tobin, Northern Blossom, Ten Gold Pots, and Allan Blue, winner of the 1980 Prince of Wales Stakes at Fort Erie. Gurkhas Band was another good filly he had. He’s won 1,036 races. He tossed his rubber boots in 2012, when he retired.

One day, long after he had left Stafford, Rowntree found himself watching a filly coming down on the turf course.

“And she was running,” he said. “[Overskate] used to run with his head like that, reaching. He was always over reaching his whole body. And I seen this filly coming down and I thought: ‘Geez that filly runs just like Overskate.””

When Rowntree looked at the racing program, he discovered she was a daughter of Overskate.

It was like living in a dream, just to see that. So despite everything, Rowntree created a stellar career. Many trainers never win a Queen’s Plate. He won four. He invaded the United States and returned victorious. At one point in his career, if you walked down Rowntree’s shed row, just about all of his horses were stakes winners. He fooled them all.

Says Platts, upon reflecting: “We didn’t know Gil would be successful like that.”