When Shark Week became the first Standardbred in history to win sub-1:50 on Western Canadian soil, people celebrated the feat nationwide. The truth is however, that there is much more to this story than just a fast horse. The father and son duo that train and drive him - Rod and Mike Hennessy - are lifelong horsemen that have seen the highs and the lows of both horse racing and life, and after you read their story you’ll probably be as happy for them as they are, that Shark Week has come into their lives. By Keith McCalmont.
Harness drivers tend to have that built-in need for speed. While many folks might be squeamish piloting a standardbred around the track at upwards of 55 kilometers per hour, driver Mike Hennessy finds a sense of calm amidst the chaos.
The Century Downs-based reinsman has overcome a lot in life, from drug addiction to homelessness, but he’s made it through to the other side, and is now enjoying a life re-built that includes recent Western Canadian record-setter Shark Week, his girlfriend Crystal, her young daughter Miyah, and skiing - lots of skiing.
“That’s my main passion these days. I race horses and I ski. Last year, I got up to 92 kilometers per hour on the ski hill. Pretty rad. I like the adrenalin,” Hennessy said. “Part of why I love skiing and the mountains is to just clear my head and be completely in the moment. When I’m challenging myself in the mountains, I’m never more free.”
As for the aforementioned Shark Week - who is trained and co-owned by Mike’s father Rod Hennessy, in partnership with Lorne Duffield - the Alberta star has posted a record of 65-31-8-11 for purse earnings of $278,475… more than 46 times his $6,000 purchase price at the 2019 ASHA Yearling Sale.
A wonderful purchase from the beginning, it was part way through his four-year-old year that the now five-year-old Vertical Horizon gelding really started putting it all together for the team of Hennessy & Hennessy. Currently a winner in 22 of 29 starts over the past 12 months, on June 3rd at Century Downs, Shark Week etched his name into the Western Canadian record books when he romped to a glorious 8 ¾ length score, to take the Preferred Pace in 1:49.2, recording the first sub-1:50 mile in the history of Western Canadian Standardbred racing.
Needless to say, Mike appreciated the pacer’s abundant speed.
“He just fired out of there - I was at the quarter in 26.2. I was shutting him down pretty good coming to the quarter-pole, and then I let him cruise along to the half in 54.4,” he said.
Shark Week was knifing through the fractions at an impressive pace, clocking three-quarters in 1:22.3, with his four opponents strung out in his wake.
“Our three-quarter clock wasn’t working that day, so I didn’t know what I hit the three-quarters in. If I’d seen it, I may have thought I didn’t have a chance,” he said with a laugh. “I just started rocking the bike on him and he seemed to like it. He started pacing out of his skin coming out of the turn, stormed home in 26.4 and paced right through the wire like he had more left. It was pretty awesome. Once I saw the clock, I just raised a hand - we did it.”
The elder Hennessy, who has now won 2,198 races as a trainer and eclipsed 2,800 wins as a driver in his own right, was enjoying the spectacle from the grandstand.
“If you watch the replay closely you’ll see a guy fist-bumping, and that’s me,” grinned Rod. “Mike and I never talked about it. I just let him do what he does. I drove enough races to know you can’t tell a driver what to do because they won’t listen anyway. He let him ramble and it was one of them days that he was just floating.”
In true racing fashion, the moment was celebrated across the track by friends and competitors alike, from the connections of horses in the paddock preparing for upcoming races, to the fans and officials in the grandstand.
“They have TVs in the paddock and everyone was there to watch the race because the barn [stabling area] is at the far end of the track and you can’t see anything but the turn [from there],” Rod said. “When they hit the wire and announced ‘49 and 2’ they told me the whole paddock just roared. Everyone was excited and cheering for this horse.”
* * * *
Racing is a family business for the Hennessy clan. Rod’s father, Owen, originally launched his stable in 1963 with a modest group of horses.
“He handed the reins over to me and he passed away when I was 20-years-old. So, I ended up with a stable of horses and most were no good,” Rod said. “But I’ve been lucky along the way. I’ve always had a couple good owners with me.”
Rod, who has been training and driving horses since he was 16-years-old, campaigned his horses all across the Western circuit, racing for purse money of $400-500 in Saskatoon, at Marquis Downs in Regina, and at smaller Alberta tracks in Red Deer and beyond.
“We called it the leaky roof circuit,” said Rod with a laugh. “In some of those towns we’d race four harness races, dig the track up and then we’d race four Thoroughbred races, and then maybe race chuckwagons - three different disciplines in one day, and I got to meet some great people along the way.”
A career highlight for the veteran conditioner, who would later find success in Ontario before returning back home to the west, was training the top-three finishers in the 2003 Western Canadian Pacing Derby, with Armbro Aviator besting Rustys Gold, with the Rod-piloted Talon Seelster completing the triactor.
“I’d love to have won [with Talon Seelster] because I owned half of that one,” laughs Rod. “I had a front-running horse that most of the guys didn’t have any respect for, but after the half they did. I told one guy going to the quarter-pole, ‘You better duck because I’ve got two more coming!’
A true pillar of the sport in Western Canada, in 2016, Rod was rightly honoured with the Ron McLeod Award of Achievement for his lifetime of contribution to Standardbred racing in Alberta.
As for Mike, he said he never really considered any other profession but driving and training horses.
“You’re born into a career if you want to embrace it. When I was growing up, racing was at a whole different level than it is today for fan interest and attendance, so it was pretty cool,” Mike says. “I’d see my dad, or other people I knew, in the newspaper quite often. Just to be around the excitement and to have the opportunity to start jogging or training, really stoked that fire. I always wanted to drive.”
Mike was training horses as a teenager and in the bike professionally by the age of 20. He said his mentors included his father, Johnny Chappell and Kelly Hoerdt.
“I had part of my dad’s barn here when my dad was racing in Ontario,” Mike shares. “We had a lot of success together… Johnny was driving for us [here] and taught me a lot of little things about understanding why people drive a certain way, and situationally, where you want to be with certain types of horses.
“Kelly gave me a lot of opportunities early on,” he added. “He gave me the most qualifiers when I went for my license and has given me a lot of catch drives over the years. That’s three pretty solid guys to learn from.”
It seemed like the family business was in good hands with Mike starting to run up big numbers as both a driver and trainer, but a demon lingered beneath the surface.
* * * *
Mike put up very solid training numbers from 2002-2005, banking a combined $2.1 million in purse earnings over the four year period. He started driving more regularly in 2005, and from 2005-2010, he never won less than 34 races as a driver, including a then career-best, 66 scores in 2007.
But the statistics were only providing a semblance of cover for a deeper issue.
“I was partying pretty hard,” Mike said. “It progressed from alcohol and cocaine on to pills. I thought the pills were great because then I didn’t want to do those other things. But then they take a big hold of you, and it took everything from me in the end. I lived homeless on the street for a while and was in and out of jail a few times as well.”
In 2008, Mike hit what might have been a rock bottom for most.
“I wrote my truck off while driving drunk. I got a DUI. I drove through a telephone pole and fire hydrant, and into the back of another truck. I walked away with only a little burn on my hand. I got pretty blessed there but that didn’t even drive me to the point of quitting.”
Mike said his apparent professional success proved to be a detriment.
“I think that’s why a lot of people never approached me to get help or recognized what it was. I was able to carry on and do my job at a level that seemed like I was still successful, but as a person I was not very successful at the time,” said Mike, who eventually left to race in B.C. to avoid the mounting suspicion of others.
The elder Hennessy said the issues weren’t as hidden as it may have seemed.
“The worst, for me, was even when he was doing good [racing], you always knew something was wrong, and you were always waiting for that phone call in the middle of the night saying that there was an overdose,” Rod said. “Drugs are a different type of addiction. You can deal with an alcoholic addiction because you see it more, but drug addiction you don’t see. It happens as the night falls. Alcohol, you smell it on them.”
Even when homeless on the streets of Vancouver, it wasn’t until he landed in jail that Mike found the bottom of his addiction.
“I was going to stay in jail and I was looking at 2-3 years… I thought I should just stay because I was doing good in there, but both the Crown and my lawyer pushed for me not to stay in that long because I didn’t have a history and they wanted me to get help.”
After being released he went to a couple of recovery centres that didn’t work out, and then endured the dark side of the rehabilitation industry.
“The ones that didn’t work - a couple were pretty shady,” Mike said. “The sad thing is that there are recovery houses out there that are operated by people that don’t really care, and just want the government funded money from all the people staying there to pay the mortgage on their house. They just let us sneak away to do what we wanted.”
And, of course, left to his own devices, Mike landed back in jail once again.
“They gave me one more chance, and I went to The Launching Pad in White Rock, B.C. and lived there for 13 months. When I got there they asked me how long I thought I’d need to stay and I said, ’30 days?’
They said, ‘It took you 30 years to become this way, do you think 30 days is going to fix it?’”
The Launching Pad Addiction Rehabilitation Society recommended he stay at their facility for a period of eight months to one year, but Mike ended up sticking with the program for a full 13 months.
“When I went into The Launching Pad, I’d just been in jail for 70 days at that point, so I was more stable of the mind and had done some programming in the jail. Plus, The Launching Pad was operated by guys who truly wanted to help. It was legit. There was no outside influence. You couldn’t have anything but addiction literature in the house. It was pretty structured. A lot of meetings, 2-to-3 times a day. It was the right spot, and White Rock was a place I vacationed at as a kid, so it was nice to be at a place you were fond of, too.”
Rates of relapse with regard to drug addiction ranges from 40-60 percent of patients and Mike did fall into that category once, briefly.
“In 2016 I came back to racing [after having no drives in 2014 or 2015] and I was good for a couple years… then I had a bit of a relapse. I took some time away again, went to another rehab and got myself a job in the mountains for a summer,” he said. “I figured if I chilled out for a bit I could figure it out. I came back in 2018 and things have been really good since then. I have my girlfriend, Crystal, and her little girl Miyah, and we all live together with a couple of dogs and a cat. Life is pretty good,” he smiles.
In addition to his family, his racing family, and hurtling down a ski hill at incredible speeds, Mike credits yoga, daily journaling and meditation as part of his key skill sets to stay on the straight and narrow - but most of all, he appreciates the love found within his new normal.
“Miyah became part of my life when she was one, and now she’s seven. She just came over and gave me a hug right now,” Mike said, appreciatively. “We have a lot of fun and adventures together.”
And while he needs to work his program for himself, the strength and support provided by Crystal and Miyah make the heavy lifting that much easier.
“There’s more to me than just myself these days,” he said. “There’s been times in my life I didn’t care much about myself. Now, I like the life I’m living. I’m really blessed, but sometimes there are days where you have to do it for someone other than you.”
* * * *
Father and son are now reaping the benefits of their hard work together - both personally and professionally.
“Mike’s come through it all and he’s doing great,” Rod says with a great deal of pride.
And you can feel the respect between the two men, as they try to give the other one his share of the credit for the success they’ve had with Shark Week.
“I’ve learned to listen to him because he’s a very good horseman,” says the proud father. “Mike does his shoeing and checks his aches and pains, if he has any. It’s quite an accomplishment that the two of us can work through this together - along with all the bad ones [horses] we have,” jokes Rod.
Such is Mike’s dedication that he was in the shedrow working on Shark Week the night before he set the new record.
“He’s a special horse. I’m not sure when I’ll be around one that’s this good again and have this kind of connection,” Mike says. “I went in to check his shoes and I felt that his feet were a little hot, so I put a little ‘Magic Cushion’ on the soles and a little something on his hairline and made sure he’d be good-to-go the next day.
“I like to cover all the bases when it comes to hands-on care in the barn,” he added. “If I do my best job, I can feel good about the result.”
That personal connection with horses - in particular with Shark Week - has helped ground Mike and bring him back to the roots of what got him started in horse racing in the first place.
“I don’t train many anymore, but my favorite part of having a barn was put-away time. I don’t really enjoy jogging horses, but I like putting them away and taking care of them afterwards,” Mike said. “I just like being around them. On the track you’re just going around in circles, it’s a bit monotonous. But when you’re working with them and brushing them off, it gives you an opportunity to enjoy the animal in a different way than just making them work.”
Shark Week had coasted home in 1:50.1 the week before he set the record, and Mike spent the next several days thinking about what fractions he’d need to set to make history. In the interim, the elder horseman, Rod, was pulling out all the stops to have his big horse ready.
“My dad did a really good job with him… he got some acupuncture done on him and that seems to help a lot,” Mike said. “In the post-parade that night he was on both lines real good. He usually storms through the post-parade, it’s something he likes to do - it’s like he’s flexing across the grandstand.”
So on June 3, 2023, Shark Week, with all the benefits of several decades worth of Hennessy horsemanship, flew home and made history.
“It’s incredible how smart he’s become,” says Rod, of a horse they helped overcome significant ulcer issues. “He’s a great-gaited horse and a freak of nature.”
And Mike has become pretty smart too, for someone who once thought he needed a little ‘assistance’ to be a good driver.
“It’s amazing how well the body and mind function when you don’t have outside interference,” Mike says proudly. “There’s been a lot of good days recently. You need the horsepower. You’re nothing without them. But I’ve had a lot of live mounts lately and horses that really suit me.
“Sometimes, you might experience a setback, but there’s going to be a spring forward,” he added. “We’re reaping the benefits, even through the tougher times.”
Mike credits his mother, Dianne, his sister Katie, and so many close family and friends that stuck with him through those tough times, but in particular, he’s thankful to his dad.
“It’s a real gift to be getting to drive this horse right now, and to do it with my dad as the trainer. It’s a nice gift for him because I put my family through hell and made them age,” Mike says. “So, it’s nice to share this with him. I think this horse has helped heal some old wounds and resentments. He’s a special horse and he’s done a lot for us as a family, but being able to share it with my dad is the best part.”
This feature originally appeared in the August issue of TROT Magazine. Subscribe to TROT today by clicking the banner below.
