Don McDougall is unassuming. He does not look the part of a captain of industry whose name was splashed across the business and sports sections of newspapers across the country. But he is. And now, the septuagenarian has become active in another sports enterprise – one which has rekindled the love he first developed for harness racing growing up in Prince Edward Island.
By Perry Lefko
Sitting in the corner of a restaurant in a downtown Toronto hotel, Don McDougall is quite unassuming. He does not look the part of a captain of industry whose name was splashed across the business and sports sections of newspapers in Toronto and Montreal in the ‘70s when he worked as president of Labatt’s. The beer brewery giant became active in building the Toronto Blue Jays baseball team in 1977 and the Ile Notre-Dame oval for Formula One racing in Montreal the following year to improve its market share. Both sports entities became eminently successful, but Don won’t take credit for either, insisting he was merely working on behalf of the company.
In the last three years, however, the septuagenarian has become active in another sports enterprise – building a stable of racehorses – this time purely for himself, and it has rekindled the love he first developed for the sport growing up in Prince Edward Island, where harness racing had (and still has) a huge following.
There is only a slight hint of an East Coast accent when Don speaks, but while you can take the boy off of the Island, you can’t take away the memories, in particular of his horses. When he talks about the love affair his family had with standardbreds and the people who raced them, there is pride and passion and good times embedded in his head and his heart.
“We talked horses all the time,” he says, remembering in particular the conversations about Lucky Pal, a gelding who became the best racehorse his family ever had. “That was the centre of our life. While I enjoyed the association of harness racing and still do, my dad (Frank) was passionate about it. Harness racing was a huge piece of his life. Huge. He’d usually have one at a time, or a maximum of two. I can’t remember Dad not having a racehorse his whole life. He would trade and he would sell and he would buy and he would train. Regardless of how fast the horse was, you were always so proud of your horses; proud of what they looked like; proud of how they performed; that they were well-mannered. You’d always say ‘it’s my horse.’ You’d personalize it. And you had favourites over time, which one you liked the best and which one was the best and which one was the fastest.”
Lucky Pal was one of 38 horses Frank McDougall owned in his life. He worked as a railway station agent sending telegraphs and selling tickets, but racehorses meant so much to him. In fact, he wrote a poem about all his horses. He inherited the love from his family and passed it along to his offspring. Lucky Pal never made the big-time, though he did win several dashes. Frank eventually sold the horse at the height of its value because he needed the money.
“He got a half a year’s salary, to put it into perspective,” Don says. “I think it was $1,500, but it was huge. We were buying horses for $100. We had horses we raced all the time, but we only had one good horse. But, man was that exciting. You live for that.”
The McDougalls lived in the west end of P.E.I. in Bloomfield, and Wednesday afternoons routinely became the day when the people in the area congregated a few miles away in Alberton to race their horses on the property of Harry O’Brien. He was the patriarch of a family that produced numerous horsemen, notably his son, Joe, who became the superstar of his time. The annual Canadian championship awards are named in his honour.
Don remembers the matinee racing being more about community building than actual competition. The horses were assigned in classes relative to their ability, and they would warm up together for their respective races, line up and go. There was no starting gate or pari-mutuel wagering, and the prize for winning may have been something as simple as a blanket. “It was just the neighbours getting together and having a horse race, much like a fall fair,” he recalls. “That kind of injected me with this whole horse thing, to say nothing of my dad always having horses.”
Any horses that showed exceptional ability would be raced two hours away at the P.E.I. tracks that had pari-mutuel wagering and purses. On the odd occasion that Frank McDougall had a horse competitive enough to race out of town, Don would go along as the stablehand. He regularly jogged horses, and recalls one time at the age of six or so when he hooked up his dad’s racehorse to a sleigh and drove it through the village with a few of his buddies along as passengers. One woman in town, who clearly wasn’t impressed, called Frank McDougall and lectured him about it.
“Needless to say my mother wasn’t much happier than that lady, but it was just natural to us,” Don says. “From the time you (were big enough), you just started doing it.”
People drove their racehorses as a means of transportation and sport. It was not uncommon, he remembers, for neighbours to challenge one another to a horse race, going a straight mile along the flat, clay backroads. “It was pretty common that people would do that,” says his youngest brother, Philip, who still lives in P.E.I. “There were a half dozen people I could think of in the area that if they happened to be on the road jogging horses on a Saturday afternoon, they’re likely going to have a race. It would just be the sport of racing. There could be 25 other places or more like that around P.E.I. at that stage of the game because people had grown up with a love of horses. At one stage horses were critical to farming, among other things, but in terms of harness racing it evolved from there. For those who loved horses it was fun to do.”
Racing became a family affair for the McDougalls, some of whom became quite passionate about it. Philip drove in many matinee competitive races, which are still a fabric of the community. “Up around where we lived, there would have been within a short distance five to ten families that would never have been without a horse of some racing capacity in their lifetime,” he says. “It was just a fun thing to do. They did it, they loved it. They all loved horses. Half of P.E.I. still loves it. Racing in P.E.I. is still a very active sport. Don got it pretty honestly.”
Don pursued a career in business – leaving P.E.I. for Ontario to complete a Master’s degree – and soon thereafter began working for Labatt’s. His work required moving to different parts of the country while at the same time he and his wife started a family that would eventually total five children. Horses, he says, were not part of the picture... mostly for practical and economic reasons.
In 1973 he became president of Labatt’s and moved to London, Ontario. Around that time, a P.E.I.-based trainer and friend, Ron MacArthur, contacted him about a horse, Sali Jayne Hanover, which was available for sale for some $15,000 following the yearling sale in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Don put together a partnership that included, among others, Paul Beeston (who would later make a name for himself as president of the Blue Jays) and McArthur did the training. But the partnership dissolved the following winter because of the cost of training the horse. Don bought out his partners, had some minor success racing the horse and then sold it. “So I got in and out and didn’t get hurt,” he says. “I had some fun and then I thought I’m not going to do that anymore. We were all too driven by our careers and our families, so that was the end of racing.” He had no regrets.
“If he didn’t have the feeling to really develop it as a real passion, he might set it aside and say, ‘I don’t have the time to do it but I’ll come back to it or I hope I’ll have an opportunity to come back to it,” Philip says.
And he did that, more three decades after the Sali Jayne Hanover experience.
He was back in P.E.I., where he built a summer home in Ebbsfleet, near where he was born and raised and on the same land owned for generations by his mother’s family dating back to 1845. Once again, he began attending the matinee races that still continue in Alberton. Doug Ross, the son of a close friend of Don’s from his youth, jogged his interest about revisiting harness ownership as a retirement hobby.
Don had reached a stage in his life where he could afford to do it, but this time he took the time to make a plan and accompanied Doug to the 2009 Canadian Open Sale at Flamboro. Don bought two yearlings, LH Fillybuster, a $13,500 trotting filly by Kadabra out of the Wesgate Crown mare Domino, and Frill Seeker, a $22,000 Angus Hall colt out of the Yankee Paco mare Yankee Frilly. He purchased another one, Hertz Seelster, a $21,000 trotting colt by Angus Hall-Haveyoubeentoparis, at the Forest City Sale in London. Don knew of Seelster Farms in Lucan, having worked in London with Labatt’s.
He decided it would be better to get three instead of one as a fallback because if an injury sidelined one, he’d at least have the others racing. All of his horses were trotters because of the success his father had with them. “It had nothing to do with any mathematical calculations because the best horse we had was a trotter,” he says. “You wouldn’t get any credit for science here.”
The plan was for Don to train the horses, but he changed his mind and asked Ron Waples Jr. to take over. Don had worked for Ron’s father and knew the family well. The horses were stabled at Waples’ farm in Fergus, and while he wasn’t keen on taking on a client because he prefers to primarily train his own horses, Ron agreed.
As an owner, Don opted for the name Ebbsfleet Stables to correspond with his summer home. While admitting he is learning everything now about the race business (“I know bugger all,” he admits), he has had some great tutors in Ron Jr. and his brother Randy, who does the driving for Ebbsfleet.
He has also come to understand the difference between the two brothers. “Randy is the talker, Ron…you have to squeeze words out of him,” Don says with a grin. “He’s not going to say very much.”
Though that’s not altogether true... Ron Jr. becomes like a fountain when talking about his client. “He’s incredible,” Ron says. “He’s the easiest person in the world to train for. This is the kind of guy that any of these big stables would love to have because it’s all for the horse. If you tell him the horse is a little tired and needs a week off, or is sore or getting sick, no problem. I think he’s one of these guys that really enjoys the experience. I told him when I took the horses that I would treat them like I owned them. I know how much money he’s bought these horses for and I’m just trying to get the guy out, so if things went bad that he wasn’t going to get burned. The last thing we need is another owner sour on the business. There’s enough of those guys out there. And it’s worked out.
“To me he’s like a throwback. He seems like the type of owner that used to be around years ago when I was a kid,” Ron Jr. adds. “He’s always dressed up. He’s very personable. I can think of all the guys that had horses with my dad. They were there. They liked to come on race nights. They liked to watch the horses. He likes to be there. It doesn’t matter if it’s qualifying or schooling. He likes to come and watch his horses.”
Don compares Ron Jr. to Pat Gillick, the general manager who built back-to-back World Series winners in Toronto in 1992 and ’93, and then added a third in a similar role with Philadelphia in 2008. “I have the Pat Gillick of trotter trainers,” he says. “He’s just that good. That’s what you need – somebody who knows how to do what trainers do. I always think of trainers being the wrong word for what they do. I think of them as general managers of the horse business. Ron is really the brains behind the racing. I’m there for the fun and the support – and I’m really quite enjoying it.”
All three of the yearlings made it to the races, enjoying some level of success, notably Frill Seeker, who has raced solidly in the Ontario Sires Stakes program. He has won six of 22 starts races, $117,550 and has a mark of 1:56.1. When told by Ron that he had squeezed as much ability out of the filly as he could winning one race in 17 starts, Don sold L H Fillybuster and replaced her with an Angus Hall yearling colt, Sharp Ratio, purchased for $8,500.
Philip McDougall says he was surprised when his brother re-entered the horse racing ownership game, but understands that he has the time and expense to do it now. Philip took the plunge a few years ago, albeit without the same success and, equally important, luck. “His horses are doing relatively well,” Philip says with only a slight hint of envy. “That helps. I can’t confess to having the same kind of luck, but that’s another story.
“He is the real horseman in the family,” Don agrees of Philip, “but has lacked that essential ingredient – luck.”
“It was fun,” says Philip of growing up around horses, “but I didn’t get the same feeling that Don got in terms of the love of horses and getting into the business as seriously as he has. I kind of got away from it, and as much as I have dabbled in it the last five years, it hasn’t gotten back to me the same way as it has to him. More power to him. Dad would be proud of him.
“I’m not sure whether there’s genes involved in this or not, but I think he could have seen the love of horses that was around here when he was growing up. Certainly not competing at the level he’s at today at Mohawk and Woodbine and wherever else, but in terms of socially and locally. It was a good thing then and still is around P.E.I.”
Waples laughs when he recalls an incident last year when he was called away to do something in the paddock and he turned to McDougall and asked him to walk a horse that had just raced. It was like handing off the horse to an old stablehand.
“It’s not like he doesn’t know anything about horses,” Waples says. “He leaves most things up to me as far as staking and those things. He just trusts that I’m not going to go crazy. But you tell him something and he knows what you’re saying. He’s pretty intelligent that way. He had enough horse experience when he was young and he gets the gist of it.”
Once a horseman, it seems, always a horseman.