While he may be from a harness racing family, James MacDonald didn’t aspire in his early years to become a professional driver. But once he turned his attention to the craft, there was no stopping him.
By Melissa Keith
You can rest assured you’ve made it as a top Canadian driver when you’ve got stats like James MacDonald. Third only to Chris Christoforou and Sylvain Filion in earnings, and second to Trevor Henry in wins so far this year, the former Islander also got the call to drive Gold Cup and Saucer contender Wazzup Wazzup in both his Cup trial and the Final – a race he narrowly lost.
How, then, should someone take it when James MacDonald tells them that he never aspired to become a professional reinsman? Is he joking around, like brother Anthony might?
“I didn’t have as much interest in it as Mark and Anthony, but when I graduated high school, Anthony was swamped so I went up (to Ontario) and worked with him,” explains James.
Their mother, Gail, is the track photographer at Red Shores Charlottetown and their father, Fred, is a well-known sports columnist who “lives at the track in the summer,” so James grew up in a P.E.I. harness racing family, complete with family-owned broodmares. Older brothers Mark and Anthony were on their way to becoming successful drivers while James was busy pursuing other interests. “I moved back from Ontario and actually went back and finished my first year of college at Holland College in P.E.I. I didn’t like Marketing and Advertising a whole lot, so I went back with Anthony again and it’s just kind of taken off from there.”
James never had an early interest in becoming a driver, yet he was always an athlete. “I was obsessed with sports,” he tells TROT. “I played hockey, I played baseball. You name it, I played it, and I played most of them competitively.” He wasn’t enthusiastic about the track, even though he liked his job at the Charlottetown Driving Park canteen. Mark and Anthony were not direct role models, as they were no longer living in P.E.I., adds James. “They were gone early. They left around 15-16 to go work with Mike MacDonald and his horses, so me and my brother Curtis were by ourselves there.”
Gail MacDonald witnessed her youngest son’s transformation from watching races to getting in the race bike himself. “He spent a lot of time at the racetrack, but wasn’t big on hanging out at the barn,” she recalls. “He was more interested in hockey and baseball than the horses at that time, playing at the top level in baseball as a second baseman and also as a very talented goalie in the hockey league. This all changed when he went to Ontario and his brother put him up behind a horse, something just clicked. His natural athletic ability along with a healthy dose of MacDonald competitiveness sparked his interest in learning this new sport, but not just doing it—he wanted to learn how to be the best he could be at it.”
Anthony MacDonald admits there’s a big on-track rivalry among the brothers, but he’s proud to have helped James get established in the racing game. “Well, we had a big stable and we needed a lot of help, and James wasn’t doing much at the time,” says Anthony. “It didn’t take long to see that he had talent.” A few years spent helping out around various Maritime racing stables brought out James’ innate skills.
“He went from that stage, just being available to groom, to becoming somebody who could jog and take care of horses in the barn in a groom’s role, to literally being thrust into schooling horses and going behind the gate, and I lobbied very hard for him to get his qualifying license early,” adds Anthony, the brother with whom James now regularly competes. “He literally went from a kid at SportChek to qualifying within six or seven months, and I don’t think anybody recognizes the sheer talent it takes to be at the level he’s at right now, with that absolute lack of experience that he had coming in.”
The career trajectories of Mark and Anthony were parallel when they were starting out, then diverged. “I mean, I grew up always knowing that I wanted to drive horses, both Mark and I, that was our goal,” says Anthony. “Mark eclipsed me in a very odd way, because we both started from nothing. We went from qualifying the horses that people don’t want to qualify, the ones that kick and fall down and shit all over you, to driving the ones that aren’t supposed to do good, and that continued for me for quite some time!” he laughs. Mark, however, won the 2003 and 2004 Gold Cup & Saucer with Sand Olls Dexter and the 2006 Little Brown Jug with Mr Feelgood, plus captured the 2005 and 2006 O’Brien Awards for top driver in Canada, prior to victories in the 2010 North America Cup (with Sportswriter) and his third Gold Cup & Saucer (in 2011 with Blissfull Breeze.) He relocated to drive regularly in the United States in February 2012
Anthony readily compares James’ rise to the top of his trade with that of Mark. “You know, I watched Jody Jamieson and Mark take over Mohawk and do very well and dominate for a while, and I watched Doug McNair and Scott Zeron follow somewhat the same trend the past four or five years, and I’m a little biased, but I’d say as far as the young kids are concerned in Canada right now, there isn’t anybody in competition with James.” He calls the similarity between Mark’s and James’ driving styles “scary.”
While the brothers may drive in the same uncannily-smart way, there’s another aspect of scariness shared by Mark and James, and that’s their serious racing accidents. “James’ only downfall is he’s got Mark’s penchant for falling down and getting himself hurt,” advises Anthony. “He was actually in a lot of bad ones that people don’t recognize and James is very fortunate. He shattered his leg in the one at Woodbine last year, then he was in another at Flamboro, and another one at Grand River. Mark always found a way to get hurt bad on the track.” Despite crediting himself with being the most “reckless” MacDonald, Anthony notes he’s never faced the more career-altering level of injuries endured by his siblings.
James recalls his worst accident. “It was a Preferred at Woodbine. My horse (In Commando) caught a shoe. He fell down and I broke my leg.” Shattering an ankle, he left the track on a stretcher and was unable to drive for nearly for nearly three months in early 2013. For a long-established driver, it would be a major setback; for an up-and-coming one, it could have been even harder to get back in the sulky at Woodbine and Mohawk. But for James, it proved a temporary, if unfortunate, break in the forward momentum of his driving career. “It really sucks to sit on the couch and watch, but I was lucky when I came back,” he says. “A lot of trainers, you know, it’s kind of ‘What have you done for me lately?’ But I was really lucky—a lot of people used me. It kind of took me a while to get back in the swing of things, but once I hit my stride, I started winning again and getting more drives and ‘live-er’ drives and it just kind of snowballed.”
June 22nd, 2014, James recorded his 1,000th lifetime driving win behind Brocks Fortune at Georgian Downs. “Being 28, I think I’ve got a lot of good years of driving ahead. Most of the best don’t hit their prime ‘til their mid-30s, so I guess it’s good timing,” he says. WEG regular Scott Zeron departing for the U.S. may have helped the youngest MacDonald get established, and then re-established post-accident, but there’s much more than circumstances behind his success. “The timing is huge, obviously—Scott left and I was just starting to do well. I picked up a lot of those drives. You know, timing is everything, and my timing was good I guess,” he laughs. “I didn’t start driving like most people at like 18, you know, as soon as they’re eligible, so just to be able to get into Mohawk and Woodbine and compete with the best is pretty cool.”
Anthony says there’s a third factor behind James’ great season. Beyond his skill in the sulky and the convenient timing of Scott Zeron’s migration stateside, there’s the young reinsman’s ability to get along with people. “I said to James, ‘You know, to be honest, everybody that likes me likes you. Everybody that hates me likes you!’” recalls Anthony. “He’s a likable kid—I can’t think of a reason why anyone wouldn’t like James.” Except, perhaps, when it comes to the battle between he and James to be the next brother to bring home the Gold Cup and Saucer. Then the gloves come off. Sort of.
“Deep down, I guess I want to see him win it, but I can’t imagine being the third MacDonald to win the Gold Cup. It would really annoy me,” says Anthony with a grin. Catching up on racing following a lengthy political campaign in Ontario, he was not in this year’s big feature at Charlottetown.
“If you’re second through ninth, it’s all the same!” quips James about Old Home Week’s main event. 2014 marked his fourth year driving in the final. “Three years ago I drove Fleet Sensation for Dean Nixon. He drew bad in the final—the seven hole—but that was pretty cool that me, Mark and Anthony were all in the race together. Mark of course won again!” While he’s driven in such major races as the Breeders Crown and the Maple Leaf Trot, the Island expatriate was very hopeful for a 2014 victory on home turf with Wazzup Wazzup. “It’s the race I want to win. I’ve watched it since I was a kid. I’ve never missed one,” he says from his home in Guelph, Ontario. “I don’t know if it’s my ‘biggest’ goal, I mean I’ve raced in a lot bigger races (money-wise), but prestige-wise, I’d love to win the Gold Cup & Saucer. You’d have to do something pretty severe to wipe the smile off my face if I ever won that race!”
In the meantime, James is enjoying a career year on Canada’s toughest circuit, and appreciating the day-to-day horse-keeping activities he shares with his new wife Jenna, daughter of driver Paul MacDonell. The couple was married earlier this year in Jamaica… in a wedding that included a reception that one hotel worker recalled as ‘one of the liveliest the establishment had ever hosted’.
Picking up catch drives galore hasn’t taken away the basic pleasure of the sport for the youngest of the MacDonald clan. “I like going to the barn, working with the babies,” he says, an audible smile in his voice. “Jenna loves it too—she spoils them! You know, it gets you out of bed in the morning and I think it keeps you sharp, working with the horses, so you don’t lose that edge: you see them in the morning and it’s second nature at night.” Stabling his stock with trainer Johnny MacKinnon at Baycairn Training Centre in Campbellville, James notes he likes to buy or buy in on a few babies every year. “We usually have a couple of okay ones; this year’s been a little slow.”
Competition-wise, there’s been nothing slow about 2014 for James MacDonald. The catch driver confesses he doesn’t really aspire to ever “just grabbing the lines” without hands-on participation with the horses themselves, yet he’s passionately driven to compete, and never more so than with his brothers. The sibling rivalry is intense; as Anthony eloquently expresses it, “All of us are so much alike that we can only take so much of each other one on one. It’s like, if you put us in a room, there would be people heading to the emergency room and likely incarcerated!” He recounts some Ultimate Fighting Championship bout re-enactments during James’ early tenure in his barn, which didn’t turn out so well for his brother—“I think he had a professional record around the barn of 3-98; he got choked out a couple of times!”
A very serious real-life battle came when 37-year old Anthony took time away from his driving career to run as an Ontario MPP, inspired in part by his desire to support the racing industry for future generations. James was one of the many young horsepeople to campaign door-to-door with him. “It’s been tough for a lot of people. I got lucky. I was starting to get in at Woodbine and Mohawk when the Slots at Racetracks Program ended, and I’m still able to make a living at it,” James says modestly.
The WEG driver whose childhood dreams didn’t include steering trotters and pacers to victory now finds himself living the dream of many a child back home in the Maritimes, or anywhere there is a passion for harness racing. “I find it surreal a lot of times, going to the gate in a stake race. I look to my right and it’s Jody (Jamieson) and Paul (MacDonell) and Rick (Zeron) and (Steve) Condren and all those guys, you know, the Tetricks and the Campbells and (Brian) Sears and Yannick (Gingras),” he marvels. “When you go behind the gate with all of them, you’re kind of like, ‘Wow—this is something special!’”
