At a new farm in a new province, 60-year-old Pat Lang, alongside his wife Lise, is making good use of four decades of equine experience. After the dire state of investment in Quebec racing forced them from their 100-acre paradise in Dewittville, the couple has found rejuvenation and
a new sort of peace at Ontario’s well-known Tara Hills Stud.
By Paul Delean
Pat Lang isn’t the nostalgic type, which is just as well. It makes it easier when you are forced to pack up and leave your life’s work in Quebec.
Lang has no doubt lost a few illusions along the way – including Illusion Farm, the scenic 100-acre spread in the southwestern Quebec community of Dewittville that was the heart of his racing and breeding operation for 30 years – but not the daily joy of working with standardbreds, which he now does at Tara Hills Stud Farm in Port Perry, Ontario.
Lang and Lise, his wife of 40 years, joined the staff at Tara Hills just before Christmas. He looks after the stallions, she works with the broodmares. “People seem surprised that I would want to do that after years of being on my own,” says Lang, today 60. “It’s actually been very easy. We’re surrounded by great people and champion horses. We have a nice apartment at the farm. It’s nice to get a salary, after years of paying myself $300 for seven-day weeks and putting everything else back into the farm and horses. I couldn’t pay myself what they’re paying me. The only decision I have to make every day is what to eat. I don’t have to deal with bailiffs, banks, lawyers, GST or PST, but I do still get to work with Lise every day. How lucky can a man be?”
Like so many Quebec horsemen, Lang had been struggling to keep his farm going in the wake of the collapse of the provincial racing and breeding industry in 2008. Last year, he finally threw in the towel. “I had a farm for 50 head, and I was trying to make it work with 10,” he admits. “The lack of a stakes program (in Quebec) devalued the horses I had left. There were no investors left, as everyone in the province was getting out. I was losing $2,000 a month trying to do the impossible, keeping a horse operation going in Quebec. Finally, I just said ‘I’m out of here.’ I sold, probably for less than it’s worth, to get it off our backs. My vet was in tears when I told him but I said ‘why is that sad?’ It’s an end, it’s over, it’s finished. It was the most beautiful place on the face of the earth, and we had a great 30 years there. I don’t regret one minute living there, but now it’s time to move on. We had a great life there and we’ll have a great life here. I live in the present. I don’t think about the future or dwell on the past.”
The couple’s past includes several momentous racetrack achievements, but also episodes of extreme pain and loss, including the death of their only child in a farm accident at age 11.
Chester Boy, a three-year-old pacer that Lang bred, trained and co-owned, won the richest race of 1997 in Quebec, the $184,525 Coupe des Eleveurs final at Blue Bonnets, only to be disqualified and placed last for a pylon violation visible on none of the judges’ videotapes. He appealed the disqualification, spending more than $30,000 on legal fees, but the courts ultimately upheld it on the grounds the decision had not been “unreasonable.”
In 2005, Lang suffered a broken neck after being thrown from the sulky in a race at Rideau Carleton Raceway. He recovered, but it was the end of his driving career. And their 22-horse broodmare band was dispersed, because they were too much work for Lise alone while he recovered.
Two years later, Lang got unseated taking a horse to the training track at his farm and broke his pelvis. Internal bleeding and an infection made things worse. While he was convalescing, one of his two siblings, musician brother Scot, died in hospital of liver disease at age 54, after a lifelong battle with addiction.
While others might have cracked from the physical and emotional onslaught, Lang persevered. “If you’ve never known real hardship,” he says bluntly, “where’s the courage going to come from?”
He always believed in his talent for developing racehorses, honed from the time he was hired to manage the breeding operation at George Henderson’s Glencoe Farm in Howick, Quebec, at age 20, and confirmed over the years by the success of such horses as Hanko Angus, Chick N Tell, Nuke It Linsay, Nuke It Freddie and Chester Boy. Three times in the 1990s, horses from Lang’s small stable won the biggest races of the year for Quebec-breds, the Coupe des Eleveurs finals, and it would have been four if Chester Boy’s apparent victory had counted.
THE SON OF A WELDER, LANG GREW UP IN ONE OF Montreal’s poorest and toughest east-end neighbourhoods. It’s a place he wanted out of from an early age. “Everybody there worked for the oil companies; I wanted no part of them. The negativity of the east end, the belief you could never amount to anything... it was constant. Some accepted it; I fought. I make my mind up real quick, and I never do anything I don’t want to do.”
Richelieu Park racetrack was his escape of choice. He’d gone to the track in east-end Montreal with his father and uncles and found it irresistible. “At 11, I was catching a bus at 5:30 (a.m.) to get to the track at 6 to work,” Lang said. “I always knew what I wanted to do.”
After high school, he travelled to western Canada, where a chance encounter with sawmill owner Pat Brennan in Squamish, British Columbia, led to a job with hall-of-fame horseman Joe O’Brien.
“I’m in this guy’s office, looking for a job at the mill, and I see a picture of a standardbred on his wall,” says Lang. “So I tell him ‘what I’d really like to do is work with your horses. Because I’m a horseman.’ He said ‘do you want to work for Joe O’Brien?’ He immediately calls Joe, who’s in California, and says ‘do you need a man?’ Joe says ‘ask him one question. Do you drink?’ I said no. He says ‘send him down.’ I had no money, but I was too proud to say it, so it took me three days to get there from B.C., hitchhiking. It was around the time of the [Charles] Manson murders and nobody was picking up hitchhikers.”
After his time with O’Brien, Lang returned to Quebec and worked for trainer Roach MacGregor. When MacGregor headed back to the Maritimes, Lang stayed put. “I’d heard Mr. Henderson was building a (breeding) farm in Howick so I went and introduced myself and offered him my services. He said he was going to Europe, and to come back in two weeks. I said ‘it’s Friday... by Monday I’ll be working, if not for you, then for someone else.’ So he hired me right then. Lise and I handled the breeding, Percy (Robillard) was the trainer.’”
Lang stayed with Glencoe Farm for a decade, supervising an all-star stallion roster that included the likes of Primo Hanover, Elesnar, Glencoe Pride’s Boy and Glencoe Skipper. “There were 10 horses there when I started and over 100 when I left in 1981.”
After launching his own racing stable, Lang started to get noticed in Montreal with horses like Calm Seas and B Crafty.
The ‘90s were his heyday as a breeder, horseman and businessman, with Coupe des Eleveurs victories for Nuke It Linsay, Nuke It Freddie and Piranha Pat, and profitable private sales (Nuke It Linsay to German interests, her dam Atomic Reactor to Hanover Shoe Farm). Lang was never reluctant to sell part, or all, of the horses he bought or bred. He was the original buyer and trainer of Quebec-bred trotter Hanko Angus, paying $10,000 for a horse who went on to win the Maple Leaf Trot and top $1 million in earnings, though he sold his stake before the horse made most of his money. He also has a connection to another trotting millionaire, Chick N Tell; his farm bred the horse, sired by a stallion that used to stand at Illusion farm, Glory B River (now breeding roadsters in Pennsylvania).
Recent years, however, brought a lot more misses than hits, and Lang admits it was starting to get to him. “Once I stopped driving, there was no adrenaline anymore. I loved driving. I was racing cheap horses in Ottawa, just making a living. I wasn’t dealing with champions anymore, and it’s not the same.”
Lang approached Tara Hills himself around auction time last fall, after finally conceding the numbers were never going to add up in Quebec.
As it turned out, Tara Hills did need someone to replace retiring stallion mananger Terry McVeay. “There was a good connection right away when I met David Heffering and (farm manager) Matt Harrison,” says Lang.
He said he finds it stimulating to be around “brilliant, educated young people. The breeding business has changed a lot in 10 years. I’m learning a lot from these guys. And I think, with our experience, we have a lot to offer them. The stallions here are something else. Over $20 million in earnings. They’re not like normal horses, and I recognize and appreciate that. Mister Big may be the most perfect animal I’ve seen in my life.”
He’s also enjoying the freedom that goes with living simply. “I’m happy as a pig and all we own right now is a car and one horse.”
That horse, E W Fisher, could develop into an interesting new chapter in the Lang story. Back from a suspensory tear that sidelined him eight months, the five-year-old son of former Quebec stallion Fool Me Not trotted to an impressive victory in 1:54.3 at Woodbine on January 21.
Trained by Rick Zeron, who made Hanko Angus a millionaire, E W Fisher was bred by Lise and named after a kindly female landlord who reduced the rent on an apartment for her family to “whatever you can afford,” at a time of dire need. She remained a family friend until her death at 99.
“The horse was named for her just before she died. He’s from the last crop we raised,” says Lang. “I sent him to Rick hoping he was a $50-$75,000 claimer, but he seems to think he’s more than that. Rick’s the only person I’ve ever met with more confidence than me, which is why the horse is with him. Because he believes.”
It won’t be the last chapter, either, Lang insists. “I think my best years are in front of me,” he said. At a new farm in a new province at age 60, Lang says he feels rejuvenated. “I guess it was meant to be,” he said. “If I’d called (Tara Hills) later, the position might already have been filled, and I’d have had nothing to show for 40 years (of work). I’m not religious, but I do have faith., because whenever we need something, it seems to fall out of the sky.”