Where I live, in the city of Cambridge, Ontario, the Zehrs chain of grocery stores rule. For a centre of approximately 145,000 residents, we have three rather large-but-similar Zehrs stores to choose from. I tend to use all three, depending where I’m coming from, or what my other needs on that day may be.

Two of the three are situated close to the bank that I use, as well as the LCBO and the Beer Store, so you’d think that they’d each have the edge on attracting me versus store three. But store three has something the other two don’t have - Donald Ruddick.

Donald Ruddick is a HUGE fan of harness racing, and every time I visit his store - where I swear he’s out placing fresh produce on the shelves 364 days/year - because I’ve never been there when he wasn’t, he and I take anywhere from one to 10 minutes to chat horses.

This has been going on for a decade at least. In fact, I have no recollection as to how the friendship even started. He may have recognized me from my picture in TROT? Or maybe I was wearing a TROT or OSS t-shirt one day and he approached me? In the end, I guess it doesn’t really matter.

Donald’s cousin has owned horses with TheStable, and his cousin’s wife works for Ontario Racing. He has other friends that owned, until recently, Lamborghini Lou - a gelding that made $147,155 last year, at three, racing mainly in the OSS Prospect Series and its related opportunities, before losing him in a claimer for $75,000.

Chatting about Lou’s exploits, we recently shared a chuckle over the people who say you can’t make money with an OSS horse that’s not able to race at the Gold-level.

Regardless the topic, for a guy that basically “never goes to the racetrack” Donald is one of our biggest fans. He must live on the SC website, because there’s almost no horse or topic that I mention that he’s not somewhat well-versed on. He’s really a breath of fresh air - for a Standardbred junkie like me - when I’m doing my grocery shopping.

Away from that certain Cambridge Zehrs however, anywhere else that I go, I find myself to be the Donald Ruddick of the racing conversation - the instigator. I wrote this very column a year or so ago, about a trip to Florida, and my harness racing interactions with a Home Depot worker, as well as a few of Florida’s finest Uber drivers. This past January, in Florida, however, there were no trips to Home Depot, and the Uber drivers we met were quiet on the horse-talk; but that doesn’t mean I struck out completely.

You see, wherever I go I find myself naturally promoting our sport. I figure that if all of us do so, we might make up for some of the lack-of-promotion on the bigger front, which many of us question.

This year, in Florida, I had two people take the bait on the golf course, and one on the pool deck.

We were randomly paired with David (from Hamilton, Ontario) on the golf course one morning, and he was similar to Donald. He’s not a participant but is good friends with a few - people that we actually knew - and he really loves our sport. David is one of Canada’s leading oyster shuckers, believe it or not, and has attended events at both Summerside and Charlottetown Racetracks in PEI. He had nothing but good things to say about our sport and its people.

Then there was Howie - this guy was a real beauty! A 78-years-young, native-New Yorker, we got paired with at another course. When asked if he’d ever been to the trotters, he admitted to only going to Yonkers and Roosevelt “hundreds and hundreds of times in the 70s and 80s.”

Although Howie referred to Herve Filion as the greatest driver ever, and George Sholty as his favourite, he knew for a fact that “the game was crooked, the drivers ALL cheated and that rarely any outsiders made money.”

Where I normally explain things to people to try and sway them a little, Howie is 78, and VERY set in his ways. I’m a pretty good judge of people, and at this point decided to save my breath. He was a really friendly guy, but he knew what he knew, and there would be no going back.

Character number three, as described in the title, was ‘the guy in the jacuzzi’ - because the jacuzzi, to me I suppose, is as good a place to chat harness racing as anywhere.

Nice guy, but he won’t get much ink here because he was full-on ‘Team Howie’ - but worse!

According to him, “Years ago in New York, they fixed one race a week that a bunch of the horsepeople were in on.” He was pals with the son of a trainer in-the-know, so one week they got ‘the word’ and went to the OTB.

It only got more bizarre after that, and in the end they lost all their money, so this fella, as nice as he was, wasn’t exactly enthralled with our sport either. And like Howie, it was easy to see that he was well beyond being swayed.

Though somewhat entertaining to this point, what’s the moral of my column this month you may ask?

Well I guess there will always be lovers - aka Donald and David - and always be doubters, but in the end I sadly thought this:

I know that we’re innocent of the outrageous stories that the two bitter-gamblers told above, but we did have all four of these men interested in us at one time - and to this day, we still possibly have Donald and David. But I asked them all the same question, so I know the following statement to be true:

We haven’t attracted one red cent of revenue from any of the four in the past two to three decades. And some people think the status-quo is just fine?

Dan Fisher [email protected]