A previously unheralded Mach Three colt showed up for the $683,000 Metro Stakes final at Mohawk and BOOM... just like that... he gave his small-time breeder/owners a night that they’ll never forget.

Story by Perry Lefko

About six kilometres north of the main strip of the southwestern Ontario town of Tillsonburg, along a dirt road near a Mennonite school, is Ballykeel Farm, a nine-acre spread that has a house, a barn, some paddocks and a small oval for jogging horses. It is here that Boomboom Ballykeel, the recent winner of the 2013 Metro Pace, the richest race for two-year-olds in North America with a purse of $683,000, was born and raised. And his victory in the Metro is definitely the biggest win ever for Cam McKnight, who along with his wife Cynthia are the breeders and owners of the colt.

It took more than 15 minutes for the Metro Pace to be declared official because the judges wanted to review the stretch drive to determine if Boomboom Ballykeel’s reinsman, Sylvain Filion, had caused any interference. Once the official was posted, Cam remarked that everything has to fall into place perfectly to win a race of this stature. He called it luck – racing luck, if you will – but this is a horse that was born with Irish luck mixed in with serendipity.

Ballykeel Farm was named by Cam’s late father, J.C.R., in honour of the town of Ballykeel, Northern Ireland where his parents were born. J.C.R. built the Ballykeel property in the late ‘70s and it was here that he and his wife Pat, who still lives on the property, resided. J.C.R. worked in the publishing business as the majority owner/operator of the Tillsonburg News. J.C.R. did some occasional writing about harness racing, which helped him develop a love of horses. Through his coverage of horse racing, J.C.R met future Canadian Horse Racing Hall of Famer Cliff (Chappy) Chapman. Chappy’s colourful career included a stint as Ontario’s last legal bookmaker before the advent of pari-mutual wagering. Chappy and J.C.R. became good friends and McKnight helped out with the bookmaking crews Chapman operated at the fall fairs. As a teenagers, Cam and Chappy’s son Paul, now a blacksmith, followed their fathers around the fair circuit writing down wagering tickets and doing various odd jobs for the bookmaking crew. It was, as Cam recalls, a pretty good learning experience.

By this time, Cam had developed a passion for the racing business – a passion he had in common with his father, who over the years owned some racehorses, but Cam wanted to become more hands-on. His father had a horse, Pick Dillon, who had soundness problems, and Cam asked if he could work on the steed to get him back to the races.

“That guy had lots of heart and won his only race for me, but I couldn’t keep him sound,” Cam says, sitting outside Ballykeel, sipping on a beer four days after Boomboom Ballykeel’s win. If you could paint a picture of happiness it would look like this.

The experience of working with and driving horses sealed Cam’s lifetime interest in horses.

Cam, who got his drivers license when he was 16, recalls the first good racehorse he drove, a pacer called Bookie Philbrick, in the early 70s. He drove against the likes of southwestern Ontario standouts Dave Wall, the star at Western Fair Raceway in London, Ray McLean and John Campbell, who would develop into a superstar driving at the Meadowlands in New Jersey. But unlike those three, his career didn’t blossom into a profession.

“I would have liked to have driven full-time, but probably wasn’t good enough, not disciplined enough,” he says. “I thought I was okay, but in this business, not unlike a lot of businesses, if you have family involved it’s beneficial. I was a bit of an outsider in that regard. No regrets. I enjoyed it, and would have to say I’m pretty happy with the way things worked out.”

His family connections led him down another path and he joined his father in the newspaper business, which was expanding with the purchase of properties in Ingersoll and Norwich. Cam started out working on the sales side, but later expanded his duties as a reporter and then a publisher when he had to move away to operate a paper in Port Colborne. He made an unsuccessful run for a seat in provincial politics at age 27 while living there. When he returned to Tillsonburg nine years after leaving, he began to get involved in a number of community organizations, and that involvement reinvigorated his passion for politics, so he decided to run for the mayor of Tillsonburg.

“Our family had always taken an interest in politics and I had a liking for it,” he says. “With community newspapers, you are directly involved with the fabric of the town. In many communities the local newspaper is the only opposition to council and at the time there had been a bit of a kerfuffle over a number of issues.”

He beat out the deputy mayor and a city councillor with the support of a very effective campaign team that collectively helped him win with 48 per cent of the votes. Over the years Cam developed a model that he used as a dictum for politics, business and horse racing: “I’m not a genius, but I’m smart enough to know that I don’t know everything, so I try to surround myself with quality people, empower them and then stay out of their way as much as possible.”

He did well in his first term as mayor, and won by acclamation in the next two elections before deciding to retire from politics because of the demands on his time and its impact on his wife and the couple’s three children – two girls and a boy – all under 10 at the time.

“My family was young, I wanted to spend more time with them and politics is not only a tough business, but it can be very time consuming and very tedious,” he says.

After the passing of his father in 1995, Cam eventually moved some horses onto the Ballykeel property. One of the horses he campaigned from the property was a trotting mare Frost On The Gate and later her first colt Ballykeel Mike, who was born in 2002.

“He was the first colt with the Ballykeel moniker and it is meant as a tribute to my father,” Cam says. Ballykeel Mike would go on to win two OSS events at age three, take a mark of 1:54.2 at Mohawk at age seven, and earn $276,203. And he’s still toughing it out in claimers in Pennsylvania, now, at the age of eight. The Ballykeel name would go on to be as lucky as a four-leaf clover again and again.

In 2005, Cam divested himself of his financial interest in the newspaper business, which included a minority ownership in a dozen papers. Shortly thereafter he repurchased a broodmare, Teig N Riley, named after his two daughters, Teigan and Riley. He had been partners with a friend, Gerry Belore, owning the broodmare’s mother, Bridal Fund, and when it came time to naming her filly, Belore told Cam he’d named the horse after the McKnight daughters. Her first foal, born and raised at Ballykeel, was a colt sired by Mach Three named Mach Of Ballykeel.

Previously, Cam had a couple of incidents in his life that had proved his Irish luck… and when raising race horses, a little good luck can never hurt. One time he fell on some harrows, but managed to avoid any injury. Another time, he was in a horse van which came undone from behind the truck transporting it, but the horse was unfazed.

With Cam doing the training, Mach Of Ballykeel had a strong freshman season, winning more than $150,000, including $65,000 with a three-length OSS Gold Final victory at Flamboro Downs in August and a third-place finish in the $300,000 Super Final in November. Cam had invited some longtime friends of his with whom he routinely goes to the Little Brown Jug to join in a minority interest of the horse, thus creating the Mach Of Ballykeel Racing Stable to go along with the Ballykeel Racing stable name he and his wife use. After training the horse for his first year and a half, Cam had Richard Moreau take over the duties. He met Moreau through driver Sylvain Filion, and the trio would become quite successful.

McKnight named the second foal out of the mare, a full brother, Boomboom Ballykeel, because anything faster than the speed of sound creates a booming sound that appears as a cone and is classified as a Mach. Little did he know just how much sonic boom this colt would create.

He trained the horse down and he drove him in his qualifier because Filion picked off. When Boomboom Ballykeel won the qualifier by four lengths over Filion’s mount in 2:00.4 (last quarter in :28), Cam thought he had something special. Sylvain told Cam after the qualifier that he was impressed by Cam’s colt, and Cam joked back that the only way he would probably get Sylvain as the driver was to move the horse into the Moreau stable. And then Cam moved the colt into the Moreau stable. Filion drove the colt 37 days later in his first pari-mutual start, finishing fifth by less than two lengths in an OSS Gold race at Mohawk, pacing his own mile in 1:53.4.

Trevor Henry drove Boomboom Ballykeel in his next three starts, all on half-mile circuits, and the colt won an OSS Grassroots event and the consolation of the Battle of Waterloo. Filion took back over when Boomboom returned to Mohawk. In his next start (the Nassagaweya Stakes) the colt closed from 7th at the quarter pole, at odds of 55-1, and finished a close second to OSS leader Arthur Blue Chip. Another second place finish in his elimination race for the Metro Pace, where he closed in :27 seconds to only miss by a neck, had him set up perfectly for the rich Metro final where the only once-defeated Western Vintage would be the 3-5 racetime favourite. As the favourite gunned toward the early lead and had control, Filion sat patiently in the three-hole. And when Western Vintage suddenly started to tire after three-quarters in 1:22.2, Filion moved his horse off the rail and blew by to win by 2 ¼ lengths in a new life’s best of 1:50.4.

Cam had won his biggest race in more than four decades in the business, but had to wait out the judges’ inquiry. Filion was called to the paddock to speak to the judges, while the colt stood in the winner’s enclosure. Cam and his entourage of family and friends could do nothing but wait for the official sign to be posted.

“From the angle I watched the race, I didn’t see anything that involved my horse,” he says. “However, after seeing the replays I could see why the judges wanted to talk to all of the drivers. When I spoke with Sylvain in the winner’s circle he was confident there wouldn’t be any changes. He said there was some bumping but he didn’t believe we were at fault. The longer it dragged on, I started to get a bit tense, but it wasn’t like I ever planned on winning the race to start with. It wasn’t like the $300,000 was committed to something. It was a dream just to be in the race, let alone think about the issues that could come of it.”

When asked if he’d consider selling the colt should someone present an offer, Cam says, “I’m just enjoying the ride of winning an important race. I would be ecstatic if there was a chance of him doing it again somewhere down the line. It’s not inexpensive to keep 15 horses; my expenses are substantial. You need to get lucky every now and again to keep the wolves away from the door. Thankfully I’ve been able to separate the business and pleasure side of it. I’ve lost money in the business the last couple years, but I’m not sure that would be enough to encourage me to sell this colt unless it was an outrageous price. Victories like this certainly make it easier to say no”.

“Like so many people in the business, you’re the eternal optimist even as you’re going down in flames,” he adds sipping on another beer, while a bunch of barefoot Mennonite children walk by Ballykeel following a day of school. “If you’re not an optimist you’d better not be in the horse racing business to start with. Did I ever envision him winning a race like that? No, but a couple days before the race a friend asked hypothetically if someone made me a substantive offer for the horse – say $200,000 – would I take it, and I said, ‘No’. A week later we’ve won North America’s most prestigious race for two-year-olds, got the cheque that goes with that and still have the horse.”

Now that’s lucky!

Sounding Off

Speaking as a former municipal politician to the current Premier of the Province of Ontario, Cam McKnight says Kathleen Wynne needs to immediately change the current lottery system to prevent the horse racing industry from galloping into the sunset.

McKnight, who served three terms as the Mayor of Tillsonburg, says Wynne must broaden the criteria of the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (OMAFRA) Transition Panel, which was created to work with the racing industry following the controversial cancellation at the end of March of the Slots At Racetracks Program. Introduced in 1998, SARP created billions of dollars in revenues for the racing industry and the Province, but it was deemed by the previous Premier and his Finance Minister to be a subsidy for the 17 racetracks and the nearly 60,000 people employed directly and indirectly in the industry.

“If six or seven automotive plants closed and threw 10,000 people out of work, the government would have – in fact does have – subsidies flying every way to save those jobs,” McKnight says. “There have been 10,000 lost jobs in racing and hardly a peep. The Premier has been talking nice to everybody, but at some time she’s got to fess up, and it’s got to be pretty soon otherwise I just don’t see how the business hangs on.”

McNnight says the OMAFRA Transition Panel must be given the authority to go to the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation (OLG) and tap some of its funds and create a new lottery or find another creative funding source from within that provincial-operated agency. McKnight, active in horse racing as a breeder/owner of many horses, including recent Metro Pace winner Boomboom Ballykeel, says it is imperative that Wynne take a firm stance in changing the way the OLG is currently set up so it can connect it again with the horse racing industry.

“If racing is part of the OLG model again, there’s hope, otherwise the industry will wither away,” McKnight says. “The Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs set up a Transition Panel to create a solution that works for both Ontario and the horse racing industry. In order to find that solution, the OMAFRA Transition Panel must have the ability to alter the OLG to create a stable funding source for purses. As Premier, Kathleen Wynne clearly has the ability to change the OMAFRA mandate and save racing.”

Wynne was elected by the Liberal Party to replace Dalton McGuinty, who announced the cancellation of SARP last year and subsequently retired this year following a controversial nine-year term in which the province hemorrhaged under the weight of a debt of almost $250 billion. One of Wynne’s leadership platforms focused on putting the racing industry back on track.

~ By Perry Lefko