Forty years later, Fred Grant recalls how he spent most of 1974 with one of the greatest pacing mares in harness racing history.

By Melissa Keith

Trainer Fred Grant was inducted into the Northside Sports Hall of Fame this year, forty years after the North Sydney, NS native spent a memorable year with 1974’s Horse of the Year. Handle With Care was a filly true to her name—she wasn’t mean, but required careful handling. Grant looked after her during her undefeated freshman campaign, however it was at three that Irving Liverman’s star made her most memorable impressions on the racing world and Grant himself.

“That’s the year, as a 23-year old, I had the privilege of being the groom and assistant trainer for Handle With Care. I was entrusted with responsibility for her travel arrangements, blacksmith and veterinary care, training, entering and warming up for races. I spent nearly every waking minute and many of the sleeping ones, on a cot in front of her stall, within a few feet of her.”

A few years of bad luck brought Grant to his eventual job looking after the fastest filly in the world. “I’ll tell you how I ended up with her. In 1971, my junior hockey career ended,” he tells TROT. “I’d moved to Truro from North Sydney to play two years with the Truro Bearcats. I was about 125 pounds and 5’5’ or 5’6”. I knew my hockey career wasn’t going any further and I had a love of horses.” He became a groom and driver at Truro Raceway, travelling to Florida at age 20 with hopes of advancing his career in harness racing. At the old Pompano training centre, Grant met Stanley Dancer and was soon working for the Hall of Fame horseman. When he gave three weeks’ notice that he wanted to return to North Sydney to visit family in the spring, Dancer asked him to stay on and take care of a certain colt.

“I called my mother and said ‘I’m going to stay here for the summer, give it a try,’ so I went back the next day or two and said, ‘Yeah, I’ll definitely go on the road with him,’” recalls Grant. “So I went on the road with a horse named Silent Majority, who ended up being Horse of the Year in Canada in 1972.” When owner Irving Liverman moved the horse to trainer William Haughton, Grant went with him. “So that winter, the Livermans (Irving and Herb) bought a yearling or two, and I took care of Silent Majority, to bring him back for his four-year old year, and the other yearling I happened to be taking care of was a pacing filly. It turned out she was Handle With Care.” In spring 1973, when Grant was preparing to travel to New York with Silent Majority, the horse broke a coffin bone training and was retired. “If Silent Majority hadn’t broken a bone, I wouldn’t have been with Handle With Care, I would’ve been with him. But fate works in funny ways and he broke down and I ended up staying with her and looking after her in ’73 and ’74.”

Flawless in 1973, Handle With Care amassed a lengthy win streak and end-of-year divisional honours. When she came back at three, Grant says it was a relief to see his charge actually lose a race after 17 straight victories. “It was like a load of potatoes coming off your back when she did get beat—everything leading up to that was ‘the undefeated Handle With Care!’, ‘the undefeated Handle With Care!’,” he laughs. “You never want to lose, but when it’s over with, you give a sigh, you exhale a little bit, and then you go on and try to build another streak.”

Handle With Care’s three-year-old season revolved around a Quebec program developed to improve racing and breeding stock in the province. “That’s why she was purchased to begin with,” says Grant. “The Quebec program was weak: not a lot of horses, not a lot of good-bred horses. So they developed a stakes series called the ‘Loto Perfecta’, which was for Quebec-owned fillies, and that’s where the Livermans got involved.” American-bred Handle With Care was eligible to the Loto Perfecta races, which she dominated, save one which her former caretaker would rather forget.

“I drove her one time as a three-year old, and it was a very unpleasant experience,” remembers Grant. It was in a Loto Perfecta stake that took place at the Hippodrome de Quebec, two weeks prior to Montreal’s Prix d’Été. “I’ll tell you how much respect she had: even with me driving her, she was barred from the betting. Billy Haughton couldn’t be there. I think he had to drive in the Cane Pace, and he said to Irving Liverman, ‘You know, there’s no one in the world who knows her any better than Freddy. Why don’t we let him drive her?’” What everyone expected to be an exhibition mile for the brilliant pacer turned into a nightmare for her driver.

“My mother and father came up from North Sydney, they drove up to watch this, because it was kind of a big deal,” says Grant. “I drove (Handle With Care) the way she’d been driven 20 times, the exact same way, and going down the backside, I was on the front with her, and she started pulling, which was a little uncharacteristic. People always wanted to get in behind her and stay there, you know they never really challenged, because most of the time, these people knew they were racing for second money.” Not on this occasion, however: “They all started coming at me, and all of a sudden, they’re all going by me and I was out of gas. I just wanted to pull over on the side of the racetrack and throw up, because I knew that she was getting beat.”

Even though Haughton told him that he made no errors in driving the great filly that day, Grant still calls the occasion “one of the biggest downers in the three years (’72, ’73, ’74) he took care of Silent Majority and Handle With Care.” There was never a clear reason for her poor performance in that Loto Perfecta event, although he remembers her post-race blood analysis “probably wasn’t as good as we would have liked it.”

Friends still tease him about the race from time to time. “You have no idea! It’s been 40 years, and 40 years later people still remind me of that,” sighs Grant. “We got over it, but it took a long time, I’ll tell you that right now. It’s still nice to have on your resume that you were entrusted to drive her, though.”

It was also encouraging that Handle With Care showed no lasting issues afterward, so she was pointed toward the Prix d’Été at Blue Bonnets. “It’s a large entry fee, back then it was probably $2,000 or $3,000 to enter the race, coming out of a very poor performance,” Grant recalls. Discussions ensued: “Do we still race her against the boys?” The final answer was yes, a decision vindicated by Handle With Care’s first-heat elimination win followed by a strong third-place finish in the final, behind winner Armbro Omaha and Dorado Almahurst. “We went from me getting her beat against a very mediocre group of fillies to beating the colts two weeks later, so that just shows you I wasn’t cut out to be a top driver I guess!” jokes Grant.

In retrospect, some of Handle With Care’s 1974 accomplishments seem even more impressive. Take her time trial at The Red Mile, for instance. “That was quite a day. She was scheduled to race two heats that day. The Grand Circuit used to race two heats at Lexington in the fall—you’d race and then two or three hours later, you’d come back and race again, and the purses would have been divided among the two races. That was the old time racing—two heats, three heats, depends on how many it took to win. But she had to race two heats to win the Jugette as well, and that was probably two weeks earlier.” Haughton and the Livermans talked the situation over between heats, and opted for a remarkable choice: “They decided that she was so sharp and good that day that they gave up a pretty nice purse to race against the clock and try to set the World Record to be the fastest three-year old filly of all time, and she got the job done.” Handle With Care’s 1:54.2 clocking was not only the fastest-ever for a sophomore filly - it was the fastest mile by any pacer in North America in 1974.

Was her caretaker/assistant trainer excited before or during the time trial? Not at all, says the man who spent almost 24 hours a day, every day, with the champion filly. “Excited? Believe me when I tell you, you don’t get excited until maybe when it’s over and you relax a bit,” reflects Grant. “I wasn’t excited, but I was anxious to get it over with. I thought she could break the world record. I didn’t think there was any doubt and I wasn’t trying to be arrogant or cocky, but she was just so good. I knew how good she was that day. You know, if Billy Haughton thought so, that was okay with me! If he thought that was the right thing to do, who am I, a skinny little kid with long hair and sideburns, from North Sydney, to tell him that it shouldn’t be?”

Grant has vivid recollection of Handle With Care’s physical giftedness, 40 years and many horses later. “If you didn’t know her to see her, you would think she was a colt…She was a big, strong, great-gaited filly, never went offstride in her life, did nothing but pace from day one.” Her attitude was another aspect of her greatness. “She wanted to win and would fight horses hard if anybody challenged her, and if she had to come from behind, she would hunt horses down and go by them.” But her personality left a little to be desired, says Grant. “Not real pleasant at times! No, she was tough! She’d pin her ears and she’d come at you every now and then, and you had to be very careful when you fed her and when you went in to change her water bucket - she’d say ‘Hey, this is my house, what are you doing in here?’”

Handle With Care left her caretaker with an unwanted souvenir as their time together was winding down in late 1974. “We were at Liberty Bell and it was the fall, and she had two blankets on her for the evening, because it was in the 40s (Fahrenheit); it was probably October or November. The blankets were kind of slid over to the side,” Grant tells TROT. “So I went in like I do, hundreds of times, and reached over with both hands to put them in the proper position. She reached around and grabbed me right in the middle of my back and lifted me off the ground and threw me against the wall.” Luckily, he wasn’t badly hurt, but Grant was able to show people his “impression” of Handle With Care for a considerable time afterward. “I had those teeth-marks on my back. Never broke the skin, never drew blood or anything, but I had her teeth-marks,” he remarks with a smile in his voice. “I must have shown that to a thousand people over the years. I said ‘This is Handle With Care!’”

A Canadian Trotting Association committee of seven, unanimously declared her the nation’s 1974 Horse of the Year, the second year she had claimed the title. Handle With Care was named Three-Year Old Filly Pacer of the Year in Canada and the US, although Delmonica Hanover claimed the overall American Horse of the Year title. With 20 wins in 24 starts on the season and the status of fastest all-age female pacer, it was an incredible year for the Quebec-owned daughter of Meadow Skipper. Handle With Care was even able to exact revenge upon Prix d’Été victor Armbro Omaha, defeating him in the Western Pace at Hollywood Park in only the second sub-1:55 race mile ever paced by a filly or mare (1:54.4).

By 1975, Fred Grant had decided it was time to take his dream of a career in harness racing further. So when Handle With Care returned to the track at age four, he was no longer her caretaker. “I could’ve been, but I decided that it was time to maybe start out on my own. Everybody knew that I was going to be done at the end of her racing year in ’74, and that I would try to move on to better myself - in other words, to try to go to the next level.” He opened his own stable at Blue Bonnets and never looked back

Now based at Florida’s Sunshine Meadows Training Centre, Grant remains an active trainer and has experienced success at the game’s highest level. He has no regrets about handing over one of harness racing’s greatest fillies to another groom at the end of 1974, and continued to follow the exploits of his former charge as she spent the next two years mixing it up with horses like Rambling Willie and Silk Stockings in the Free For All ranks.

“For a small town boy from North Sydney, NS, to be given such a responsibility by perhaps the greatest horseman of all time, Bill Haughton, was a humbling and daunting experience. He once told me that my work with Handle With Care meant he felt like a catch driver - all he had to do was show up and drive.”