Ben Wallace: The Racing Way Of Life

He could have been a baseball player, with one foot in Cooperstown. He could have been a football player, chasing around 280-pound defensive ends, having his knees cut out from under him. He could have been an urban planner, pushing the buttons of the Not-In-My-Backyard crowd.

But no. Ben Wallace fills his days with hopple hangers and bits and entry schedules and always, always, keeping his eye out for the next equine treasure. Now he’s a Standardbred horse trainer, not necessarily a career for the rich and famous.

Woodbine Racetrack opened its doors to the public on June 12, 1956 and will celebrate its 60th anniversary, many decades worth of memorable moments and rich traditions, on Sunday June 12th as the finest thoroughbred fillies in the country compete in the Woodbine Oaks, Presented by Budweiser.

To honour this landmark anniversary, each Monday leading up to Oaks day, WEG will share stories of some of the longstanding names of the industry, both thoroughbred and standardbred, courtesy of Sovereign Award winning writers Beverley Smith and Bruce Walker.

This horse racing thing initially started out as an innocent fling. “Just a stupid thing,” he said. Nothing permanent. But he’s 66, and he’s been doing it now for 45 years.

Wallace grew up in Guelph, the son of a Bell Canada employee. His father, Thomas Benjamin Wallace (Ben took his entire name from him) was a horse lover. He wouldn’t bet $2, but just loved watching the horses. Wallace knew that was in him too. An Irishman, Wallace Sr. died in the grandstand at Mohawk Raceway on March 17 – St. Patrick’s Day.

In high school, the younger version of Thomas Benjamin Wallace played baseball in the city, and made such a name for himself, that he was scouted by the Detroit Tigers.

But he had other plans. Wallace spent the year after graduating from Grade 13 “doing nothing.” He took a year off. Actually the nothing was a supreme adventure. He and five friends from Guelph, armed with Arthur Frommer’s book Europe on $5 a day set off across the Atlantic for London, England, their first stop, in 1969. (If they tried to see Europe on $5 a day now, they’d still be at the airport).

It was a time when tourism wasn’t common, and rooms could be had for $1.70 a night, depending on the spot. The group did Belgium, then Central Europe, down to Italy. They hitchhiked through France, lolled on the French Riviera, meandered around the Mediterranean Sea, and set their caps for Spain.

“We did it all,” Wallace said. “It was an exciting time.” He helped finance the plan by working as a cleaner at the London Baths, an ancient, cold spring-fed plunge bath off the Strand. He worked as a lifeguard, too, in London. He and his friends caddied at the golf course in Marseille, France and in Monte Carlo. “We just had a great time,” Wallace said.

“When you’re 17 years old and you’re from Guelph, and the next thing, you’re in Rome and you’re around the corner from the Coliseum, you really get your eyes opened,” he said. “It sort of shaped my life, to be honest, to some degree.” The world was no longer so remote. It could be seen. And it was grand. Anything was possible.

They ended up in Barcelona, and one day, walking down a street, they spied Peter Graves, the white-haired guy who played the role of James Phelps, the director of a secret force in the television show Mission Impossible. (He won a Golden Globe for his role in 1971).

It was Wallace’s first sighting of a television/movie star. Star-struck, Wallace and one of his friends walked past Graves two or three times until Graves finally said: “Why don’t you boys just sit down and have a drink with us?”

Eagerly, they did. Graves was sitting with a man known for doing the Camel cigarette commercials on television. ("I’d walk a mile for a Camel," he’d say, showing off shoes with a worn sole.)

They all sat back with some Cuba Libres (rum and coke and a squeeze of lime) and Graves said: “What are you guys doing?”

They told him they were hitchhiking around, intent on getting to the Straits of Gibraltar on their way to the Canary Islands, a subtropical Spanish archipelago off the southern Coast of Morocco.

Graves told them that casting directors were looking for American-looking jeep drivers for a movie that was being filmed in Madrid. “I know the casting director,” Graves said. “I can get you a job for a couple of weeks, if you want it.”

The group didn’t have enough money to make a side trip to Madrid and then go back south to the Canary Islands, so they didn’t take Graves up on the offer. They spent a couple of months on the Canary Islands instead, busy as puppies on a slipper, having a blast.

Later, they discovered the movie that Graves referred to was Patton, winner of seven Academy Awards, starring George C. Scott and Karl Malden. Most of the film was shot in Spain.

The Road Less Travelled

Back home, Wallace went to the University of Windsor to get a degree in urban planning. He played football for the university there, but wrecked his shoulder. His shoulder in a sling and largely immobilized, Wallace decided to get the rest of his credits during the summer and finished the degree in 2 ½ years. Not once did he set foot at Windsor Raceway, which at the time was a twinkly powerhouse of a racetrack. The idea didn’t occur to him.

His friends wanted to go to Europe again, but Wallace took the road less travelled. His baseball coach in Guelph from his high school days -- Walt Jeffries -- had some horses at Buffalo Raceway, so Wallace decided to take a crack at working as a groom, much to the dismay of his family. He was the only one who had a university degree.

He had an idea to spend a year with the horses there, but the plan could end at any time. He could have been there a day, a week, a month. He earned $40 a week rubbing horses.

“If you make it through the winter, you’ll never get out,” the trainer warned him.

Wallace was there for a year. Still, he wasn’t convinced that this sort of tough slogging was the way to go. But Wallace found his way to Mohawk Raceway and walked into Keith Waples’ barn in 1971. There, he encountered the most revered man in the sport, the first man to drive a sub-2:00 mile with his Mighty Dudley, a horse he traded for a broodmare. He’s also the first man to drive a Canadian-owned horse to win the Roosevelt International Trot with Tie Silk. Also the man who drove Strike Out to win the fastest Little Brown Jug in history to that point. First time a Canadian-owned horse won. You get the picture. A walking, living harness racing wizard.

Waples took Wallace into his fold and paid him $60 a week. “How long has this been going on?” Wallace thought. And he stayed there for three years. Urban planning became a distant memory. Advantage: harness racing.

Waples, now 92, was the laconic type. “But you learned by being around him,” Wallace said. “He’s a great judge of character.”

A Way of Life

Wallace started a way of life that has been as impossible to shake as a squirrel on a nut. It wasn’t life at the Ritz Hotel. Rather it was Tack Hotel. Wallace lived in the barns for two or three years, unable to afford a house or apartment. But draft beer was 15 cents. And it was fine. “Everybody seemed to have enough money in their pocket to get by,” he said. “And we knew the Queen Street [streetcar] run pretty good.” Deals were done with a handshake that could be trusted.

It was even better when the harness set moved, lock, stock and barrel, to Garden City Raceway near St. Catharines, Ont. Grooms like Wallace could actually live in a motel, with a swimming pool and real beds, and heated, too, if need be. You could rent a room for $35 a week and if you shared it with another groom, half that. “Are you kidding me?” Wallace said. “This was big time. And you’re 20 minutes from Buffalo where you could go crazy. That was heaven for a caretaker. It was a fun, fun time.”

Wallace fell right into the middle of a cast of characters found only at racetracks.

“I think that’s what kept me going was the lifestyle,” he said. “There were long hours, but there was camaraderie among guys that you just don’t seem to get any more.”

His years at Greenwood Raceway were a special time, times that are now gone. “Those days were so unique,” Wallace said. “There were 800 horses on the backstretch at Greenwood. Nobody had a truck and trailer. There were no training centres. Everybody who raced there was pretty well stabled on the grounds. They had their own little farm someplace. Back then, you had Ronnie Feagan with 35 or 40 horses, and Bill Wellwood with 35 or 40, and Keith Waples with 20 or 30 and Ross (Cowboy) Curran with another 25 or 30. “ He looked at them as god-like. Harold McKinley, too. He doesn’t see any more of that in the game now.

One of his fascinating pilgrimages was with driver/trainer Bill Kirkpatrick, who came from a small town where adventure was the main form of entertainment, where you had to keep your cots locked up for safety during bed-race season. They decided to drive to Buffalo when the new Caliente helmets came out; Kirkpatrick knew about a place where they could buy them cheaper than at home. And besides, they could always stop for some beer.

They squeezed into Kirkpatrick’s tiny MGB “midget car,” as Wallace calls it. When they returned home and had to face the border crossing, they mulled over what to do about the helmets they had just bought.

They decided to plop them on their heads, as if that was the most normal thing to do in the world. Kirkpatrick put the roof down on his car. They approached the border, looking like rally car drivers in a Spielberg movie.

The custom agent looked at Kirkpatrick and said: “This guy must be a real bad driver.”

“What do you think these are for?” they said, pointing to the helmets.

The agent let them through.

Lessons Learned at the Feet of Wellwood

After a two-year stint with Garth Gordon, Wallace took a job as assistant trainer for Bill Wellwood, a job that lasted for seven years. He revered Wellwood. “That’s the catalyst for any success I’ve ever had,” Wallace said. “Spending the time in that shedrow with him every day, I think I would have done it for nothing.

“I damned near did, for what he paid me.”

Wallace was making $125 a week as an assistant, but at the time, grooms were earning $110. He’d been there almost a year, and was earning only $15 a week more than grooms. Wallace decided to ask Wellwood for a raise.

He waited for him one night after the races at Greenwood, back in the barn, steeling his courage for the task. When Wellwood returned to the barn, Wallace said: “I’ve got something to talk to you about.”

“What’s that?” Wellwood said.

“I think I need a raise,” Wallace replied, determined to refuse Wellwood’s first offer, which he expected would still be too low.

“Yup, I think you do,” Wellwood said. “Why don’t I give you twice as much?”

Pigeons ruffled their feathers. Horses peered out of their stalls. Pitchforks fell. “No,” Wallace said.

Wellwood was taking off his driver’s uniform and he paused, looked at Wallace and said: “Excuse me?”

“That’s not enough,” Wallace said.

“Okay,” Wellwood said. “Well, tell me what you think you are worth, then.”

At that moment, Wallace didn’t know what to say. Wellwood had him. They didn’t settle anything that night, but as Wallace drove home to an apartment he had in Leaside, he thought: “What the hell did I just do?”

He was too proud to go back the next day and say anything.

Six weeks went by. His paycheque continued to arrive for the same piddly amount. Finally one night, when employer and employee were sitting together on opening night of a Mohawk Raceway meet, Wellwood said: “You never put in for your raise. You never told me what you were worth.”

He told Wallace to go and see Lil Clark, the bookkeeper he used, and tell her “what you think you are worth.”

The next morning, Wallace told Lil to increase his pay to double. “I was too stupid to say yes when he offered double,” Wallace said. “He knew. He was putting it right to me.”

Wellwood paid Wallace the new amount retroactive to the night they initially talked about the raise.

Wellwood had a knack for picking out and buying good young horses. But Wallace says he was an ever better judge of people. That was his greatest skill.

“You’ve got to have the finances to get that horse,” Wallace said. “There’s got to be product and he had a way of getting the people who were affluent enough to get that product. And they loved him.”

A case in point: Horse owner-insurance guru Brian Webster tells the story about a group of Swedes looking to buy horses from the track. When they spotted one they liked on Wellwood’s shedrow, they asked him what it was worth. Wellwood replied: “$40,000.”

They offered $30,000. “I said he was worth $40,000, but if you want to buy him, the price is $75,000,” Wellwood told them. He later sold the horse to the Swedes for $65,000.

Wallace and Wellwood were a remarkable team, both garbed in the Wellwood colours, green, yellow and white. They never worked at cross purposes, never argued. Except maybe once. Once Wellwood thought Wallace had driven a horse badly. Never one to mince words and quite feisty at times, Wellwood told him so.

Wellwood and Wallace were racing as an entry in a race, but Wallace was driving Paulas Peanut, a horse owned by Wellwood’s young daughter Paula. “Maybe I raced him the way he didn’t want me to race him,” Wallace said. “But I think he was mad because I beat him.”

But in general, Wellwood was like family. Wallace saw Wellwood more than he ever saw his family.

Every day was an adventure, working for Wellwood. “He approached the game in such a different way,” Wallace said. “He was such a futuristic kind of guy. He could almost feel the future. He could sense it. It was just remarkable to see, but his handling of people and his handling of situations would be the most adventuresome part of this.”

Wallace was eventually offered a job by Scott Campbell, a Winnipeg Jets player and the No. 1 pick in the expansion draft. Campbell, who had played junior hockey in Guelph, loved horse racing and met Wallace one summer. After owning one or two, Campbell offered to pay Wallace $25,000 a year, plus 10 per cent of what he earned on the track driving and training. Wellwood had been paying him $13,000 a year plus five per cent of his earnings when he drove – which was seldom, although often Wallace would drive a race entry.

And Wellwood, always prescient, said: “I can’t afford to lose you, but I can’t afford to keep you. And I’ll tell you, you’ll be out of business in a year.”

As if he knew. A year later, almost to the day, Wallace’s arrangement with Campbell went up in smoke when Campbell’s career went on the skids. Wallace was left with one horse, a trotter called Flowing Harry, who wasn’t quite an open trotter, but would win preferred trots. Flowing Harry got Wallace going, but it was difficult at first. Because Wallace had been a private trainer for Campbell, he had missed opportunities to train publicly. Now he was forced to. But the next thing Wallace knew, he had 20 or 25 horses and off to the races he went.

“The game has always been very good to me,” Wallace said. That’s another Wellwoodism. Wallace remembers driving to the Harrisburg yearling sales with Wellwood once time and he asked him: What was your worst year?”

Wellwood replied: “I never had one.”

A consistently successful career

Every year, Wallace has always found a horse that helped him out, got him through a tough stretch, paid the bills. Wallace’s stable has earned more than $1-million ever year for 18 or 19 consecutive seasons on the Woodbine Entertainment Group circuit. He raced 30 to 40 horses in the Breeders Crown, and had the back pads of each in Barn 1 at Classy Lane Stables before a fire in early January destroyed everything. He’s trained nine horses that have earned more than $1-million in their careers.

But perhaps one of the most memorable of his training achievements occurred when Wallace slid over to Tier One racing in North America and guided Blissfull Hall to become the ninth pacing Triple Crown winner in history.

Daniel Plouffe, a grocer from Bedford, Que., noticed Wallace after some caviar days with owners Marv Chantler and Tony Aarts. “Those two guys gave me the opportunity of getting some quality,” Wallace said.

Out of a sale, he and Chantler plucked Armbro Rosebud, a filly that won 12 of 17 starts (and five seconds), broke two track records and won more than $700,000 without leaving Ontario.

That association brought Aarts into the fold, who brought him Camotion. He retired with $1.9-million in earnings after finishing third from a bad post in the North America Cup to Gallo Blue Chip. Wallace remembers him fondly as one of his favourites after the horse set an all-age track record in the Windy City Pace at Maywood Park in Chicago -- where he defeated Gallo Blue Chip.

Then Plouffe showed up. Wallace gives Plouffe all the credit for the research he had done on hip No. 44 at the 1997 Tattersalls sale in Kentucky. He had remembered that Blissfull Hall’s dam, Hundred Kisses, had paced a final quarter in 25 4/5 at The Meadowlands in 1992 -- at the time the fastest ever at the New Jersey track.

Plouffe had set a limit on the amount he’d pay for Blissfull Hall, but the bidding rose above it. Wallace kept looking at Plouffe, who kept saying: “Bid.” They got him for $47,000 US.

Trouble is, they had bought Blissfull Hall as a ridgling. And as a two-year-old, whenever Wallace asked him for speed, the colt would “ride one line terrible all the time.” The trainer figured it was all due to a testicle that hadn’t descended from his body cavity. Wallace put it squarely to Plouffe: He had a choice to make. “You can’t race against the best three-year-olds if he races like this. He’s going to have to be castrated, or we’ll have to put up with it.”

Wallace sent Blissfull Hall to The Meadowlands, where he also had Armbro Rosebud, along with about eight others, just for training purposes. The track surface was much better.

Blissfull Hall was turned out for two months. Wallace would go down weekly. One day, Wallace’s employee, Bruce MacDonald, told Wallace to take a peek at the underbelly of the colt.

“Another testicle was sitting there,” Wallace recalled. It was magic. From that day on, Blissfull Hall was a happy horse.

“He just drove straight and forward,” Wallace said.

Wallace never made Blissfull Hall eligible for the North America Cup, as a disincentive to rush to get the horse ready for early June eliminations. On the night of the Cup, Blissfull Hall won a three-year-old open pace and paced about as fast as they did in the big race. However, Wallace knew that they do it differently in a race like the North America Cup. There is nothing easy about the North America Cup.

The Panderosa won it, instead, and The Meadowlands Pace, too, two of the heavyweight $1.5-million races of the season. Owned by the colourful Bob Glazer, and trained by Brett Pelling, a star U.S. trainer, The Panderosa’s efforts prompted his driver, John Campbell, to call him the greatest pacer he had ever driven. Glazer had bought him as a yearling for $250,000, the highest price paid for a Standardbred yearling that year. Hype had surrounded him before he set foot in the ring. It was as if he glowed in the dark.

Who was going to take seriously a lesser known trainer from Canada and an upstart French-speaking Canadian owner -- not a major farm syndicate -- who had carefully plotted the career of Blissfull Hall?

The thing about Blissfull Hall was that he possessed such a blistering turn of foot, he could embarrass rockets. Any Mach metre trying to measure him would come unhinged. He’d crack on with such lightning force, his opponents barely had time to notice him fly by. They’d be left panting in his lengthening shadow, once he turned it on. And for the rest of the season, Blissfull Hall used this trait to full advantage.

His performance in the final heat of the 1999 Little Brown Jug was special. He raced four times that day, the final heat going off at 7:00 p.m. “He went around a two-horse Monte Gelrod entry like they were tied together,” Wallace said.

But in newspaper accounts of the day, that’s never mentioned. “The Panderosa breaks stride,” blared the headlines, describing how the rival broke at the start and never made it out of the first elimination heat. The subhead, in smaller print, mentioned that Blissfull Hall had set a combined-heat world record, powerful from start to finish.

Blissfull Hall had already won the opening leg of the Triple Crown, the Cane Pace, the hard way. He pulled a shoe off before the elimination, and when the gate pulled away, the replaced shoe flew off. He raced with one bare foot. Still, he won. The next week, he won the final in track record time.

Plouffe knew the history awaited. Blissfull Hall wasn’t eligible to the third leg, the Messenger, so Plouffe paid a $35,000 (U.S.) supplementary fee. He won in straight heats, but in the second one, he came from sixth place to blast past the entire field to the lead after the quarter. He mocked the sound barrier.

Ron Pierce, who drove Blissfull Hall to some of his arresting conquests, regards Wallace as “an underrated trainer.” And so, too, was Blissfull Hall an underrated champion.

Chances missed

It’s horse racing to take one step forward and one backward. From 2004 to 2008, Wallace had a talented pacer called Zooka that won more than $1.3-million in his career, becoming the fastest free-legged pacer in history with a 1:49 3/5 clocking in 2007.

He was a son of Astreos, and when Wallace saw another big gorgeous yearling son of Astreos selling in Lexington, Ky., one year, he couldn’t resist. He spent $90,000 for him. However the horse, called Stars On The Water, won $50,000 or $60,000 and it took him three or four years to do it. In other words, he was no Zooka.

The next foal out of the mare was Somebeachsomewhere. Wallace looked at him, but didn’t bite, at the sale the following year. He sold for $40,000. Trainer/part-owner Brent MacGrath told Wallace he was finished at $41,000. Wallace followed him and when the two-year-old colt won the Battle of Waterloo at Grand River Raceway, Wallace saw him walk in like a champion, not roaring, or squealing on his hind legs. “He was a big stud colt, but he didn’t need to let everybody know,” Wallace said. “He walked in, stood there in those little stalls, walked out on the racetrack and won in 1:52 or 1:53. I said to myself: ‘Whoa. He’s a gorilla.’”

Time proved that Somebeachsomewhere was indeed a gorilla. He proved to be harness racing’s version of Secretariat, losing only once in 21 starts and that a second-place finish in The Meadowlands Pace. Less than a year after his final race, he was inducted into the Canadian Horse Racing Hall of Fame. But Wallace already had castrated his half-brother. “He wasn’t going to make it in the breeding shed,” Wallace said. “Some you get. Some you miss.”

Chances Taken

As unlucky as Wallace may have been on missing Somebeachsomewhere, he got lucky with a Western Hanover colt he saw at Harrisburg on the fourth day of the sale. He saw him “just about as square and as nice-looking colt as you’d want to find,” Wallace said. Wallace snapped him up for $25,000. The colt’s name was Totally Western.

So he turned to Antoinette Nigito, who had been part-owner of 1983 Hambletonian winner Joie de Vie, as well as Moni Maker. He had trained only one previous horse for Nigito, and it was a mare she found at a U.S. auction being sold for only $500. She was told this mare, called Walk On the Beach, was probably being sold for meat.

Horrified, she contacted the buyer and bought the horse off the meat truck for $1,000. When the mare failed to set the racing world on fire, Nigito turned her over to Wallace, who had just been named Canada’s Trainer of the Year, for his exploits with Blissfull Hall.

Nigito loved Walk On The Beach and Wallace did his best to make something of the mare. After Nigito sent the mare to him, she blossomed. She finished third in a Breeders’ Crown race from an outside post at odds of 99-1 against the top mares in the sport. All in all, the rescued mare earned $800,000.

When Wallace was at the yearling sale in Harrisbug, Wallace told Nigito he’d love to win the Little Brown Jug for her.

He had just bought Totally Western and told her he could afford only one-quarter of his price ($6,250.) Nigito said she would take the other three-quarters, reserving a quarter for an insurance friend that wanted to get into the business.

When Wallace began to train Totally Western, he marvelled at his gentleman-like manners. He was a natural. Two weeks in, he was automatic. Ears up. Took right to the starting gate. A month in, he called Nigito again and asked her if the friend had actually stepped forward to buy a quarter. She said she hadn’t heard from him. So Wallace bought the other quarter.

Totally Western won the $943,809 (U.S.) Breeders’ Crown for two-year-old pacers in 2002, easily by five lengths over 6 to 5 favourite Allamerican Native, which had cost $70,000 at the same sale. Wallace’s colt paid $40.70 for a $2 win ticket.

With the exchange conversion taken into account, the total purse for that Breeders’ Crown was $1,040,000 Canadian. And later, Wallace found himself standing there with a cheque for $600,000 – and half of it was his.

Later Wallace sold a quarter interest in Totally Western for $250,000, but although Totally Western had won one of the eliminations of the North America Cup, he suffered a hairline crack in his left hind pastern and didn’t race in the final. It was a blow to lose him at that time of the season. But the $250,000 Wallace had in his pocket for selling a share of the colt helped him to get started again.

“You miss one, and you’re on your way out and you trip over a Breeders’ Crown winner that you probably shouldn’t have got,” Wallace said. “Hard work makes you luck, for sure.

“And you’ve got to be in the right spot when opportunity knocks. You’ve got to have the wherewithal to open the door.”

Starting Over

Setbacks come, too. Big ones. Wallace had a barn full of 17 horses that he lost in the devastating fire at Classy Lane Stables in January of 2016, but with the help of owner Brad Grant, he’s back on his feet and winning races.

Grant has known Wallace since the Greenwood Raceway days when Wellwood was stabled in Barn 9, and so was Ross Curran, where Grant hung out. Grant, who got out of the business for a time, returned and reached out to Wallace.

A couple of years ago, Wallace found Apprentice Hanover for Grant. He’d watched him train at Classy Lane and thought the colt had big talent. Grant’s best memory of his times with Wallace were on the night of the Nassagaweya Stakes at Mohawk. Apprentice Hanover won the race by nine lengths.

“In the winner’s circle, he was very happy for me,” Grant said. “We had tried for a long time to get this good horse and we believed Apprentice Hanover was going to be this good horse. I had a couple of people tell me that in the winner’s circle Ben was very emotional about that fact – this this is the horse that I’ve wanted for Brad for a long time.”

Apprentice Hanover died in the fire, but Grant bought three good horses for Wallace at a sale in New Jersey.

“The unfortunate part of this was that this might have been Ben’s long overdue big year with some of the horses he had in his barn this year coming along,” Grant said.

He likes Wallace because he’s passionate about the business, he’s very involved in the sport, he’s open and honest about good news and bad and never fails to call, and his horses are always ready to race.

“I’m just glad he’s back on his feet,” Grant said.

As for Wallace, he maintains that he never wants the fire to define him and his career. “If I’m going to be defined, it’s going to be by the horses I trained,” Wallace said. “And that’s why the only way that’s going to happen is if you get up and get at it again.“

He doesn’t look back often. “I’m excited by what I’ve got to race this weekend,” Wallace said. “When I don’t have that any more, that’s going to be bothersome.”

When he’s not working on a Saturday night, he’s restless. He doesn’t like sitting around, watching television. But his life to now has been racing every night. Every single night. Somewhere. He’s another harness racing lifer.

(Beverley Smith for WoodbineEntertainment.com)