Scott Zeron, casually clad in jeans and a blue and white plaid shirt, strides confidently into the frame at a private gun club. He picks up a Kimber 1911 .45 ACP handgun, (modified to shoot a 22-calibre long rifle bullet) from the bench, smiles mischievously, and takes dead aim at a bull’s-eye target hanging gingerly off a peg some 25 yards away. He pulls the trigger.
By Keith McCalmont
POP! ZERON FIRES HIS FIRST BULLET. TENTATIVE, HE FIRES ANOTHER ROUND AND THEN ANOTHER. POP! POP! SQUINTING DOWN THE BARREL OF THE GUN, HE FOCUSES, AND SQUEEZES OUT TWO MORE ROUNDS. POP! POP!
“That was awesome,” exclaims the 22-year-old.
Jan Miller, our ex-military weapons expert, peers down the shooting gallery and points out that not one bullet hit its intended target.
“Well, it is windy out today…,” laughs Zeron.
Miler offers some helpful advice as the acrid scent of cordite fills the room. It’s a tiny hut, framed with six narrow shooting windows, each station separated by mesh screens to protect from the discharged shells that whip back over Zeron’s right shoulder.
“My guess is, you want to try that again,” Miller smiles. “The thing is, you have to pull the trigger slowly.”
This time, he offers Zeron a heavier gun, a Smith & Wesson .38 Special, and teaches his willing pupil how to load the bullets. The new set-up is met with much satisfaction.
“This bitch is heavy,” drawls Zeron, weighing the hefty piece of metal in his hand.
Zeron, peering up at Miller from behind his gun, can’t help but try to up his game.
“How do I know if I’m aiming perfectly?”
“Raise your gun a little higher. Wrap your hand around this way more,” Miller demonstrates. ”That locks your thumb down. Let’s give it a shot. Press on the trigger until it goes.”
Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Zeron fires off all five rounds of .38 Special wad cutter target ammunition in quick succession, as 25-yards away, bits of paper fly from the devastated target. Smoke trails out the barrel of the gun and a sly smile appears.
“Ohhh yes,” purrs Zeron.
“It’s in the black!” cries Miller in disbelief.
“Get out! I knew it…,” laughs Zeron.
In a matter of minutes, this kid, intent in concentration and inquisitive by nature, found his way to the heart of the matter and reasonable success on the range.
It’s little wonder Zeron, who didn’t even get in the cart until he was 15, has amassed over $15.6 million in career purses with more than 1,500 trips to the winner’s circle. Currently ranked as Canada’s leading driver, this grinning gunsmen has already notched 507 wins and earnings in excess of $7.7 millon in 2011.
Seems he’s definitely in the black.
QUIET, BUT CONFIDENT. He’s exceedingly polite, making sure that photographer Matt Waples and I take our turns with the weapon, and he answers questions without hesitation as Miller prepares another round of bullets for us.
“I go to the gym five days a week,” he tells me when I inquire about his spare time.
What about a girlfriend?
“I broke up with a girl four days ago,” he shrugs.
“Oh no,” I reply, foot in mouth.
“No, it’s oh YES,” he laughs, adding. “It lasted two weeks. I can’t keep them. I have a hard time keeping them.”
Gunshots accentuate Zeron’s laughter as Waples, for once, snaps a shot of a different sort.
Given the guy’s busy schedule, it’s hard to imagine him having much time to focus on maintaining a relationship. His mornings are spent jogging horses for his famous father, Rick, and he drives afternoons at Flamboro, is a regular on the WEG circuit and takes sojourns to Georgian Downs.
But, still, he’s trying to meet someone – away from the track. “I’ll go to the club sometimes,” he admits. “I don’t go to bars, I don’t drink. I hang out with my high school friends. I don’t really hang out with anybody around the racetrack.”
The shots die down and our intrepid photographer turns toward us. “Is it empty?” he asks, looking back down at his gun.
“Don’t look down the barrel!” we shout in unison.
A sheepish Waples places the gun cautiously on the table and Miller, ever professional, counts the bullets, while Zeron and I exhale and then laugh and laugh.
OUR AMMUNITION EXPERT steers us outside of the hut, away from the heat of the wood-burning stove, and into the cool, morning air for the next round of gun play. Miller introduces another weapon and while he sets up a clean target, I finally ask Zeron about his father.
“My father’s taught me almost everything I know,” he says.
In January, Rick took home the O’Brien Award for Horsemanship following a seemingly endless array of near misses.
“He’d had nine nominations and he finally won,” recalls Zeron. “It was the best night ever. For me, I was nominated for Driver of the Year, not thinking I was going to win, but it was such an honour to be there with my dad and I’m happy he finally took it home.”
“He was so proud,” says the prodigal son. “I’m so happy we were there to celebrate with him.”
It’s abundantly clear how important family is for the young driver.
“I have three sisters, one younger,” he grins. “They’re all absolute geniuses, and they’re all pretty girls, and all three of them are successful.”
It’s not idle chatter. Almost relieved to talk about someone other than himself, he lists their abundant accomplishments with more than a little pride. “Jade is the youngest at 18 and she is figure skating with Disney On Ice, travelling across the west coast of the United States,” he boasts. “The 24-year-old, Jerrica, she is just below the Premier working in the Ontario government. And the 27-year-old, Jennifer, she works for Donald Trump in one of the big buildings downtown as a civil engineer.”
“We’ve got quite the family,” Zeron admits with a broad smile.
When I ask how all of them turned out so well, he responds with a laugh and without pause. “Good breeding!”
“My dad always says that he’s a proven stud,” he adds, rolling his eyes.
The foundation for the success that he and his sisters enjoy is not lost on Zeron. “We have a close family and my parents have given us everything growing up, so it wasn’t too hard for us to have the opportunity to be successful,” he says.
He’s so well-rounded, so endearingly polite, that for a brief moment, I forget that I’m talking to a 22-year-old.
But then Miller hands Zeron the new weapon and with the joyful face of a kid ripping the wrapping paper off a present on Christmas morning, he sprays a flurry of bullets at a waiting target just a few short yards away.
“That was gangster,” he bellows as the smoke clears.
Oh, right.
WITH THE GUN SHOW OVER, Zeron allows himself to be prodded and positioned by our photographer outside the club.
“Put your weight on your back foot!”
Zeron, back in student mode, shuffles his feet and asks if his new stance is better. A nod from Waples confirms and the confident smile returns to Zeron’s face as we talk about the beginning.
“I never took an interest in racing until I was about 12 years old, and then I started going every night,” says Zeron. “I jogged my first horse when I was 15. Other guys are eight years old jogging horses but I was 15.”
He picked up his trainer’s license at the age of 16 and was soon spending his mornings at the barn with his father.
“I would mostly just jog for my dad,” he says. “At the same time, I was going to school, so I’d only make it out there on Saturday. But, all summer long, I’d be at the barn in the morning and do some of the work.”
As we walk the grounds of the gun club, Zeron, double-fisted with (now unloaded) widow makers, waves the steel around and uses them to punctuate his points. He reveals that his interest in the game escalated despite his parents’ protests.
“My dad always said he didn’t want me in this business,” admits Zeron, aiming a gun skyward. “Believe it or not, he and my mother, always said... go do something bigger, better, not as risky. They always encouraged me to do what I wanted to do, but I wanted to go to the races with my dad because I liked watching him win. Of course, when my dad was the top guy and winning all these races, I took an interest in that.”
By the age of sixteen, Zeron was focused on the task at hand. Not only was he putting time in on the track, he was building relationships that would be the foundation for future success.
“When my friends were out partying, I was spending my nights at the track, warming up for everybody, just trying to be a familiar face at the track with some of the top trainers,” recalls Zeron. “That put me in a friendly relationship with people before I was even able to drive for them. Then, when I was 18, and I started driving, they gave me opportunities and I made the most of it by putting those horses in the winners circle.”
The stats are impressive. In 2007, at the age of 18, Zeron won 35 races from 352 drives. He scored 129 wins in 2008, added 266 victorious trips in 2009 and blossomed in 2010 with an incredible 606 trips to the winner’s circle and earnings in excess of $4.4-million. Today, Zeron has arrived.
During his meteoric rise, at his parent’s insistence, Zeron completed a two-year accounting course at Humber College. “I’m good with numbers, good with math,” he says. “It’s what I might have done if I didn’t do this.”
But he isn’t likely to have to count on his formal education to put the bread on the table anytime soon. In fact, if possible, Zeron is falling more in love with the game each day. He recalls his big scores with eyes wide.
In 2009, he piloted FBS Terror to victory in the $300,000 Ontario Sires Stakes Super Final at Woodbine. “That was almost to the point of tears,” he recalls, twisting his gun sideways like a Hollywood street thug. “I couldn’t even blink! That was so surreal... a $300,000 purse.”
Last year, Zeron steered Part Shark to a track record of 1:51 in the prestigious Gold Cup & Saucer over Charlottetown Driving Park’s half-mile oval. He was also invited to represent Canada at an international driving competition in France, finishing second in the Prix des Rencontres Internationales du Trotteur Français at Paris-Vincennes.
His 2011 numbers are inspiring, but it doesn’t seem to have got to his head. He knows he has a lot left to learn. Zeron is quick to point out that he watches race tape daily and spends an inordinate amount of time studying the best in the business. Some of his greatest learning experiences have come from in the bike, when competing against his idols, Tim Tetrick and Jim Morrill Jr. “I tried to get as much info as I could out of them, because you watch them and they’re motionless in the bike but these horses are just bionic,” he says. “So you want to find out how other people have that edge in their driving style and how they get a horse to respond at its best.”
Our banter is interrupted momentarily as Zeron is instructed to take dead aim with both firearms and stride full on towards our cameraman, sprawled on the grass with his own weapon of choice. It will look menacing in print, but it’s comical in reality and Zeron struggles not to smile as he bears down on the scrawny shutterbug.
Mission accomplished, Zeron shares that his father also plays a big part in his continuing education as a driver.
“Now that he’s been injured the past couple months, he’s become an even bigger fan of mine,” he grins. “He watches all my races and when I come home at night, we talk abut every race that happened – the things I did right, and the things I did wrong. It’s amazing that I can be the top driver in Canada and there are still little tips I need. There’s always somebody better than you out there, so you have to be on your toes and perform at the top of your game every night.”
When I ask if it’s been difficult to get out from under the shadow of his father’s numerous accomplishments, Zeron is adamant in retort.
“It hasn’t been, and a lot of people said it would be,” says Zeron, making eye contact, and raising one gun with purpose. “They would say, ‘if you could just be half as good as your dad’ and I’d say, ‘I want to be better!’
BACK IN THE HUT, warming up by the wood stove, I propose that if there’s a difficulty to being so good, so young, it might come from the driver’s room.
“It’s a different atmosphere,” admits Zeron. “I’m coming from college or high school where everyone is my age, and now I’ve got to be with 50-year-old or 40-year-old guys and I’ve got to drive with them, and they’ve got families to feed and mortgages to pay and I’m just some 22-year-old.”
It’s one thing to love the game, it’s another thing entirely when the game you love is your livelihood.
“Nobody wants to see some young punk come and take money out of their pockets. I’m sure it was an adjustment for some of those guys. I wouldn’t say they tried to run me out of there, but they like that little niche of ten people they’ve always had. I think I’ve managed to fit in quite well. I try not to get in anybody’s way and be nice to everybody and it goes a long way.”
Fortunately, Zeron broke into the game at the same time as his good friend Doug McNair.
“Doug and I are really close,” says Zeron. “We started driving around the same time and went through the same phases. This year, we both tried to stay on the WEG circuit and it worked out great for both of us.”
The pressure of winning has yet to get to Zeron.
“As many drives as I’ve won, I haven’t lost that edge,” he states. “I still love the game, the horses and being here. I hope it never gets stressful. If it ever did, I’d consider it a job and I don’t consider it a job.”
The kid is so well-spoken I joke that he must have received media training. Without skipping a beat, he jumps all over the accusation.
“I did! Grand River gave us media training and I loved it,” he grins, and shares, gleefully, how awful his good friend Doug, used to be at the media game.
“Doug, I can’t believe it, I saw him on TV last night and he did a great job,” laughs Zeron. “He was the worst person to pose for pictures and gave terrible interviews but he’s getting better.”
And Zeron is getting better too. In the past week, the kid was out, in his colours, to support the Toys For Tots campaign at a Canadian Tire in Milton. A day later he was on a plane to Vancouver to compete in the BC Breeders’ Classic Day card at Fraser Downs – winning four races – and returned home on Saturday in time to win a pair of OSS Super Finals.
The adventurous driver takes it all in stride. “Some would say that’s a stressful schedule but I feel like a rock star doing stuff like that, so I like it,” smiles Zeron.
The smell of metal and burning wood hang in the air as we finally kick the brisk November chill. It’s time to head home. But with all that Canada’s winningest driver has accomplished thus far, it certainly makes you wonder what this rock star might have planned for an encore.