Bruce Johnston was a communicator respected all across the sport of standardbred racing.
But to those who knew him, he was so much more - always striving to make the industry better for generations to come. By Melissa Keith
Between 1976 and 1993, Bruce Johnston was The Canadian Sportsman. The 2016 Canadian Horse Racing Hall of Fame inductee revived the venerable magazine, continuously in print from 1870 until its November 2013 demise. Contributing his own distinctive insights to the Standardbred industry at both publication and personal levels, Johnston’s posthumous induction as a Communicator resonates with many in the Standardbred industry today.
Gary Foerster is owner and president of Sportswood Printing, former home to The Canadian Sportsman. He remembers when publisher Johnston hired him on the recommendation of mutual friends: “Bruce was a practicing lawyer. At that point, he had just purchased The Sportsman and was deciding the direction it would go.” Former Standardbred owner Foerster joined him in 1977, becoming editor of the racing publication. He later started Straffordville, Ontario-based Sportswood Printing, which was founded to print the magazine in-house beginning in 1989.
Foerster says Johnston’s column ‘Short Turns’ was “one of the first things people would turn to, on the inside-back of The Sportsman.” Readers enjoyed his timely commentary on the industry, expressed in the words of Johnston’s comedic alter ego, ‘Lance Loser.’ A fictional character from the fictional community of Tippytoes, Lance Loser was an affectionate parody of the stereotypical die-hard horseman with more passion than profits. “Lance married Fifi, a former pole dancer, then they had a son, ‘Bejorn’,” over the course of the ‘Short Turns’ saga, notes an amused Foerster. Johnston’s hapless horseman often made his points about the ups and downs of the game in poetic verse, adding to the wide appeal of ‘Short Turns.’
“I don’t see anybody who writes in the same way he did,” observes Foerster. “He had a way of using humour to make a point. Writing came to him very naturally —- his father [William Victor Johnston] was a medical doctor in a small town [Lucknow, Ontario] and wrote a book called ‘Before the Age of Miracles: Memoirs of a Country Doctor.’” The entertainment value of Johnston’s writing helped garner a sizable audience for The Sportsman and its comprehensive coverage of Standardbred racing. The publication fulfilled a valuable role in the years before the internet made race results and commentary more readily available. “Certainly Bruce had a tremendous impact,” remarks his proud colleague. “What a lot of people will remember is he was not afraid to tackle any of the issues of the day in racing.”
Norman Hall was one of Johnston’s many friends. Together, they came up with what would become the name for Canada’s top harness racing honours. “We were sitting in the pancake house here in Charlottetown, having breakfast, and he brought up the subject and we just kind of kicked it around,” PEI’s pedigree expert tells TROT. “At that time, I was putting something together called the ‘Joe O’Brien Exhibit.’ I guess we were discussing that—the idea was to put together an exhibit and then take it all over the Island.” Johnston became a supporter of the exhibit, and asked Hall what might make a suitable name for the annual Canadian harness racing awards, to be established in 1989. “It was pretty logical —- ‘The O’Briens.’ So that’s how it came to be, over a feed of pancakes.”
Johnston’s New London, PEI cottage was a short distance from Hall’s, located in Cavendish. “The first time I ran into Bruce, we played golf together at the Green Gables,” remembers the manager of the PEI Colt Stakes. “We were paired together in the same group to start out. I knew of him, of course, from The Canadian Sportsman. When you’re walking around with a mutual interest in horses and such, that’s how our friendship grew.”
Hall says Johnston often arrived in PEI with another friend from Ontario, the late Hall of Fame trainer/driver Bill Wellwood. “Bruce and him were both characters. They were very good friends off the golf course, but put them on the golf course and put a putter in their hand, and they were at war —- and neither of them could play very well!”
Johnston was definitely not on the Island to talk shop about publishing or journalism, according to Hall: “We used to get together up at his place. He’d have late-night soirees where he’d get a bunch of the boys and girls together and we’d sit on the patio, look at the stars, and the story that he loved to tell everybody was about the local ‘ghost ship’ in the bay there. He’d make everybody sit out there and watch—of course, the drunker they got, the greater the chance they might see something!”
Standardbred racing was never far from his thoughts, however. “Our discussions were all centered on harness racing, what we can do to improve it —- that was always a constant theme in his mind: trying to make it better,” says Hall. Their conversations were filled with ideas to grow the sport. “He suggested one time, when we were worried about the decline in the local trotting population on the Island, ‘Why don’t you have a trotting-only program? Highlight them!’ So as part of Colt Stakes weekend, we put together a program with two and three-year-old trotters and every other trotter we could dredge up in the Maritimes,” explains Hall. “That’s how we had ‘Trotfest’ —- the first time it had ever been done. We had it three years in a row.”
Hall has no recollection of Johnston ever bringing his own racing stock to PEI, but he does mention an innovation the new Hall of Fame member once brought to Canada. “Joel Falkenham [Canadian Sportsman co-owner and proprietor of Gala Farms] was one of Bruce’s best friends -— they owned horses together,” says Hall. “Joel had a little farm there in Aylmer, Ontario. Bruce talked him into building a straight strip. It was kind of a new thing in North America, but it was used over in Europe. Bruce had been over there and seen one, and thought it would be a good idea to kind of train them in a straight line instead of going around turns, [with] young horses in particular, straining their joints going around turns. It does make sense, and they built it right alongside Joel’s track and Joel built a special bleacher for the spectators, and specifically for Bruce, at the end of the track there to watch the proceedings.”
A member of the Ontario Agriculture and Horse Racing Commission and promoter of the Ontario Sires Stakes program, Johnston was constantly working on new plans to improve the sport. Hall, who occasionally wrote articles for The Sportsman, recalls his friend always seeking the next “edge” to boost harness racing, while simultaneously dealing with the stresses and deadlines inherent to journalism. “Bruce died before his time, on a golf course, playing with Bill [Wellwood],” says Hall. Johnston was only 59 years old. His contributions were acknowledged the same year he passed when he became the posthumous recipient of the Canadian Standardbred Horse Society’s General Achievement Award for 1993.
The trophy presented to each season’s best Ontario Sires Stakes trainer is also named the Johnston Cup in his honour, a tradition that began in 1993.
Johnston’s contributions to harness racing are many, yet none eclipse the reasons he merits the title of “Communicator” in the Hall of Fame. He kept a piece of Canadian racing history alive, entertaining his readers and building relationships with others who love nothing more than a day at the track. Norman Hall remembers sitting with him in the bleachers outside at Summerside Raceway and Charlottetown Driving Park during stakes season: “He didn’t have much interest in going inside and dining —- he liked to get out and talk to people.” Stirring the pot was sometimes part of those conversations. “There are so many characters in the sport,” laughs Hall. “I’ve written about them different times and I’ve run into my share of them personally. Some have caused me grief and some have caused me joy.” Where did Bruce Johnston fall on that spectrum? “Oh, very much on the joy side!” Extending the years of The Canadian Sportsman was very special -— “And he was too.”
Gary Foerster agrees: “Bruce passed away 23 years ago. Unfortunately, I’m getting to the age of going to a lot of funerals of Bruce’s contemporaries, but whenever his name is brought up, it’s with smiles and laughter.”
