Why I Left (And Why I'm Coming Back)

It’s no secret that legendary driver and 2011 Hall Of Fame inductee Steve Condren has been absent from the racing roster for the better part of this season,

and, always modest, he has kept the details of his sabbatical quietly under wraps. But here, in the midst of his recovery from colon cancer, Condren shares his story with his good friend (and award-winning writer) Rob Longley.

Even though he has spent much of the past three decades as one of the savviest catch drivers in the sport, Steve Condren looks so calm in the race bike that you might wonder if he has a pulse, nevermind a fighter’s punch.

You think Condren and you think cool. Whether timing a stretch rally to perfection or his statuesque posture behind a horse, his style has long been about understatement and precision rather than forced flashiness.

Calm or not, with 6,621 victories banked in a stellar career, the St. Catharines, Ontario native has no intention of ending the party any time soon. Condren clearly knows far more about winning than losing. So when things got off to a rocky start shortly after his diagnosis with colon cancer this spring, a fire rarely seen in the 54-year-old bubbled to the surface. And it was a burst of emotion that may ultimately have changed the course of his life.

What should have been a Hall of Fame summer for one of the Canadian shrine’s newest inductees was overshadowed by the fact that it was also the summer he became a cancer patient. Imagine what went through his mind, then, when just days after being diagnosed, the news got progressively worse.

After receiving the initial verdict and a treatment plan at one Southern Ontario hospital, Condren admits he came close to losing it. Still emotionally raw from coming to terms with the idea, the blunt prognosis and course of action to kick it came as a shock – and the bedside manner he received he found insulting.

Condren was told that the colostomy required after a tumour was removed from his bowel would likely be a permanent fixture, meaning an end to his career... and so much more.

“When (doctors) told me to be prepared not to be attached again,” he recalls, “because the tumour is in a very difficult spot, I guess I reacted. ‘Don’t worry about it!’ they said. ‘It’s your life we are trying to save!’ Needless to say, I wasn’t getting that loving feeling.”

With his wife Carol at his side, Condren left the hospital steaming and immediately searched for other options and opinions. Before the day was over, he was in touch with Dr. Robin McLeod, a renowned expert on bowel disease, who was more than willing to offer a second opinion. “She saw me the next morning – and this is a high-profile surgeon, a real star in her field – and within five minutes she had her whole team there,” says Condren of the Toronto-based doctor. “They explained to me the operation and how we could re-attach everything and how she didn’t see a problem. I asked her if she could do it and she said “yes.”

Within five days, they had developed a course of action.

Besides the speed and professionalism of McLeod’s team, Condren was enthused by confirmation that the tumour was containable, and that the surgeon believed there was a good shot her newest patient could win the battle. “At first you have a hard time accepting it,” Condren admits. “Then, when you get the news that it’s beatable, you drive on.”

Though well under way, that treatment plan is far from finished – and indeed, the toughest times lie ahead, most significantly with surgery to remove the tumour scheduled for early September.

But to borrow from the commentary of his profession, Condren has gone a nice first half in this... the biggest race of his life. The initial treatment involved five weeks of radiation and chemotherapy, a daily grind that zapped him of his energy. Every weekday morning, Condren and his wife would leave their Milton home shortly after 5 a.m. for the minimum 45-minute drive to Toronto’s Princess Margaret Hospital, where chemicals and radiation were set free to attack the nastiness in his body.

Having survived that ordeal, (which ended in early August), Condren is readying himself and summoning some strength for the next phase of his fight in an operating room. “It does knock you on your (butt), but it seems like the more I do, the better I feel,” Condren tells me over lunch one day – just a few hours after one of those treatments. “The radiologist can’t believe how well I’ve been doing.”

“I haven’t lost any hair and I’ve only lost about eight pounds,” he adds. “The worst part about that is I finally got over 140 pounds before I was diagnosed and was quite pleased with that.”

Indeed, (and almost incredibly), Condren looks none the worse for wear, even on a day towards the end of his first round of treatment. Our conversation is upbeat and funny, and at times crudely self-deprecating. In other words, it is the Condren of old I’m having lunch with... not just an older Condren.

While he doesn’t mind the well wishes, Condren doesn’t want your sympathy, nor to be the centre of attention. His desire to avoid a fuss is the big reason that since he informed Woodbine Entertainment Group officials of his illness in May, Condren hasn’t returned to the track at all. His appearance at the Hall of Fame induction ceremony, in fact, was the first time many of his racing colleagues had contact with him other than by telephone. “I dont want that, people making a big deal over me,” says Condren when I ask why he has stayed so far away.

If that sounds a little like a stricken man feeling sorry for himself, my guess is you’ve got Condren all wrong. It’s not like he has been holing up in the basement of his home, waiting for the cancer to cure itself.

For most of his adult life, his passion away from reining thousands of horses to victory is surely packing his clubs around the golf course. Indeed, it’s at Trafalgar Golf and Country Club (where he has been a longtime member) that Condren has found his biggest support group. Hitting the links almost daily during his treatment was a therapeutic exercise that helped him both physically and mentally.

“There must have been times where he was feeling bad, but he keeps making the effort,” says Trafalgar’s head professional, Fraser McIntyre. “He said to me once that he felt like when he walked the golf course, the bad stuff was getting pumped out of him.”

“He doesn’t look any different,” McIntrye adds. “He’s the same guy, the same skinny runt who has managed to take money from me many times over the years. I truly believe it’s been great therapy for him – he shot even par on our front side the other day, so I can tell you he hasn’t lost too much!”

When he first returned to the course, though, Condren said he had trouble reaching down to pick the ball out of the hole without feeling dizzy, and breaking 80 was a big deal. For a guy who can routinely shoot in the mid-to-low 70s, this was a new feeling, but the score hardly mattered. “The golf course is like the backstretch – word spreads pretty good,” he tells me. “I’ve had lots of people come up to me and tell me they’ve gone through the same thing and they’re still kicking around. My close friends at the golf course have been great support.”

“I try to do something. If I don’t get to play a little golf, I try to go out for a good walk – anything to get some exercise. Even on the days I felt too beat up to do it, that’s where I put the effort in because it makes me feel better.”

There is no good time to find out you have cancer, of course, but there were a couple of extra kicks to the gut for Condren when he was dealt the bad news. For one, he had just returned from what for the past seven years has been his annual winter sabbatical in Florida. As it seems to do every spring, getting back behind some promising horsepower got Condren’s juices flowing again, re-energizing his love for the sport that has provided him a handsome living and lifestyle.

The prospect of guiding more young horses, always his forte, mixed well with his desire to show the young bucks crowding the driver’s room on the WEG circuit that he still has it.

Not long after his return, however, Condren took the advice of his good friend Andre St. John, and went in for a colonoscopy, a procedure he figured would merely be an unpleasant bit of preventative medicine. “The only thing that pissed me off (about that appointment) is I had a bunch of drives Thursday and Friday and had to book off of them,” Condren says.

But that was far from the worst of it.

“When you wake up on the table from the colonoscopy and they send you downstairs for a CT scan because you’ve got cancer... that was probably the gloomiest I’ve been in my life,” says Condren. “That and the (four-week) wait for an MRI. I went through about six weeks of not sleeping much.”

As the fickleness of fate would have it, mere days after getting the dire news, Condren got a pick-me-up with the call that he was destined for the Hall this summer. While the celebration may not have been as robust as in happier times, the honour was a welcome distraction.

Even though treatment was still a few weeks away and he was feeling ‘like he was 25 again’ after his winter rest, Condren made a decision to inform the WEG race office that he was going to be out of business for a while. While it’s the nature of a catch driver to get back into the sulky as soon as possible, Condren says that after the diagnosis, he quickly decided he wouldn’t be driving. Part of it was the doctor’s recommendation – but part of it was common sense. “The baby races were coming, the stakes were coming and I didn’t want to piss anybody off,” he shrugs. “I didn’t want to win a couple of races and then just disappear. The main thing is I didn’t want to stiff the trainers wanting to use me.”

“It’s what I wanted to do. It’s the professional thing to do. It’s a different story when you are racing and get banged up and you are out for six months, but I knew this (stuff) was coming and I knew I wasn’t going to be working. Believe me, I did a lot of soul searching, but to keep on driving until the treatments started wouldn’t be fair to the people I work for.”

Other than a rough stretch immediately following his diagnosis, Condren says he has remained resolute that he can kick the disease and be back in harness sometime in 2012. That inspiration comes from a number of sources, including his father-in-law, Doug Hyatt, who Condren says has “beat (the disease) three times.”

There was also a memorable call from standardbred owner and breeder Dr. Cal Stiller, who is chair of the Ontario Institute of Cancer Research; he counselled Condren on how to attack the diagnosis head-on. “He told me a lot of it is mental,” he says. “He says that’s the part that gets people. I’ve taken that to heart. Other than the first four or five weeks, when I was having a hard time, I have kept this really good attitude. The worst thing you can do is sit around and ask: what did I do to deserve this? I go down to Princess Margaret and I see probably hundreds of people who are in worse shape than I am. That’s a real eye-opener.”

As good as Condren looks and feels now, the biggest battle is still in front of him. With the initial treatment done, a six-week break to build up strength was scheduled prior to the early September surgery. After that, he’s been told to expect to live with a colostomy for six months. The next steps will depend in part on the surgery, but will likely include at least another five weeks of therapy. All told, and if all goes well, it will be a minimum of 13 months from the time he drove his last race until he gets the chance to hop on a bike again.

Condren knows that he will need every ounce of strength and perseverance for the next phase, which will keep him hospitalized for 10 days and essentially immobilized for two months. “It’s a very aggressive plan and they tell me it’s because I’m in such good shape,” Condren explains. “But until they get in there (for surgery), you never know... so you always have those concerns in the back of your mind. They’ve given me every opportunity to beat this, though, so it’s not like I’m sitting around making my bucket list.”

But as you might expect, Condren misses the game even more now that it is temporarily out of his grasp. Not making his annual trek to Delaware, Ohio and the Little Brown Jug for the first time in a quarter century will be tough to take. Still, he watches the races on television with a burning passion – and an itch to return. “Put it this way... I miss the action,” he admits. “I miss the camaraderie of the drivers’ room and the competition.”

In his brief return to racing, Condren managed to find his way to the winner’s circle twice, extending his streak of having at least one winner to 34 consecutive years. The veteran had his share of fun spreading that news around the driver’s room, especially to some of the young guns who were far from being born when he won his first race.

Will there be a 35th and beyond? Go ahead and bet against him – Condren will gladly take your action. ”After my last night driving, I put my helmet inside my locker and told (drivers’ room attendant) Chris Baise: ‘I’ll be back,’” Condren grins. “‘I’ll let you know when to knock the dust off of it.”