Only four pacers born in the last 40 years have won more races than Tattler’s Jet, but last week it looked as if he, after 460 starts, might miss his final chance to win one more.
On Dec. 18, he was lame in one foot, the result of an abscess. His trainer, Gene Miller, had taken him to the veterinarian but left frustrated and disappointed. Miller had planned on racing Tattler’s Jet, a 14-year-old gelding, at Monticello Raceway in upstate New York.
“I give up,” he said at the time. “The horse is done. It’s just not supposed to happen, I guess.”
But Miller did not give up. Inside his barn on the Eaton County Fairgrounds outside Lansing, Mich., he worked on that sore foot day and night, and covered it with a homemade cow manure poultice meant to relieve inflammation. An old-fashioned antibiotic tonic, it was the stuff of farmer folklore, and Miller’s last shot.
It did the trick. Three days later, Miller entered Tattler’s Jet in Monticello’s $5,000 Au Revoir race for Thursday night. The race is restricted to 14-year-olds, who by harness racing mandate must retire at the end of the year.
It is fitting that Tattler’s Jet made the race. A blue-collar folk hero on the Midwest harness circuit, he has never missed a beat in a career that beggars belief. Bred in Wisconsin, a state known more for livestock, he is one of the sturdiest racehorses to pull a sulky. He has won 120 races from 460 starts in a 12-year career, racing every week, at 53 tracks across seven states and Canada. His career earnings of $324,735 were ground out a few hundred each race; he never won more than $3,650 in a single race.
Tattler’s Jet has never raced in the Northeast, where most of the big tracks and best races are concentrated. He is one of 54 14-year-olds who made at least one start this year; seven entered the Au Revoir, which has been staged only five times since 1991. In terms of career starts, the closest to Tattler’s Jet in the field is 331.
“He’s a tough old horse,” Miller, 68, said. “He had the stamina like some of these old baseball players.”
Standardbreds, the breed of horse in harness racing, are far more durable than thoroughbreds. More muscled and longer bodied than thoroughbreds, they have been bred for centuries for their solidity and calm temperament. Their action is also more balanced, making them less prone to injury. A thoroughbred’s weight basically lands on one front foot at 40 miles per hour; with trotters and pacers, two legs move in unison.
Still, Tattler’s Jet is special. Of the hundreds of thousands of standardbreds foaled since 1973, 65 have made 450 or more starts. The most wins by any pacer is 137.
“He is basically a war horse,” said Gabe Wand, president of the Wisconsin Harness Horse Association. “It’s incredible. To race a horse 460 times is outrageous, to keep him going like that and keep him sound.”
More remarkable is how Tattler’s Jet made it to this point. He lost his first 30 races and rarely came close to winning, at which point most people would have given up. His owner, Dave Carter, did not. Carter, 71, trained Tattler’s Jet in his early years — and even drove him in many races — and then sent him to Miller in December 2003, after the horse had proved his worth at small Wisconsin fairs.
Neither man has spent his retirement in repose. Carter, who lives in Eau Claire, Wis., worked at a paper mill for more than 37 years and retired at 60. Retirement allowed him to train and race more horses. He had built a half-mile, sand-based track on his 30-acre farm, where his daughter and son also train and drive horses.
For 31 years, Miller worked on an assembly line at General Motors’s Fisher Body plant in Lansing. He retired in 1997. His craftsmanship carries over to training horses. A gruff, do-it-yourself man, he shoes and ships his horses, and he once won an amateur driving series in Montana. To keep costs down, he buys grain from a farmer at wholesale prices and stores several tons at $5 a month. The majority of his costs come from fuel. He drives 60,000 miles a year between his farm and tracks around the Midwest.
Asked to explain Tattler’s Jet’s longevity, Miller offered one reason: “Proper nutrition. That’s a big thing. I only feed the whole grains — corn, oats, barley, soybean — and good quality hay.”
Tattler’s Jet got better with age and more racing. In nine years with Miller, he averaged 40 starts per year. Last year, at 13, he raced 51 times. For Miller, this is normal: he also trained a trotter named Crafty Sailor for Carter during the second half of the horse’s 330-race career. Miller also won 113 races with a horse named Bingham.
“One thing about Gene is he likes to race,” Carter said. “And he’ll get ’em ready for you. He’s an honest trainer. He don’t give them no drugs or anything.”
In 1991, Carter purchased Jodhpurs, Tattler’s Jet’s dam, for $1,100 at an Amish sale in Granton, a town about 60 miles from Eau Claire. She had never raced, but her brother had won more than $200,000, Carter said.
Her first foals were unexceptional, and that looked to be the case with Tattler’s Jet. He started once at age 2, and at 3 could muster only two third-place finishes. He showed little interest in racing. Carter’s daughter Wendy drove him in some races before she got fed up.
“She said he’s too lazy,” Carter recalled, “and he just sits back there and she keeps tapping him.”
In Wisconsin, Tattler’s Jet raced for tiny purses. Minnesota and Iowa, where he also raced, had purses in the thousands. The Wisconsin races are held at county fairs, as entertainment, and the purses are raised from 50/50 raffle tickets, auctions and an annual fund-raising dinner. There is no parimutuel wagering. In 2012, the Wisconsin Harness Horse Association staged races for 13 days at 6 fairs.
“Sometimes we’ll race for $200 and a blanket, or a $50 gas card to the winner,” Wand, the association’s president, said. “We get no government subsidy. It’s as grass-roots as it gets.”
Like other Wisconsin horsemen, Wand has a “real job to pay my horse bills,” he said with a laugh. He works full time in the packing department of a dairy company.
Thinking that Tattler’s Jet’s pedigree indicated he would improve with age, Carter persisted. In the late summer of 2002, he won his 31st start, at Cannon Falls, Minn. Soon afterward he won three in a row — two in one day — at a small fair in Mineral Point, Wis. His winning purses were $225, $225 and $135. Something had clicked for Tattler’s Jet, his come-from-behind style made good.
“We could’ve sold him that day,” Carter recalled. “But money ain’t everything, you know.”
Around this time, Carter met Miller. Their introduction was not particularly pleasant, although Carter laughs about it now.
They were racing against each other one day. Carter recalled: “I was on the lead, and Gene kept running his horse into my cart until finally my tire popped. I got real mad at him that day.”
Carter knew Miller was a tricky, smart trainer who liked to win. Miller was also closer to more tracks and larger purses than Carter was in Eau Claire. So Carter first sent Crafty Sailor to Miller, and Tattler’s Jet the next year.
Miller raced Tattler’s Jet in Michigan, North Dakota, Illinois, Ohio, Minnesota, Iowa and Ontario. Occasionally he returned to Wisconsin. For several summers, Tattler’s Jet shipped to Colonial Downs in Virginia, where the purses were about $10,000. There, in 2010, Tattler’s Jet recorded the fastest mile for a harness horse bred in Wisconsin.
In the Midwest, he has been something of an ambassador for the sport, often giving fans rides once a week at Running Aces Harness Park in Minnesota. He liked to be petted, Carter said, and even if he had raced the day before, he would still do a nice, easy jog for the beginners he pulled.
For Carter, this story almost lost its happy ending. He looked forward to seeing Tattler’s Jet spend his own retirement on the farm, alongside Crafty Sailor, together winners of 227 races. But in July, the old gelding was claimed by a new stable, a surprising move given his age. He became sore almost immediately, was scratched from a few races, and raced only four times. Six weeks later, Carter claimed him back for $6,000.
Miller suggested that Carter not claim him back. “But he had to have him back,” he said. “That’s Carter’s decision. He wanted to give the old guy a home.”
Miller will saddle him one more time, however, before Tattler’s Jet returns home for a much-deserved break.
“I never thought twice about getting him back,” Carter said. “I wanted to finish out his career best we could. They do good for us, so we will do good for them, too.”