by Rich Fisher, USTA Web Newsroom Senior Correspondent

Rich Fisher

Trenton, NJ — Mark Winters, Sr. says there has been no singular highlight in his career as a trainer/driver/owner. Most likely, that’s because Winters feels that having a career in harness racing is a highlight in itself.

“I just like to drive and train horses,” said Winters, who on July 14 won his 1,000th career race at the Franklin County Fair in Hilliard, Ohio. “I don’t care if I’m going for $400 or $400,000; to me a race is a race. I just hope I can continue to do this and make a living out of it.

“I don’t have to be rich. It would be a lot easier if I was, but I’m not. I’ve come to the realization that I’m never going to be rich. But if I can maintain, make a living and pay my bills that’ll be nice.”

As for reaching 1,000 wins, Winters conservatively considers it a nice milestone.

“For a person in my position I reckon, yeah,” he said. “What most people don’t know is that probably three quarters or better of those horses, I own part of.

“I’m just a small stable. I have more partners than I do owners. I do have some owners, but mainly I own horses with other people.”

USTA/Ed Keys photo

Mark Winters, Sr. recently drove the 1,000th winner of his career.

Winters is a slow-talking, quick-witted Ohioan who has lived in Sabina — halfway between Columbus and Cincinnati — since age 5.

“It’s not very big,” he said. “We haven’t even got a McDonald’s here.”

But they have horses that need shoes. And the desire NOT to shoe horses is what led Winters into racing.

As a kid in Sabina he came in contact with a blacksmith named Walter Ferguson, Jr.

“I would go watch him and kind of hung around with him,” Winters said. “I would go with him to shoe horses and I got to see the money change hands and I thought ‘Dang, I gotta get in on this.’”

So Winters went to horseshoeing school in Oklahoma City.

“I quickly learned that job was a lot tougher than (Ferguson) made it look,” Winters said.

Back in Ohio, he shod horses for family friend Bob Stuckey at his training center, and the bug hit him.

“I just thought I’d try training a horse,” Winters said. “I got one horse, one horse escalated into two. Then I thought maybe I’d like to drive a horse. So (Ferguson and Stuckey) helped me get a fair license and it helped me escalate from there.

“I thought training horses was better on my body than shoeing horses. Mr. Ferguson made that look a lot easier than it was.”

Now 47, Winters began driving fairs in 1989 at age 24. With the help of some other friends, including Daryl and Buddy Lewis and Barb Mitchell, he threw himself into the sport and trained at the Clinton County Fairgrounds in Wilmington, Ohio. He moved on to Washington Fairgrounds in 2004.

Winters was strictly an Ohio racer for the early part of his career, but found that for financial reasons he needed to start branching out. Winters has been racing in Indiana and Kentucky over the past few years, more out of necessity than a desire to see the world.

“It got to where it was harder to make a living in Ohio,” he said. “I mainly would rather stay right here, but I mean, with the purse structure falling in Ohio and the economy and all that it was getting a little tough to make a living here.

“Scioto (Downs) is kind of coming back and the rest of the state has come back,” Winters said. “If that happens I would rather just stay here. I’m pretty much a home boy.”

Winters’ partners are many and varied. He drives horses in Kentucky that he raised with Bill Dean and owns Indiana-breds with Allen Schmidthorst of AWS Stables in Lima. Don Dean (Bill’s cousin) is another partner who wants to stay in Ohio and support his state’s racing game. There is also Harry Horowitz of Brooklyn, and one could only imagine the conversations between one guy with a New York accent and the other with a drawl.

“Harry had to learn a whole new language when he started dealing with me,” Winters said with a laugh. “I had to learn a whole new language dealing with him.”

The list goes on, as Winters was fearful of leaving someone out. He also credits Ronnie Glover and KSJ Stable, both of Ohio, as supportive partners.

“I’ve got an interesting group of people,” Winters said. One owns hotels, another is in real estate, one is a retired FBI agent, another is a retired high school athletic director and yet another worked for the phone company.

Too bad one of them isn’t a doctor, since Winters sure needed one over the past year when he suffered a dislocated shoulder and torn rotator cuff in one on-track accident, and a broken jaw in another.

But his time away from driving still worked out well for the family, as his 21-year-old son, Mark Winters, Jr., received the 2011 Peter Haughton Award given to an outstanding young driver in Ohio by the Ohio chapter of the U.S. Harness Writers Association.

“My dad has helped me more than you can imagine,” Mark Jr. said. “He kind of made my career, really. He’s the reason I got that award.

“The majority of my wins from last year and the majority of my success from last year comes from him. Not only the advice he gives me, but being that he was injured a big part of the year I drove his horses. That played a huge role. He could have let someone else drive them.”

That thought never entered the elder Winters’ mind.

“I would really like to see him get a little more horse power,” dad said. “At this time I don’t have much horse power to give him, and I kind of like to drive myself too. I give him as much as I can, I would like to help him more.”

As for the advice he gives his son, Winters said, “We communicate back and forth. Actually he pays a lot of attention and listens a lot to (Ohio Hall of Famer) Chip Noble, which is not a bad mentor.”

Winters is quick to note that his step-daughter, Devan Miller, is also enjoying success.

“I’m very proud of the success she’s having racing horses, along with my own kid,” Miller said. “I’m very proud of both of them.”

And while he would like to watch them race more, Winters is still enjoying life in the sulky. He just hopes he can stay healthy after last year.

“The driving competition is getting pretty serious at Scioto right now,” he said. “The last couple years I hit the dirt a few times and I’m getting pretty picky on what I do drive.

“I like driving horses that I know. That doesn’t mean I won’t drive horses I don’t know, but I’m probably a little more cautious on the ones I don’t know. But, especially at the raceways, you can’t be cautious. You gotta be safe but if something happens in front of you, you can’t be fearful.”

His big hope is to remain in the Buckeye State, where he is a fixture on the fair circuit in addition to racing at pari-mutuel tracks, as much as possible. In 2011, Winters raced 135 times — at 25 different tracks. In 2010, he visited 30 different ovals.

“I enjoy racing horses, I enjoy driving horses,” he said. “I’m by far not the best in the world, but it would be a lot simpler if I could just do it in Ohio, it wouldn’t be so much wear and tear on me. And my wife Carol helps me a ton.”

Carol just happens to be the daughter of Troy Hall of Fame member R.J. “Skeeter” Brown and the mom of Devan, so she understands the sport.

With an up-and-coming son and step-daughter, a Hall of Fame father-in-law, and a solid career in his own right, it’s no wonder every day is a harness racing highlight for Mark Winters.