by Jerry Connors

Harrisburg, PA — I had quite a few memories come back to me when I read of the passing of Lou Guida over the weekend. I’ll bet a lot of other people did, too.

Guida was the car-wash operator turned Merrill-Lynch super-executive turned dominant owner of his era, especially flourishing in the mid- to late-1980s. He paid big prices for horses he and his many partners wanted — and they wanted a lot of them — to the point that there were often four-plus horse entries all hooked up with various Guida ownerships. (Burke–Weaver Bruscemi? Yeah — 25-30 years earlier).

This, of course, was not the way that things were usually done in harness racing. Guida did many things counter to the existing harness culture. For example, he indirectly jump-started the catch-driver era when a horse he owned went from one driving Bill to another — Haughton to O’Donnell — behind Nihilator.

Guida was the furthest thing from the “good colt–tough field-lucky to get a good trip” horsemen of the day. He said non-normal things for harness racing — at times I believed somewhat outrageous — and deliberately so, understanding the old adage that “any press is good press as long as you spell my name right.”

In fact, that was the memory that Lou’s passing specifically triggered in me. I once wrote about what I believed was his “calculated semi-outrageousness” in some of his press conversations. I noted he had the ability to both speak truth, even when it was semi-painful, and also “massage it,” stretch it to a proportion that heightened the event or horse, and harness racing’s awareness of it.

In doing so, I compared Guida’s interviews to those of “Rowdy Roddy” Piper, the famous wrestler who was obviously intelligent and talented, but was also no stranger to hyperbole. I noted that harness racing was not wrestling, but that this particular tactic certainly did much for the profile of both Piper and Guida.

A month or so later, I got a handwritten note back from Mr. Guida, who mentioned reading the story and enjoying it. The part I enjoyed most is that he signed the note “ROWDY RODDY PIPER.” (Caps HIS).

Which made the “irony” of a quote in his obituary particularly striking to me:

Mr. Guida, known for his innovative and often controversial remarks and methods, was asked how harness racing would remember him and he replied, “Probably not at all.”

This was a classic Guidaism/Piperism, because Guida knew that he had changed the harness landscape.

Harness racing remembers him as a member of the Hall of Fame, a master owner and syndicator, and a calculating individual who may not have been always right and danced on some (usually arbitrary) boundaries, but always was trying to make his horses and partnerships — and thus his impact — more substantial, with the media one prime outlet.

In the beloved cult movie They Live (1988), Roddy Piper played a character named Nada (na-da; gui-da), a drifter who undermines a nefarious plot, though losing his life. Piper/Nada is remembered best for a line uttered by the character, an ad-lib by Piper during the filming: “I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick (butt)…and I’m all out of bubblegum.”

Before he came to harness racing, Lou Guida must have used up all of his bubblegum, too.

Jerry Connors is the secretary of the United States Harness Writers Association and a former track and USTA publicist. The views contained in this column are that of the author alone, and do not necessarily represent the opinions or views of the United States Trotting Association.