PHOTOS BY JEFF GRANIT staff A horse bearing the name and colors of harness racing Hall of Fame driver Stanley Dancer makes a final trip around the Freehold Raceway track on Tuesday in a tribute to the legendary horseman, who died Sept. 8 at the age of 78. Stanley Dancer, 78,
put New Egypt on map;
leaves sterling legacy
BY TIM MORRIS
Staff Writer
To harness racing fans Stanley Dancer was a legend, a groundbreaking, record-setting driver who changed the sport.
Surrounded by their families, Stanley Dancer’s daughters, Susan Moyher and Shaldonna Chaisson, watch as a hearse bearing the body of their father takes a final lap around Freehold Raceway on Tuesday afternoon. His son, Ronald Dancer, knew a different Stanley Dancer.
“He was down to earth, very humble, shy and modest,” he said. “He never lost sight of his humble beginnings.”
Ronald Dancer lost more than a father and a friend. He lost a role model with the passing of his father, Harness Racing Hall of Fame driver Stanley Dancer, 78, on Sept. 8 in Pompano Beach, Fla.
JEFFGRANIT staff Jody Dancer, wife of the late Stanley Dancer, holds granddaughter Ceanna Chaison as she touches Stanley’s silks during a memorial service at Freehold Raceway on Tuesday. “We all look up to our fathers as role models,” said Ronald, the mayor of Plumsted Township and a state assemblyman for the 30th District in Monmouth and Ocean counties. “I was fortunate to have him as a father and a role model, someone who instilled honesty and integrity.”
With the passing of Dancer, the son of a sharecropper who called New Egypt home and began his career at Freehold Raceway, harness racing lost a legend, and Freehold Raceway lost a good friend.
His death signaled the end of an era, an era when harness racing was king. Dancer won the International Trot in 1962 with Su Mac Lad in front of 54,000 fans at Roosevelt Raceway in New York, and Dancer was the face of the sport. He could count Whitey Ford and Mickey Mantle among his friends. He was invited to the White House by President Lyndon Johnson in 1968 and made the cover of Sports Illustrated.
But for all of his great races on the track and the thrills he brought to fans across the country, Stanley Dancer’s legacy is not the records he set, according to his son.
“Many records of his still stand, but it’s his record of impeccable honesty and integrity in a sport that depends upon the public’s trust that is his greatest record,” Dancer said. “Everyone knew every time he went on the track in six decades of racing that he brought honesty and integrity.”
Dancer made his debut in 1946 at Freehold Raceway, Freehold, and retained a fondness for the track. He brought Cardigan Bay, the first standardbred to earn $1 million in a career, to the half-mile oval, and later his superhorse, Albatross, there to race. The Harold Dancer Memorial Pace and the Helen Dancer Pace for fillies, begun at Freehold in the mid-1970s, remain major stakes events. The James B. Dancer Memorial Stake has a purse in excess of $275,000 this year and will be raced on Oct. 29. When Dancer was asked if he wanted to move the Dancer Pace to the Meadowlands, where it would draw more attention and money, he refused. The races belonged in Freehold, he said.
In 1980, Niatross, the superhorse of his time, raced at Freehold and packed the stands. It was all because of Dancer. Clint Galbraith, the driver of Niatross, said the only reason he brought his horse to Freehold to race was because Stanley Dancer had asked him to.
Steve Wolf, the former publicity director at Freehold Raceway and currently publicity director at Pompano Park, where Dancer trained his horses in the winter and retired to in the mid-1990s, said that Dancer stood as the giant of his sport.
“He more than anyone emphasized being the icon of harness racing,” Wolf said. “He did it as a gentleman and the ultimate sportsman. With his passing we see the end of the great era of the driver/trainer.”
Popular Freehold Raceway driver Harold Kelly, of Manalapan, who now trains horses at Showplace Farms, Millstone, drove for Dancer for five years in the late 1980s.
“It was a great experience, the best of my life to be around someone who excelled at what he did,” said Kelly, recalling Dancer. “There’s no comparison. He was the best. He had so much ability and did everything to perfection. He has to be one of the best, if not the best person in harness racing history.”
Dancer was an inspiration for younger drivers as well. Freehold’s Cat Manzi, the current driving champion of Freehold Raceway, raced against Dancer briefly. But, like any admiring fan, he watched his every move on the track.
“The guy was a great horseman,” Manzi said. “One of the greatest ever in the sport. I never really got to know him, but I raced against him and saw his work.”
Dancer’s record speaks for itself — the 23 Triple Crown wins (a record at the time); the record three Triple Crown winning horses, trotters Nevele Pride (1968) and Super Bowl (1972) and the pacer, Most Happy Fella (1970); four wins in the Hambletonian and Little Brown Jug; driver of such all-time greats as Nevele Pride and Albatross, and other Harness Horse of the Year winners Su Mac Lad (1962) and Keystone Ore (1976); he drove and trained more Horse of the Year winners (seven) than anyone in the sport’s history; he was the first driver to earn $1 million in purses in a single year, and Cardigan Bay was the first career-winnings $1 million standardbred.
Over his driving career that lasted from 1946-1995, Dancer won 3,781 races with total purse earnings of more than $28 million.
Perhaps the Universal Driver Rating System (UDRS) speaks best for Dancer. Like a .300 batting average in baseball, a .300 rating is considered very good. In successive years from 1962-68, his UDRS rating was .468, .468, .442, .423, .493, .488 and .511.
Perhaps his finest moment in racing was in 1983. His Dancer’s Crown was the overwhelming favorite to win harness racing’s biggest event, the Hambletonian.
Dancer, who knew a great horse when he saw one having driven the likes of Albatross and Nevele Pride, was putting this trotter in their league. However, less than a month before the race, Dancer’s Crown died from an intestinal ailment. A distraught Dancer turned to his stable and the filly Dueena. She went on to beat the colts, giving Dancer an emotional Hambletonian triumph, his record-setting fourth.
The Dancer story is one of rags to riches.
“My father didn’t have much of a formal education growing up,” Ronald said. “He had a God-given talent for race horses. That was his calling. He had an innate ability.”
According to Dancer, among other things his father used to drive a milk route with a horse and buggy. When the day was done, he and others would race along the back roads of New Egypt. Dancer took a liking to harness racing as a result and made his racing debut at Freehold Raceway in 1946, before he was 18 years old.
That year, Dancer borrowed $150 from his mother and bought the pacer Candor. He was an old pacer considered broken down by many. But Dancer worked his magic, got the horse to the track and would earn more than $13,000, enabling him to start purchasing other horses. He was in the sport for good and the rest is harness racing history.
Dancer’s driving changed the way standardbred races were run. He was an aggressive driver who took his horses to the front, forcing the pace. Gone were the days of drivers positioning themselves for a mad dash to the finish over the last quarter-mile. Dancer won many a race by darting to the front and leaving everyone else behind. It’s the reason that at one time he held every racing world record for trotters and pacers on all size tracks.
Driving at Roosevelt Raceway in New York in the late 1940s allowed Dancer to meet other sports celebrities, among them Ford and Mantle. He would eventually train horses for Ford in Florida.
The Yankees, Ronald Dancer pointed out, were the closest thing that his father had for a hobby.
“My father was so focused on harness racing that he hardly took a vacation,” he said. “He was totally dedicated to the business. That was his hobby. He had no other outside interests. He became a New York Yankees fan through his connections with Whitey Ford.”
Dancer would follow his father into the business, developing a different relationship with his famous father.
“I worked with him many years,” he said. “I drove horses with him. I seldom beat him, but when I did he’d be the first to congratulate me. It was a friendship.
“He was pleased that I got into the sport,” he added. “Dad did not want to push me. I enjoyed working on the farm. It was a wonderful opportunity for me.”
Stanley Dancer never forgot his roots, even after he became a celebrity. He gladly opened his New Egypt farm, Egyptian Acres, to the public for a country fair that attracted 6,000 to 8,000 fans daily for a weekend of racing. All of the money went to charity.
“He had a fondness for country fairs and the grass-roots heritage of the sport,” said Ronald.
As the son of sharecroppers, Dancer constantly moved around western New Jersey as a youngster (he was born in West Windsor). One of the farms that he stayed at is today the New Egypt Historical Museum, where the Stanley Dancer Room houses many of his awards and trophies. It’s the room he slept in when the family lived there.
“It’s kind of an irony that my dad started out basically with nothing and today the farmhouse he lived in for a couple of years is the New Egypt Historical Museum,” noted Ronald.
Stanley Dancer and Freehold Raceway still had one final act to play. Dancer was scheduled to make one last trip around the racetrack on the way to burial at Maplewood Cemetery in Freehold Township on Tuesday. Family, horsemen and fans were expected to line up along the fence to pay one final tribute to the harness racing giant.
“Father had a wish to retire on the racetrack,” said Ronald Dancer. “His last drive will be on Freehold Raceway, where he drove his first race.”