The Winner’s Circle
TALES OF THE TRACK, A FAINTING ATTACK
Ever wonder what Motown’s music makers and marketing mavens did when they weren’t working?
Well, gambling was obviously a major pursuit, outside (and sometimes inside) Hitsville U.S.A. “We used to gamble a lot,” admitted Brian Holland in Come and Get These Memories, recalling weekend poker sessions at Berry Gordy’s house. “What a sight,” remembered Gordy in To Be Loved. “The table was piled high with thousands, and everyone concentrating, holding their cards close to their chests.”
Smokey Robinson was a golf addict, about which he wrote in Inside My Life: “We’d get to the office early, write, record, do our business, and by noon be out at the links.” He added, “Golf will get you going – like it got me going in the ’60s – and hold you in its spell for the rest of your life.” True enough. When speaking to Mickey Stevenson by phone a couple of years ago, I heard someone else come into the room – and Stevenson said he had to go. It was Smokey, waiting to hit the links with him.
David Ruffin, stable owner
In How Sweet It Is, Lamont Dozier recalled another activity. “Now that we all had a little money,” he wrote, “the Hollands had gotten into horse racing. They were as likely to be at the track as they were at Hitsville.” The songwriter wasn’t happy about that. “I found myself increasingly isolated, hammering away alone at the piano for hours,” he declared.
Eddie and Brian took their new hobby seriously, using part of their hitmaking income to set up Holland Stables in Detroit circa 1969 even while establishing their new label ventures. Brian told the Detroit Free Press that he’d “like to be the first black man to win the Kentucky Derby.” The brothers owned at least eight horses, including Father Zakoor – a four-year-old gelding which won the Hazel Park Gold Cup in July ’69, just as the Honey Cone’s “While You’re Out Looking For Sugar” was climbing the charts – and a three-year-old, Misty Mint. (In the mid-1980s, when Eddie Holland suffered with tax troubles, he sought to have Holland Stables’ financial losses deducted from his liabilities.)
Another senior Motown figure who was partial to racing was the late Barney Ales. He served as the company’s promotion kingpin through the ’60s, and its executive VP and general manager as the 1970s drew near. “My father was always a big horse person,” Ales told me, “and when I was a kid, I always had to go get him the racing form down the street.” In the summer of ’69, influential Detroit impresario Joe Nederlander, whom Ales knew well, introduced the Motown executive to thoroughbred ownership. “He said, ‘You know, Barney, there’s a big sale coming up in Louisville, why don’t you fly down and see what you think?’ I thought, ‘That’s not a bad idea.’ ” It led to the purchase of his first yearling that August. Fourteen months later – as Motown ruled the Billboard Hot 100 with the Jackson 5’s “I’ll Be There” – Ales secured his first Number One as an owner: his Barnacle B won at Detroit’s Hazel Park racetrack in October 1970.
A MILLION-DOLLAR ACQUISITION
There were riders in the Gordy family, too. Ales and his wife Mitzi “used to go horseback riding on Belle Isle with Berry and [Gordy’s sister] Louyce,” he remembered. “Loucye was a big horse lady.” At Hazel Park, though, Ales seldom rolled the dice. “I would only bet $100 on my own horse. I was never a gambler. I gambled on records – I didn’t gamble on something I couldn’t control.”
For a serial gambler, Berry Gordy himself took a while to invest in the track and its possibilities. It was in late 1980 that, through an acquaintance with art and rare coin dealer Bruce McNall, the Motown founder bought Argument, his first steed – which promptly won a prestigious race in Washington, D.C. It had cost Gordy and McNall $1.2 million to acquire the French colt. “I fainted when he told me how much it would cost to buy the horse,” Gordy said at the time. “When I came to, we had [bought] him.” And the rider who steered Argument to triumph? It was Lester Piggott, now regarded as one of the 20th century’s greatest jockeys.
Berry Gordy with Bruce McNall (first left), the winning Argument, and jockey Lester Piggott
“When Argument won the Washington, D.C., International, our first race, we were offered $5 million on the spot,” wrote Gordy in his autobiography. “That day I became a fanatic about horse racing. The horse’s value had quadrupled and I didn’t have to worry about him coming back to renegotiate his deal.”
Gordy continued as an owner through the 1980s and ’90s, and his Vistas Stables was managed for a while by Roger Campbell, former valet and road manager for the Supremes. “I get such a kick out of seeing how much [Gwen] and Anna enjoy themselves at the track,” he reminisced in To Be Loved. “Avid handicappers, decked out, sharp from head to toe – they always come dressed for the winner’s circle.” In the early 2000s, Gordy’s interest in thoroughbreds was rekindled, and he co-owned steeds Just Wonder and Miss Bridget Jones.
But such interest was not confined to members of Motown’s executive circle. David Ruffin, too, owned a stable of 18 horses during the early ’70s in Windsor, across the Canadian border. “I used to want to be a jockey,” he said during interviews promoting his 1975 comeback album, Who I Am. “My father had two horses and about 250 chickens.” As a youngster, Ruffin worked with horses at a jockey club in Arkansas, before moving to Detroit; decades later, he taught his own children to ride.
‘EVERYBODY KNEW JOANNE’
But perhaps the most committed, successful owner of horses in the Motor City’s music community was Joanne Jackson, wife of numbers runner Ed (“Fast Eddie”) Wingate, who also owned Motown rival Golden World Records. Given her husband’s primary business, it was perhaps no surprise that Jackson began racing thoroughbreds circa 1965. “She was at the track all the time, everybody knew her,” Barney Ales said. “She could tell you who was the stud for every horse that was running in Detroit.”
Moreover, in 1976, Jackson headed a group of black entrepreneurs, known as Detroit Downs, who sought the rights from Michigan’s racing commission – unsuccessfully, as it turned out – to operate their own racetrack and compete with the Windsor Raceway. “It sticks in my craw to see so many millions of American dollars going across the river to Canada every winter,” she told the Detroit Free Press. Doubtless, her husband felt the same way.
At the Detroit racetrack in 1967, Barney Ales (first left) and Esther Edwards
Jackson had her own box at Hazel Park, recalled Ales. “She was always drinking in the dining room area, too, she had a table there.” He also owned a box, near the finishing line (the Motown official wasn’t short of his own influence in racing circles). In later years, Jackson and Wingate retired to America’s gambling haven, Las Vegas.
Ales wrapped up his racehorse recollections with a tale of Nate McCalla, known for his New York-based Calla label (J.J. Jackson, Bettye LaVette) and as an associate – bodyguard, even – of music industry godfather Morris Levy. “Nate came through Detroit, for whatever reason, and came to the track when I had the horses. Joanne was there, near my table upstairs. Nate was leaving and he gave me $100 to put on this horse. I didn’t get to the window in time, or whoever I sent to the window didn’t get there in time – and the goddamn horse won.
“So the next time I was in New York, I gave the $400 or $500 to Nate. He said, ‘I can pick ’em, can’t I?’ I told him the story – and he gave me the money back.” Hardly the sort of behaviour one usually associates with McCalla.
These days, you’re more likely to spot the Motown name attached to a horse than see Berry Gordy or the Hollands at the track. Steeds by the name of Motown Magic and Mo Town have raced in Limerick and Louisville, respectively (the latter horse also won at the Hollywood Derby). And earlier this year, Motown Girl, the four-year-old sibling of a graded stakes winner in Kentucky, sold for a handsome sum – even more, perhaps, than the thousands of dollars piled high on that table in the Gordy mansion.