Happy Handicapper /By Bob Summers
‘Dewey’ goes after a big prize today
You’ll hear a lot about Ray Schnittker today, especially when you watch the telecast of the Hambletonian this afternoon (2 p. m., Ch. 2).
Schnittker, a 50-year-old native of Pendleton (with a North Tonawanda mailing address) who now lives near Goshen in the Catskills, drives and trains the 2-5 morning line favorite, Deweycheatumnhowe, in the $1.5 million Hambletonian, harness racing’s richest race, at the Meadowlands in New Jersey.
The Happy Handicapper has been hearing about Schnittker and his undefeated trotter — named for the fictitious law firm made famous by numerous comedians — for more than a year now. It’s been a topic whenever he runs into Warren Schnittker, Ray’s father, at the OTB parlor on Ridge Lea Road in Amherst.
“Is this the best horse Ray’s ever had?” the H. H. asked Warren by telephone the other day.
“No,” he said. “This is the best horse anybody’s ever had. He’s a freak. He’s never been beat.”
Sure enough, the 3-year-old “Dewey” is perfect in 14 starts. He went 10 for 10 last year, earning $936,191 and the Dan Patch Award as North America’s champion 2-year-old trotting colt. This year, he’s won $267,055 in four races, most recently a 6v-length victory in his Hambletonian elimination heat last Saturday night.
Ray’s two Hambletonian entries — “Dewey” and the Daniel Dube-driven Make It Happen — mark the high point of a horse-training/driving career that started when Ray was about 9 years old.
“I bought a weanling [less than a year old] for a hobby because I had a friend who had a race horse,” Warren recalled. “It cost $250. . . . We raised him on our farm on the canal by the Wendelville Fire Hall. . . . He helped me break it.”
“There’s a picture of me jumping up on him bare-footed,” Ray recalled when contacted by phone at the Meadowlands.
Flash forward a few years and Warren buys another standardbred for $1,800. He remembers it was not very cooperative.
“I come home and said [to Ray], ‘Instead of riding that quarter horse you got, why don’t you ride this rotten thing?’ ” Warren said. Its name was Popular Tuxedo. Ray remembered, “I broke my collarbone riding him.”
“Ray rode him pretty hard,” Warren said. “But he won three races in a row [at Buffalo Raceway] and somebody claimed him off me.”
“He was the first horse we had that was any good,” Ray said. “Actually, he wasn’t very good, but we didn’t know it then.”
As time went on, father and son advanced their equine educations.
“With the money [Popular Tuxedo] made, I went to [the horse auction in] Harrisburg [Pa.] and bought a Tar Heel [sired] yearling named Dave Hanover for $9,000. . . . Ray got his first driving win with him at Buffalo Raceway in ’78. . . . We went from there. . . . Every year Dave Hanover made [money] and every fall I’d go to Harrisburg and get another one,” Warren said.
Training, driving and racing was still a part-time thing for Ray, who worked an assembly-line job at Harrison Radiator in Lockport after graduation from Starpoint High School.
“He was working at Harrison,” Warren recalled. “Then one day he said, ‘Dad, I quit. . . . If I can’t make it full-time racing horses, I’m going back to school.’ ”
From then on, it was all horses for Ray, who competed on the Western New York harness circuit until that fateful day at the end of May 1986 when he and his horses took a big step up in class.
After a feud with Buffalo Raceway President Gaston Valiquette, Ray took his better horses and moved to Roosevelt Raceway on Long Island, where the competition was stiffer but Ray found animals able to compete in the higher classes.
Ray still has bitter words for Valiquette, who retired in 1987 and died in 1992. But, he admits Valiquette “forced me into being a millionaire.”
A pacer named Covert Action, who won 49 of 251 races between 1987 and 1995, helped Ray take a big step up to millionaires’ row. (Through the end of last week, Schnittker had driven 2,268 winners and the horses he drove won over $28 million in purse money).
“Covert Action was a tremendous horse,” Warren recalled. “He raced seven or eight years and made $1,183,000 with Ray. . . . Without him he probably wouldn’t be in a position to own a horse.”
Over the years, Ray Schnittker — who trains about 65-70 horses with a crew headed by second-trainer Paul Doherty — has had some pretty good racers. Many of them were owned, at least in part, by Western New Yorkers. Twice now, he’s finished third in the Hambletonian — with Armbro Plato in 1997 and Armbro Trick in 2000 (both were partly owned by Earl Scheelar of Hamburg and Ron Kelkenberg of Lockport).
But this Deweycheatumnhowe — named by his breeder, Steve Jones of Montgomery and sold for $80,000 at a Kentucky yearling auction — is something else.
His 14 wins, all at the standard one-mile distance, have been by an average of almost 3z len 3/4 th 1/3 , with the fastest in 1:52 2/5.
Not only is he fast, he’s easy to handle and train. He also likes to swim in a pond on Ray’s farm and enjoys letting Ray ride him.
Warren, who has “never missed” seeing any of “Dewey’s races in person, said his “most tremendous race” was his third — in the New Jersey Sire Stakes final on July 11, 2007.
“It was in a driving rain storm . . . when they came off the head of the [first] turn, he was 13 lengths behind,” Warren said.
He was still 2z len 3/4 th 1/3 behind after the third quarter, but kept gaining and won by a neck.
“You can drive him with two fingers, he’s a really good horse,” Ray said last Saturday after “Dewey” won his 14th race, and the 10th at the Meadowlands.
“He likes this track here, very few horses do,” Ray said. “And he just gets over the ground great here.”
