Rye's David McDuffee has spent a lifetime raising champions
Oct. 7—Rye's David McDuffee did not want to give up on her.
After his filly, Bella Bellini, had a forgetful 2-year-old season on the harness racing circuit, his trainer, Nifty Norman, suggested McDuffee cut his losses and sell Bellini.
To Norman's surprise, McDuffee gave Bellini another shot. McDuffee has learned as a horse owner that it pays to have a little patience and he knew Bellini's pedigree well.
"She was part of my family, more or less," said McDuffee, who grew up in Pepperell, Mass., before moving to Merrimack and, later, Rye.
Bellini then won the 2021 Dan Patch 3-Year-Old Trotting Filly of the Year award, became the second 4-year-old mare to win the Trotter of the Year award last year and finished her career with 21 victories and 42 top-four finishes in 51 career starts.
Star horses like Bellini are why McDuffee was recently elected into the Harness Racing Living Hall of Fame.
"Everybody in the industry loved to watch her race because she would be last at the half and first at the end," said McDuffee, 85, who has been involved in harness racing for more than four decades.
"She just wanted to chase horses. If you put her on top, she thought the race was over."
Bellini's mother (a dam in horse-racing terms), Bella Dolce, and grandmother (second dam), Pizza Dolce, were also owned by McDuffee.
Bella Dolce won 15 races in the late 2000s as a 2- and 3-year-old, including the Canadian Breeders Championship, Champlain Stakes and Simcoe Stakes.
Pizza Dolce was the 2002 Dan Patch 2-Year-Old Trotting Filly of the Year and won notable races like the Goldsmith Maid, Matron, Lexington Breeders and Kentucky Sires Stakes final over her career.
McDuffee recently sold half his ownership stake in Bellini, now on to her second career as a broodmare, to Steve Jones, a breeder who owns Cameo Hills Farm in New York.
"Those horses are the reason I'm going in," McDuffee said of the hall of fame honor, "because they made me."
Harness racing is similar to thoroughbred racing but harness racing drivers sit in a two-wheeled cart attached to the horse, called a sulky, instead of riding the horse like thoroughbred jockeys.
Growing up around horses
While McDuffee was growing up, his dad, Duane, always had a few horses. McDuffee owned his first race horse, Atto Mite, before his first car and fondly remembers racing him at Rockingham Park in Salem in the late 1940s.
While McDuffee was in the U.S. Army, he spent one year stationed at Fort Bragg in North Carolina around 1960. Conveniently for McDuffee, Fort Bragg was only a 45-minute drive from Pinehurst Harness Track, a winter racehorse racing training center where he spent most of his weekend recreational time.
At that time, McDuffee said, legendary trainers and drivers like Earle Avery and Frank Safford, a Swanzey native, had their stables at Pinehurst.
"I just fell in love with the horses as a kid and I've never stopped," McDuffee said.
McDuffee spent his working adult life in the insurance business but always had his eyes on eventually becoming a harness racing owner. He owned McDuffee Insurance, which started in Merrimack and later had several locations in New Hampshire and Massachusetts before he sold it about 20 years ago to Brown & Brown.
McDuffee started buying horses as a hobby when he was about 40 years old and first raced them around New England at tracks like Rockingham Park and Foxboro (Mass.) Raceway, which was located next to the old Foxboro Stadium before closing in 1997. Eventually, he moved his stable to New York and New Jersey.
Magical Mike was McDuffee's first notable racehorse. The colt, over a two-year span in 1993 and 1994, won top races like the Little Brown Jug, Breeders Crown Final, Woodrow Wilson Pace and Governor's Cup Stakes.
McDuffee was part owner of Magical Mike and another of his successes, Kadabra, an Illinois-bred colt who was inducted into the Canadian Horse Racing Hall of Fame in 2012.
Kadabra, who did not have a great pedigree, was not on McDuffee's radar until a conversation he had with Chuck Sylvester in 2001.
Sylvester, who co-owned a training center with McDuffee in New Jersey then, was preparing for a final race in Delaware but, to McDuffee's surprise, was not confident his horse could win it.
"It was a big race — $300,000, $400,000 or something and I said, 'You'll be OK,'" McDuffee said. "He said, 'No, Dave, I'll tell you something. There's a horse out in Illinois ... there's no way I'm going to win.'"
Kadabra won that final. Six months later, in January of 2002, McDuffee got a cold call at his Florida home from an owner trying to put together a group to buy Kadabra.
Remembering his conversation with Sylvester, McDuffee joined the five-person group who purchased Kadabra for $800,000 — then the highest price ever paid for an Illinois-bred horse. "I didn't hesitate one minute," McDuffee said.
Kadabra won 10 of his 14 races as a 2-year-old, another 11 races as a 3-year-old and 25 overall in his career, including the Canadian Trotting Classic, Stanley Dancer, American National Stakes and Breeders Crown.
Lesson learned
Kadabra, McDuffee said, was a prime example of one of the biggest lessons he has learned over his ownership career: You can research everything about a horse — race history, pedigree and conformation (physical structure) — but its heart cannot be measured.
"He had the perfect body for a race horse but his breeding was not outstanding ... but he was just a very special, gifted athlete," McDuffee said. "I would never, ever have bought Kadabra as a yearling, which is when I buy most of my horses — when they're a year old. I would have fell in love with him from a physical standpoint but the family tree wasn't strong enough at that time.
"He made the tree."
As a stallion, Kadabra, who died in 2021 at age 22, sired more than 1,300 horses. Over 900 of his offspring are racing horses, including McDufee's recent champions like 2013 Horse of the Year and Harness Racing Hall of Famer Bee A Magician and 2009 2-Year-Old Filly of the Year Poof She's Gone.
Pizza Dolce was the first mare bred to Kadabra, McDuffee said, and the two produced Bella Dolce, the dam of Bella Bellini.
"I've had that family for four generations now, which is pretty amazing," McDuffee said.
McDuffee, who won the 2021 owner of the year award, does a great amount of research when deciding which horses to buy at the horse sales in Kentucky, an annual event in October.
Pedigree is a big factor for McDuffee, who prides himself on his breeding knowledge, and he also considers the horse's conformation. He compared the research process similar to what MLB teams do when looking for their next big prospect.
McDuffee had first-hand knowledge to draw on when researching a group of horses he will be looking to buy at least a couple of in Kentucky this year.
The first crop of offspring of 2020 world champion Papi Rob Hanover, who McDuffee said could have been his greatest horse if not for an injury early in his career, will be available for purchase there.
Papi Rob Hanover set the world record (1 minute, 47.1 seconds) for a 3-year-old colt on a 5/8s-mile track in 2020 to win the Delvin Miller Adios Pace for the Orchids. He won seven races overall before a broken coffin bone in 2020 ended his career. "I think, if he hadn't broken that bone, he probably would have every record in the world today because he was an incredible horse," McDuffee said.
McDuffee, who played baseball and basketball growing up, said he currently owns nearly 40 horses. What keeps him in the business is the same aspect that hooked him on it in the first place: the competition.
"I've always said that, after I got a little bit older, I couldn't play baseball, I couldn't play basketball," McDuffee said, "I couldn't own a baseball team or a football team but I could manage a horse racing stable and I did that."
