Toronto’s Marvin Katz (above, Dave Landry photo) is fresh off his seventh Breeders Crown victory as an owner Saturday (Oct. 24) at Woodbine Racetrack, but the horse that changed his life is not the royally-bred homebred two-year-old trotting filly All The Time he shares with Al Libfeld of Pickering, ON.
In fact, despite owning countless champions as one of Ontario’s most successful owners of standardbreds, Katz needed less than a second to name the horse that was his life-changer.
“Dream Away. It’s a no-brainer,” Katz said of the 1997 winner of the $1 million Meadowlands Pace; a horse that earned more than $1.3 million on the track for Katz, Libfeld and Sam Goldband of Toronto, Katz’s 40-year partner in the private real estate business KG Group that owns and manages over 1,200 rental apartment units in Toronto.
“It was timely for both Sam and myself. It was really at the right time and the right place. It was a huge win,” Katz said, referring to the Meadowlands Pace. “We’d been in the business a long time and hadn’t had a dynamic victory like that. For a lot of personal and economic reasons, (Dream Away) was the horse.”
Goldband, a five-time Breeders Crown winner, doesn’t own a piece of All The Time, but he does own Haughty — the runnerup in the $778,440 Breeders Crown for freshmen trotting fillies — with Katz and Libfeld, who is a six-time Breeders Crown winner.
Goldband also holds considerable affinity for Dream Away, whom he separately named as the horse that also changed his life.
“It was the greatest time of my life,” said Goldband, who vividly remembers the first time, 20 years ago, that he and the late, great bloodlines expert Bart Glass of Kentucky saw Dream Away in the paddock together.
“We were both leaning against the fence and Dream Away was going up and down. He paced every step of the way. There was just something about him. He was just an incredible-looking yearling,” Goldband said. “For some reason, Marvin couldn’t go down to Lexington to purchase him. So, I went down. I didn’t have the experience and I bought him and that was the best thing.”
Goldband paid $85,000 for Dream Away as a yearling at the Kentucky Standardbred sale.
“I was not going home without him,” Goldband said, and Katz concurred. “He could have had a one or two in front of that and Sam was still going to buy him,” Katz said.
“It was probably the happiest day I ever saw Bart,” Goldband said. “As soon as the hammer fell I went back to Bart and he gave me such a big bear hug. He was so happy that we had bought him. It was an incredible moment.”
Two years later, Dream Away won the Meadowlands Pace and Goldband, in particular, was hooked on racing pacers. It’s a preference he maintains to this day, despite Katz and Libfeld’s growing proclivity for acquiring trotting mares to add to their world-class broodmare band.
Though Dream Away failed in two attempts to win the Breeders Crown, the Meadowlands Pace trophy has a place of honour in Katz’s home.
“The Meadowlands Pace win for Dream Away… was just beyond exhilarating,” Katz said. “We hadn’t had a lot of success prior to that. He was one of the favourites. He wasn’t a longshot, but he wasn’t the favourite. It was timely. It just made us feel that we could do it.”
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