Gregg Doyel

​Casting will be crucial. When someone makes a movie about Hoosier Park harness driver Verlin Yoder – and someone really ought to do that – whoever plays Yoder will have to look just right.

Because Yoder looks all wrong.

Kind of tall, sort of heavy. Older. Glasses. Think: the guy who played George Costanza on Seinfeld. Or a character actor, maybe. One who specializes in playing the character of a mechanic.

"He doesn't look like any harness driver anyone has ever seen," says Tim Konkle of the Hoosier Horse Review and Midwest Harness Report.

Nor does he race like any harness driver anyone has ever seen. Not any harness driver from this state, anyway. Verlin Yoder has broken through the glass ceiling that has hovered above Indiana harness racing, not only earning an invitation into one of the most prestigious events of the year – the $250,000 International Trot Preview on Oct. 25 at Yonkers, N.Y. – but winning the dang thing.

In world-record time.

It's a movie, I'm telling you. This guy, with that look, from this state, beating the best of the best and setting a world record in the process? Disney stuff. Cheesy, unbelievable, true. And I've not told you one of the quirkiest parts.

Verlin Yoder is Amish.

* * *

Well, he was Amish. Maybe still is. I've talked to him several times and still am unclear where he stands on that, in part because he's a fun, goofy guy who likes to play cat-and-mouse with people – first time I called him and asked if I was speaking to Verlin Yoder, he answered: "Not if you're the IRS" – and also because he's a dead-serious, middle-aged man who would prefer to keep his personal life personal.

"It's not part of the story," Yoder tells me when I asked about his Amish background.

"It's part of the one I'm writing," I tell him, and not unkindly. Look, how many times have you read about harness racing in the IndyStar? You can maybe count the number of stories on one hand, or even one finger. And this would be that story.

But Verlin Yoder is a story that has to be told. "A story about the American Dream," is how Yoder describes himself. A Disney movie, is how I'd frame it. Fascinating and uplifting, however you look at it, and his Amish heritage is a part of the fascination. Part of my fascination, anyway.

So I asked him about being Amish, or being "ex-Amish," as I was told by the Star reader who emailed me with the idea of writing about the best harness driver at Hoosier Park.

"Don't say I'm ex-Amish," Yoder tells me. "Just say I left the Amish lifestyle."

Is that permanent? He didn't say. But for more than 25 years he lived that life in Columbia City. Had the long beard. Drove the horse buggy. (More on that in a minute.) Worked for a Dutch furniture manufacturer. Did his house have electricity? Some, sure.

"We had a generator," he says. "Kerosene lamps. Gas lanterns. Stuff like that. But by no means was it Stone Age stuff. We had indoor plumbing, hot water. There's a big difference, church district to district. Go to Grabill, the Fort Wayne area, and they don't have running water. Different place, different way of life."

Yoder decided that life wasn't for him in the late 1990s, when he and his wife – also Amish – left the church. Tough decision, tough conversations. Yoder told his dad, and said that was hard. He told his wife's dad. Said that was harder.

"You married?" he asks me.

Was, I say.

"You had a father-in-law?"

Did.

"Then you know."

Absolutely.

Yoder didn't leave the church because of harness racing. He wasn't even racing at the time, in 1999. He'd raced some, sure, but it was hush-hush stuff, the kind of thing that happens in Amish country when kids get together out of sight from church elders, start riding their buggies, then start racing. I asked Verlin Yoder: Was that your introduction to racing? When you were a kid in the buggy?

"Oh man, you're gonna get me in trouble," he says. "Uhhh … yeah, we were kids. There's always racing going on in the neighborhood. There'd be times, on the weekend, we'd all get together and we'd go riding. There was always racing. But it was just kid stuff."

Yoder always loved horses, and about 10 years ago he and his wife bought a few.

"Something to do after dinner to get my mind off work," he says. "Just to play with. The first year we made $100,000 with them. I said, 'Wow, this is easy.' Then we had a couple more wins, then next year bought a couple more horses. It was going all right. We were surviving. I quit my factory job in July 2005, but at the end of '05 and '06, I figured out it's not an easy business after all. We had some struggles."

Three years ago Yoder decided to go all in. He sold his farm in Columbia City, bought a place in Bell, Fla., about 20 miles northwest of Gainesville, and got serious about the business. Every year he comes back to Hoosier Park, though. Comes up here alone in April, leaves his wife and family back in Bell, stays six months for racing season. Sleeps in an RV at a campground down the road. Eats hot dogs. Too many hot dogs. He weighs close to 210 pounds, maybe 50 pounds heavier than the typical harness driver. Even though his career is on the line, he can't lose the weight, or won't. I ask why.

"Because I love food," he says. "And food loves me."

You listening to this guy, Disney?

* * *

Yoder wins as much as he loses at Hoosier Park, wins so much that he was invited to one of the biggest harness driving events of the year in early August, Hambletonian Day at the Meadowlands, where he won the $75,000 Vincennes Trot on his best horse, a 4-year-old Indiana-bred named Natural Herbie. The folks who run the absolute biggest race on the calendar, the $250,000 International Trot Preview at Yonkers Raceway on Oct. 25, invited Yoder and Herbie to come up, take on the best of the best.

"It's one of those things you always dream of, but when the moment comes you're kind of lost for words," Yoder says. "They call you – 'This is an official invitation' – and you're kind of star-struck."

At the paddock it was more of the same. Yoder got there and was confronted with the magnitude of this mountain. He was competing not against humble men like himself, but conglomerates that owned 100 horses, sometime more. Yoder owns fewer than 15. Most of his competition had an owner, trainer, driver and some grooms to get the horse ready.

Yoder had Yoder: owner-trainer-racer and his own groom, the guy putting on the harness, bathing Natural Herbie after the workout. Yoder does it all, a mom-and-pop operation in a world of corporate suits.

A 9-to-1 long shot, Natural Herbie won the race in 2 minutes, 24.4 seconds, beating the previous world record for a mile-and-a-quarter on a half-mile track set by His Majesty S in 1995 -- by nearly two seconds. It was an absurd performance, and afterward Yoder did what he does every time one of his Indiana-bred horses goes out of state and waxes the bigger, badder competition: He bought everyone in the paddock pizza. It took more than 30 pies to feed everyone.

"We called Papa John's," he says.

"He gave Indiana it's first 'classic' winner," says the Hoosier Horse Review's Konkle. "It's a great story. It's David beating Goliath. It's the U.S. hockey team winning gold 20 years ago. It's just a classic underdog upsetting the horses he wasn't supposed to beat -- but he did. It's a great sports story for Indiana."

After Konkle tells me all that, comparing Yoder to some of the greatest underdogs in sports (and Old Testament) history, I call Yoder back and scold him for not telling me just how big his Hambletonian Day victory was.

"Don't make an ass out of me," he says ."I'm by no means trying to make it like I'm better than anybody, because I'm not. Biggest moral behind the story is, the American Dream is still alive. You can be a small guy and still create something. If someone gets up in the morning and does their work and works hard at it, every once in a while you get lucky and make your mark."

Sounds like a movie, one I've seen before. Too bad the title "Hoosiers" is taken.

Follow Star columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter: @GreggDoyelStar

If you go

Where: Hoosier Park Racing & Casino; 4500 Dan Patch Circle; Anderson

When: Tuesday thru Saturday, when the season ends; post time 5:15 p.m.

Website:www.hoosierpark.com



