Fifty Proof is a monster, in a good way.
He's the biggest horse at Woodbine Racetrack here, standing 17 hands tall in his stocking feet - or 5 foot 8 at the highest point of his back. He can barely fit into a starting gate. He looks like an elephant squeezing into a shoebox, his head crumpled against his chest, until the gate springs open. Back at the barns, they call him Tiny.
He's ridden by the shortest jockey at the track - Justin Stein, who on a good day is five feet tall.
But it's a match made in heaven. The two of them shocked all of the hardboots at Woodbine by falling short by just half a length of winning the $750,000 Northern Dancer Stakes against some good international horses last month. Dismissed by the bettors, he went off at 29-to-1 odds.
With his gritty effort in the Northern Dancer, Fifty Proof earned a shot at a tougher field in the $2-million Canadian International Championship Stakes, the richest race in Canada, at Woodbine on Saturday.
"He's cool to sit on," said Stein, who has never ridden in the International before. "When I'm sitting on him, I feel like I'm Leonardo DiCaprio, saying: 'I'm the king of the world.' "
Stein is the only local jockey in the field.
"He's the Newfoundland dog of the equine world," part-owner David Willmot said of the well-named son of Whiskey Wisdom. "He is a big, big boy."
At first, Willmot was reluctant when breeder Bob Anderson showed up just before a Woodbine board meeting, trying to find people to buy him.
"I'm in," board member John Fielding said. "I'm in," said another, Ben Hutzel.
Both of them glanced at Willmot and said: "He's by Whiskey Wisdom [owned by the Willmots] so David, you're in?"
"I don't really need …," Willmot said, to no avail. Willmot became a partner.
Fifty Proof didn't make it to the races as a two-year-old, suffering from a hairline fracture of a tibia. Trainer Ian Black thought he'd win an Ontario Sires Stake race with him some day.
Black, too, was a long shot. He served as farm manager for Willmot's Kinghaven Farms for 30 years until the farm began to downsize. At 62, Black decided to become a trainer. Willmot thinks of him as a brother and didn't hesitate to give him Kinghaven horses to train.
Before the Northern Dancer, Willmot said to Black: "At age 62, you've probably started too late to make the Hall of Fame, but if you win this race, it might just get you in."
Black hadn't trained very long before he won the $1-million Queen's Plate with Mike Fox, and the $1-million Woodbine Mile with Rahy's Attorney. Both were long shots.
"The horses I've have in my barn now, I know that people have been here for 30 or 40 years and never had one," Black said. "I'm well aware of that, how lucky I am,"
Fifty Proof's size causes him plenty of problems. Last July, his gate sprung open prematurely in a race at Woodbine that he won. The horse probably spilled out of the tight quarters. Others in the race thought he had an unfair start.
Willmot, the former president of Woodbine Entertainment Group, came out of a 20-year retirement as a lawyer and argued his own case at the Ontario Racing Commission to keep the win. He won the case.
All for a horse he wasn't particularly sure he wanted in the beginning. But Fifty Proof has that effect on people.
"He's just this great big, nice, honest horse," Willmot said. "He has a wonderful disposition."
"He's just like a pony," Stein added. A very big pony.