DaytonDailyNews.com

The harness horses he'd fed, hooked to sulkies, exercised on the track and then rubbed down were back in their stalls. The gin rummy game and its accompanying belly-aching had begun in the tack room.

It was midafternoon in Barn 17 at the Montgomery Country Fairgrounds, and 75-year-old Tom Horner Sr. — a grizzled Damon Runyon character with his faded orange Tennessee Vols cap, worn blue jeans held up by suspenders, a grin with just three front teeth and syntax sometimes mangled, always steeped in his Smoky Mountain roots — finally had time to plop down in a chair and talk:

"I guess you might say I'm a crazy old SOB."

That's an understatement.

He once went flying off the high-banked first turn at the old Dayton Speedway, his airborne stock car landing high in the trees.

He trained standardbreds for Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa and raced cars alongside such famed stalwarts as Johnny Parsons, Troy Ruttman, Sam Hanks, Bud Tingelstad and Fonty Flock.

Watch sports classics on TV, and you'll see him featured in the first-ever ABC "Wide World of Sports" broadcast of the World Demolition Derby from Pennsylvania.

"I been doing this since I was 17," said Horner, who now trains Tom Gray's six standardbreds, which race the Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana circuit. "I probably done more laps around racetracks — cars and horses — than any man in these United States."

In his words

"The little burg I come from in Tennessee is called St. Clair. When I was 14, I was kind of an onerous kid. I was getting into all kinds of BS, so my dad sent me here to live with my brother. Moved to Jasper Street and walked across the street to the fairgrounds.

"Got tangled up with another car at New Bremen Speedway and started barrel rolling till there wasn't nothing left but me and the seat. They took me to St. Marys hospital, but I was getting worse and worse, so I had my brother come with his station wagon. He put a mattress in the back and toted me to St. Elizabeth's.

"Was in there six months. Had cracked the bottom of my skull off. Back then, there wasn't no modern techniques. They put two eye screws in the top of my head, ran a rope through it and put weights on the end to pull my skull up and release pressure. Doctor told me never to drive again, but I did. Gotta say, though, I never had the desire I did before. I used to be like Dale Earnhardt — if I caught ya, I crashed ya.

"Driving and training myself, with my son (Tom Jr.'s a trainer) and some others, I probably been around 2,500 winners. But I also been kicked, drug around the track and had a horse fall on me a couple years ago. Broke five ribs. One punctured my lung, but I healed up and come right back here.

"I tell you straight to your teeth just how it is, whether you like it or not. Tom (Gray) gets mad at me every day ... then we go to Denny's or the pancake house on Keowee, come back and play some cards and head off to the races. ... I wouldn't change a thing."