As one of the area’s best harness drivers, his job is to sit in the sulky with reins in hand and look at the south end of a horse going north.
He wouldn’t have it any other way, although for a while he did.
“When racing looked pretty grim here, when it looked like we were going to go belly up in Ohio, I wanted to have a backup plan,” the 34-year-old Nisonger said. “I have a family — we have two little girls — and I needed to be able to take care of them.”
Nisonger went through the police academy, did well and when he came out he got a job on the police force that tends to Grandview Medical Center and six other area hospitals. But as he was beginning to make a nice career there, racinos were brought into Ohio and the harness racing industry here suddenly became healthier than it had been in a long time.
With Dayton Raceway and three other harness racinos in Ohio and 66 of the state’s 88 counties putting on racing cards, the state has become a hotbed for standardbreds again.
At first Nisonger tried to do both jobs full time — police work and horses — but found himself sleeping about three hours a night. He knew something had to give and he knew what it would be.
“My wife and I have tons of backup plans, but I knew what was in my heart,” he said. “And like a lot of people in the business, we’re able to go after our dreams again.”
He now does police work part time, and though he doesn’t drive as much as he once did, Nisonger still is a sulky regular at the venues in Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky. In his 18-year career as a driver, he has 19,108 starts, 2,886 victories and has won over $8.5 million in purses.
Dayton Raceway opened its second season Monday night and will features a live card five nights a week, including tonight, post time 6:35.
Last year Nisonger had about one-fifth the number of starts of Dayton’s driving champ, Josh Sutton (127 to 603,) and he finished 13th in total wins with 17. But his winning percentage, 13.4, was sixth-best among all drivers here last season.
Nisonger’s time in the sulky has been cut down because he now trains anywhere from 30 to 50 horses for other owners at his Nisonger Stables that are housed at the old Lebanon race track.
It’s a husband and wife affair, with wife Stacey — who grew in a Clinton County harness family and now works as an emergency room nurse at Miami Valley South — handling much of the evening feeding, as well as jogging horses and other chores, while also tending to the couple’s two kids, 8-year-old Alexa and 6-year-old Abby, who had soccer and volleyball practices Tuesday night.
It requires a lot of juggling and work, but that’s part of the harness racing life, Stacey said:
“When the horse racing business is bad, it can be very bad, but when it’s good, it’s great. For Jeff, I think driving is about the whole adrenalin thing. It’s exciting. It’s quite a rush.
“And when your horse crosses the finish line in first place in this business, it’s just an awesome feeling. There is nothing better.”
‘Like an addiction’
Go through the paddock at Dayton Raceway and you find harness families with all kinds of multi-generational ties.
That’s even the case with Stacey. Monday night, her dad, trainer Rusty Leyes, had Royal Cam-Hall, an 8-year-old bay gelding, in the seventh race. Stacey’s brother Chad was the driver.
Jeff, though, didn’t come from a racing family.
Although he grew up in Greenville in the harness hotbed of Darke County, his dad drove trucks, not standardbreds. His mom worked in a factory.
“When I was in high school, I was in a co-op at Whirlpool and worked there several months,” he said, shaking his head. “Four walls, trapped inside, that wasn’t for me. I liked working outside. I liked the freedom that came with horses.”
When he’d been 9, a family friend, Jo Ann Gibbons, took him to her family farm, where she had horses, and then to the Darke County Fairgrounds. Jeff loved it and soon was doing whatever he could to be part of the scene.
“I didn’t start at the bottom, I started below the bottom,” he said.
Working for trainers like Dave Brumbaugh and Tim Harless, he moved his way up from mucking stalls and at age 16 got his license to drive harness horses.
His first win was Aug. 18, 1997 at the Darke Country Fair. He piloted Bobs Other Barb, a problematic trotter, to the only victory in an 11-race career.
In the early days, he was overly eager to get in any race he could and that once prompted an older horseman to put up a hand-printed sign at the Darke County Fair where owners and trainers paid their entry dues. To the plea — “I’ll drive anything for anyone” — he forged Nisonger’s name.
Although Jeff soon realized the joke, he didn’t take the sign down.
Within eight years, he had 1,000 victories.
But along with the good times there have been a couple of nasty spills.
Eleven years ago, almost to the day, he was driving 81-1 longshot R.W.’s Outa Town in a conditioning race at the Delaware County Fairgrounds when a horse in front of him came to a dead stop break coming out of the turn. His horse hit the other one and Nisonger was sent flying.
As he lay there lifeless on the track, veteran trainer Dan Ater rushed to him and, as he would tell harness writer Brad Schmaltz, he first thought Jeff was dead.
As Ater began pressing on his chest, Nisonger stirred. He had just been knocked unconscious.
Tuesday, Stacey remembered another crash several years ago in Kenton. Her husband landed on his arms and sustained two fractures.
And yet each time, as soon as he could, Nisonger was back in the sulky.
“You love it so much,” he said quietly. “It’s like an addiction.”
Screamin’ & hollerin’
Monday night between races at Dayton he sat on a bench outside the paddock barn and talked to Herb Le Van, a 77-year-old trainer from Indian Lake.
“I first met him when he was a young kid hunting for drives,” said Le Van, who recalled one race at Kenton when he put Nisonger in the cart behind his 3-year-old gelding, Carmel Dumpling.
“I told Jeff, ‘He’s as comfortable being last as he is being first,’ and he told me, ‘He’s not gonna be comfortable being last!’ ” Le Van laughed. “It just so happened that at the start of the race the PA system went out, so all the way around I could hear Jeff just a screamin’ and a hollerin’ at that horse.
“When he crossed the finish line, the sound system came back and the PA man says ‘Guess what? You just saw a new track record!’
“Jeff had driven my horse to that win and that record still holds.”
As they were talking, Nisonger was called to the sulky of Mustang Tom, a 5-year-old gelding he’d drive for Ty Van Rhoden in race seven.
“Jeff’s a likable guy who handles himself well and handles the horses well,” Le Van said once he was alone. “It’ll tell you, they don’t come any better than him.”
As he was getting ready to head out onto the track, Nisonger called out to Mustang Tom and grinned.
Earlier he had explained his love of nights — and moments — just like this:
“I love the horses. I’ve got more horse friends than I do people friends.”
That comes when the back-end views beat the backup plans.
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