“Good horses come from everywhere”
How Dana Parham’s Indiana-sired gelding Odds On Mr Mamba landed in James MacDonald’s lap and the Pepsi North
America Cup winner’s circle.
by Dave Briggs
The photographers had dispersed. The winner’s circle crowd had thinned. Dana Parham stood on the edge of the Woodbine Mohawk Park track on a perfect June evening with a look of mild satisfaction on his normally serious face. Minutes earlier, the Boca Raton, FL-based owner won the $1 million (Cdn) ($720,000 U.S.) Grade 1 Pepsi North America Cup with his homebred, Indiana-sired gelding Odds On Mr Mamba, who, until now, had not received the appropriate accolades relative to his success.
“Good horses come from everywhere,” said Parham.
Odds On Mr Mamba’s driver James MacDonald knows this well.
Despite winning the last five Canadian Driver of the Year titles, the best MacDonald had done in the NA Cup in prior years was a fifth-placed-fourth with Legendary Hanover in 2024. Last year, MacDonald was fifth with the favorite, Lite Up The World, in a Cup won impressively by the Burke Brigade’s Louprint in a 1:47.1 record.
In all his prior Cup attempts, combined, MacDonald has collected total purses of $101,360. On Saturday (June 13), he more than tripled that amount thanks to the winner’s check of $360,000.
That MacDonald’s Cup breakthrough came with an Indiana horse he had never driven prior to the NA Cup elims – and for people he had never driven for before – was pure serendipity.
Standing in the glow of the Mohawk paddock receiving congratulatory hugs from some of his fellow drivers, MacDonald grinned like a man who had just won the lottery, which is just about the case.
Asked where the NA Cup will rank in his trophy case, MacDonald said, “At the top. It’s pretty hard to beat right now. I just can’t get over it. I can’t believe it happened.”
In each of the last six years, MacDonald has entered the season hoping to be the driver attached to the right horse that could win Canada’s biggest harness race – to no avail. This year, MacDonald was blessed with an abundance of choice for the final having won both elims – the first with his regular mount Sweet Lovin Lou and the second with Odds On Mr Mamba. That he ultimately chose the latter for the rich final was just one of his many winning moves when it came to this year’s Cup.
“You always think ahead about who you have coming back this year,” MacDonald said. “Obviously, I was pretty excited for Sweet Lovin Lou and I was hoping he’d come back well and he did. And then [Odds On Mr Mamba] kind of just fell into my lap [after Dexter Dunn chose Brandon Blvd over Mamba].”
MacDonald said he could never had predicted this was how he was going to win his first NA Cup.
“I’ve never driven for [Odds On Mr Mamba’s connections] before and I can’t get over how it all shook down and just how lucky I am,” MacDonald said. “It hasn’t sunk in yet and it probably won’t for quite some time.”
ODDS ON RACING FIGURED AS MUCH
Parham, whose nom de course is Odds On Racing, and his investment in the industry is vast, was less surprised about the outcome.
Odds On Mr Mamba has been nothing short of sensational in his career; he was just doing it in Indiana, a little removed from a spotlight that tends to find East Coast and Canadian horses with more frequency.
The son of Parham’s homebred sire Odds On Equuleus is out of the breeder’s talented mare Honky Tonk Woman.
As for the knock, from some, that Odds On Mr Mamba is not fashionably bred, Parham said, “Someone else’s opinion doesn’t bother me in the least. I hope my opinion doesn’t bother others… I’ll say this, my pacing broodmare band is as good as anybody’s in the country. I have 40 broodmares that almost anybody wishes they had some of those. So, I spend a lot of time with the breeding. ‘Equuleus’ has never had a fair chance. He still doesn’t get good mares, but he always gets three good ones of mine every year.”
In eight years at stud, Odds On Equuleus has bred, on average, 26 mares per year. His richest and fastest offspring is Odds On Mr Mamba, who now sports career earnings of $740,405 and has a world record mark of 1:47.4 set at 2. The gelding has a career record of 10-for-11 that includes 10 straight victories. Odds On Mr Mamba’s only loss came in his pari-mutuel debut in Indiana Sires Stakes competition at Harrah’s Hoosier Park on July 30, 2025.
Odds On Equuleus earned $935,816 lifetime and was ninth in the 2013 Pepsi North America Cup for trainer Robin Schadt. In the final two of his six racing seasons, Odds On Equuleus was trained in the Midwest by Melanie Wrenn, who now conditions all of Parham’s Indiana stock, including Odds On Mr Mamba.
“I moved Equuleus to Kentucky for a year and [Wrenn is] going to get all of those anyway,” Parham said. “Now he’s back in Indiana and he’s had a phenomenal career as a sire. Every year he gets more mares than the year before. By the time he’s 20, he might have a full book.”
Parham laughed as he said that, but there’s no doubt Odds On Mr Mamba has put Odds On Equuleus on the map as a stallion.
As for Honky Tonk Woman, Parham bought the Western Ideal mare in November of 2020 after she amassed $560,138 and recorded a marked of 1:50.2 racing between 2010 and 2012, mostly under the tutelage of Ross Croghan. Honky Tonk Woman has produced 10 horses to date, seven of them before Parham owned her. All but two have raced, with four of them earning six figures: Brush N Crush ($177,662), Pirate Booty ($119,095), Bowery ($117,954), and Odds On Mr Mamba. Her most recent foal is a yearling full-sister to Odds On Mr Mamba named Odds On Honeydew.
Like Parham and MacDonald, it was also the first NA Cup triumph for Wrenn. She finished fourth in the 2020 final with another Parham homebred – Odds On Osiris.
Asked where the NA Cup victory ranks in her career, Wrenn flashed a magnetic smile.
“Oh, seriously?” she asked, laughing. “I mean, this is pretty huge.
“[Odds On Mr Mamba is] a pleasure. We’re very fortunate to have him.”
Yet, in a typical example of Midwestern nice, Wrenn directed much of the credit to her husband, trainer/driver Peter Wrenn, and Odds On Mr Mamba’s caretaker Ernie Perez.
“[Peter] does an amazing job with the horses,” Melanie said. “He’s a hell of a horseman and we’re a good team.”
Clearly this was the Wrenn family’s night.
One race earlier, Peter and Melanie’s nephew, Ronnie Wrenn, Jr., drove Loua Dipa to a Canadian-record 1:48.1 victory in the $420,000 Grade 1 Fan Hanover. That victory came one year after Wrenn, Jr. won the NA Cup with Louprint.
But this year’s NA Cup went beyond family.
Asked what Odds On Mr Mamba’s victory means for Indiana, Melanie didn’t hesitate.
“A lot,” she said. “Look at last night, [Indiana-sired] On To Norway [won his 27th straight race impressively at The Meadowlands], and tonight with ‘Mamba’ – I mean, come on. They are looking pretty good in the Midwest.”
STRIKING LIKE A BLACK MAMBA
As for how Odds On Mr Mamba came to be standing in the Pepsi North America Cup winner’s circle, that was courtesy of a patient drive and the gelding’s proclivity to strike in the stretch, which is fitting for a pacer Parham’s son named after the highly-venomous black mamba snake.
“He comes like a freight train,” Melanie said. “I’ve never seen a horse that turns it on like him. He wants to be there at the wire, that’s what he wants to do. He generally gets it done.”
But Parham said he wasn’t sure Odds On Mr Mamba was going to get it done in a race in which favored hometown hero and reigning continental Horse of the Year Beau Jangles led the field into the stretch, with the most-excellent Brandon Blvd on his heels.
“In so many of his races, by mid-stretch [Odds On Mr Mamba is] in front,” Parham said. “Tonight, he was racing against the very best and I didn’t see him gaining. Then 50, 100 yards out, I thought ‘Okay, I think we can get him.’ But I didn’t know. It’s out of everybody’s hands, but the horse’s and the driver’s.”
MacDonald, who positioned Odds On Mr Mamba a close third at the top of the stretch, said his confidence went from sky-high to much less than that in the race’s waning moments.
“In the last turn, I was thinking, ‘I’m going to win by five,’ with the trip [Odds On Mr Mamba] got,” MacDonald said. “Then, when I moved him, it turned into a dog fight. They both kicked away – ‘Beau’ and ‘Brandon’ – and we were slugging it out halfway down the lane. I said, ‘I’m going to be third’ and then he just found a way to find a little more to get it done.
“Obviously, he’s got a huge desire to win and he’s a fast horse.”
As for what went through his mind the second he crossed the wire a half-length ahead of Brandon Blvd in 1:48.1 – with Beau Jangles a nostril hair further back in third – MacDonald said, “It felt amazing. The way the trip worked out, I couldn’t have planned it any better. I’m just lucky, blessed, to get the drive and blessed with the way the race worked out. I’m just a happy guy.”
As a further indication of Parham’s horse IQ, he said he was the underbidder when Brandon Blvd sold to Bill Pollock, Bruce Areman, and trainer Andrew Harris for $425,000 at the 2024 Lexington Selected Yearling Sale.
“I didn’t know who I was bidding against [at the time], but they bid $360,000 and I jumped the bid to $400,000,” Parham said. “Usually, you put it in a new zip code [and that’s the end of it]. They went to $425,000 and that’s what they paid. I feel if I would have been bidding against almost anyone else, we would have ended up with that colt.”
Not that he’s unhappy. He said it’s more satisfying being that man who both bred and owns the Pepsi North America Cup winner.
“But, you know, mine is a gelding and theirs is a colt,” he said, being practical.
There he goes thinking like a breeder again, and the financial value of winning one of the sport’s biggest races.
In terms of the emotional value, what Odds On Mr Mamba gave Parham was immeasurable.
As a long-time race fan, Parham said the large crowd at Mohawk took him back to the sport’s better days.
“When I first started going to the races, we had crowds like this every night,” Parham said. “I haven’t seen a crowd like this in I don’t know when.”
Just for a second, he flashed a smile.
Good horses can come from everywhere and anywhere, but great victories often require the universe to be in perfect alignment.
