IIRC he had a nice little run and they brought in what they figured was a washed up Jimmy Young to give him a name win and probably hoped to propel him into contention. Young, coming off the loss to ****ey defeated him, kick-starting his last run of success, which ended with a loss to Greg Page (although Jimmy fought on as an opponent). Gord beat a few declining names after that but I don't remember him as ever getting back into the contender scene again. Tough guy, had a decent career.
Started a thread about him maybe 7 or 8 years ago as I had always wondered about this guy. I first noticed his name when I was scrolling through I believe Trevor Berbick's record and saw him in Berbick's win column. He had something like a 28-1 record at the time. When I clicked on it I saw that a lot of his early fights happened over the course of a few days in some tournament held in Canada.. Most of his opponents were either unknown to me or featured the usual trial horse suspects like Ken Lakusta, Ken Arlt, Rudy Lubbers, Scott Ledoux, Harvey Steichen etc.. About 15 of his 39 wins came against debuting fighters as well. And I noticed that of those 15 debuting fighters, virtually none of them ever fought again after facing Racette, leaving me to question the validity of these men even being real pros to begin with..Being stopped by Jimmy Young ( and an aging one at that ) indicates that he wasn't the most durable fighter either.. Still, he made an effort at being active, put together a nice record on paper, and from my understanding became a referee after his boxing career had ended.
A couple of magazines I have from way back did profiles on him. Then he fought and lost to Jimmy Young - when Young went on a brief run before losing to Page - and Racette was basically forgotten. There's a long piece on him on YouTube broken into six parts. It includes some or all of most of his bouts. He was just a guy. Not top level at all. (If you go to the start of that third clip below ... he gets a full 19- or 20-second standing eight count in that Young fight.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ipaw0rNs_pI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uz-PQjbWAzE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy9MuCcsP70 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0AKxmJHXZ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8C-9qcll08 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2y3_iU679o
Yeah he looked like he was in reasonably good shape. But he had extremely limited skill. Had he been matched with real professionals ( even standard journeyman level guys ) early rather than a dozen debuting fighters, he never would have reached 25-0.