Seabiscuit: An American Legend

Charles Howard, Red Pollard, and Tom Smith

(KEENELAND-COOK)

For Borden

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Preface

PART I

1. The Day of the Horse Is Past

2. The Lone Plainsman

3. Mean, Restive, and Ragged

4. The Cougar and the Iceman

5. A Boot on One Foot, a Toe Tag on the Other

6. Light and Shadow

PART II

7. Learn Your Horse

8. Fifteen Strides

9. Gravity

10. War Admiral

11. No Pollard, No Seabiscuit

12. All I Need Is Luck

13. Hardball

14. The Wise We Boys

15. Fortune’s Fool

16. I Know My Horse

17. The Dingbustingest Contest You Ever Clapped an Eye On

18. Deal

19. The Second Civil War

PART III

20. “All Four of His Legs Are Broken”

21. A Long, Hard Pull

22. Four Good Legs Between Us

23. One Hundred Grand

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

A Reader’s Guide

About the Author

Excerpt from Unbroken

Copyright

“Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bullfighters.”

—ERNEST HEMINGWAY, THE SUN ALSO RISES

PREFACE

In 1938, near the end of a decade of monumental turmoil, the year’s number-one newsmaker¹ was not Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Hitler, or Mussolini. It wasn’t Pope Pius XI, nor was it Lou Gehrig, Howard Hughes, or Clark Gable. The subject of the most newspaper column inches in 1938 wasn’t even a person. It was an undersized, crooked-legged racehorse named Seabiscuit.

In the latter half of the Depression, Seabiscuit was nothing short of a cultural icon in America, enjoying adulation so intense and broad-based that it transcended sport. When he raced, his fans choked local roads, poured out of special cross-country “Seabiscuit Limited” trains, packed the hotels, and cleaned out the restaurants. They tucked their Roosevelt dollars into Seabiscuit wallets, bought Seabiscuit hats on Fifth Avenue, played at least nine parlor games bearing his image. Tuning in to radio broadcasts of his races was a weekend ritual across the country, drawing as many as forty million listeners.² His appearances smashed attendance records at nearly every major track and drew two of the three largest throngs ever to see a horse race in the United States. In an era when the United States’ population was less than half its current size,⁴ seventy-eight thousand people witnessed his last race,³ a crowd comparable to those at today’s Super Bowls.⁵ As many as forty thousand fans⁶ mobbed tracks just to watch his workouts, while thousands of others braved ice storms and murderous heat to catch a glimpse of his private eighty-foot Pullman railcar. He galloped over Manhattan on massive billboards and was featured week after week, year after year, in Time, Life, Newsweek, Look, Pic, and The New Yorker. His trainer, jockey, and owner became heroes in their own right. Their every move was painted by the glare of the flashbulb.

They had come from nowhere. The horse, a smallish, mud-colored animal with forelegs that didn’t straighten all the way, spent nearly two seasons floundering in the lowest ranks of racing, misunderstood and mishandled. His jockey, Red Pollard, was a tragic-faced young man who had been abandoned as a boy at a makeshift racetrack cut through a Montana hay field. He came to his partnership with Seabiscuit after years as a part-time prizefighter and failing jockey, lugging his saddle through myriad places, getting punched bloody in cow-town boxing rings, sleeping on stall floors. Seabiscuit’s trainer, a mysterious, virtually mute mustang breaker named Tom Smith, was a refugee from the vanishing frontier, bearing with him generations of lost wisdom about the secrets of horses. Seabiscuit’s owner, a broad, beaming former cavalryman named Charles Howard, had begun his career as a bicycle mechanic before parlaying 21 cents into an automotive empire.

In 1936, on a sultry August Sunday in Detroit, Pollard, Smith, and Howard formed an unlikely alliance. Recognizing the talent dormant in the horse and in one another, they began a rehabilitation of Seabiscuit that would lift him, and them, from obscurity.

For the Seabiscuit crew and for America, it was the beginning of five uproarious years of anguish and exultation. From 1936 to 1940, Seabiscuit endured a remarkable run of bad fortune, conspiracy, and injury to establish himself as one of history’s most extraordinary athletes. Graced with blistering speed, tactical versatility, and indomitable will, he shipped more than fifty thousand exhausting railroad miles,⁷ carried staggering weight to victory against the best horses in the country, and shattered more than a dozen track records. His controversial rivalry with Triple Crown winner War Admiral culminated in a spectacular match race that is still widely regarded as the greatest horse race ever run. His epic, trouble-plagued four-year quest to conquer the world’s richest race became one of the most celebrated and widely followed struggles in sports. And in 1940 after suffering severe injuries that were thought to have ended their careers, the aging horse and his jockey returned to the track together in an attempt to claim the one prize that had escaped them.

Along the way, the little horse and the men who rehabilitated him captured the American imagination. It wasn’t just greatness that drew the people to them. It was their story.

It began with a young man on a train, pushing west.

PART I

Howard at the wheel of his Buick race car, San Francisco, 1906

(COL. MICHAEL C. HOWARD)

Chapter 1

THE DAY OF THE HORSE IS PAST

Charles Howard had the feel of a gigantic onrushing machine: You had to either climb on or leap out of the way. He would sweep into a room, working a cigarette in his fingers, and people would trail him like pilot fish. They couldn’t help themselves. Fifty-eight years old in 1935, Howard was a tall, glowing man in a big suit and a very big Buick. But it wasn’t his physical bearing that did it. He lived on a California ranch so huge that a man could take a wrong turn on it and be lost forever, but it wasn’t his circumstances either. Nor was it that he spoke loud or long; the surprise of the man was his understatement, the quiet and kindly intimacy of his acquaintance. What drew people to him was something intangible, an air about him. There was a certain inevitability to Charles Howard, an urgency radiating from him that made people believe that the world was always going to bend to his wishes.

On an afternoon in 1903, long before the big cars and the ranch and all the money, Howard began his adulthood with only that air of destiny and 21 cents in his pocket.¹ He sat in the swaying belly of a transcontinental train, snaking west from New York. He was twenty-six, handsome, gentlemanly, with a bounding imagination. Back then he had a lot more hair than anyone who knew him later would have guessed. Years in the saddles of military-school horses had taught him to carry his six-foot-one-inch frame straight up.

He was eastern born and bred, but he had a westerner’s restlessness. He had tried to satisfy it by enlisting in the cavalry for the Spanish-American War, and though he became a skilled horseman, thanks to bad timing and dysentery he never got out of Camp Wheeler in Alabama.² After his discharge, he got a job in New York as a bicycle mechanic, took up competitive bicycle racing, got married, and had two sons.³ It seems to have been a good life, but the East stifled Howard. His mind never seemed to settle down. His ambitions had fixed upon the vast new America on the other side of the Rockies. That day in 1903 he couldn’t resist the impulse anymore. He left everything he’d ever known behind, promised his wife Fannie May he’d send for her soon, and got on the train.

He got off in San Francisco. His two dimes and a penny couldn’t carry him far, but somehow he begged and borrowed enough money to open a little bicycle-repair shop on Van Ness Avenue downtown. He tinkered with the bikes and waited for something interesting to come his way.

It came in the form of a string of distressed-looking men who began appearing at his door. Eccentric souls with too much money in their pockets and far too much time on their hands, they had blown thick wads of cash on preposterous machines called automobiles. Some of them were feeling terribly sorry about it.

The horseless carriage was just arriving in San Francisco, and its debut was turning into one of those colorfully unmitigated disasters that bring misery to everyone but historians. Consumers were staying away from the “devilish contraptions” in droves.⁴ The men who had invested in them were the subjects of cautionary tales, derision, and a fair measure of public loathing. In San Francisco in 1903, the horse and buggy was not going the way of the horse and buggy.

For good reason. The automobile, so sleekly efficient on paper, was in practice a civic menace, belching out exhaust, kicking up storms of dust, becoming hopelessly mired in the most innocuous-looking puddles, tying up horse traffic, and raising an earsplitting cacophony that sent buggy horses fleeing. Incensed local lawmakers responded with monuments to legislative creativity.⁵ The laws of at least one town required automobile drivers to stop, get out, and fire off Roman candles every time horse-drawn vehicles came into view. Massachusetts tried and, fortunately, failed to mandate that cars be equipped with bells that would ring with each revolution of the wheels. In some towns police were authorized to disable passing cars with ropes, chains, wires, and even bullets, so long as they took reasonable care to avoid gunning down the drivers. San Francisco didn’t escape the legislative wave. Bitter local officials pushed through an ordinance banning automobiles from the Stanford campus and all tourist areas, effectively exiling them from the city.⁶

Nor were these the only obstacles. The asking price for the cheapest automobile amounted to twice the $500 annual salary of the average citizen—some cost three times that much—and all that bought you was four wheels, a body, and an engine. “Accessories” like bumpers, carburetors, and headlights had to be purchased separately.⁷ Just starting the thing, through hand cranking, could land a man in traction. With no gas stations, owners had to lug five-gallon fuel cans to local drugstores, filling them for 60 cents a gallon and hoping the pharmacist wouldn’t substitute benzene for gasoline.⁸ Doctors warned women away from automobiles, fearing slow suffocation in noxious fumes. A few adventurous members of the gentler sex took to wearing ridiculous “windshield hats,” watermelon-sized fabric balloons, equipped with little glass windows, that fit over the entire head, leaving ample room for corpulent Victorian coiffures.⁹ Navigation was another nightmare. The first of San Francisco’s road signs were only just being erected, hammered up by an enterprising insurance underwriter who hoped to win clients by posting directions into the countryside, where drivers retreated for automobile “picnic parties” held out of the view of angry townsfolk.^10,11

Finally, driving itself was something of a touch-and-go pursuit. The first automobiles imported to San Francisco had so little power that they rarely made it up the hills. The grade of Nineteenth Avenue was so daunting for the engines of the day that watching automobiles straining for the top became a local pastime. The automobiles’ delicate constitutions and general faintheartedness soon became a source of scorn. One cartoon from the era depicted a wealthy couple standing on a roadside next to its dearly departed vehicle. The caption read, “The Idle Rich.”

Where San Franciscans saw an urban nuisance, Charles Howard saw opportunity. Automobile-repair shops hadn’t been created yet—and would have made little sense anyway as few were fool enough to buy a car.¹² Owners had no place to go when their cars expired. A bicycle repairman was the closest thing to an auto mechanic available, and Howard’s shop was conveniently close to the neighborhoods of wealthy car owners. Howard hadn’t been in town long before the owners began showing up on his doorstep.

Howard had a weakness for lost causes. He accepted the challenge, poked around in the cars, and figured out how to fix them. Soon he was showing up at the primitive automobile races held around the city. Before long, he was driving in them. The first American race, run around Evanston, Illinois, had been held only eight years before, with the winning car ripping along at the dizzying average speed of seven and a half miles per hour.¹³ But by 1903, automotive horsepower had greatly improved—one car averaged 65.3 mph in a cross-European race that season—making the races a good spectacle. It also made for astronomical casualty rates. The European race, for one, turned into such a godawful bloodletting that it was ultimately halted due to “too many fatalities.”¹⁴

Howard was beginning to see these contraptions as the instrument of his ambition. Taking an audacious step, he booked a train east, got off in Detroit, and somehow talked his way into a meeting with Will Durant, chief of Buick Automobiles and future founder of General Motors. Howard told Durant that he wanted to be a part of the industry, troubled though it was. Durant liked what he saw and hired him to set up dealerships and recruit dealers. Howard returned to San Francisco, opened the Pioneer Motor Company on Buick’s behalf, and hired a local man to manage it. But on a checkup visit, he was dismayed to find that the manager was focusing his sales effort not on Buicks but on ponderous Thomas Flyers. Howard went back to Detroit and told Durant that he could do better. Durant was sold. Howard walked away with the Buick franchise for all of San Francisco.¹⁵ It was 1905, and he was just twenty-eight years old.

Howard returned to San Francisco by train with three Buicks in tow.¹⁶ By some accounts, he first housed his automobiles in the parlor of his old bicycle-repair shop on Van Ness Avenue before moving to a modest building on Golden Gate Avenue, half a block from Van Ness.¹⁷ He brought Fannie May out to join him. With two young boys to feed, and two more soon to follow, Fannie May must have been alarmed by her husband’s career choice. Two years had done little to pacify the San Franciscan hostility for the automobile. Howard failed to sell a single car.

At 5:12 A.M. on April 18, 1906, the earth beneath San Francisco heaved inward upon itself in a titanic, magnitude 7.8 convulsion. In sixty seconds the city shuddered down. Fires sprang up amid the ruined buildings, converged, and raced toward Howard’s dealership, consuming four city blocks per hour.¹⁸ With the water lines ruptured and the sewers bled dry, there was nothing to check its course. Wagon horses ran in a panic through the streets, snapped their legs in the rubble, and collapsed from exhaustion. The horse-drawn city was in desperate need of vehicles to carry firemen and bear the injured, 3,000 dead, and 225,000 homeless out of the fire’s path. Fleeing citizens offered thousands for horses, but there were none to be had. People were fashioning makeshift gurneys from baby carriages and trunks nailed to roller skates, pulling them themselves. There was only one transportation option left. “We suddenly appreciated that San Francisco was truly a city of magnificent distances,” wrote one witness. “The autos alone remained to conquer space.”

Charles Howard, owner of three erstwhile unsaleable automobiles, was suddenly the richest man in town. He saved his cars from the flames and transformed them into ambulances.²¹ By one account, Howard himself served as a driver, speeding into the ruins to gather the stranded and rush them down to rescue ships on the bay. His cars were probably also employed to bear massive stacks of army explosives, which were used to create firebreaks.

On April 19 the fire drove the soldiers and firemen west into Howard’s neighborhood. Van Ness Avenue, half a block from Howard’s dealership, was the broadest street in the city.²⁰ The firefighters chose it as the site of their last stand. As the fire bore down on them, they unloaded dynamite from the automobiles, packed it into Howard’s dealership and the surrounding buildings, and blew it all sky-high to widen the firebreak.¹⁹ That evening the fire roared over the rubble of Howard’s dealership and reached Van Ness. The exhausted firefighters refused to give. Though it burned for two more days, the fire did not jump the road.

Howard lost everything but his cars, but he had been insured. The reimbursement check that arrived at his door offered him a painless way out of his automobile venture. But Howard was certain that he could coax his new city into the automotive age. The earthquake had already done half the work for him, proving the automobile’s superiority to the horse in utility. Two weeks after the quake, a day’s rental of a horse and buggy cost $5; a two-seated runabout cost $100 a day.²² All Howard needed to do was prove his automobiles’ durability.²³ He put up one of the first temporary buildings in the quake’s aftermath, moved the cars in, and set out to craft a new image for Buick.

———

Few men have demonstrated a better understanding of the importance of image than Howard. He could probably thank his father, Robert Stewart, for that. While accumulating a vast fortune in his native Canada, Stewart had become the focal point of a business scandal. Though his role in it remains unclear, his subsequent behavior suggests a spectacular fall from grace: He left the country, changed his last name to Howard, and spent the rest of his life in exclusive hotels and clubs all over the eastern United States. Listing his occupation as “traveler,” he never again owned a permanent home or stayed in one place for long. He married and divorced repeatedly, gaining notoriety among gossip columnists for slugging one of his wives and engaging in public shouting matches with the others.

Charles Howard was never close to his father. Growing up in a Victorian upper-class America in which reputation was social currency, he must have felt the sting of the family’s ignominy. He made himself into his father’s antithesis. Whereas Robert Stewart Howard was wealthy, his son evidently refused to base his life on its advantages, embarking on his westward journey with virtually no money to his name.²⁴ Whereas his father lacked the interest or discipline to save his reputation and that of his family, Charles measured himself by his image in the minds of others. It was a preoccupation, verging on obsession, that would inform his decisions, and guide his energies. By instinct or by study, he had an exceptionally firm grasp of the human imagination and how to appeal to it. Habitually putting himself in other people’s shoes, he was in his private life charming and engaging, generous and genuinely empathetic. In his public life, he demonstrated a prodigious talent for promotion and manipulation.

Howard knew that to get his automobiles into the public eye, he had to get his name into the press. He also knew that car salesmen didn’t interest journalists. Race-car daredevils did.²⁵ Donning a gridiron helmet, a white scarf and goggles, Howard slipped behind the wheel and put on a holy show.²⁶ He drove his Buicks in breakneck speed races at Tanforan and harebrained hill climbs up the harrowing grades of Diablo Hill and Grizzly Peak. He ground through twenty-four-hour endurance tests and “stamina runs,” in which contestants looped up and down local roads until their beleaguered automobiles exploded or shed their wheels—the last one rolling was the winner. He was reportedly the first man to send a car down into Death Valley and the first to push over the snowbanks of the Sierra Nevada, performing the feat on an annual basis. The ventures were not without risk. Drivers were killed all the time. The cars also came to sad ends; the joyous celebration after the first Skaggs Springs economy run came to a tearful halt when the winning car spontaneously burst into flames and burned to the ground. Howard was utterly fearless and wildly successful, especially with his sturdy new Buick White Streaks. When he wasn’t winning other people’s races, he was organizing his own and pressing other Buick agents to join him.

The reporters ate from his hand. Here was the dream subject: daring, dashing, photogenic, articulate, a man who was always doing something stunning and always saying something quotable afterward. Out of the rubble of San Francisco, a perfect marriage arose. Howard gave the press a banner headline; the press gave him the public. He and his Buicks became local legends.

Where the press fell short, Howard and the Buick management filled in by papering the city with full-page ads and brochures trumpeting every win.²⁷ Critical to the publicity’s success was Howard’s shrewdest decision. He recognized that the common practice of competing with specially outfitted racing cars muted the promotional effects of victories, given that the consumer knew he was not buying the race car. So Howard opted to race unmodified stock models, exactly the same cars customers could buy off the dealer floor. He also made the transition from horseman to auto driver as easy as possible for prospective buyers. Because virtually none of his customers had owned a car before, he gave free driving lessons. Most important, he began accepting horses as trade-ins. The experience he gained in judging horses would be invaluable to him later, though he would have scoffed at the idea at the time. “The day of the horse is past, and the people in San Francisco want automobiles,” he wrote in 1908.²⁸ “I wouldn’t give five dollars for the best horse in this country.”

The promotion worked. In 1908 Howard sold eighty-five White Streaks for $1,000 each.²⁹

In 1909 he paid a visit to Durant. The new GM chief was grateful; Howard had virtually created what would be one of the industry’s leading markets. With a handshake, Durant gave Howard sole distributorship of Buick as well as GM’s new acquisitions, National and Oldsmobile, for all of the western United States.³⁰ Howard began ordering multiple trainloads of cars, some three hundred at a time, and printing his orders and the company shipping confirmations in full-page ads. He was soon the world’s largest distributor in the fastest-growing industry in history. Throughout the West, frontier regions that had long revolved around the horse were now dotted with sleek, modern Howard dealerships.

He wasn’t done yet. Durant, for the umpteenth time, took a huge financial leap before looking, and emerged bankrupt. Howard bailed him out with a reported $190,000 personal loan.³¹ Durant repaid him with GM stock and a generous percentage of gross sales, guaranteed for life. A poor bicycle repairman just a few years before, Howard soon had hundreds of thousands of dollars for every penny he had brought to California.

In the mid-1920s, Howard began to live like the magnate he had become. In 1924 he funneled $150,000 into the establishment of the Charles S. Howard Foundation and built a home for children suffering from tuberculosis and rheumatic fever.³² It was the first of a lengthy list of philanthropic projects he spearheaded. He also began to live a little. Finding his elder sons, Lin and Charles junior, attempting to play polo with rake handles and a cork ball, he divested Long Island of its best polo ponies and gave them to his boys, who became internationally famous players. A few years later he outfitted a gigantic yacht, the Aras, rounded up a crew of scientists, and sailed them all down to the Galápagos for a research expedition.³³ He returned with a rare blue-footed booby and a collection of other animals, which he donated to a zoo.

He also lived out a fantasy that he had probably cultivated since childhood. He stumbled upon a magnificent ranch sprawling over seventeen thousand acres of California’s remote redwood country, 150 miles north of San Francisco, near a tiny lumber village called Willits. Fulfilling a long-held desire to be a rancher, Howard bought it. Though he stayed in a mansion in the San Francisco suburb of Burlingame whenever he was on business, Howard thought of the ranch as his true home. For all his love of the automobile, Howard was still attracted to the romance of frontier simplicity. He strove to make the ranch, called Ridgewood, a model of rustic self-sufficiency, complete with massive herds of cattle and sheep, several hundred horses, a dairy, a slaughterhouse, and fruit orchards. Dressed in embroidered western shirts, Howard surveyed his ranch from a stock saddle on a cow pony. But he couldn’t resist a little modernity here and there; he sped around his lake in gleaming speedboats. On the hills of Ridgewood, removed from his business, “Poppie” Howard watched his sons grow.

———

On the weekend of May 8 and 9, 1926, Charles Howard took Fannie May to Del Monte, California, to attend the opening of a new hotel. They left their fifteen-year-old son, Frankie, behind at Ridgewood. Early that Sunday morning, Frankie borrowed one of his father’s old trucks and set out for a morning of trout fishing with two friends. At about 9:00 A.M., they gathered up a big catch and headed back toward the main house. Driving along a canyon road about two miles from the house, Frankie saw a large rock in his path and swerved to avoid it. A front wheel dipped over the side of the canyon and Frankie lost control. The truck flipped headlong into the canyon. No one saw it crash.

Frankie’s friends found themselves at the bottom of the canyon, thrown clear. The truck was near them, wheels facing skyward. Struggling to the vehicle, the boys saw Frankie pinned under it. They ran to the ranch house and notified the ranch foreman. There was no hospital anywhere near Ridgewood. The closest thing was the house of the town physician, “Doc” Babcock, who kept a few spare beds to cope with the cuts and bruises suffered by the local loggers. The foreman fetched Babcock and they rushed to the scene. Babcock climbed through the wreckage and used what little medical equipment he had to try to revive Frankie. He was too late. When the Howards arrived by special charter train from Del Monte, they were told that their son was dead, his skull and spine crushed.³⁴

Howard retreated to Ridgewood and remained secluded there for months, prostrate with grief. Doc Babcock came to console him and found the auto magnate wrestling with the question of how he could best memorialize his son. Babcock had an idea: Build a hospital in Willits. Howard embraced the idea, underwrote the entire cost, and arranged to have Ridgewood’s orchards, fields, and dairy supply the hospital with food. Ground was broken by an ox-drawn plow in 1927, and in 1928, with Doc Babcock at the helm, the modern, well-equipped Frank R. Howard Memorial Hospital was open for business. Howard remained on its board of directors for the rest of his life.

He would never truly recover from Frankie’s death. In his Buick office in San Francisco he kept a large painting of Frankie, kneeling beside a dog. Many years later, a teenaged job applicant named Bill Nichols casually asked Howard if he was the boy in the picture.

“Do you think it looks like me?” Charles asked.

Nichols said yes. When he looked up, tears were running down Howard’s face.³⁵

In the 1920s California was not the place to be for a man in a sinning frame of mind. The temperance folks had given America Prohibition, and had thrown in a ban on gambling while they were at it. A guy couldn’t cavort with women, and thanks to the ban on cabaret dancing, he couldn’t even watch women cavorting by themselves. If he was discovered in a hotel room with a woman not his wife, his name would appear in the section of the newspaper reserved for public shaming. Everything was closed on Sundays. The only place to go was church. There he could hear the usual warnings about alcohol, gambling, dancing, and cavorting. When the Southern California ministers were really whipping their congregations into a froth, they would get rolling on the subject of “the Road to Hell,” a byway that ran south from San Diego. At the end of it stood the town of Tijuana, “Sin City,” a place where all those despicable things, and a whole lot more, were done right out in the open.³⁶

You can’t buy that kind of advertising. Thousands of Americans a day were sprinting for the border.

For all the fire-and-brimstone buildup, the avenue that led down to Tijuana was a little disappointing. One might expect the Road to Hell to be well-paved. It wasn’t much more than a meandering dirt lane, one car wide in spots, cutting through the blandness of sagebrush and ducking down to an anemic border river. If travelers were on foot, they could usually wade across and catch a burro taxi on the other side. If they had wheels, they could take a somewhat rickety-looking bridge, followed by a road dipping into Tijuana.

Now, there was some sinning. Only recently a sleepy village, Tijuana was fashioning itself into California’s guilty pleasure. For every restraint in force north of the border, Tijuana offered unlimited indulgence. During Prohibition, one third of the businesses revolved around alcohol, including the longest bar in the world (241 feet), in the Mexicali Club. The minute San Diego outlawed cabaret dancing, Tijuana bristled with high-kicking girls. When boxing was illegal in California, you could find an abundance of the sweet science in Tijuana. You could get married anywhere, anytime; enterprising matchmakers tailed American couples down the streets, offering to get them hitched for cheap. Those who declined were offered quickie divorces, while single men were steered into one of the many brothels, a cottage industry in Tijuana. The town was wide open every hour, every day. In 1929, when the Depression came and poverty began to replace temperance as the narrower of American life, Tijuanan businesses kept prices at bargain-basement levels, so that northern tourists purring past the clapboard shops along the Avenida Revolución could afford to live high in every conceivable way: lobster dinners, fine spirits, salon services, dancing. The place had a state-of-nature feel to it; former jockey Wad Studley recalls seeing a truckload of Mexican soldiers pull up in the middle of the desert, force a rape suspect out onto the sand at bayonet point, send him running, then use him for target practice.³⁷

Tijuana’s greatest tourist attraction was its racetrack, which benefited from the hard times afflicting the racing industry in the United States. Thoroughbred racing had a lengthy and celebrated history in America, but at the height of the temperance and antigambling reform movements in the first decade of the century, a series of race-fixing scandals involving bookmakers inspired a wave of legislation outlawing wagering. The result was catastrophic for racing. At the turn of the century, well over three hundred tracks had been operating nationwide; by 1908, only twenty-five remained, and the attrition continued until World War I.³⁸ In California, the center of top-class western racing, the only track that survived the ban was San Bruno’s Tanforan, which barely scraped by. Many horsemen were forced to abandon the sport and sell off their farms and horses. Most of the rest, especially in the West, retreated to a sort of racing underground, a series of leaky-roof tracks scattered through Canada and the few American states where the sport had not been banned.

For Tijuanans, the racing ban was a godsend. In 1916, shortly after California’s ban on wagering, they opened the Tijuana Racecourse, which immediately became a haven for American stables and racing fans. It was a dilapidated place—one former rider compared it to an outhouse—but like everything else in Tijuana, it was innovative, offering the first primitive movable starting gates and photo finishes. When a departing Hollywood film crew forgot to pack its loudspeaker equipment, racetrackers appropriated the gear, fiddled with it, and soon fashioned the first race-calling public address system.³⁹ The racing was lawless and wild and the Americans loved it.

Among the Yankees pouring down to the border was Charles Howard.⁴⁰ He never explained why he came. Perhaps the place freed him from a straitjacket of grief. By some accounts, his marriage, already ailing before Frankie’s death, was staggering, and maybe he needed to get away. Or it could have been that all that he had worked for mattered less now. The automobile, which had given him great wealth, had stolen something immeasurably more important. His interest in cars, said at least one acquaintance, withered. Howard found himself slipping down the Road to Hell and drifting into that exuberant, swaybacked little town. He avoided the girls and the booze. It was the horses that captured his attention. He tumbled along with the racetrackers, and soon found himself buying a few nondescript Mexican horses and traveling down to attend their races. They were the poorest sort of runners, racing for no more than a handful of pesos, but Howard enjoyed sitting in the stands and cheering them home.

On a summer day in 1929 Howard’s eldest son, Lin, invited his father to the annual Salinas Rodeo. With Lin that day was his wife, Anita, who had talked her older sister Marcela Zabala, a local actress, into joining them for the outing. There in the stands, Charles Howard first set eyes on her dark, wavy hair, straight, slender eyebrows, easy smile.⁴¹ Schooled in a convent and raised on a modest horse ranch just outside of Salinas, where her father was a lawyer, she had once been named Lettuce Queen at the annual Salinas Lettuce Festival.

Charles Howard was bewitched. Not long afterward, Anita gave birth to her first child and asked Marcela to stay with her. Marcela moved into Lin and Anita’s home, where she and Charles saw each other daily. Though a May-December romance must have caused a sensation, Howard fell in love with Marcela and she with him. She was twenty-five and the sister of his son’s wife; he was fifty-two and married. His marriage, wounded by Frankie’s death, collapsed. In the fall of 1932, at a ceremony at Lin’s house, Charles and Marcela were wed.

In Marcela, Howard found his perfect complement. Like him, she was deeply empathic. Suddenly elevated into the world of the rich, she moved with an easy, charming propriety, yet had the rare grace and aplomb to make her frequent departures from convention seem amusing instead of scandalous. She dazzled the society writers. At golf, she packed such a wallop that she swung from the men’s tee. In 1935, when Charles organized a five-month African safari, Marcela eagerly enlisted in the adventure.⁴² In a world in which women’s roles were still highly traditional, Marcela’s trip was the talk of the town, prompting the San Francisco Examiner to feature daily reports on her exploits in the jungle. She gave them plenty to gawk at. When a lion charged their party, it was Marcela who leveled her gun and cooly shot the animal. And when she found a tiny orphaned baby blue monkey, she smuggled him back to New York in a hatbox. She talked the Waldorf-Astoria into letting her house him in a luxury suite, posed for reporters with “Blooey” and a banana on the Waldorf’s plush settee, then carried him home as a pet.⁴³ She shared Howard’s understanding of the importance of image and cheerfully joined him in the public eye. And like her husband, she had spent much of her life with horses.

In 1934 Charles Howard could look out from his offices and see a city shaped by his vision. The horse-drawn San Francisco he had walked into thirty years before had vanished. Only a few horses clopped down the city’s streets, and they would be gone before the decade was out. Howard was worth millions, lived in supreme luxury, and enjoyed the devotion of friends and the admiration of the public. But he was not content. He was ready to move on.

Howard’s friend George Giannini, owner of a string of fine racehorses, thought he knew where Howard belonged.⁴⁴ Giannini saw Howard rekindling his lost love of horses and thought he should stop dabbling and commit himself fully to Thoroughbred racing. Howard was only lukewarm. He would not enter the business on a large scale, he said, unless he could go first-class, with the very best trainer. The idea was bandied around a bit and apparently dropped.

It took a San Francisco dentist, former pro baseball player and investor named Charles “Doc” Strub to change his mind. Five years earlier, on a Monday afternoon in the fall of 1929, Strub had sat down in his lucky chair at his barber’s and settled in for a shave. He was handed a telephone. Sitting there with his face slathered in shaving cream, Strub learned that the stock market had crashed, and in a single day he had lost everything and fallen into a debt of more than $1 million. Strub put the phone down, stunned. An idea came to him. He had lost his money, but not his connections, nor his eye for opportunity. He would build a racetrack, the finest in the world, and bring horse racing back to California.

His timing turned out to be flawless, for the catastrophe that had struck him that afternoon had plowed under the entire nation. Over the next three years, as the Depression strangled the economy, state governments searched desperately for revenue. Californians hoping to relegalize racing pounced. For the first time in a quarter century, they received an audience. In 1933 California agreed to legalize wagering on two conditions. First, tracks had to use the pari-mutuel wagering machine instead of the bookmakers whose corruption had prompted the betting ban. Second, wagering would be heavily taxed. Racing was reborn.

With a ready plan for a $3-million racing Xanadu, built on the site of the vast Rancho Santa Anita at the apron of the San Gabriel Mountains just outside Los Angeles, all Strub needed was the cash. He couldn’t find a bank to back him, so he went door to door in search of private investors. Strub was turned away from many homes, but when he called on Charles Howard, he was invited in. Howard, his close friend Bing Crosby, and several other wealthy Californians handed Strub a hefty sum to build his Santa Anita Park.

Strub spent the money well. He built a track like none other on earth, a cathedral to the Thoroughbred so resplendent that writer David Alexander described his first sight of it as one of the most stirring visual experiences of his life. Strub’s mountain-flanked racecourse opened on Christmas Day, 1934. It was an immense, immediate success with the public, and in consequence, the state, which raked in millions in new revenue. It was just as popular with horsemen, for Strub had the brilliant idea of inaugurating a signature race for the track, the Santa Anita Handicap, to be held every year in late winter, beginning in 1935.⁴⁶ Unlike the Kentucky Derby, which was limited to three-year-old horses, the handicap would be open to any mature horse, three years old and up. But it was the purse that stopped traffic. In 1934 American marquee races carried a net value to the winner of between $6,000, and, in rare cases, $50,000. In contrast, Strub’s purse was staggering: $100,000, plus a few thousand dollars in entry revenue, to the winner. It was the biggest purse in the world. Offered in a year in which the average per capita income in the United States was $432, Strub’s purse caused a national sensation.⁴⁵ The pot was so distracting that hardly anyone referred to the race by its actual name. The Santa Anita Handicap became, in the parlance of racetrackers, the hundred-grander, or “hunnert-grander.”⁴⁷

Strub had created the race at the perfect moment. States all over the nation were relegalizing racing under the pari-mutuel system, resulting in a 70 percent increase in the number of tracks. Racing was rapidly becoming far and away America’s most heavily attended sport.⁴⁸ From 1934 on, millions of new racing fans turned their eyes to Santa Anita to see who would claim Strub’s pot. The hundred-grander became an overnight classic. Everyone wanted to win it. Including Charles and Marcela Howard.

Perhaps it was Giannini’s urging, perhaps the example of Bing Crosby, who was investing heavily in racehorses, or maybe the spellbinding vision of the track their money had built. Whatever the reason, the Howards, especially Marcela, hung their hearts on winning the big race. In 1935, shortly after San Francisco’s new Bay Meadows Racecourse opened, Howard assembled a group of modestly talented racehorses and hired a crack young trainer named Buster Millerick to condition them. The stable was registered under Marcela’s name. She designed the silks that would become legendary: crimson-and-white cap, white sleeves, and a crimson vest emblazoned with the Ridgewood cattle brand, an H inside a large white triangle. The horses were fairly good, but Howard had his sights on better things. That summer, he and Marcela bought fifteen yearlings at a Saratoga, New York, auction. In keeping with his love of lost causes, Howard bought only the worst-looking horses at the sale, animals who lingered in the ring, attracting few, if any, bids. Millerick was a very good young trainer, but for his new yearlings and the hundred-grander-caliber horses he planned to have soon, Howard wanted the best. In 1935 he went looking for him.

Tom Smith

(AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS)

Chapter 2

THE LONE PLAINSMAN

Several hundred miles south of Charles Howard’s estate, an old horseman named Tom Smith was spending 1935 at a Mexican racetrack, living on a cot in a horse stall. He was a stark man, square-built, with a hard mouth. Ever since he had materialized at the track from somewhere on the frontier—no one knew exactly where—none of the racetrackers had known what to make of him.

As a general rule, Smith didn’t talk. He had a habit of walking away when anyone asked him questions, and he avoided social gatherings because people expected him to speak. A journalist who had watched Smith for years described him thus: “He nods hello, shakes hands goodbye, and hasn’t said a hundred words in all.”¹ One man swore that he had seen Smith accidentally chop off his own toe with an axe; the sum of Smith’s response had been to shake the amputated digit out of his boot and say, “My toe.”² The men on the backstretch assumed that anyone who made such a point of saying so little had to have something to hide, something shady or, perhaps, something immodestly valiant. They filled his biographical vacuum with suitably large Wild West myths: knocked-over banks, rodeo stardom, daring exploits in the Indian wars. None of it was true, but it made for good, salty rumor, and it made Smith pleasingly terrifying. The truth about Smith was a lot more interesting, but he never let anyone in on his secrets.

He was fifty-six but he looked much older. His jaw had a recalcitrant jut to it that implied a run-in with something—an errant hoof or an ill-placed fence post—but maybe it was the only shape in which it could have been drawn. He had a colorless translucence about him that made him seem as if he were in the earliest stages of progressive invisibility. On the rare occasions when he took off his gray felt fedora, you had to look hard at his threadbare head to tell where his gray hair ended and his gray skin began. When photographed hatless, he had an unsettling tendency to blend with the sky, so that his eyes hung disembodied in space. Some photographers gave up and drew his head into the picture by hand, guessing at his outline. When they were lucky enough to catch him head-on, all his features but that big shovel of a jaw vanished in the shade of his hat brim, so that all that appeared above his mouth were his spectacles, the lenses reflecting the photographer’s image back at him. Smith almost never looked at cameras anyway. He was always looking at his horses.

He appeared to have reached the end of the road. His training stable consisted of just one horse who would never be better than ordinary. The old cowboy ate his meals alone in the track kitchen and spent the rest of his time with the horse. For a time he provoked a smattering of discussion over ham-and-egg breakfasts on the backstretch benches. Eventually, the racetrackers grew accustomed to his silence, and he was forgotten.

In Tom Smith’s younger days, the Indians would watch him picking his way over the open plains, skirting the mustang herds. He was always alone, even back then, in the waning days of the nineteenth century. He talked to virtually no one but his horses, and then only in their vernacular of small gestures and soft sounds. The Indians called him “Lone Plainsman.”³ White men called him “Silent Tom.” People merely brushed up against him. Only the horses seemed to know him well.

They had been the quiet study of his life. He had grown up in a world in which horsemanship was as essential as breathing. Born with a prodigy’s intuitive understanding of the animals, he had devoted himself to them so wholeheartedly that he was incomplete without them. By nature or by exposure he had become like them, in their understatement, their blunt assertion of will. In the company of men, Smith was clipped and bristling. With horses, he was gracefully at ease.

His history had the ethereal quality of hoofprints in windblown snow.⁴ He came from the prairies, where he had tamed countless mustangs for the British cavalry’s effort in the Boer War. Before that, his career with horses stretched back to boyhood, with stints as a deer hunter, sheep-ranch foreman, mountain-lion tracker. In childhood, he rode in the last of the great cattle drives; at thirteen, he was already a skilled horse breaker. The wheres and whens are lost, but always there were horses and empty land. He had a wife, but her presence seems to have been detected only by inference: A son named Jimmy turned up later in Smith’s company, prompting his friends to conclude that the boy “must have come from somewhere.”

As the century turned he rode out of the wilderness and into Grand Junction, Colorado. He was in his early twenties. The British cavalry didn’t need him anymore, so he had been forced to leave the mustangs and find a new job. He and his horse strayed onto the vast continuity of Colorado’s Unaweep Cattle Range. He had heard that a ranch needed a foreman.

He won the job and stayed for twenty years. He was a jack-of-all-trades, breaking the sturdy little cow ponies, treating their injuries and illnesses, trimming their hooves, and bending over an anvil to forge their shoes. He lived day and night in their company, warming himself against their skin as he wandered over the range, sleeping at their feet under the Colorado mountains.

Change was coming. As Smith passed his days in the Unaweep, the West that had formed him was making a long, painful retreat. Modernity, led by the automobile, was perforating the frontier. Horses, and all the ways of life that had grown up around them, were slowly being pushed out. Perhaps on his rare sojourns into civilization, Smith had passed the Howard Automobile Company dealerships springing up. He didn’t need to see them to know that there was less and less use for skills like his. All around him, men were redefining themselves for the new world, and a vast pool of knowledge and tradition was evaporating. A myth of what the frontier had been, the Wild West legend, was taking hold in the popular imagination, and it would not be long before people defined Smith by it.

People around him moved on, but Smith stayed where he was for a little longer, quietly becoming a relic. He knew no other life, and probably could imagine none. His mind had been shaped by the prairies and ranges, and until the day he died, he would make order of the world with lessons learned from cow ponies, jagged land, and wide-open sky.

In 1921 the cattle ranch on the Unaweep was sold, leaving Smith unemployed. He drifted into a Wyoming county fair, where he found a job working for an obscure firm that supplied decrepit horses to rodeos for use in relay races. Smith was put in charge of training and shoeing six racehorses. He did a superb job, nursing the horses’ ailments while honing their speed. It was strictly small-time racing, but Smith’s horses were winning. A giant of a man named Irwin noticed.

“Cowboy Charlie” Irwin ran two businesses: a raucous Wild West show in summer and an even more raucous racing stable in winter.⁵ Irwin was a colossus, in form and personality. His weight, thanks to a glandular disorder and 50-pound tumors, swung from a comparatively petite 400 pounds to 540 pounds, packed mostly in a monstrous quaking belly that won him the nickname “Ten Ton” Irwin. His immediate surroundings had to be remade to accommodate his girth. He ran his business from the overburdened back of a freakishly oversized Standardbred horse wearing a superwide saddle. Because Irwin didn’t come within 200 pounds of fitting through a standard car door, he drove a customized sedan outfitted with a wide-load rear hatch through which he wiggled in and out.

Irwin was incurably newsworthy. At the hanging of his friend, convicted killer Tom Horn, he made national headlines by stepping up to the gallows and belting out “Life’s Railway to Heaven.” When notorious fugitive Bill Carlisle robbed a train on the Union Pacific Railroad, Irwin galloped off with the posse that hunted him down, then recounted his story of how he “bagged the gamest train robber that ever pulled a hold-up in the West” in blazing prose in The Denver Post. As an agent for the Union Pacific, he single-handedly saved Colorado’s wool trade during a blizzard by ramming locomotive plows through snowdrifts to open the tracks for trains bearing sheep feed.

Important people were always hovering around him, from General John Pershing to Will Rogers. Teddy Roosevelt once bailed out Irwin’s show when it went broke and got stranded in Sheepshead Bay. Charlie paid him back with a pinto pony and a long friendship. Irwin greeted newcomers with bone-crushing handshakes and tooth-shattering back-slaps. He smothered men in broad smiles, fast talk, and wild stories. He was bold, innovative, blessed with an instinct for promotion, slick, unscrupulous, and completely magnetic. Some of his neighbors, traditional live-stockers, didn’t like him much, but he was the prototype of the new breed of western man. Invariably, those who knew him summed him up with the phrase used by former jockey Mike Griffin, who never forgot a brief riding audition he made for Irwin: “the biggest man I’ve ever seen.”

Irwin saw what Smith could do with a horse, and he needed as many good horsemen as he could find. He offered Smith a job as a foreman, farrier, and training assistant. Irwin was a very hard man to refuse, and Smith had few choices. He said yes.

The Lone Plainsman had signed on to a turbulent life.⁶ In summer he clattered around the nation by rail, pulling into towns to put on the show under circus tents Irwin had bought cut-rate from the Ringling Brothers outfit when it merged with Barnum & Bailey. The acts were a curious mix of history and myth, everything from cowboy-Indian fights, Pony Express rides, cavalry rescues, and stagecoach robberies to Roman-style chariot racing, relay races, women’s steer wrestling, and mounted rope tricks and gymnastics. The supporting cast was mostly disenfranchised Indians, Mexicans, and cowpunchers, all of whom possessed horsemanship and livestock skills honed on the vanishing frontier.

The headliners were Irwin’s windblown daughters, Frances, Joella, and Paulene, all fearless horsewomen. As a pigtailed child, Joella had once ditched school to compete in, and win, a horse race against legendary Arapahoe riders. She came home to a whipping from her mother and a new horse from her beaming father. Smith worked mostly behind the scenes but occasionally came into the ring to hold relay horses for Irwin’s daughters. Irwin oversaw it all from the back of his huge yellow horse, galloping around the center field with his feet jutting out to the sides, hat waving, booming encouragement to his cowgirls. The nation couldn’t get enough of it, and the show was a sellout from coast to coast.

In the winter, the Irwin racing stable got rolling. Thanks to the wagering ban, the only places for it to go were seedy tracks, backwater ovals so small they were called “bullrings,” and dirt roads, but this was Irwin’s kind of racing. On this circuit, Ten Ton Irwin was king.

The Irwin racing outfit was a little city on railroad tracks. When the bigger tracks—Tijuana, nearby Agua Caliente, or Omaha’s Ak-Sar-Ben (Nebraska spelled backward)—were running, Irwin’s railcars would rattle into town. The workers would pull the horses and tack off the cars, throw up the Ringling Brothers tents and seats, open up “all you can eat, pitch till you win” kitchens inside horse stalls, and settle in for an assault on the racing community. Irwin’s stable was probably the largest in America at the time, and may have been the largest ever, but most of the horses would have been hard-pressed to outrun Irwin himself. The vast majority were relegated to claiming races, rock-bottom events in which any competitor can be purchased for a set, low price before the race. Irwin took a shotgun approach, throwing as many horses as he could into claiming races in the hope that a few would hit pay dirt, then reloading the ones who hadn’t been claimed for another go in a day or two.

When the big tracks closed, Smith and the Irwin crew piled back on the railcars and began endless loops of smaller towns, stopping off in big cities like Kansas City and crossroads like Laramie, Medicine Bow, and Sheridan, Wyoming. Indian reservations were also on the itinerary; Irwin would schedule his arrivals for the day after government checks came to be sure that everyone had betting money.⁷ Upon arrival in the town or reservation, Irwin would trot the horses off the railcars and straight to the nearest back road or bullring, where he would implement a nearly fail-safe betting system. He would talk the locals into racing their horses against his for side bets, with a forfeit fee of about $10. He would accept all comers sight unseen, but in the interim between the deal and the race, he would spy on the training of the local horses. If he thought they’d whip his runners, he’d fork over the forfeit fees and skip town, often “forgetting” to pay his hotel bill on the way out. If the local horses were clearly inferior to his, he’d talk their owners into betting all of their cash. When the cash ran out, he’d work on them until they had staked practically everything they owned, right down to their horse blankets. Irwin’s horses almost always won, and Irwin would clean out the locals, pack the horses back on the trains, and leave. “Irwin would put a guy out,” remembered Hall of Fame trainer Jimmy Jones, who cut his teeth running horses against Irwin’s. “The minute [a man] got any money, Irwin would rob him of it. He was an old racketeer in a way.”

This was a rough life for man and beast. For a wage of about $60 a month, Smith slept and ate in horse stalls and struggled to keep up with the farriery needs of fifty-four horses. And Irwin was no easy boss. He had a contract jockey named Pablo Martinez, who worked on a set salary instead of being paid per ride. To save himself the $5 fee a replacement rider would cost him, Irwin once hauled poor Martinez out of a hospital bed and made him ride a race. Though he was down with pneumonia, Martinez somehow managed both to live through the afternoon and to win the race before wheezing his way back to the hospital.

The horses fared worse. Irwin was known to pack thirty horses onto a single four-door railcar, ship them to a race, yank them off the car, and run them without giving them water or letting them warm up. His racing schedules were barbaric. In an era in which one race a week was considered a full calendar, he ran a mare named Miss Cheyenne sixteen times in twenty-one days. He ran another unfortunate horse every day for eight straight days. Rival trainers who claimed horses from Irwin sometimes found them so exhausted that they had to give them long layoffs before they were capable of running again. The hardship paid off for Irwin, who became the winningest trainer in the nation, but it took a toll on the animals. Smith patched them together, soothed their ailments, and learned.

It must have been humiliating for Smith, tending to horses run into exhaustion and watching men and women whose skills had once been so vital prancing around for an audience that had already forgotten their fading world. It is hard to imagine Tom Smith surrounded by the artificialities of show business, standing in a glitzy showring, loosing horses to run in chaotic sprints, and not think that something precious was being squandered.

But Smith adapted. He was assigned the duty of handling horses for walk-up starts in relay races and matches. In watching thousands of match races, he learned that in most cases the horse who broke from the start fastest would win. Smith began devising new ways of teaching horses to blow off the line as quickly as possible. For the time being, the knowledge helped keep the Irwin barn solvent. In the long run, it would mean much more.

The Depression upended Irwin’s business. Workers, at least, were easy to find. He made annual trips through Chicago to buy horses, and to add hands to his roster he simply swung through the masses of unemployed men milling in the Chicago train stations, hauling aboard anyone who wanted a job. But attendance at his show waned, and paying his men became a problem. Eventually, his money gave out altogether. Irwin made speeches to his employees, pledging that he would pay them, but he couldn’t. Irwin’s horses still needed care, so Smith remained on the job. One horse had caught his eye, a hopeless wreck named Knighthood.⁸

The horse had quite a history. In the 1920s, Knighthood had been handled by an able conditioner named Bob Rowe, one of only a handful of black horsemen training in that era. Under Rowe’s handling, Knighthood was a holy terror, winning thirty races and $22,000. The horse became an icon of Tijuana’s black community, which turned the horse’s race days into joyful celebrations. But as Knighthood aged, his speed diminished. In 1930 he was placed in a claiming race. Rowe didn’t want to part with him, but he thought that no one would claim an aged veteran of nearly 150 races. He was wrong. To add insult to injury, the claiming trainer was white. Rowe was heartbroken, and the horse’s fans were outraged. After Knighthood changed hands, a rumor began circulating that someone from the horse’s erstwhile rooting section had placed a curse on him. Superstition runs long and deep on the backstretch, and the trainer who had claimed the horse was unnerved enough to sell him without ever racing him. The next owner promptly dropped Knighthood into another claiming race.

Irwin was not the superstitious sort, and he put in a claim for Knighthood before the race. So did the rueful Rowe, but when a drawing was held to determine who would get the horse, Irwin came out on top. If Knighthood was running under a curse, it worked. In that very race he was badly injured and limped into Irwin’s barn a seemingly ruined horse. Irwin, who was fond of the horse, refused to euthanize him. Knighthood languished in Irwin’s barn, refusing to eat.

Smith wanted the horse. After two months without pay, he approached Irwin with a proposal: He would call off the debt for past wages if Irwin would give him Knighthood. Irwin at first declined, saying the horse was useless. Smith persisted and prevailed. Smith took Knighthood and disappeared. The horse was gone for so long that everyone on the backstretch assumed he had died. Ten months later Smith showed up in Tijuana with Knighthood in hand and entered him in a race. In racing, a victory by a horse older than seven, even in claiming races, is an extremely rare event; Knighthood was ten. But the horse’s old fans, overjoyed to see him again, rushed the betting windows. In the time it took Knighthood to walk to the post, his betting odds plunged. Knighthood won. His comeback became legend.

Irwin knew talent when he saw it, and he offered Smith a shot at training his horses. He sent Smith out to a little bullring track in Cheyenne with a string of runners. The trainees won twenty-nine of thirty races, a feat that may be unequaled at any level of the sport. During a losing streak, Irwin shipped Smith off to Seattle to train another string. Again, Smith turned Irwin’s luck around completely.

In his course from meadows and rangeland to back roads and bullrings, Tom Smith had cultivated an almost mystical communion with horses. He knew their minds and how to sway them. He knew their bodies and how they telegraphed emotion and sensation, and his hands were a tonic for their pains. In his era, racing was a business made rigid by tradition and imitation, superstition and wives’ tales. Even mainstream trainers would drop pennies in mares’ water buckets to halt estrus, or exhaust themselves trying to get a mane that fell to the left—a bad omen—to fall to the right. But Smith was a radical departure from conventional trainers. He followed no formulas, no regimens, no superstitious rituals. The wisdom he harbored was frontier-tested. He approached each horse as a distinct individual and followed his own lights and experience to care for it. Horses blossomed in his care.

Perhaps Smith spoke so infrequently because he was listening so hard. Horses speak with the smallest of motions; Smith heard and saw everything. “Hotwalkers” leading horses around the shed row to cool them out after workouts would see him squatting down on the floor, staring straight ahead, turning the horses over in his mind.⁹ The grooms could circle the barn and come around again, and there he’d be, exactly as he was before. Sometimes he would become so absorbed in watching a horse that he wouldn’t move for hours.¹⁰ At times he wouldn’t leave the horses, not even to go over to the grandstand to watch the races, for weeks on end. He built ingenious training devices out of whatever was lying around, brewed up homemade liniments, prepared his horses in exactly the way they said he shouldn’t. He carried a stopwatch, but left it in his pocket; he had an uncanny ability to judge a horse’s pace by sight, and he resented any distraction that might make him miss a nuance of movement. “I’d rather depend on my eye than on one of those newfangled timepieces,” he said.¹¹ “They take your attention off your horse. I got a watch and it works, too, but the eye is better.”

For Smith, training was a long, quiet conversation. He was baffled by other people’s inability to grasp what he was doing. “It’s easy to talk to a horse if you understand his language,” he once said.¹² “Horses stay the same from the day they are born until the day they die.… They are only changed by the way people treat them.” He believed with complete conviction that no animal was permanently ruined. Every horse could be improved. He lived by a single maxim: “Learn your horse.¹³ Each one is an individual, and once you penetrate his mind and heart, you can often work wonders with an otherwise intractable beast.”

The cow ponies, the broncs, the show horses, and the weary racers: All had helped to craft Smith into the complete horseman. He was waiting for the right horse.

An early spring sun hung in the Mexican sky on March 21, 1934, when Ten Ton Irwin shimmied his 425 pounds through the giant rear door of his sedan and pushed off for Cheyenne. The “meet” (racing session) was over at Northern Mexico’s Agua Caliente Race Track and Irwin was due back in Wyoming to tend to his livestock leasing business. He drove north, making his way over the Wyoming border. On a lonely road fourteen miles outside Cheyenne, a tire blew. The car veered out of control and plunged into a ditch. Rescuers found Irwin in the wreckage with chest and head injuries. Two days later he was dead.

Irwin’s barn was dissolved. Smith wound up on his own at Seattle’s Longacres Racetrack. After briefly training a few of Irwin’s old horses, he ended up working as a foreman for an old rodeo trick rider turned trainer named Harry Walters. That, too, was short-lived; the owner Walters trained for soon retired from the racing business. Knowing that he was putting Smith out of work again, the owner gave him a gift. It was a horse, a well-traveled $1,500 claimer named Oriley.¹⁴ It was a dubious present: The horse was lame.

As with Knighthood, Smith settled in to work on the horse. After a period of recuperation, he brought Oriley back on the track, sound and fit. The horse began winning. Soon Smith was bumping the horse up in class, and he kept finding the winner’s circle.

Sometime in the latter half of 1934, Tom Smith brought his one-horse stable down to Agua Caliente. Oriley did passably well, but Smith was barely making it. The trainer was living out of a horse stall, sharing it with another struggling horseman.¹⁵ He found no clients. He was a few dollars short of flat broke and only marginally employed at the depths of the Depression.

He was saved by a remarkable coincidence. Noble Threewitt, the young horseman who was sharing the horse stall with Smith, happened to be training horses for George Giannini, Charles Howard’s close friend. While visiting the barn to oversee his horses, Giannini noticed how Oriley was flourishing under Smith’s care. He realized that wasting away on this Mexican backstretch was a brilliant horseman. Giannini contacted Charles Howard.

“Now,” he told his friend, “you can have the best trainer in the country.”¹⁶

Tom Smith and Charles Howard came face-to-face. The two men stood in different halves of the century. Smith was the last of the true frontiersmen; Howard was paving Smith’s West under the urgent wheels of his automobiles. Howard was driven by image; Smith remained the Lone Plainsman, forbidding and solitary. But Howard was blessed with an uncanny ability to see potential in unlikely packages, and he had a cavalryman’s eye for horsemen. He took one look at Smith and instincts rang in his head. He drove Smith to his barn and introduced his horses to their new trainer.

Smith and Seabiscuit

(AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS)

Chapter 3

MEAN, RESTIVE, AND RAGGED

Prosperity, in the form of a fat salary from Howard, had found Tom Smith. He had invested a little in the outer man. Gone were the overalls, the big plaid work shirts, the muddied boots, the chaps, the cap. He began showing up at the barn in neat gray suits, dark vests, whipcord trousers, wing tips, and on race days a restrained Republican tie.¹ He had even purchased a camel-hair coat. Topping off the ensemble was, of course, the utterly unremarkable gray felt fedora. Head and hat were inseparable. Given that Smith was not a man of particularly noteworthy appearance, it was probably the hat, not his face, that people recognized. A couple of years later, during a stable trip to New York, Smith decided that he had just about worn the hat to death and left the barn in search of a replacement. He stomped back in, brushing past Howard, four hours later. On his head was an exact replica of the old hat. Obviously in sour spirits, he muttered that he had spent the entire morning scouring the town trying to find a hat for $2.50.

“Couldn’t find one,” he grumbled. “Had to get this one.”

Howard asked him how much the new hat had set him back.

“Three dollars.”²

The new raiment fit him. Tom Smith had arrived. He had taken Howard’s ill-bred yearlings, worked with them in solitude for a year, then slipped them into Barn 38 at Santa Anita and hung out his shingle. Right from the start he attracted curious glances. Someone saw him wrapping up an alarm clock in a towel and burying it in the straw of a filly’s stall, letting her get used to the ticking.³ Then, while everyone at the track was speculating about what he was up to, Smith tacked up the horse, fished out the clock, and went to the track. He loaded the filly in the gate, set off the clock alarm, and let her rip. He brought her back and did it again and again until she was primed to jackrabbit down the track when she heard a bell.

Pretty soon, people were coming around just to watch Smith. No one had ever seen a trainer work like this. The Howards motored down and watched, too, feeding sugar cubes to their horses and surely wondering what they had gotten themselves into. But then the races began and Smith’s horses started winning. Not just a little; Smith owned the place. The horses were almost all long shots, because no one trusted what Smith was doing, but that just made the payoffs for Howard’s bets all the greater. The filly trained with the alarm clock, a 70-1 long shot, smoked a giant field right out of the gate to win the biggest juvenile race of the season, paying $143.60 for every $2 bet, a meet record. Smith won so much that he started to make the papers almost daily. The racetrackers were soon calling the winner’s circle “Howard’s Half Acre,” and Barn 38 was the track’s runaway leader in wins.

Howard and Smith came to an understanding. Howard called his trainer Tom; Smith, without fail, called his employer Mr. Howard. The Howards came to the barn almost every morning, and Charles stayed on, sometimes for fourteen hours at a stretch. He brought in a big truck of a saddle horse named Chulo so he could ride out with Smith on the track. But he knew his place. He didn’t mess with Smith’s business. For a hands-on executive like Howard, the urge to tinker must have been strong, but he was smart enough to recognize superior understanding, no matter how bizarre the training practices looked. “Mr. Howard pays me for results,” Smith once said. “He doesn’t ask questions.” In turn, Smith put up with Howard’s love of the spotlight, the long stream of friends and reporters he brought to the barn, his need to be in the center of things. To a point. If Howard’s friends got too close to his horses, Smith would snap at them to get back. The union had its rough points, but it worked.

Howard was hungry for more winning. As the spring waned, they decided to take the show on the road. The horses would go to a little track in Michigan called the Detroit Fair Grounds. Smith was sent on alone, farther east, on a different mission. Howard wanted some mature horses to augment his fleet of juveniles. Howard had the kind of money to turn the head of any major-league owner, and he could have used it to acquire a ready-made stable of proven runners. But Howard didn’t want to take the easy route. He wanted a bargain animal whose talent had been overlooked by the old-money lords of eastern racing. He knew he had the trainer who could find him. In June 1936 Smith arrived in Massachusetts. He traveled from track to track, looking at hundreds of cheap horses, but he couldn’t find the one he sought. On the sweltering afternoon of June 29, at Boston’s Suffolk Downs, the horse found him.

The colt was practically sneering at him. Smith was standing by the track rail, weighing the angles and gestures of low-level horses as they streamed to the post, when a weedy three-year-old bay stopped short in front of him, swung his head high, and eyed him with an arch expression completely unsuited to such a rough-hewn animal. “He looked right down his nose at me,” Smith remembered later, “like he was saying, ‘Who the devil are you?’” Man and horse stood on opposite sides of the rail for a long moment, sizing each other up.⁴ An image materialized in Smith’s mind: the Colorado ranges, a tough little cow horse. The pony boy leading the colt to the post tugged him on his way. Smith watched the animal’s rump swing around and go. Thin, yes, but he had an engine on him.

Smith flipped to the horse’s profile in the track program. The colt was a descendant of the mighty Man o’ War through his sire, the brilliantly fast, exceptionally handsome Hard Tack, but his stunted build reflected none of the beauty and breadth of his forebears. The colt’s body, built low to the ground, had all the properties of a cinder block. Where Hard Tack had been tall, sleek, tapered, every line suggesting motion, his son was blunt, coarse, rectangular, stationary. He had a sad little tail, barely long enough to brush his hocks. His stubby legs were a study in unsound construction, with squarish, asymmetrical “baseball glove” knees that didn’t quite straighten all the way, leaving him in a permanent semicrouch. Thanks to his unfortunate assembly, his walk was an odd, straddle-legged motion that was often mistaken for lameness. Asked to run, he would drop low over the track and fall into a comical version of what horsemen call an eggbeater gait, making a spastic sideways flailing motion with his left foreleg as he swung it forward, as if he were swatting at flies. His gallop was so disorganized that he had a maddening tendency to whack himself in the front ankle with his own hind hoof. One observer compared his action to a duck waddle.⁵ All of this raggedness was not helped by his racing schedule. His career had been noteworthy only in its appalling rigor. Though only three years old, he had already run forty-three races, far more than most horses contest in their entire careers.

But somehow, after throwing a fit in the starting gate and being left flat-footed at the bell, the colt won his race that day. While being unsaddled, he leveled his wide-set, intelligent eyes on Smith again. Smith liked that look, and nodded at the horse. “Darned if the little rascal didn’t nod back at me,” Smith said later, “kinda like he was paying me an honor to notice me.” He was a horse whose quality, an admirer would write, “was mostly in his heart, and Tom Smith had been the first to recognize it.”⁶ A man for whom words were encumbrances, Smith didn’t take note of the horse’s name, but he memorized him nonetheless. He spoke to the horse as he was led away.

“I’ll see you again.”⁷

The horse’s name was Seabiscuit, and for a bent-backed trainer on the other side of the backstretch, the brief exchange of glances between the horse and Tom Smith was the beginning of the end of a long, pounding headache. In 1877, when James Fitzsimmons was three, the Coney Island Jockey Club annexed his family’s Brooklyn neighborhood and literally built a track around his house, leaving it standing in the infield while the racing world revolved around it.^8,9 “Sunny Jim,” as admirers called him, was thus entangled in the racetrack from the beginning of his conscious life. He never escaped it. “All I ever wanted to do,” he once said, “was be with the horses.” At age ten he worked as a dishwasher in the track kitchen. He moved on to a harrowing career as an exercise boy, then became a jockey. “I was vaccinated for jockey,” he liked to say, “but it didn’t take.” He survived a rocky reinsman’s career, then hung it up to try his hand at training. He had found his niche.

Fitzsimmons soon established himself as the most successful conditioner of Thoroughbreds in the nation. That June he was sixty-one and imprisoned in a body so ravaged by arthritis that his upper spine was slowly collapsing forward, driving his head so far downward that in time he would have to learn to identify his horses solely by their feet. He coaxed a phenomenal amount of work out of his rigid body, laboring so hard over his horses through the week that he had to sleep straight through Sunday to recover. The work paid off: Fitzsimmons had cultivated the talents of myriad champions, including Gallant Fox and Omaha, two of the first three horses to sweep the Kentucky Derby, Preakness Stakes, and Belmont Stakes—the Triple Crown. His greatness was beyond question. His was a household name across America, and trainers regarded him with profound reverence. Tom Smith was no exception. Fitzsimmons was apparently the only man whom Smith ever regarded with awe.

The events that brought the two trainers together had begun in 1928, when Fitzsimmons was entrusted with the two-year-old Hard Tack, sire of the colt Smith would see at Suffolk Downs. Owned by Gladys Phipps and her brother Ogden Mills, operators of the East’s legendary Wheatley Stable, Hard Tack was a copper-colored paragon of symmetry, grace, and blinding speed. Everything about him was superlative, including his single flaw: He was uncontrollable. The characteristic had surfaced, to a greater or lesser degree, in nearly every horse to descend from his great-grandsire, Hastings, a thousand-pound misanthrope for the ages. On the track, where he won races as prestigious as the 1896 Belmont Stakes, Hastings deliberately rammed and attempted to maul his competitors. Off the track, he ripped groom after groom to ribbons. “He went to his death unreconstructed and unloved,” wrote Peter Chew in American Heritage magazine, “having left his mark literally and figuratively on many a stablehand.” Hastings passed both speed and malevolence down to his son Fair Play, who in turn bequeathed it to his incomparable son, Man o’ War. Racing in 1919 and 1920, this immense red animal so devastated his competition that he won by as many as one hundred lengths and set numerous speed records. Man o’ War lost only once in his career—to a colt coincidentally named Upset—a defeat that still ranks among the most shocking in sports history.¹ Arguably the greatest runner who ever lived, Man o’ War became a prolific sire, populating the racing world with beautiful man-eaters.¹⁰

A typical example was War Relic.¹¹ While a youngster, he acquainted the world with his jolly personality by stomping a groom to death. His trainer, Culton Utz, tracked down leading jockey Tommy Luther, famed for his fearlessness and ability to stay aboard even the most unrideable beasts, and brought him to the training farm to work with the horse. Luther was appalled at just how bad the colt was. “The horse,” remembered Luther, “would do everything wrong.” Luther and Utz put War Relic through endless hours of patient schooling until they felt he was ready to go to the track without killing anyone. At Rhode Island’s Narragansett Park they entered him in a race. War Relic displayed cherubic behavior, grabbed the lead out of the gate, and never relinquished it, winning with consummate ease. “Next time he runs,” Luther told his wife, Helen, “bet a hundred dollars. It will be like taking candy from a baby.”

Helen did as her husband asked, then sat in the stands on race day, terrified and praying. War Relic rocketed to the lead, held it around the track, and flew into the homestretch all alone. Luther thought his $100 bet was going to cash in. But War Relic had been an angel for exactly one and three quarter races, and he was pushing his limits. As the crowd cheered him on from the grandstand, he abruptly bolted to the inside, hit the rail, and stopped dead, vaulting Luther into a spiraling dive directly toward the toothy track harrows parked in the infield. Luther was on the verge of being skewered. Throwing out his hands, he caught the rail, swooped around it like a gymnast, and made a clean dismount onto the track. Steward Tom Thorpe walked across the course and stared at Luther’s uninjured body, incredulous.

“Tommy,” he said, “you must have had somebody praying for you.”

Praying was usually the best you could do when confronted with a son of Man o’ War. Hard Tack, also a Man o’ War son, inherited the fabled Hastings temper distilled to crystal purity.¹² The colt spent three years plunging around the track in devil-possessed rages and nurturing a vendetta against the hapless assistant starters assigned to hold his head in the doorless starting gate. He terrorized them without mercy; they feared and loathed him without reserve. Hard Tack became a notorious rogue, inspiring turf writer John Hervey to dub him “the archexponent of recalcitrance.” Fitzsimmons had gentled plenty of miscreants, but he had no answers for Hard Tack. By some miracle, on three occasions, he was able to coax the horse into playing the racing game. Running with an unusual gait in which one foreleg jabbed out as he swung it forward, Hard Tack channeled savagery into velocity, whipping top horses in stakes races—the highest level of racing—and breaking speed records.¹³ But these were only skirmishes. Hard Tack won the war. At the starting gate before a race in 1931, he issued his declaration of independence. When the starter banged the bell, Hard Tack rooted his hooves in the ground and stayed right where he was. Fitzsimmons packed him up and shipped him back to owner Phipps.

By the time Hard Tack entered stud in 1932, his name burned in infamy. No one was foolish enough to pay a stud fee to breed a mare to him. Poor Gladys Phipps offered him to Maryland breeders for free, but she couldn’t find a single taker. She then asked Kentucky’s famed Claiborne Farm, which boarded her mares, to stand him at stud. They declined. Eager to see some return on her investment, she had him vanned far down a lonely Kentucky lane, onto a farm called Blue Grass Heights, and parked him in a paddock deep in a grove of mulberry trees. She sent some of her own mares over from Claiborne to be bred to him. One of them was a mealy, melon-kneed horse named Swing On. She, too, had once been in Fitzsimmons’s care, but though she had shown a quick turn of foot occasionally, she hadn’t trained well enough for Fitzsimmons to think she was going to be much of a racehorse. He had retired her without ever racing her. She was nicely bred, so Phipps decided to send her to Hard Tack’s court, along with three other mares. Swing On and her fellow mares came back to Claiborne pregnant. Phipps crossed her fingers, hoping that these matings would recreate the perfect forms of the forebears without the tyrannical disposition.

They didn’t. At New York’s Aqueduct Racecourse late in 1934, Hard Tack’s first two yearlings stepped off a railcar into Fitzsimmons’s care. Swing On’s son Seabiscuit (a synonym for his sire’s name) and the other colt, Grog, could not have looked less like their sire. Noah, the foaling groom at Claiborne, had summed it up about as well as anyone when he pulled Seabiscuit into the world: “Runty little thing.”¹⁴ Claiborne handlers had been so dismayed with the colt that they had hidden him in a back barn when Phipps came to look over her new crop of horses. A year of maturing hadn’t helped much. “Seabiscuit was so small,” said Fitzsimmons, “that you might mistake him for a lead pony.”¹⁵ Curiously, Hard Tack appeared to be stamping his foals in a mold that was the polar opposite of his own. The only similarity, evident in Seabiscuit, was that swatting foreleg. Not only were these colts strange-looking, shaggy, and awkward, but aside from the slight difference in their mutually diminutive heights—Grog was a hair shorter—they were identical. Without the assistance of a halter nameplate, virtually no one could tell them apart. The colts must have liked the mirror image; they had become inseparable in the Claiborne paddocks.

Fortunately, Hard Tack’s raging temper had also come out in the genetic wash. Seabiscuit floated along in a state of contented, bovine torpor. Sleeping was his favorite pastime. Horses usually sleep in numerous brief sessions scattered throughout the day and night; about 20 percent of their daytime is spent snoozing. Because of the size and configuration of their bodies, they suffer impeded breathing and circulation when recumbent, and as prey animals who have trouble getting to their feet quickly, they are instinctively disinclined to stay down. As a result, the vast majority of horses’ sleeping is done standing, which they can do thanks to ligaments that lock their leg joints in the extended position. The average stabled horse spends just five minutes at a time lying down to sleep, almost always at night.¹⁶

Seabiscuit was the exception. He could keel over and snooze for hours on end. His inability to straighten his knees all the way may have been the culprit, preventing him from locking his forelegs in the upright position. Fortunately, he suffered no negative consequences. While every other horse at the track raised hell demanding breakfast, he slept long and late, stretching out over the floor of his stall in such deep sedation that the grooms had to use every means in their power just to get him to stand up.¹⁷ He was so quiet that Fitzsimmons’s assistant trainers once forgot all about him and left him in a van for an entire afternoon in brutal heat while they went for a beer.¹⁸ They found him there hours later, pitched over on his side, blissfully asleep. No one had ever seen a horse so relaxed. Fitzsimmons would remember him as “a big dog,” the most easygoing horse he ever trained. The only thing Seabiscuit took seriously, aside from his beauty rest, was eating, which he did constantly, with great vigor.¹⁹

He may have been an amiable little horse, but his career prospects looked dim. He was as slow as growing grass. He barely kept up with his training partners, lagging along behind with happy ineptitude. Worked over and over again, he showed no improvement whatsoever. “The boys who took care of him could do anything with him,” Fitzsimmons said. “Anything, that is, except to get him to run in the mornings.… I thought he simply couldn’t run.”²⁰

But in time, something in Seabiscuit’s demeanor—perhaps a conspicuous lack of sweating in the workouts, perhaps a gleam in the horse’s eye that hinted at devious intelligence—made Fitzsimmons question his assumptions. “He was as wise as a little owl,” Fitzsimmons remembered later. “He was almost too quiet, too docile.” Fitzsimmons began to wonder if this horse might be just as obstreperous as his sire, only much more cunning in his methods. His father had raged; Seabiscuit seemed … amused. “He struck me,” Fitzsimmons said, “as a bird that could sing but wouldn’t unless we made him.”²¹

Fitzsimmons made him. “I decided to fool the Biscuit,” he explained, “to prove to him he wasn’t fooling me.” One morning, when working all the yearlings over two furlongs—a quarter of a mile—in sets of two, he paired Seabiscuit with Faust, the fastest yearling in the barn and a future major stakes winner. He told Seabiscuit’s exercise rider to find a stick to use as a whip.²² This was a radical departure from Fitzsimmons’s regular training practices, which mandated that exercise riders never use whips on their horses. The trainer believed that racehorses were instinctively hard-trying, competitive creatures who did not need to be forced to exert themselves. During one race in his jockey days, he heard another rider cursing after dropping his whip on what he thought was an otherwise sure winner. Fitzsimmons handed the jockey his whip, then rode his own horse right past him to win, urging him with nothing but hands and voice. But Seabiscuit could not be coaxed into showing any speed at all, and to find out if the horse was hoodwinking him, Fitzsimmons opted to make an exception to his no-whip rule. To ensure that the stick would not hurt Seabiscuit, Fitzsimmons had the rider select one that was flat, so it would merely slap his flank.

“Keep this colt right up with Faust as close as you can,” he later recalled telling the jockey. “Just see how many times you can hit him going a quarter of a mile.” Fitzsimmons expected that, at best, Seabiscuit would be able to cling to Faust for a little while.

Faust never had a chance. Slapped over and over again with the stick, Seabiscuit blew Faust’s doors off, covering a quarter mile in an impossible 22⅖ seconds. It may have been the fastest quarter ever run by a yearling. Today, on tracks that are several seconds faster than they were in the 1930s, such a workout time is considered exceptionally swift, even for a mature horse. The bird could sing.

“I found out why he wasn’t running,” said Fitzsimmons. “It wasn’t that he couldn’t. It was that he wouldn’t.” Fitzsimmons realized that he was confronted with a behavioral problem at least as maddening as Hard Tack’s murderousness: pathological indolence. “He was lazy,” marveled Fitzsimmons. “Dead lazy.”

The colt had proven that Hard Tack’s speed lived on in his homely little body. But the revelation didn’t make him any more eager to work. Though he later denied it, Fitzsimmons evidently suspended his no-whip rule indefinitely with Seabiscuit. “We used a whip on him every time we sent him to the track, and we used it freely, too,” he once conceded. “When we didn’t, he loafed along.” The horse performed better, but he still wasn’t working hard enough to get himself fit. Fitzsimmons came to the conclusion that the only way to tap into the potential he had glimpsed was to race him hard. Very hard. His logic: Since the horse rested himself so much more than other horses, he could stand up to an unusually heavy racing schedule. And since the horse was uncommonly intelligent, he would know to back off if he became overworked.

Entrusted to assistant trainer James Fitzsimmons, Jr., while Sunny Jim manned the helm on the more precocious horses, Seabiscuit began a regimen of incredibly rigorous campaigning. Thoroughbreds are placed in age classes according to the year in which they are born, rather than their birth month. On January 1 all horses graduate to the next age class even if their birthdays fall months later. Seabiscuit had been a very late foal, born at the end of May 1933, but in January 1935, half a year short of his actual birthday, he was deemed a two-year-old, officially eligible to race. On January 19, he began his career at Florida’s Hialeah Race Track. He finished fourth. It wasn’t good enough for the Wheatley Stable, which was overflowing with top prospects. Three days later, Seabiscuit was put up for sale, placed in a rock-bottom claiming race for a tag of just $2,500. No one wanted him even at that price, and he lost again. James junior then put the colt on the road, touring through thirteen tracks up and down the East Coast to run in low-rent races spaced as little as two days apart. Sixteen times Seabiscuit ran; sixteen times he lost. From Florida to Rhode Island and practically everywhere in between, he was offered in the cheapest claiming races. No one took him.

Once in a while the Hard Tack speed reappeared. In the colt’s eighteenth start, for no explicable reason, he finally won, clocking a sterling time. Rolled back into another claiming race just four days later, he broke a track record, an unheard-of feat for a claimer. But the brilliant form fell apart immediately, leaving him back among the dregs of racing. He plodded along for another few months, then rebounded with three moderate wins in the fall of 1935 before sinking back into failure.

By season’s end, Seabiscuit had been shipped over six thousand miles and raced a staggering thirty-five times, at least triple the typical workload. Grog had fared even worse, racing thirty-seven times before being claimed for a paltry $1,500. Sooner or later, it appeared, Seabiscuit would meet the same fate.

At least the problem of how to get Seabiscuit in shape had been solved. Raced constantly, he surely no longer lacked for fitness. But his problems were predominantly mental. By the time his two-year-old season drew to a close, he was showing signs of burnout. He became edgy. He stopped sleeping, spending his nights pacing around and around his stall. On the track, he fought savagely in the starting gate and sulked his way through races, sometimes trailing the field from start to finish. A young jockey named George Woolf, aboard for one of these woeful performances, summed up the colt’s mental state in four words: “mean, restive and ragged.”²³

Years later Fitzsimmons would argue that the intense campaign through which he and his assistants put Seabiscuit gave the horse the seasoning that enabled him to race for so long as an older horse. There may be some merit to this, as recent research suggests that steady, hard training and racing in sound horses, especially in young ones, may give bones and soft tissue the loading they need for optimal durability, and give horses the wind foundation to tackle harder racing later. But such a thing can be overdone. Thoroughbreds run because they love to, but when overraced they can become stale and uninterested, especially when repeatedly trounced and bullied by their riders, as Seabiscuit was. By the spring of 1936 he was clearly miserable, and it is hard to avoid the conclusion that his exhausting schedule was the cause. Given that he wasn’t winning, or even running passably well, it’s very difficult to defend it.

Seabiscuit had the misfortune of living in a stable whose managers simply didn’t have the time to give his mind the painstaking attention it needed. Fitzsimmons’s barn, consisting of horses owned by the Wheatley and Belair Stables, was teeming with precocious youngsters and proven, high-class older horses. As Seabiscuit ground through his first season, Fitzsimmons was touring the nation amid a storm of publicity as Seabiscuit’s stablemate, Omaha, made a successful assault on the Triple Crown. The following season Fitzsimmons turned his attention to the promising Granville, readying him for a shot at the ’36 Kentucky Derby. It was often said that Fitzsimmons nearly ruined Seabiscuit by using him as a workmate for Granville, pulling him up during hot contests to bolster Granville’s confidence. This is highly unlikely. Since Seabiscuit refused to exert himself in workouts, it would have made little sense to pair him with the brilliantly fast Granville, especially as Granville already had a designated workmate who traveled with him. Further, as Fitzsimmons often explained, Granville was owned by Belair Stable, Seabiscuit by Wheatley, and one of horse training’s cardinal rules is that the horse of one owner is never sacrificed to benefit the horse of another. Fitzsimmons would certainly have avoided this conflict of interest.

But Granville’s presence probably did work against Seabiscuit, simply by virtue of the demands that a Kentucky Derby contender makes on his trainer. Granville was a temperamental animal who needed coddling, and little time was left over for the Seabiscuits and Grogs of the stable. The Fitzsimmons barn was one in which a horse who did not display spectacular talent could slip through the cracks. That is what happened to Seabiscuit, and Fitzsimmons knew it. “He had something when he wanted to show it,” the trainer later admitted.²⁴ “It was like he was saving himself for something. Trouble was, I didn’t have time right then to find out for what.”

In the spring of ’36 Fitzsimmons set off for the Triple Crown prep races with Granville, leaving Seabiscuit in the hands of assistant trainer George Tappen. The horse’s campaign became a road show of athletic futility. Seabiscuit shipped all over the Northeast, never stayed more than two or three weeks in one place, averaged one race every five days, and racked up losses to inferior horses practically every time out. But just as in his freshman season, he showed glimmers of promise. There was a decent effort at New York’s Jamaica Race Track, then a modest allowance win at Narragansett Park. The decent performances were mixed with laughably bad outings—two ten-length thumpings, one of which saw him lag in twelfth from start to finish—but Fitzsimmons was becoming more and more convinced that the colt could be improved. He never stopped trying to encourage Seabiscuit to work harder in the mornings, including offering a $1 incentive—twice the standard fee—to any exercise rider who could get him to run a half mile in anything under a sleepy fifty seconds. “None of them,” Fitzsimmons lamented, “ever won the dollar.”

The puzzle of the horse weighed on Fitzsimmons’s mind. One morning at Aqueduct, while standing by the track to watch Granville complete his preparations for the Kentucky Derby, reporters were surprised to hear Sunny Jim ruminating not on his stable star but on the unknown Seabiscuit. The colt was, said the trainer, “a pretty nice hoss, the kind that might take some time to get going, but would take a lot of beating when he did.”²⁵

As Fitzsimmons was warming up to Seabiscuit, Wheatley was cooling off. Gladys Phipps was convinced that even if Fitzsimmons could make a silk purse out of this sow’s ear, the horse was still much too small to make it in the more lucrative “handicap” division, in which he would have to carry heavier weights. The new crop of horses coming into the barn was a big one, and the stable string had to be culled. Seabiscuit topped the list of disposable horses, and Phipps was eager to find a buyer. Unable to do so, she tried to pawn the colt off as a polo pony.²⁶ The prospective buyer took one look at the colt’s crooked legs and passed. Early that spring, before she left for a tour of Europe, Phipps set a $5,000 price on Seabiscuit, hoping he would be sold before she came back.

Fitzsimmons had bigger things to worry about. In early May, a few days before Seabiscuit earned $25 for finishing fourth in a race at Jamaica Race Track, Fitzsimmons and Granville shipped off to Churchill Downs to go for the $37,725 winner’s share of the purse in the Kentucky Derby. Coming into the race with an excellent shot at winning, Granville fumed, stormed, and lathered through the post parade and bounced and shimmied in the starting gate. When the bell rang, he was sideswiped by a horse named He Did and nearly went down. He dumped jockey Jimmy Stout and took off for a glorious solo gallop around the track. In Baltimore’s Preakness Stakes, Stout stuck to his stirrups but finished second to Derby winner Bold Venture, foiled by the brilliant reinsmanship of Seabiscuit’s onetime jockey, George Woolf. In early June, as Seabiscuit was being humiliated in a cheap stakes race in New Hampshire, Granville finally lived up to expectations by winning New York’s Belmont Stakes, the final jewel in the Triple Crown. He would be named Horse of the Year for 1936. With a competitor like Granville in his barn, Fitzsimmons now had no reason to be fretting over a colt like Seabiscuit.

In June, after being whipped by a total of more than twenty-five lengths in his previous three starts, Seabiscuit appeared at Massachusetts’s Suffolk Downs to compete against a lowly field vying for a $700 winner’s purse. There Tom Smith bent over the track rail and exchanged looks with him for the first time. Countless horsemen had run their eyes over that plain bay body. None of them had seen what Smith saw.

In a private box above Saratoga Race Course on August 3, 1936, Marcela and Charles Howard surveyed a field of generic $6,000 claimers. In town to bid on the yearling sales on behalf of Bing Crosby, they had stopped by the track to take in a few races. Charles pointed to an especially homely colt and asked his wife what she thought of him. She offered a wager of a cool drink that the horse would lose.²⁷ He accepted the bet, and they watched as the colt led wire to wire. Marcela bought her husband a lemonade. Sitting together in the clubhouse that afternoon, husband and wife felt a pull of intuition. Howard contacted Smith and told him he had a horse he wanted him to look at, stabled in the Fitzsimmons barn. Smith was probably skeptical. That spring he had been shown nearly two dozen prospects and had frowned over every one of them.

Smith walked over to the Wheatley barn and presented himself to Fitzsimmons, asking to see the horse of whom Howard had spoken. Fitzsimmons walked the colt in question out of his stall. Smith recognized him immediately; it was Seabiscuit. Smith saw the bucked knees, the insistent pressure of ribs under skin, the weariness of the body. But he saw something else, too. He tracked down Howard.

“Better come and see him for yourself,” he said.²⁸

Led out of his stall with the two men standing by, Seabiscuit headbutted Howard. Smith made his case with four sentences: “Get me that horse. He has real stuff in him. I can improve him. I’m positive.”²⁹

It was a statement astounding for its audacity. Tom Smith was an obscure trainer with one year’s experience with a mainstream stable. Fitzsimmons was the undisputed leader of the nation’s training ranks. If Sunny Jim couldn’t get a horse to win, no one could. Few trainers, even the most cocksure, were fool enough to buy a horse from the master. For Smith, walking into that barn must have been akin to entering a cathedral; telling Fitzsimmons that he could improve on his work must have felt like sacrilege. And there was another reason for worry. Howard sent veterinarians to inspect the horse. They were only lukewarm about his prospects, eyeing that iffy left foreleg and pronouncing the horse only “serviceably useful.” But in this horse, Smith knew there was something lying dormant.

The bump from Seabiscuit’s head took care of Howard’s sentimental side. “I fell in love with him,” he said later, “right then and there.”³⁰ Marcela was sold and urged him not to wait. But Howard’s business side was still not convinced. He contacted co-owner Ogden Mills and made an offer of $8,000, with one string attached: Seabiscuit had to perform well in his next start.²

The appointed day arrived with pouring rain, and Fitzsimmons considered scratching Seabiscuit. But no one else seemed to want to run in the mud either. All day long, trainers kept scratching horses from the race. By afternoon, only one other horse remained in the field. Fitzsimmons decided he had nothing to lose. Howard amused himself by putting a $100 bet on the horse, then settled in to watch. Smith was terrified. He had studied Seabiscuit’s past performances and knew that the horse did not run his best in mud. The trainer stood on the track apron and fretted.

Seabiscuit broke slowly and dropped farther and farther back. By midrace, he was trailing by at least ten lengths. Smith was dismayed. But Seabiscuit began to rally. Slogging through the slop, he lumbered up to his competitor, pushing as hard as he could, and passed him. It wasn’t much of a race, but it was a win nonetheless.³¹ Howard was satisfied. The horse had grit.³

“I can’t describe the feeling he gave me,” Howard said later, “but somehow I knew he had what it takes.³² Tom and I realized that we had our worries and troubles ahead. We had to rebuild him, both mentally and physically, but you don’t have to rebuild the heart when it’s already there, big as all outdoors.”

Smith breathed a sigh of relief. Years later, he would shiver at the thought of how easily he could have lost the colt in the driving rain that day.

Howard let Mills know that the offer was still on the table. Mills mulled it over. Fitzsimmons had become deeply fond of the colt and entertained private doubts about parting with him. Seabiscuit might, he muttered dubiously, win another purse.³³ He didn’t share his reservations with Mills, an omission he would come to regret. Howard found Mills in the Saratoga paddock.

“Deal or no deal?” he asked.³⁴

“Deal,” said Mills. Howard wrote out a check to Mills, then gave his new horse to Marcela.

Tom Smith had found the horse who would lift him from obscurity.

On an August day in 1936, Seabiscuit was led from the Fitzsimmons barn for the last time. No one came to see him go. Fitzsimmons hadn’t been told that the sale had gone through, so he didn’t come to say his good-byes. Seabiscuit was walked down the backstretch, a long canopy of trees bowing over his head. At the Howard barn, Smith waited, flanked by a cluster of stable hands. Though the trainer hardly ever said anything, there was an air to him that day that told the grooms how special the horse was to him. One kid who had not picked up on it was a teenaged apprentice jockey named Farrell Jones, who joined the others at the barn as Seabiscuit was led up. Seeing a thin, homely animal, Jones made the understandable assumption that this was no racehorse.

“Looks like they got a new saddle horse,” he blurted out, loud enough for Smith to hear.³⁵

The grooms shushed him.

A few days later, Smith led Seabiscuit up onto a railcar, and the Howard barn pushed off for the Detroit Fair Grounds. Smith began thinking about finding a jockey.

Red Pollard

(KEENELAND-COOK)

1 It has long been part of racing lore that the use of the word “upset” to mean the surprise defeat of a favorite originates from Man o’ War’s shocking loss to the horse Upset in 1920. Though a good story, it is false. Use of the word “upset” in this sense predates that race. In fact, reporters covering the race noted how coincidental it was that Man o’ War should lose to a horse with such a name.

2 Though $8,000 sounds like a lot in Depression dollars, it was a relatively low price for a racehorse. Horse racing was one of the most lucrative sports in America at that time, and even undistinguished horses often earned two to three thousand dollars a year. In addition, the breeding industry was potentially profitable, adding considerably to the value of horses. Seabiscuit was reasonably well-bred, giving him additional value as a stallion.

3 The official Daily Racing Form record of this race states that Seabiscuit held the lead from the start, but it appears to be in error. Multiple eyewitness accounts of this race state that Seabiscuit trailed badly early, then rallied to win.

Chapter 4

THE COUGAR AND THE ICEMAN

Red Pollard was sinking downward through his life with the pendulous motion of a leaf falling through still air. In the summer of 1936 he was twenty-six and in the twelfth year of a failing career as a jockey and part-time prizefighter. He was an elegant young man, tautly muscled, with a shock of supernaturally orange hair. Whenever he got near a mirror, he wetted down a comb and slicked the hair back like Tyrone Power, but it had a way of rearing up on him again. His face had a downward-sliding quality, as if his features were just beginning to melt.

He was, statistically speaking, one of the worst riders anywhere. Lately, at least. Once, he had been one of the best, but those years were far behind him. He had no money and no home; he lived entirely on the road of the racing circuit, sleeping in empty stalls, carrying with him only a saddle, his rosary, and his books: pocket volumes of Shakespeare, Omar Khayyám’s Rubaiyat, a little copy of Robert Service’s Songs of the Sourdough, maybe some Emerson, whom he called “Old Waldo.” The books were the closest things he had to furniture, and he lived in them the way other men live in easy chairs.

On the day Seabiscuit settled in at the Detroit Fair Grounds, Pollard was in North Randall, Ohio, sweltering through August at a middling racetrack called Thistle Down Park, which was wrapping up its summer meeting. Pollard’s career had continued slipping there, as it had everywhere else. His win percentage had dropped into the single digits.¹ The last horse he rode came to a halt right in the middle of his race. On August 16, 1936, when Thistle Down Park shuttered its doors for the season, Red Pollard appeared to be out of chances.

Back home in Edmonton, Alberta, he had been known as Johnny.² Right from his boyhood, people had seen the restlessness in him. They must have known he wouldn’t stay in their town for long.

Wanderlust ran in his family. Johnny’s father and namesake, the son of an Irish emigree who had become a Union Cavalryman, had spent his young adulthood rambling across the western Canadian wilderness in search of gold. In 1898, prospecting led him to a nearly vacant trail crossing that the trappers called Edmonton, where he found that the soil was the perfect medium for making brick. The Irishman staked a claim, opened a brick factory on the banks of the North Saskatchewan River, and made a fortune on the Northwest’s turn-of-the-century construction boom. He bought up a huge portion of Edmonton and built the first real house in town, a vast home surrounded by sprawling acres of virgin countryside. With his wife, Edith, he raised seven whip-smart, buoyant children: Jim, Johnny, Bill, Edie, Betty, Norah, and a little girl whom, with characteristic Pollard whimsy, they called Bubbles. The elder Pollard’s brother Frank and his family moved in to join the business, and the Pollard home was soon teeming with sixteen family members and a host of workers who took their meals at the house.

Born in November 1909, Johnny was the liveliest member of a clever and boisterous family. In the Pollard home, books were always open, old Irish songs sung, jigs danced, long stories spun. Johnny played on the grassy fields of his family’s estate and spent his Sundays in the lap of the family Model T, competing with his siblings for a window seat. As the car swung over a high bridge that crossed the North Saskatchewan River, he could peer over the railing to see the family business at the water’s edge below.

Misfortune struck suddenly and forcefully. In 1915 the river boiled up in a flash flood, ripping over the shoreline around the factory. Johnny’s father rescued his family from the water by throwing them in a buggy and lugging them up the bank himself, but he couldn’t save the factory machinery. The business vanished, and the tax bill arrived. Pollard traveled around Canada, trying in vain to find a bank to lend him the money. The city of Edmonton foreclosed, and the Pollards lost everything but their house. Virtually overnight, Johnny’s father was bankrupt with seven children and a wife to feed. He eventually found meager income as an auto repairman. It was only by bartering gasoline for groceries that he managed to keep his family alive.³

Johnny found myriad avenues of distraction from his family’s penury. One was athletic. His father took him and his brother Bill to the community boxing ring, where they were swept up in the prizefighting craze of the 1920s. Bill, a tall, powerful fighter, made it to the Golden Gloves. Johnny, smaller and leaner, became a proficient and scrappy fighter but never achieved his brother’s success. He amused himself by provoking much bigger boys into fights, calling his “Golden Glove brother” to the rescue, and laughing as they ran in terror.

His other escape was intellectual. Johnny devoured great literature. He committed long passages of prose and poetry to memory and engaged in lively recitation duels with his sister Edie as they bounced over the local roads in the Model T. Graced with an agile mind, he had the makings of a man of letters. Later, when his fate became known, his boyhood friends would wish for his sake that he had gone the way of the academy. But the classroom smothered him. He desperately wanted to explore the wider world. He was impatient with his lessons, mouthed off at teachers, got poor grades, spent his hours coining witticisms and engineering elaborate practical jokes. His emotions were liquid; his anger was a wild rage, his pleasure jubilation, his humor biting, his sorrow and empathy a bottomless abyss. He was, his son John would later remember, a person who brought an uproar with him wherever he went. Johnny Pollard was a caged bird.

As he grew, his restlessness turned into aspiration. His father had somehow managed to obtain a gift for his second son, a little horse named Forest Dawn. To help make ends meet, Johnny began hitching the horse to his toboggan and using them to make deliveries for the local grocery.⁴ In long afternoons aboard the pony’s back, Johnny discovered a gift for riding. His daughter, writer Norah Christianson, remembers that he had “the body of a dancer, lithe and wiry and thin, everything in balance,” a physique ideally suited to the pitch and yaw of a horse’s withers.⁵ Riding also suited his passion for risk. His life, from his youth onward, was a headlong rush into danger and uncertainty. Out on Edmonton’s dirt roads, his legs swinging free from Forest Dawn’s sides while the toboggan bobbed along behind, Johnny decided he wanted to be a jockey.

As he entered his teens, Johnny began haunting local stables, trading his labor for a chance to ride. He appealed to his parents to let him go out on the racing circuit and learn to be a jockey. His mother wanted to stop him. His father did not. Perhaps the aging prospector understood the futility of trying to contain a torrential boy within the confines of a small town. Perhaps he was proud of Johnny’s aspiration to make a career of sport. Surely money played a role in the decision Pollard would make; he was barely able to feed his children. But his wife was frightened. In 1925 the Pollards made a compromise. Johnny would be allowed to go to the racetrack to pursue his career, but only on the condition that he be escorted by a trusted family friend. The Pollards swallowed their fears, kissed their son good-bye, and handed him over to his new guardian.

Sometime in 1925 Johnny and his guardian pulled into the old mining town of Butte, Montana, where the local bullring racetrack linked up with a network of other tracks, carnivals, and fairs. Featuring bottom-level Thoroughbreds and quarter horses, these tracks offered the worst of low-rent racing. Most were little more than makeshift ovals cut through hayfields.⁶ Races were begun either by walking horses away from the starter, then spinning them around when the starter said go—a method called “lap and tap”—or by lining them up behind a simple webbing that was rigged to spring upward to start the race, sometimes catching riders under the chin. Purses were often smaller than the cost of shoeing a horse—about $1.40. The tracks were only a half mile around. The turns were so tight that a horse with a head of steam on him—elite quarter horses have been clocked at peak speeds of well over fifty miles per hour¹—would go winging off into the hay if he didn’t ease back as he left the straightaway.⁷ It was nothing special, but it was a start.

Johnny had only just arrived when his guardian vanished. The man never returned.⁸ Pollard was completely alone and penniless in a remote town of a foreign country. He was just fifteen years old, and his boyhood was over.

If Pollard had any way to get home, he didn’t use it. Somehow, he managed to find a place to sleep and something to eat. He began wandering around the carnivals and tracks, trying to talk his way onto the backs of horses. Though he towered over other jockeys, ultimately leveling off at about five feet seven inches, he hadn’t filled out his frame yet, weighing just 101 pounds, light enough to ride. The local racetrackers grew fond of the odd, bookish boy, nicknaming him Red, and a few let him ride their horses.

It was a rough place to start a career. Racing in the bush leagues was utterly lawless.⁹ “If you could survive there,” remembered former jockey Joe “Mossy” Mosbacher, “you could ride anywhere.” With no race cameras and only two patrol judges to oversee them, jockeys could—and would—do anything to win. Jockeys on trailing horses grabbed hold of leading horses’ tails or saddlecloths so their own horses could be towed around the track, saving energy. They joined arms with other jockeys to “clothesline” riders trying to cut between horses, formed obstructive “flying wedges” to block closers, and bashed passing horses into the inside rail. They hooked their legs over other jockeys’ knees, ensuring that if their rivals moved forward, they’d be scraped off their saddles. They dangled their feet in front of passing horses to intimidate them, and when less inspired, they shoved and punched one another and grabbed one another’s reins. Because many of the tracks had no inner rail, some jockeys simply cut through the infield, dodging haystacks, to win. In some cases, riders toppled their opponents right off their horses.

Such tactics were, until the mid-1930s, seen at all levels of racing, but nowhere were they used with such ruthlessness as on the bush tracks where Pollard got his start. According to the great jockey Eddie Arcaro, who once rammed another rider over the rail in retribution for a bump (“I was trying to kill that Cuban S.O.B.,” he told the stewards, who reformed him with a year’s suspension), the desire to win wasn’t the only motivation.¹⁰ The bush leagues contained two kinds of riders: kids like Pollard seeking to make their names and veterans in the bitter waning days of their careers, sliding down to this last and lowest place in the sport. “To succeed in those days, you had to fight for everything you got,” Arcaro wrote in his autobiography, I Ride to Win!¹¹ “You were competing with men who were aware that their own particular suns were fading, and they resented your moving into the places they would leave. They fought you, and you fought them back.”

Pollard took a few licks, held his own, and learned a lot. But months passed, and still he didn’t win a single race. In danger of starving, he used the only other skill he had, straying into carnival bullrings and cow-town clubs to moonlight as a prizefighter. He was no headliner. Mostly, he boxed in preliminary matches to warm up the crowd. At the time, a local kid nicknamed “the Nebraska Wildcat” was the hottest boxing property around.¹² In imitation, Pollard took the ring name “Cougar.” His skills didn’t live up to the nickname. He fought a lot of matches, and lost, he said, “a lot of ’em.”

Though a misnomer, his nickname proved to be the one enduring thing about Pollard’s ring career. Racetrackers in that era had a peculiar animosity for given names. Among those haunting the track in Pollard’s day were Lying Tex, Truthful Tex, Scratchy Balls John, Cow Shit Red, Piss-Through-the-Screen Slim, and a man the trackers called Booger. Baptist John was the nickname of a tracker famed for being run over by a police car that was chasing him, breaking his leg.¹³ He left the cast on his leg until it rotted off, so that, in the words of horseman Wad Studley, “one leg went north and the other one southwest.” The given names of half the people at the track were complete mysteries. The name Cougar followed Pollard from the boxing ring to the races and stuck with him for good. He liked the name, referred to himself by it, preferred that his closest friends use it, and gave it to every dog he ever owned.

A year passed. Pollard didn’t win a race. The break he needed came from a genial old former jockey named Asa C. “Acey” Smith, a traveling “gyp,” or gypsy, trainer. Passing through Montana, Acey thought he saw promise in Pollard, signed him on as his rider, and brought him on a road trip to western Canada. It was at a little fair track that Pollard finally rode a winner, H. C. Basch, in a mile-and-a-half race in the fall of 1926. It was a momentous event. Once a rider logged his first win, he officially became an apprentice jockey, or “bug boy,” so called because of the asterisk, or “bug,” that was typed next to apprentices’ names in the racing program.¹⁴ Then as now, all racehorses were assigned a weight, called an impost, to carry in each race.¹⁵ The impost consisted of the jockey, his roughly four and a half pounds of saddle, boots, pants, and silks, and, if necessary, lead pads inserted into the saddle. To help aspiring riders establish themselves in the sport, a horse ridden by a bug boy had his impost reduced by five pounds. The bug offered a substantial break: The rule of thumb is that every two to three pounds slows a horse by a length in racing’s middle distances of a mile to a mile and a quarter, while in longer races every pound slows a horse by one length. Bug boys enjoyed the weight break until they rode their fortieth winner or reached the anniversary of their first win, whichever came first. After that, they were journeyman riders.

In that era virtually all jockeys were signed to stable contracts, which were clear and simple. In exchange for housing—usually a cot in a vacant horse stall—and about $5 a week for food, bug boys gave the trainer first call on their riding services, their toil in an unending stream of barn chores, and authoritarian control over their lives. Journeymen earned a slightly higher salary and usually escaped the chores. If a stable had no horses in a race, its contract jockeys were allowed to freelance for other barns. When riding for their contract stables, bug boys received nothing from the purses their horses won. Journeymen and freelancing bug boys earned $15 for a winner, $5 for every other placing, minus fees for laundry (50¢), valet ($1), and agent (10 percent) if they could afford one. Technically, freelancing jockeys were due a 10 percent cut of purses—usually about $40 at the better tracks where Pollard rode—and 50¢ for galloping horses in morning workouts, but almost no one paid it. The best journeymen negotiated for higher pay, and some tried to even things out for the struggling ones, offering to “save” or divide the winning purse among all the riders, but this was eventually made illegal as it removed the incentive for winning. In this system a tiny subset of riders became wealthy, a few lived comfortably, and the rest, the vast majority, had nothing.

The world of bug-boy jockeys was populated mostly by teenagers who had run away or been orphaned or whose families had come upon hard times, as Pollard’s had. “Every one of them would have a story,” recalls Mosbacher, who wound up at the track after running away from an impoverished home. Only a few had an elementary-school education, and none had made it through high school. Most had no place else to go. “I was hungry,” explained child bug boy Ralph Neves, who came to the races as an orphaned runaway, “and too nervous to steal.”¹⁶ By the rules, a boy had to be at least sixteen to ride, but no one ever asked for a birth certificate. Some riders started as young as twelve. During one 1920s season at the old Tijuana track, former rider Bill Buck remembered, the two oldest riders were just sixteen. Bug boys were often remarkably small; Wad Studley was so tiny when he started riding—eighty-two pounds—that he had trouble lifting his own saddle. On the day he rode his first winner, Tommy Luther weighed seventy-nine pounds. Most of these boys knew nothing of racing when they began and were completely at the mercy of their trainers.

Some trainers became surrogate parents to their bug boys. Others exploited their charges with relentless cruelty. Luther recalled that in some stables a bug boy’s punishment for losing a race was a stout beating. “Father” Bill Daly, a peg-legged trainer described by one writer as “villainous,” reportedly carried a barrel stave with him at all times so he could beat his jockeys.¹⁷ When they weighed too much, he reportedly cleaned their pockets of their pennies so they couldn’t buy food or locked them up until they starved down to the right weight. To avoid train fare, Luther and his fellow bug boys were stowed away in horse cars. When the railroad police came through the train, impaling the haystacks to flush out stowaways, the trainers packed the boys into tack trunks. On another occasion, a trainer put Luther up in a hotel, then booted him out the window when the bill came due.

On the track, bug boys were like any other commodity, to be leased, sold, swapped for horses, put up as collateral, and staked in card games. Though they earned practically nothing, they could be worth a lot, upwards of $15,000 for a good one. Many bug boys were sold without their knowledge. In 1928 jockey Johnny Longden learned of his change of ownership early one morning in Winnipeg, where his trainer had put him up in a tent. While he slept, a stranger walked up and began shaking the tent violently. “Get the hell out of here!” barked a voice from outside. “You’re working for me now, and nobody on my payroll sleeps late.”

Pollard was lucky. Acey treated him well. In the summer he usually raced at the cluster of tracks around Vancouver or at another western Canadian track called Glacier Park; in the fall and spring it was California’s Tanforan; in the winter, Tijuana. Pollard spent his days aboard Acey’s animals and his nights in a stall, sandwiched between two horses, subsisting on his books and irregular meals from the track kitchen.

Veteran horsemen were merciless to kids who wanted to be jockeys. A common prank was to send a new bug boy all over the track looking for the phantom “key to the quarter pole.” One kid who came to the track in Tijuana and announced he wanted to be a jockey was told he had to take off some weight. Horsemen draped him in two horse blankets and made him run around the track in 110-degree heat. They watched him make one trip down the track, reconsider his ambition, and keep right on going into town. They never saw him or their blankets again. Pollard got much the same treatment, but he was almost impossible to discourage. “Who hit you in the butt with a saddle and told you you could ride?” a starter hissed before a race.¹⁸ “The same S.O.B. that hit you in the butt and told you you could start!” he shot back. Pollard had found the one place on earth that could hold his interest. He was broke, hungry, and, according to his sister Edie, “happy as heck.”

He never lived in Edmonton again. His mother worried over his fate but hid it from her children. His father, eager to see him and furious with the man who had abandoned him, scraped together a few dollars and traveled all the way to Vancouver to stand in the crowd and watch his son ride. Thanks to the rigid rules governing bug boys, Pollard was not even allowed to turn his head to look at his father as he rode past. Never again would anyone in his family have the money to come see him.

Pollard struggled to find his place. In 1926 he had only eight mounts, winning with just one of them. But under Acey’s tutelage, he began to find his niche. In his first season in Tijuana he befriended a blind trainer named Jerry Duran, who was struggling to make something of a horse named Preservator.¹⁹ Devoid of talent—in three years and forty-six starts he had won just five races—Preservator was also a comparatively geriatric seven years old, roughly the equivalent of a human runner in his late thirties competing against twenty somethings. Duran brought Pollard on board as Preservator’s jockey. Seeing that Duran was incapable of handling many of the training duties, the seventeen-year-old took them on himself. In Pollard’s care, Preservator improved dramatically, winning six races and earning a respectable $3,170. After each race Pollard would read the official chart for Preservator’s performance out loud to Duran. When the horse ran poorly, Pollard skipped over the disappointing race notes and invented tales of Preservator’s impressive feats, dreaming of bad-luck excuses to account for the horse’s losses. His efforts heartened Duran and impressed other horsemen, who began to hire him. In 1927 he was assigned to ride more horses, and once in a while he won.

His small measure of success didn’t go unnoticed. After seeing Pollard booting Acey’s horses around Glacier Park, a horseman named Freddie Johnson contacted Acey and asked how much he wanted for the jockey. After a brief negotiation, a deal was struck. Pollard came cheap. For two saddles, a handful of bridles, and two sacks of oats, he became for all intents and purposes the property of Freddie Johnson.²⁰ Johnson handed him over to his trainer, Russ McGirr.

McGirr soon discovered that Pollard had a rare skill. His natural empathy and experience with the horses of the bullring circuit had given him insight into the minds of ailing, nervous horses. He rode horses no one else was willing to go near. He had learned to keep his whip idle, compensating by riding with somewhat longer stirrups that allowed him to urge horses gently with his lower legs.²¹ The horses responded to his kind handling, relaxed under him, and tried their hardest. Under McGirr, Pollard became known as a specialist in rogues and troubled horses and began to win regularly with them. Because a large percentage of his mounts were claimers competing for tiny purses, Pollard didn’t earn much money. He mailed most of what little he did make to his father to help him hang on to the family house. The rest usually went out in “loans” to needy friends. Pollard was a pushover, and all the down-and-outers knew exactly where to go to pick up a few bucks. He never had the heart to ask for it back. “I never could,” he would later say in his odd way, “throw money around like glue.” But he was getting a lot of mounts and winning with almost 10 percent of them, so he got by. After two years in the saddle, it seemed that Pollard was going to make it.

On the backstretch at Lansdowne Park in the cool Vancouver summer of 1927, Red Pollard first saw George Monroe Woolf. He must have been quite a sight. Everything about Woolf spoke in the imperative. The first thing everyone noticed was the spectacular cowboy garb: ten-gallon spanking-white cowboy hats blocked porkpie style, weighty signet rings, smoked eyeglasses, fringed leather jackets, ornate breeches, gabardine shirts tailored to his powerful shoulders and dyed in a confusion of color, and hand-tooled cowboy boots embossed with animal images in real silver.²² Arrestingly handsome, George had dark blond hair that cruised back from a part he kept just a nudge off-center, as was the fashion. He held his chin up Mussolini-style, and the corners of his mouth turned up in a smothered smile, as if he knew something no one else did. He spoke in a slow, drizzling drawl, but his eyes were as clear and sharp as a cat’s. He decorated in frontier art, pored over western magazines, listened to Gene Autry on the phonograph, and motored around town in a blindingly ostentatious hot rod Studebaker roadster with a bug boy riding shotgun. Woolf, remembered former bug boy Sonny Greenberg, was “fabulous in everything he done.” In the summer of ’27 he was seventeen, aloof, clever, and utterly singular. He also may have been the greatest riding talent racing ever saw.

Woolf had the ideal pedigree for a jockey. His mother, Rose, was a mounted circus acrobat; his father, Henry, was a stagecoach driver and rancher who, George liked to say, “never had much money but always owned a fast horse and a fightin’ bulldog”; his brothers were both professional horse breakers.²³ Accordingly, expectations for Woolf’s career in the saddle preceded him into the world.²⁴ On May 31, 1910, in the wheat and cattle country of Cardston, Alberta, Rose was midway through her labor with George when her husband interrupted the doctor. How long, he asked, before he could put the child up on a horse? If the doctor counseled patience, his words didn’t leave an impression. While growing up in Cardston and later on the similarly broad scapes of Babb, Montana, Woolf couldn’t remember a time when his view of the world wasn’t framed by a set of horse’s ears. “Must have been born on one,” he mused.²⁵ Riding, he said without exaggeration, “is as natural as walking to me.”²⁶ He spent more of his youth on horseback than on foot. “Horses are in my blood,” he said. “I’ll be with them until I die.”²⁷

Setting aside an ambition to be a Canadian Mountie, Woolf began race riding while in his mid-teens, apparently padding his age by a year. He cut his teeth on Montana match races, relays on unpedigreed horses in Indian country, and contests at rough tracks with names like Chinook and Stampede. Freddie Johnson and Russ McGirr were quick to snatch up Woolf’s contract and watched as their purchase became a smashing overnight success in the minor leagues. In 1927 Woolf was spotted by Lewis Theodore “Whitey” Whitehill, a top horseman, who soon called a meeting with Johnson. Whitey had a good claimer named Pickpocket that caught Johnson’s eye; Whitey was equally enamored of Woolf’s riding.²⁸ An even swap of horse for boy was made. Whitey brought Woolf to Vancouver, then down to Tijuana, and turned him loose.

No one had ever seen anything like George Woolf. Right out of the box, he won every prize that wasn’t nailed down. He was something to watch, pouring over his horse’s back, belly flat to the withers, fingers threaded through the reins, face pressed into the mane, body curving along the ebb and flow of the animal’s body. He could learn a horse’s mind from the bob of the head, the tension in the reins, the coil of the hindquarters. Fifths of a second ticked off with precision in his head; Woolf timed his horses’ rallies so precisely that he regularly won races with heart-stopping, last-second dives. He could, racetrackers marveled, “hold an elephant an inch away from a peanut until time to feed.”²⁹ He had an uncanny prescience, as if he lived twenty seconds ahead of himself, seeing the coming trap along the rail or the route to the outside. His commands had the understatement of the ancient cavalry art of dressage. He was shrewd and he was fearless, demonstrating such cold unflappability in the saddle that race caller Joe Hernandez gave him the nickname “Iceman.” It stuck.

Woolf’s phenomenal success came partly from God-given gifts, partly from experience, and partly from exhaustive study. He prowled the heads of his mounts and everyone else’s, scouring the Daily Racing Form for every tidbit of information that could give him an edge, and cracked contests wide open by ruthlessly exploiting his rivals’ weaknesses. His memory was a catalogue of vital notes on horses and men: hangs in the stretch, balks in close quarters, only hits right-handed. He also developed a race-preparation technique that was a half century ahead of its time. Sitting in the jockeys’ room before a race, he would close his eyes and visualize how the race would be run.³¹ He would see the pitfalls and opportunities develop and run the race in his head until he saw how to win it. He didn’t ride his races, said his archrival Eddie Arcaro, he crafted them.

Like all athletic greats, Woolf was a driving perfectionist. He abruptly sold his tack and announced his retirement in disgust over a ride he thought was poor. After being briefly suspended for making a mistake in a race at Tijuana in 1930, he stomped up to the jockeys’ room, cleaned out his locker, lugged everything outside, heaped it into a big pile, and set the whole mass on fire.³² “Me, ride again?” he said. “No siree.” He then jumped into his convertible, sped all the way to Canada, stopped at the first Mountie station he found and tried to enlist. Rejected for his diminutive stature, he sequestered himself in the Canadian wilderness, “a-huntin’ and a-fishin’.” Months later he reappeared in the jockeys’ room and went back to riding the hide off of every jockey in town.

As Woolf matured and honed his craft, his moments of self-loathing gave way to quiet, unwavering confidence. He was greatness fully realized, and he knew it. Where other elite athletes betray their doubts about their capacities with displays of touchy egotism, Woolf was utterly insouciant. He could not be rattled. “George,” remembered racing official Chick Lang, “was a guy that you could put on a street corner, and two cars would have a head-on collision right in front of him, and he would say, ‘Gee, look at that,’ while everybody else would be running in all directions.” He seemed devoid of fear. On the track, while other riders flailed and winced and scratched their way around, the Iceman “sat chilly,” as loose as water, his legs and hands supple and still. Photographers shooting races would record jockeys in various attitudes of strain; in the middle of it all would be Woolf, smiling the way a man does when he humors a child. While other riders dragged themselves to the barn to gallop horses at 4:00 A.M. seven days a week, compelled by a biting fear that their skills would wane or trainers would forget them, Woolf slept in, rarely showing up at the track before noon.³⁰ “He was a better rider than most of us, and he knew it,” remembered fellow jockey Mosbacher.³³ “So he just kind of took the easier way.”

Woolf was an uncensored man, in word and deed. “As a jockey,” wrote Red Pollard’s friend David Alexander, a columnist for the Morning Telegraph, “Woolf is noted for doing exactly the right thing at exactly the right time. He is also noted for saying what some persons consider the wrong thing at the wrong time.”³⁴ When asked a direct question, he could be counted on to say something so bald—and undeniable—that he would leave everyone around him gaping. After losing one major race on a highly regarded runner, he flatly told the national press, surely to the horror of the owner, that the horse just wasn’t any good. On the night after Woolf won a top stakes race, the owner of the winning horse called to invite him to a postrace soirée with the moneyed set. “You tell ’em,” Woolf replied, kicking back with a big steak, a long, cool beer, and a group of his roughneck friends, “that if the horse had got beat, they wouldn’t invite us over. We got a party of our own.”³⁵

“Woolf,” remembered his close friend Bill Buck, “done what Woolf wanted to do.” Throughout his career, if he felt like taking a day off, he’d just pack up and go, leaving his exasperated agent and jilted trainers hunting for him. On one occasion, after he failed to appear for several potentially lucrative races, his agent found him starring in a bull-riding exhibition. He once vanished without a trace a few days before the Preakness Stakes, throwing the entire Maryland racing community, including an owner who wanted him to ride one of the race favorites, into an uproar. He glided back to civilization three days later, tanned and happy. While driving through Pennsylvania he had simply happened upon a beautiful lake, pulled over, and taken an impromptu fishing vacation in perfect serenity. When he disappeared on another afternoon, horsemen eventually found him in a crowd watching a visiting Montana rodeo.³⁶ A trick rider had claimed that he could jump a car while riding two horses simultaneously, “Roman” style—a foot in one stirrup of each. Woolf called his bluff and volunteered his gleaming new Cord roadster for the job. The horses nicked the car up pretty good but made it over. Woolf felt the spectacle was worth the price of new paint and a furious agent.

Only his contract trainer, Whitey, was unfazed by his jockey’s behavior. This needled Woolf. To raise Whitey’s blood pressure a bit, Woolf started delaying his horses’ rallies until the last possible second.³⁷ He would send a friend to sit nearby and watch the color drain from Whitey’s face as Woolf waited, and waited, and waited before driving for the lead just when it seemed too late. Whitey surely whitened a little more with every closing kick, but the Iceman knew what he was doing. Incredibly, Woolf’s timing was so good that he rode for more than a decade before he was beaten in a photo finish of a stakes race.³⁸

Woolf was fanatical about clean riding. He never initiated any rough riding tactics, and took justice into his own hands when anyone fouled him. He was known to haul off and crack offending riders right in the mouth with his whip, then frankly tell the stewards exactly what he’d done when a lie could have gotten him out of trouble. He rode claiming races with as much zeal as he rode the Santa Anita Handicap. He was also not above a little playful heckling; a few choice words from the Iceman could spook his rivals into blowing their game plans.

George Woolf, from the very beginning, stood a rung above Red Pollard. While Pollard bedded down in a horse stall at night and grazed out of the track kitchen, Woolf lived in the comfort of Whitey’s house, eating home-cooked meals. Pollard would never escape Woolf’s shadow, but he was not a jealous man. “I know George,” he would laugh. “Big head, little ass, and roars like a lion.”³⁹ Pollard, famously, tried to take credit for giving Woolf the nickname Iceman, explaining it thus: “In all the smoking-car stories I have ever heard, icemen and traveling salesmen were very immoral characters. George does not have a pleasing enough personality to be a traveling salesman.”⁴⁰

Woolf replied in the same vein. “You don’t have to be an athlete to be a jockey,” he told a reporter. “Why, Red Pollard is one of the smartest jockeys in the country today, and he doesn’t have the strength to blow out a candle.”⁴¹

In those early days, Pollard and Woolf found common ground in their quick minds, cerebral riding styles, and keen senses of humor. On the backstretch of Vancouver Race Course in the summer of 1927, a friendship was forged in the crucible of the racetrack and adolescence. It would endure long into manhood and bind them together in history.

———

Fatally injured when his horse collided with another runner, jockey Wallace Leischman lies on the track at Bay Meadows Racecourse, 1939.

(TURF AND SPORT DIGEST)

1 In 1991, George Pratt, Ph.D., of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used high speed cameras, race films, and computer analysis to gauge the speed of high-class quarter horses at Los Alamitos Racecourse, recording a top speed of 52½ miles per hour for one horse. According to Pratt’s analysis, quarter mile world record setter Truckle Feature had a peak speed of just under 80 feet per second, or 54 mph. Note that this reflects top speed, not average speed over a distance, which would be slower.

Chapter 5

A BOOT ON ONE FOOT, A TOE TAG ON THE OTHER

On a Saturday afternoon in July 1938, a half-starved teenager wandered into a bus station in Columbus, Ohio, appearing confused and disoriented. A policeman approached and tried to speak with him, but the boy seemed not to know his own name. In his pockets the officer found $112, a bus ticket for Petersburg, Illinois, and documents that identified him as Thomas Dowell, an obscure local jockey.¹ Seeing that Dowell was in profound distress, the officer took him to the police station, where a police surgeon sat with him and tried to find out what was wrong. Dowell remained mute but appeared deeply shaken. Concerned that the boy might get hurt if released, the doctor sat him down in a holding cell and left to telephone his mother.

While the officer was gone, Dowell slipped his belt off, coiled it around his neck, and hanged himself.

When word of the suicide made its way to the backstretch, no one seemed surprised. In his brief career Dowell had learned what Red Pollard, George Woolf, and countless other riders had long since known. A jockey’s life was nothing short of appalling. No athletes suffered more for their sport. The jockey lived hard and lean and tended to die young, trampled under the hooves of horses or imploding from the pressures of his vocation.

For three years Dowell had known the singular strain of the jockey’s job, torturing his body to keep it at an inhumanly low weight, groveling for mounts in the mornings and enduring punishing violence in the afternoons, waiting in vain for the “big horse” that would bear him from poverty and peril. Dowell was no anomaly, and everyone on the backstretch knew it. His was a life no different from that of almost every other jockey. Under its terrific weight, Dowell had come undone.

They called the scale “the Oracle,” and they lived in slavery to it. In the 1920s and 1930s, the imposts, or weights horses were assigned to carry in races, generally ranged from 83 pounds to 130 or more, depending on the rank of the horse and the importance of the race. A rider could be no more than 5 pounds over the assigned weight or he would be taken off the horse. Some trainers trimmed that leeway down to just a half pound. To make weight in anything but high-class stakes races, jockeys had to keep their weight to no more than 114 pounds. Riders competing in ordinary weekday events needed to whittle themselves down another 5 pounds or so, while those in the lowest echelons of the sport couldn’t weigh much more than 100. The lighter a rider was, the greater the number of horses he could ride. “Some riders,” wrote Eddie Arcaro, “will all but saw their legs off to get within the limit.”²

A few riders were naturally tiny enough to make weight without difficulty, and they earned the burning envy of every other jockey. Most of them were young teenagers whose growth spurts lay ahead of them. To ensure that they didn’t waste time and money training and supporting boys who would eventually grow out of their trade, contract trainers checked the foot size of every potential bug boy, since a large foot is a fairly good sign of a coming growth spurt. Many also inspected the height and weight of a potential bug boy’s siblings. Trainer Woody Stephens, who began his racing career as a bug boy in the late 1920s, always felt he got lucky in this respect. In vetting him for the job, his trainer neglected to look at his sister, a local basketball phenom.

Virtually every adult rider, and most of the kids, naturally tended to weigh too much. Cheating, if you did it right, could help a little. One pudgy 140-pound rider earned a place in reinsman legend by fooling a profoundly myopic clerk of scales by skewing the readout to register him at 110. No one is exactly sure how he did it, but it is believed that either he positioned his feet on a nonregistering part of the scale or his valet stuck his whip under his seat and lifted up. He made it through an entire season before someone caught him.

Most jockeys took a more straightforward approach: the radical diet, consisting of six hundred calories a day. Red Pollard went as long as a year eating nothing but eggs. Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons confessed that during his riding days a typical dinner consisted of a leaf or two of lettuce, and he would eat them only after placing them on a windowsill to dry the water out of them.³ Water, because of its weight, was the prime enemy, and jockeys went to absurd lengths to keep it out of their systems. Most drank virtually nothing. A common practice was to have jockeys’ room valets open soda cans by puncturing the top with an ice pick, making it impossible to drink more than a few drops at a time. The sight and sound of water became a torment; Fitzsimmons habitually avoided areas of the barn where horses were being washed because the spectacle of flowing water was agonizing.⁴

But the weight maximums were so low that near fasting and water deprivation weren’t enough. Even what little water and calories the body had taken in had to be eliminated. Many riders were “heavers,” poking their fingers down their throats to vomit up their meals. Others chewed gum to trigger salivation; Tommy Luther could spit off as much as half a pound in a few hours. Then there were the sweating rituals, topped by “road work.”⁵ This practice, used by both Red Pollard and George Woolf, involved donning heavy underwear, zipping into a rubber suit, swaddling in hooded winter gear and woolen horse blankets, then running around and around the track, preferably under a blistering summer sun. Stephens remembered seeing jockeys in full road-work attire gathering at a bowling alley, so lathered that sweat spouted from their shoes with each step. After road work, there were Turkish baths, where jockeys congregated for mornings of communal sweating. The desiccation practices of jockeys were lampooned by turf writer Joe H. Palmer in a column written on jockey Abelardo DeLara: “DeLara has to sweat off about two pounds a day to make weight.⁶ Last year, by his own estimate, he lost about 600 pounds this way. Since he weighs about 110, it is a mere matter of arithmetic that he would be a bit more than 700 pounds if he hadn’t reduced so regularly.”

Most jockeys ingested every manner of laxative to purge their systems of food and water. Diarrhea became the constant companion of many riders, some of whom became virtuosos of defecation.⁷ Helen Luther once watched a rider step on a scale, only to see that he was over his horse’s assigned impost. He shouted to the clerk of scales to hang on, raced to the bathroom, emerged a moment later with his pants still at half mast, and made weight. Such results could be had from a variety of products, including a stomach-turning mix of Epsom salts and water—chased by two fingers of rye to stop the gagging reflex—a plant-derived purgative called jalap, or bottles of a wretched-tasting formula known as Pluto Water.

But the undisputed champ of the purgatives was born in the enterprising mind of a jockey’s masseur named Frank “Frenchy” Hawley.⁸ Prowling around the Tijuana jockeys’ room in reassuringly medical-looking Dr. Kildare attire, Frenchy was the self-appointed mad scientist of the racing world. Operating out of a gleaming-white training room, Frenchy stocked every manner of weight-loss facilitator, including electric blankets, infrared lamps, electric light cabinets, baking machines, “violet-rays,” vibrating contraptions, and rubber sleeping bags and sheets. He also dreamed up a particularly foul-smelling recipe for self-parboiling that required riders to steep for up to thirty-five minutes (fewer if they became dizzy) in piping-hot water mixed with three to five pounds of Epsom salts, one quart of white vinegar, two ounces of household ammonia, and a mystery lather he called Hawley’s Cream. He kept careful records of the weight he had stripped from riders. By 1945, it totaled 12,860 pounds—more than six tons.

One of Frenchy’s cardinal rules of reducing was to “keep the contents of the bowels moving down and out steadily and regularly.” To devise a mix that would bring this about, he tinkered around with God knows what until he stumbled upon a home brew that delivered a ferocious kick. The caustic laxative worked so well that Hawley marketed it commercially under the disarmingly innocuous name Slim Jim. Former jockey Bill Buck remembered it with a shiver: “It’d kill you.” He wasn’t kidding. Frenchy’s bowel scourer proved to be so fabulously potent that bottles of it spontaneously exploded in the jockeys’ room lavatory. Imagining their intestines going out in a similar blaze of glory, even the jockeys began to fear it, and Hawley’s Slim Jim experiment went down the tubes.

For jockeys who were truly desperate, there was one last resort. Contact the right people, and you could get hold of a special capsule, a simple pill guaranteed to take off all the weight you wanted. In it was the egg of a tapeworm. Within a short while the parasite would attach to a man’s intestines and slowly suck the nutrients out of him. The pounds would peel away like magic. When the host jockey became too malnourished, he could check into a hospital to have the worm removed, then return to the track and swallow a new pill. Red Pollard may have resorted to this solution.

In denying their bodies the most basic necessities, jockeys demonstrated incredible fortitude. They paid a fearsome price. Most walked around in a state of critical dehydration and malnutrition and as a result were irritable, volatile, light-headed, bleary, nauseated, gaunt, and crampy. The heavers, exposing their mouths to repeated onslaughts of stomach acid, lost the enamel on their teeth and eventually the teeth themselves. Other jockeys suffered bouts of weakness so severe that when boosted into the saddle they would fall right off the other side. Dehydration left them so prone to overheating, even in mild weather, that their valets prepared huge bins of ice cubes into which they could flop to cool off. Other riders suffered fainting spells or hallucinated.

Many jockeys’ bodies could not function under the strain. To take off enough weight to ride a horse in Windsor, Canada, Sonny Greenberg steamed in a Turkish bath, guzzled Epsom salts mixed with jalap, took a boat from Detroit to Windsor—vomiting all the way—donned a rubber suit over several layers of heavy clothing, and ran around and around the track. He staggered into the woods, collapsed, and either fell asleep or fainted. He awoke in a pool of sweat, and tried to clear his disorientation by downing a half-ounce of whiskey. Dragging himself to a scale, he found that he had suffered away ten and a half pounds in one night. It was all for naught. By post time he was too weak even to sit upright in a saddle. He gave someone else the mount, and retired soon afterward.

Greenberg escaped without permanent damage, but others, including Fitzsimmons, may not have been so lucky. Severe reducing was thought to be the culprit behind an epidemic of fatal lung diseases, such as pneumonia and tuberculosis, among jockeys.⁹ Other long-term health problems may also have stemmed from reducing practices. In a single day, to make weight on a horse, Fitzsimmons endured purgatives, an entire afternoon in a Turkish bath, heavy exercise on horseback and on foot while swaddled in several sweaters and a muffler, topped off with an hour standing inches from a roaring brick kiln. He lost thirteen pounds.¹⁰ Thick-tongued and groggy, he won the race by a nose but couldn’t repeat the weight-loss performance and retired from the saddle not much later. He soon experienced the first shooting pains from the severe arthritis that would grotesquely disfigure his body. He came to believe that that one terrible day of reducing may have triggered the onset of the crippling disease.

Finally, there was the mental toll. Stephens described his realization that he could no longer take the punishment of reducing as “the biggest disappointment of my life.”¹¹ The legendary nineteenth-century European jockey Fred Archer understood the emotion. Falling into a severe depression attributed to his taking constant doses of purgatives to fight a weight problem he could not beat, he shot himself to death at age twenty-nine.

A Thoroughbred racehorse is one of God’s most impressive engines. Tipping the scales at up to 1,450 pounds, he can sustain speeds of forty miles per hour. Equipped with reflexes much faster than those of the most quick-wired man, he swoops over as much as twenty-eight feet of earth in a single stride, and corners on a dime. His body is a paradox of mass and lightness, crafted to slip through air with the ease of an arrow. His mind is impressed with a single command: run. He pursues speed with superlative courage, pushing beyond defeat, beyond exhaustion, sometimes beyond the structural limits of bone and sinew. In flight, he is nature’s ultimate wedding of form and purpose.

To pilot a racehorse is to ride a half-ton catapult. It is without question one of the most formidable feats in sport. The extraordinary athleticism of the jockey is unparalleled: A study of the elements of athleticism conducted by Los Angeles exercise physiologists and physicians found that of all major sports competitors, jockeys may be, pound for pound, the best overall athletes.¹² They have to be. To begin with, there are the demands on balance, coordination, and reflex. A horse’s body is a constantly shifting topography, with a bobbing head and neck and roiling muscle over the shoulders, back, and rump. On a running horse, a jockey does not sit in the saddle, he crouches over it, leaning all of his weight on his toes, which rest on the thin metal bases of stirrups dangling about a foot from the horse’s topline. When a horse is in full stride, the only parts of the jockey that are in continuous contact with the animal are the insides of the feet and ankles—everything else is balanced in midair. In other words, jockeys squat on the pitching backs of their mounts, a task much like perching on the grille of a car while it speeds down a twisting, potholed freeway in traffic. The stance is, in the words of University of North Carolina researchers, “a situation of dynamic imbalance and ballistic opportunity.”¹³ The center of balance is so narrow that if jockeys shift only slightly rearward, they will flip right off the back. If they tip more than a few inches forward, a fall is almost inevitable. A Thoroughbred’s neck, while broad from top to bottom, is surprisingly narrow in width, like the body of a fish. Pitching up and down as the horse runs, it offers little for the jockey to grab to avoid plunging to the ground and under the horse’s hooves.

Race riding is exceptionally exhausting. It is common for aspiring jockeys to be so rubber-legged upon dismounting from their first circuit around the track that they are unable to walk back to the barn. Strength is not just a tool for winning, it is necessary for survival. Jockey Johnny Longden was once rammed in midrace, knocked from his stirrups and sent flying downward in front of a pack of horses. He was saved by a jockey riding alongside him, George Taniguchi, who was so powerful that he was able to catch Longden with one hand. Taniguchi didn’t know his own strength, and in attempting to push Longden back into the saddle he instead hurled him right over the back of his horse. Longden found himself in the same predicament on the other side of his mount until jockey Rogelio Trejos, whose horse was about to run Longden down, lunged forward, snagged the jockey with the ease of an outfielder and righted him in the saddle, also with one hand. Incredibly, Longden won the race. The Daily Racing Form called it “the ultimate impossibility.”¹⁴

A jockey is no mere passenger on a racehorse. His role in bringing home winners is critical and demanding. First, jockeys must have an exquisitely fine sense of pace over each furlong, or eighth of a mile. Strategy is crucial. Front-runners have the best chance of winning if they set moderate or slow fractional times, leaving themselves the energy to fend off closers, while closers have the best chance of winning if they lag behind a brisk pace, then swoop around the exhausted front-runners in the homestretch. The difference between a fast fraction and a slow fraction is often less than a second, and a jockey must be able to discriminate between the two to place his horse optimally. Great jockeys have a freakish talent for gauging pace to within two or three fifths of a second of the actual time and, if asked, can reliably gallop a horse over a distance at precisely the clip requested.

Positioning relative to the field is also critical. A racehorse is an enormous creature who needs a wide berth, and as he weighs half a ton and carries one hundred–plus pounds on his back, he cannot afford to have his momentum stopped or acceleration wasted. Running wide around turns offers the best chance of clear sailing but exacts a high price in extra distance the horse has to cover. In a big field, jockeys who opt to go wide may have to swing as many as ten “paths” out, forcing their horses to run roughly ten lengths farther than horses on the rail.¹⁵ The best riders take the inside route whenever possible, but this is risky. Because everyone wants to be there, horses usually bunch up by the rail, so closely that hips and shoulders rub and stirrups clink off each other, making maneuvering difficult or impossible. Tiring pacesetters generally slow down right in front of the rail-running pack, compounding the traffic jams.

To judge whether or not he’s likely to get pocketed if he steers his horse to the rail, a jockey must be able to read the subtleties in the stances of horses and riders in front—the tautness in the reins, the height of the jockey over the saddle, the crispness and cadence of the stride—to gauge how much gas is left in the tank. Doing homework is imperative; some runners habitually drift in or out in the homestretch or on turns, and the jockey who can arm himself with this knowledge and position himself on the rail behind such a horse can ensure himself a clear path of escape. He must also have the instinct to judge whether or not a hole opening in front of him will stay open long enough to get through, if the space is wide enough, and if his horse has the acceleration to get to it before it slams shut. If he judges it correctly, he can save ground and win a race. If he misjudges it, he may end up fouling other horses and being disqualified, checking his horse sharply and sacrificing his momentum or even falling.

Requiring that its human competitors straddle erratic animals moving in dense groups at extremely high speed, race riding in the 1930s, as today, was fraught with extreme danger. Riders didn’t even have to leave the saddle to be badly hurt. Their hands and shins were smashed and their knee ligaments ripped when horses twisted beneath them or banged into rails and walls. Their ankles were crushed when their feet became caught in the starter’s webbing. With the advent of the first primitive, unpadded starting gates in the early thirties, some riders actually died in the saddle, speared into the exposed steel overhead bars by rearing horses. Riders suffered horrible injuries when dragged from their stirrups and under their horses’ legs or when thrown forward, ending up clinging to the underside of the horses’ necks while the animals’ front legs pummeled their chests and abdomens.

The only thing more dangerous than being on the back of a racehorse was being thrown from one. Some jockeys took two hundred or more falls in their careers.¹⁶ Some were shot into the air when horses would “prop,” or plant their front hooves and slow abruptly. Others went down when their mounts would bolt, crashing into the rail or even the grandstand. A common accident was “clipping heels,” in which trailing horses tripped over leading horses’ hind hooves, usually sending the trailing horse and rider into a somersault. Finally, horses could break down, racing’s euphemism for incurring leg injuries. This could happen without warning, sending the victim pitching headfirst into the ground. A rider who lost touch with the saddle became a projectile moving at sixty feet per second, and whatever he hit became a potentially lethal instrument. If he was lucky enough to survive the impact with the ground and possibly his horse’s falling body, he often had trailing horses, their hooves striking the ground with as much as three thousand pounds of force, bearing down on him.¹⁷ In the worst cases, a single faller could trigger a chain-reaction pileup onto a downed jockey.

Serious insults to the body, the kind of shattering or crushing injury seen in high-speed auto wrecks, are an absolute certainty for every single jockey. Today the Jockeys’ Guild, which covers riders in the United States, receives an average of twenty-five hundred injury notifications per year, with two deaths and two and a half cases of paralysis. The Guild is currently supporting fifty riders who were permanently disabled on the job.¹⁸ According to a study by the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, each year the average jockey is injured three times and spends a total of almost eight weeks sidelined by injuries incurred on the track.¹⁹ Nearly one in every five injuries is to the head or neck.²⁰ A 1993 survey found that 13 percent of jockeys suffered concussions over a period of just four months.²¹ Injury rates were, by all accounts, far higher in the 1920s and 1930s; between 1935 and 1939 alone, nineteen riders were killed in racing accidents.²² The hell-for-leather riding tactics practiced in the era, and the absence of protective gear, increased the vulnerability of race riders to mortal injury. Today races are filmed from multiple angles to ensure safe riding. Jockeys wear flak jackets, goggles, and high-tech helmets and compete at tracks equipped with safety rails and ambulances that trail the field around the track. No such luxuries were available to the jockeys of the twenties and thirties. At best, only one or two stewards monitored riding tactics. A jockey’s only bodily protection was a skullcap constructed of silk-covered cardboard. Former jockey Morris Griffin, who was paralyzed in a 1946 racing fall, likened his headgear to a yarmulke.²³ Lacking a chin strap, it usually popped off before the wearer slammed into the ground. Cutting out the lining and crown to lower their riding weight, most jockeys rendered the skullcap useless.

Once riders were down on the course, tracks had virtually no protocol for coping with their injuries. Riders were lucky if someone rounded up a car to get them to a hospital, and since virtually none of them had any money or insurance, they were likely to be turned away from any hospital to which they were taken. Track officials appeared to feel little obligation to them. In 1927 best friends Tommy Luther and Earl “Sandy” Graham were slated to ride a pair of stablemates in the same race at Winnipeg’s Polo Park.²⁴ Luther was assigned to a lumbering, uncoordinated colt named Vesper Lad, while Graham was up on Irish Princess II. At the last minute the trainer reversed the assignments. While Luther was hustling Irish Princess to the lead, he heard a gasp from the crowd. He finished the race, then pivoted in the saddle to see what had happened. He saw Graham lying motionless on the track. Vesper Lad had rammed into the rail, dropping Graham to the track, where he had been trampled by the field. His ribs and back were shattered.

Track officials carried Graham up to the jockeys’ room and dumped him on a saddle table, where he lay moaning and incoherent. It had been decided that Graham could wait until after the races, when it was most convenient for someone to drop him by the hospital. Luther and the other jockeys were not permitted to leave the jockeys’ room to take him in themselves. Had they done so, they would have lost their jobs and housing. Though Luther passed the hat to raise cabfare to send him on alone, the jockeys didn’t have enough money among them. Luther spent the afternoon sitting with Graham, offering him water and pleading in vain with officials to get the boy to the hospital. Finally, after the races were over, Graham was taken to the hospital, where Luther sat by his bed. The race season soon ended, and Luther was forced to leave his friend’s side to accompany his trainer to another track.

A few days later Graham died. He was only sixteen. His death was little noticed; jockey fatalities were so common that they rarely earned more than a slim paragraph in the press. The only person left in town to mourn for Graham was a woman the riders called Mother Harrison, operator of a Turkish bath that Graham and Luther had frequented. She buried the boy but couldn’t afford a headstone. Luther mailed what little money he could spare to Mother Harrison to buy a grave marker. With the leftover money, she bought a small bouquet of flowers and laid it on the boy’s grave. She drew a picture of the grave and mailed it to Luther. Seventy years later Luther still has the drawing.

The racetrack casualty list was full of stories of the cruel, the bizarre, and the miraculous. In 1938, leading Agua Caliente jockey Charlie Rosengarten gave up the mount on the favorite, Toro Mak, to a struggling rider named Jimmy Sullivan, who needed the money to feed his wife and newborn baby. Rosengarten watched in horror as Toro Mak, sailing toward a sure victory, inexplicably crossed his forelegs and fell, crushing Sullivan to death. After a spill that knocked him unconscious, facedown in a puddle, Eddie Arcaro would have become the first jockey in history to drown on the job had a photographer not rushed out from the stands and turned his head to allow him to breathe. Steve Donoghue, who rode in Europe and the United States in the interwar years, was once on a horse that clipped heels and fell, spilling him onto the track in front of a mob of onrushing horses.²⁵ He was an instant from being trampled to death when an elderly woman suddenly materialized out of nowhere, grabbed hold of him, and dragged him under the rail. She left him in the safety of the infield, and vanished. Donoghue never saw her again.

But nothing tops the strange fate of Ralph Neves, a hard-headed, hard-riding teenaged jockey known as “the Portuguese Pepperpot.”²⁶ One afternoon in May of 1936, driving a filly around the far turn of California’s Bay Meadows Racecourse, Neves was on the lead and looking like a cinch to win. But without warning, the horse stumbled and crashed. Flipping to the track, Neves was trampled by trailing horses. The filly rose, uninjured—Neves had evidently broken her fall—but the jockey lay motionless. Two physicians in the crowd sprinted out to him, joining the track doctor.

Neves was not breathing and his heart had stopped. They declared him dead on the track. The race caller made the somber announcement and asked the crowd to stand in prayer. As the sickened spectators bent their heads and reporters rushed to get word to their editors, Neves’s body was carried into the track infirmary and parked on a table. According to one report, his boot was pulled off and his toe was tagged. Between ten and twenty minutes later, with Neves’s body already growing cold, the track physician decided to take a shot at the moon and injected Neves’s heart with adrenaline.

Neves woke up.

He asked the physician if he had won the fifth race. The stunned doctor told him the fifth hadn’t been run yet. Neves promptly stood up and announced that he had to get back to riding. The physician refused to let him go, and rushed the uncooperative jockey to a hospital in San Mateo, where attendants tried to hold him for observation. Neves, still fixated on riding the rest of the card, bolted from his gurney and made a run for it. Hospital staffers chased him outside, snagged him and pulled him back in, but Neves soon broke loose again, made it out the door, leaped into a cab, and rode back to Bay Meadows. Once at the track, he jumped out and began rushing toward the jockeys’ room.

As the shirtless, blood-splattered erstwhile corpse sprinted past the grandstand, astonished fans started running after him. By the time Neves hit the wire, most of the crowd was chasing him. Evidently hopped up on the adrenaline injection, Neves shook loose from the mob, dashed past the clubhouse, and burst into the jockeys’ room. He scared the bejesus out of everyone.

When the jockeys recovered from the shock, they took Neves, kicking and screaming, down to the first-aid room. He insisted that he was going to ride his one remaining mount. The incredulous stewards refused and insisted that he return to the hospital. Neves refused. He came back the next day loaded for bear. While San Franciscans were reading his obituary in several papers, the decidedly undead Neves rode like a man possessed, finishing second or third on all five of his mounts. Reports of his death were fifty-nine years premature.

A sidelined jockey was a forgotten jockey. Because of this cold reality, most jockeys would ride through virtually anything, and they shrugged off the grisliest injuries. “I got my leg broken once and my skull fractured once,” said former rider Wad Studley, “but never nothin’ bad.” Johnny Longden once won a major race while riding with broken bones in his back and foot. When a colt named Daddy Longlegs bolted for the closed paddock gate, sailed over it upside down, and landed on top of him, Steve Donoghue simply strapped his broken wrist bones together with cloth and rode one-handed. On another occasion, his boot caught in the stirrup as he fell off, causing him to be dragged by his foot down the track. His head bumped along beside his filly’s thrashing legs until his leg snapped and his foot came free. Not wanting to give up his mount in an upcoming race, Donoghue drove to the stables, had himself carried to his horse, and rode every day with a bulky plaster cast on his leg. Most incredibly, he rode for a full year with serious internal injuries incurred when another horse spiked him into the ground. Though he knew he had been critically injured, he refused treatment and grew weaker and weaker until someone finally took him to a doctor. The moment he entered the office, he fainted into his physician’s arms. He was rushed to emergency surgery and barely survived. The motivation for riding through such pain soon became all too clear. While still hospitalized, he was summarily fired by his contract trainer.

Finally, jockeys would not allow themselves to admit to their injuries because that would open the door to their ultimate enemy: fear. To acknowledge pain was to acknowledge danger. In their line of work, fear had a physical presence. Once a jockey let it into his head, it would rise up over him on the track, paralyzing him. Winning jockeys are daring jockeys, capable of gunning a horse through the narrowest hole with damn-the-torpedoes bravado. Frightened jockeys take what Luther called “the married man’s route,” timidly detouring around the outside of the pack. No one would hire a man who hesitated in the heat of battle. Jockeys could smell fear in one of their own and would exploit it mercilessly, trying to intimidate their way past a rival. “If a jock showed even the slightest trace of cowardice,” wrote Arcaro, “it could get awfully rough out there.”²⁷

As a result, jockeys never, ever spoke about danger, pain, or fear, even among themselves. In conversation they papered over the grim realities of their jobs with cheery euphemisms. Hideous wrecks were referred to as “spills”; jockeys hurled into the ground were “unseated.” In their autobiographies, they recounted great races in intimate detail, but falls and injuries were glossed over with the most perfunctory language. Even in the grip of agonizing pain or complete debilitation, most jockeys clung to their illusion of invulnerability.

For some, fear had a way of breaking through the illusion. “You didn’t talk about it,” remembered Farrell Jones, a jockey tough enough to earn the nickname “Wild Horse.”²⁸ “I thought about it. I don’t know if any of them other guys did. But I did. It was spooky.” Even Arcaro, one of the most daring riders, admitted that the memory of his first spill, in which a horse stepped on his back and another kicked his skull, leaving him with a concussion, two fractured ribs, and a punctured lung, was seared into his memory and burned there for the rest of his career. It was, he wrote, “a terrifying experience that somehow cannot be blotted out.”²⁹

———

For riders’ families, the danger and injuries took their toll. In dreams, Helen Luther saw her husband’s death play itself out countless times. In murky images, his horse would spiral into the ground, carrying Tommy under him, and Helen would wake into a life striated with fear.

Helen watched Tommy ride every day. She was a rarity in the sport. The vast majority of jockeys’ wives couldn’t stand to watch their husbands’ races and rarely, if ever, came to the track. Helen missed only one ride. On that day, a horse named Brick Top speared Tommy’s head into the steel overhead beam of the starting gate. He lay on the ground, his skullcap split, refusing to let the attendants take him to the hospital. “My wife will be here,” he kept repeating, sure that Helen was up in the stands. Helen didn’t come, and though Tommy recovered, she never ceased regretting it.

Forever after, Helen was there, her eyes trained on every move of her husband’s horses. She was frightened for every minute of his career. Sometime early in her marriage, Helen began a ritual: Each time his mount left the paddock and set his first forehoof onto the track, she would pray that the horse would see him home safely.

Helen’s prayers failed Tommy on a rain-drenched July afternoon at Empire City.³⁰ He was a sixteenth of a mile away from winning a race when the filly he was riding abruptly tripped over her own legs and plunged headfirst into the track. Helen saw her husband ride the arc of the filly’s back down into the mud and disappear under her tumbling body and the bodies of the three horses who struck her from behind. Their hooves cracked into Tommy’s head as they fell.

Helen never knew how she got from the grandstand to the track. Her mind drummed: He is under all those horses. The next thing she recalled, she was standing over her husband. She was sure he was dead.

They carried Tommy into the first-aid room on a stretcher. His ancient valet, Johnny Mitchell, bent over him, his tears falling onto Tommy’s cheeks as he gently sponged the mud and blood away. Helen stood back and stared at her husband. He didn’t move. Helen was seized in violent tremors, and her teeth chattered uncontrollably. She heard someone say, “This woman is in shock” and felt someone slip a brandy into her hand. She refused it. The man who fetched it, badly shaken, drank it himself.

They loaded Tommy into an ambulance and drove him toward St. John’s Hospital. Helen was left alone to find her own way there. She got into Tommy’s car and drove around New York, confused by the unfamiliar streets. The fuel gauge read empty, so she pulled over at a gas station. The attendant hooked up her car to the pump and came over to chat with her.

“Isn’t it too bad?” he said. “Tommy Luther was killed.”

Helen whirled in panic. She didn’t know what to do or where to go. She briefly thought she should go back to the track. She changed her mind and went toward the hospital. Somehow, she found it. She ran in. Tommy was still alive. Helen nearly collapsed.

Tommy survived. He would have no short-term memory for several days and no depth perception for six months. He staggered like a drunk for a good while. But he would ride for twenty more years, bearing only a single scar from a hoof.

Helen went back to their lodgings alone. It was a rental house in Yonkers, one of countless, faceless rental places she lived in for decades, like nearly all jockeys’ wives. You never stayed long enough to get a pet or a houseplant or hang any paintings. The neighbors sneered at you, knowing that you were “racetrack people.” Helen once found a burglar hiding beneath her bed in a rental place, but the neighbors didn’t respond to her screams because they assumed that screaming was the normal mode of discourse for racetrackers. Always, on nights returning alone, there were worries about practical matters. A jockey’s pay couldn’t begin to cover the sky-high insurance rates his job warranted, much less the doctor’s bills. Track officials viewed any effort to create funds for injured riders as unionizing, and they were ready to ban any jockey who took steps in that direction. So jockeys went without insurance and made do with what they had, passing the hat when one of their colleagues went down. Women like Helen could only hope there would be enough.

Helen ran to the front door, jammed the key in, and rushed inside. The empty house frightened her, and she nearly fainted when the landlord’s parrot spoke to her in the dark. She went upstairs and locked herself in the bathroom.

“If I didn’t have him,” she said as her mind rolled back over that night, “I was alone.”

Red Pollard and George Woolf had signed on to a life that used men up. But for all its miseries, there was an unmistakable allure to the jockey’s craft, one that both found irresistible. Man is preoccupied with freedom yet laden with handicaps. The breadth of his activity and experience is narrowed by the limitations of his relatively weak, sluggish body. The racehorse, by virtue of his awesome physical gifts, freed the jockey from himself. When a horse and a jockey flew over the track together, there were moments in which the man’s mind wedded itself to the animal’s body to form something greater than the sum of both parts. The horse partook of the jockey’s cunning; the jockey partook of the horse’s supreme power. For the jockey, the saddle was a place of unparalleled exhilaration, of transcendence. “The horse,” recalled one rider, “he takes you.”³¹ Aboard a racehorse in full stride, wrote Steve Donoghue, “I am so completely in the race that I forget the crowds. My horse and I talk together. We don’t hear anyone else.” At the bottom of the Depression, when wrenching need narrowed the parameters of experience as never before, the liberation offered by the racehorse was, to young men like Pollard and Woolf, a siren song.

On the ground, the jockey was fettered and muted, moving in slow motion, the world a sensory vacuum after the tenfold high of racing speed. In the saddle, emancipated from their bodies, Pollard, Woolf, and all other reinsmen sailed eight feet over the world, emphatically free, emphatically alive. They were Hemingway’s bullfighters, living “all the way up.”³²

Red Pollard’s Mexican visa, 1932

(NORAH POLLARD CHRISTIANSON)

George Woolf

(CHEERS MAGAZINE)

Chapter 6

LIGHT AND SHADOW

Sooner or later, just about all the bug boys went up the hill. When they began the journey the first time, following the narrow dirt road that turned up from the racetrack, they probably looked very young and somewhat breathless. When they came back, they were half a dollar poorer, twenty minutes older, and decidedly more swaggering at the walk. And the stories they could tell!

At the top of the hill, as everyone knew, stood the big cinder-block building that stared down on the track at Tijuana, or “Tee-a Joo-ana,” as they called it. The building was the home of the Molino Rojo, or “red mill,” a shag-carpeted shrine to the world’s oldest profession.¹ It was by far the largest house of prostitution in the world, and probably the most successful. Hovering right over the old Tijuana track, consuming half a city block, topped by an immense spinning windmill and decked out in flashing red lights that were visible clear across the border, the Molino Rojo must have been to the racetrackers what the North Star was to the magi. It took effort for the riders to avoid looking right at it every time they rode in morning workouts or circled the barn walking hots. The jockeys called it “the house of the wilted pigeons.”²

The Molino Rojo had no madam. The girls ran the place themselves, and they did so with the cunning of robber barons. It was no surprise to them that half the people at the racetrack were unsupervised hellraisers gripped in the ferocious throes of puberty. Surely it was more than happy coincidence that the price of admission—“fifty cents, straight up,” remembers one former bug boy—was precisely equal to the pay for galloping a horse. Any rider who made it up the hill had his beer paid for, compliments of the house. And in the unlikely event that a lad wasn’t quite in the mood, he would be ushered into the house theater to be inspired by an exotic blue movie. There were so many girls to choose from, every conceivable nationality, that a kid would have to gallop three hundred horses to afford them all. He could walk down the long, narrow halls, off of which were countless fabulously appointed bedrooms, listen to the girls beckoning in soft Spanish, and simply take his pick. “You went through there,” remembers one client, “like you were going through a grocery store.”

The girls took customer service seriously. Velvet-Tongued Velma and Chi Chi Grande needed no introduction. A girl the riders called One Wing Annie did a brisk business despite missing one arm. One girl told a bug boy that if he could track down $5, she’d show him something he’d never forget. Five dollars was the kind of money you could live on for a week back then, but practical considerations were unlikely to occur to a bug boy in such a situation. Within moments, a herd of jockeys packed into a room at the mill and showered $5 worth of nickels and dimes on the girl in question. She promptly stripped naked, lit up a cigarette, and blew smoke rings from a place into which only a creative-minded and supple-bodied prostitute would think of placing a cigarette. It was the greatest day of the bug boys’ lives. “What talent!” recalled a witness. “Of course, I had to change my brand of cigarettes after that.”

The Molino Rojo set the standard for Tijuana. The jockeys lived high and hard, riding by day, roaming the town in dense, noisy scrums by night, pouring into the Molino Rojo, then the Turf Club saloon, then on to wild exploits in town, chasing giggling girls buck naked down motel corridors, stealing all the room keys to the town’s biggest hotel. Among the riders were Red Pollard and George Woolf. It was to this strangely bountiful place that they came each winter, and they thought of it as home. Riding there from fall to spring every year, they defined themselves as athletes and as men.

———

In 1928, their first full season together, they took the racing world by storm. Settling into his niche as a miracle worker for tough and neurotic horses, Pollard earned assignments on nearly three hundred mounts and guided them to more than $20,000 in total purse earnings. His fifty-three winners placed him in a tie for twentieth in winning percentage among fully employed riders in North America (those with one hundred or more mounts). He was a complete success. But Woolf was supernatural. Though in the big leagues only a few months, Woolf was signed on to ride more than 550 mounts, many of whom were stakes horses of the highest quality, and won with more than 100 of them for total purse earnings of $100,000. His winning average of 19 percent ranked him in a tie for sixteenth among fully employed riders. As the weekday wonder and the money man, Pollard and Woolf established themselves in the uppermost tier of North American racing.

They also carved out their own respective roles in the social world. Pollard, with his books, his stories, and his offbeat sense of humor, earned the bewildered affection of everyone at the track. A small cadre of racetrack eccentrics gathered around him. In the jockeys’ room he orchestrated a string of clever practical jokes, sequestered himself in corners to pore over literature, and mystified his fellow jocks with aphorisms from Omar Khayyám and “Old Waldo” Emerson. A passing incident might inspire him to gallop through huge sections of Shakespeare, committed to memory, leaving the bug boys furrowing their brows.³ His language was a patchwork of cultivated speech and blue-streak profanity. He was loved for his wicked humor, delivered with a Buster Keaton straight face, and boundless generosity. He was feared and admired for his fistfighting skills, drop-of-a-hat volatility, thundering bass voice, and daring.

He was a prolific yarn spinner. One tale featured Pollard riding racehorses for Czar Nicholas. He could slip this one past the bug boys, who hadn’t gone to school long enough to know that the Bolsheviks had put an end to poor Nicholas when Pollard was only nine. Another favorite described how he inadvertently bedded down beside five hibernating bears in a Canadian cave. Hair grew on this story until the bears were wide awake and the ex-boxer was using his deadly left hook to knock all five unconscious. When he wasn’t telling stories, he was smartassing racing officials. He once attended a racing banquet at which a racing starter was the keynote speaker. The starter was notorious for his profanity, specifically his trademark phrase “Put a twitch on that son of a bitch!” referring to a restraint device that was pulled over horses’ upper lips to distract them while they were being loaded into the gate. As the host droned through the starter’s introduction, Pollard fidgeted in the crowd, slurping up champagne and, like everyone else, stagnating in boredom. As the starter rose to speak, clearing his throat for effect, Pollard abruptly stood up. “Put a twitch on that son of a bitch!” he boomed.⁴

In the rough-and-tumble world of the track, Pollard was something of a sheriff. Farrell Jones, who rode alongside Pollard, recalled a fight he got into with a veteran jockey in a dispute over a checkers match.⁵ When Jones won the match, the older jockey flipped the board across the room and promptly tackled him. Jones, who was only thirteen and weighed little more than eighty pounds, quickly found himself on the losing end of the tussle. The older jockey pounded him mercilessly and tried to jam his thumbs into his eyes. Pollard swept up to them, grabbed the attacking jockey by the back of the neck, tossed him to the ground, and pinned him. Pressing the jockey to the floor, he pinched his nose between his fingers and twisted it. The jockey howled for mercy. After letting him squirm for a while, Pollard released the rider, who had blood running from his nose and tears streaming down his face. “Don’t you ever touch that kid again,” Pollard hissed. He stalked off, leaving the room in silence. Nobody ever messed with Red.

If Pollard was the jester, Woolf was the king. The crowds adored him, shouting “Ride ’em, cowboy!” as he powered down the stretch on his good-luck piece, a battered kangaroo leather saddle once carried by Phar Lap, the greatest racehorse in Australian history.^6,8 The press doted on him. The lost boys of the racetrack worshiped him. Woolf took them under his wing, letting them copilot his roadster and teaching them the fine arts of horsemanship. After winning races, he’d drive over to the backstretch and stuff cash into the pockets of his mounts’ grooms. He chaperoned groups of riders on mornings of road work, but by the end of the run discipline always seemed to break down and he’d end up jogging them into a gin joint to refill their depleted systems with a tall one. To help some of them conceal their big feet—and their coming growth spurts—Woolf started up a black market in his shoes.⁷ Riders all over the backstretch balled up their toes, wadded them into Woolf’s hand-me-down silver inlaid boots (which, to their misery, were pointed), and limped around in them all day. A jockey’s feet might bleed, but donning Woolf’s shoes was an honor. Horseman Harold Washburn’s boyhood memory of his first sight of Woolf sums up the impression the Iceman left on the kids of the backstretch. “I walked out and see Georgie pull up with that big car with them superchargers on it, step out of that car with them boots with silver inlaid on it, white western hat, and I thought, ‘Oh my God! I am going to be a jockey!’”⁹

Woolf could get away with anything. In the spring of 1932, when a solar eclipse occurred just as he was scheduled to ride to the post, he carried a shaded glass out onto the horse with him, pulled up, lay his head back on his horse’s rump, and sat there, gazing at the sun while the crowd stared at him. In winning another race, he rode with such supreme concentration that he didn’t notice that he had torn right out of his paper-thin pants.¹⁰ He didn’t have a stitch of clothing on underneath, nor did he have the good fortune to at least be trailing the field. By the time he was galloping out, everyone at the track knew what Woolf had not yet noticed. “Hey, Woolf!” came a laughing voice from behind. “You’re sticking out!” Woolf cantered the horse back to the cheering grandstand and calmly asked his valet for a saddle towel. The valet trotted up with the requisite fig leaf, and Woolf, smiling out of one side of his mouth, wrapped it around his waist, rode into the winner’s circle, and posed for the photo. He hopped down and glided back to the jocks’ room to a hearty round of applause.

Off the track, Woolf steered clear of the town’s appeals to vice, preferring late-morning pit stops in Checks Sloan’s restaurant for a complimentary beer and a bowl of turtle soup. Not even the Molino Rojo tempted him. He had better things on his mind. In 1930, while cruising up over the border with Sonny Greenberg, he stopped at a San Ysidro train-car diner and fell head over heels in love with a gorgeous sixteen-year-old waitress named Genevieve.¹¹ Woolf began coming in regularly, parking his Stetson on the table and pointing Greenberg’s nose in the Racing Form while he romanced her. In 1931, at age twenty-one, Woolf married her.