Seabiscuit: An American Legend

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The halcyon days at the Tijuana track came to a spectacular end. On the backstretch early each morning men guided teams of horses on circuits of the barns, shoveling the mucked-out manure into wagons and driving the teams up the hill behind the backstretch, where they would dump it. The pile had been accumulating since 1917, and because the city received little rain to wash it down, it was enormous. “Oh my gosh,” remembered trainer Jimmy Jones. “It was as big as the grandstand.” Inside its percolating depths, the manure fermented, generating scalding heat.

To the locals, the mountain of manure was a steaming eyesore. To the jockeys, it was prime sauna country. Every day riders dug holes in the surface and burrowed in, Pollard and Woolf probably included. A few took the precaution of zipping into rubber suits before wiggling in, but most just wore street clothes. It was almost too hot to take, but Mother Nature’s hotbox proved unbeatable for sweating off weight.

The mountain was not long for this world. Sometime in the late 1920s, after extraordinarily heavy rains, swollen streams running off the nearby mountains backed up into a ravine, then exploded over the banks. Howling through Tijuana, the wall of water crashed into the racetrack, hurling houses, barns, and bridges along with it. Grooms ran down the backstretch before the onrushing water, throwing open stall doors and chasing out the horses, who scattered in all directions.

Behind them, the irresistible force of the flood met the immovable object of the manure pile. The water won. The mound, a marvel of solidity for a decade, was uprooted whole and began to shudder along in one murderous mass. It rolled over the San Diego and Arizona railroad tracks that fed the racetrack, tearing them out. Moving as if animated with destructive desire, it gurgled down the backstretch, banked around the far turn, bore out in the homestretch, and mowed down the entire grandstand. It made a beeline for the Monte Carlo Casino, crashing straight through its walls and cracking it wide open. Then, like a mighty shit Godzilla, it slid out to sea and vanished.¹³

For two days the track was underwater, stranding a cluster of grooms and loose horses atop a spit of land. People scurried in and out of what was left of the casino, pushing wheelbarrows brimming with silver dollars scooped up from the opened vaults. As the water subsided, grooms combed the town for the freed horses. Most had vanished in the hills, never to be reclaimed. But one man’s loss was another man’s gain. Impoverished mountain-dwelling Mexicans, who usually got around on wormy little burros, were soon cantering through town in high style, straddling blue-blooded Thoroughbreds worth a lifetime of their income. The Tijuana horsemen, long accustomed to calamity, wrote off the horses, picked up, and went on. They were racing again in a couple of days.

Soon afterward, a new $3 million racetrack called Agua Caliente was built just down the road. The old Tijuana track was reduced to a squatter’s haven, and Pollard and Woolf set up shop across town.

Woolf immediately ruled the roost at Agua Caliente. Riding the best horse at the track, Gallant Sir, he won the 1933 Agua Caliente Handicap, one of the world’s most prestigious races. In 1934 Woolf and Gallant Sir were set to defend their title.¹⁴ On the morning of the race, Woolf was scheduled to give the horse a light gallop. But at the appointed hour the rider was nowhere to be found. Trainer Woody Fitzgerald jumped in his car and drove to Woolf’s house. He found the Iceman sprawled across his bed, too absorbed in a cowboy magazine to bother going to his job. Fitzgerald fired him on the spot. Woolf went back to reading.

Fitzgerald sped back to the track and began a frantic hunt for a last-minute replacement. Pollard didn’t have a mount in the race, so Fitzgerald let him ride. Pollard rode flawlessly and won. Gallant Sir had won more than $23,000 that day, and Pollard’s cut was the biggest payday of his life. It was only the third stakes win of Pollard’s career, and in a backward kind of way, he owed it to Woolf. It would be four years before he was in a position to repay him.

The days of large life and uncomplicated success were fleeting. For Woolf, the longest shadow on his life surfaced a few years into his career. Its most evident manifestation seemed innocuous enough: Woolf was prone to nodding off.¹⁵ He would spend his days off stretched out in bed, snoozing. At parties, he was known to fall asleep in mid-conversation. His wife, Genevieve, and his friend Bill Buck were so concerned about his sudden attacks of sleep that they chauffeured him everywhere. Between races, Woolf climbed atop the jockeys’ lockers and curled up in the arms of Morpheus. He took napping so seriously that he eventually staked out a secret nest on the track roof, tucked in behind a chimney. Roused as the jocks’ room custodian shouted the traditional prerace call of “Jockeys! Jockeys!” Woolf would slip downstairs, wake himself with a tall Coca-Cola spiked with a couple of drops of ammonia, blot his lips, mutter, “Let’s go get this money and go home,” and stride into battle.

To almost everyone in the jockeys’ room, Woolf’s perpetual sleepiness was just another of his many eccentricities. To Woolf, Genevieve, and a few close friends, it meant something entirely different: insulin-dependent, Type I diabetes.¹⁶

His disease apparently surfaced in 1931, shortly after Caliente opened. Diabetes has never been easy to live with. In the 1930s it was hellish. Insulin had only been discovered about a decade before Woolf’s diagnosis. Glucose levels were monitored by testing urine, which could only measure glucose present in the blood eight hours earlier. Trial and error was the only method physicians had to figure dosage, additives had not been developed to improve the absorption of the hormone, and the proper diet for diabetes management was not yet fully understood. As a result, patients like Woolf could never truly control their illness. Giving himself repeated daily shots of canine insulin in the abdomen, arm, or leg, Woolf almost certainly spent his days boomeranging between insulin gluts and deficits. The result was frequent sickness—nausea, vomiting, extreme thirst, and hunger—occasional irritability, and exhaustion.

It also created a perilous dilemma. Woolf was in a career in which staying light was of paramount importance. He was not a natural lightweight; fellow jockeys dubbed him “Old Lead Pad.” This was a problem facing nearly every jockey, but with the onset of his diabetes, Woolf’s problems were compounded. In most patients, Type I diabetes spurs the appetite, sometimes to extremes. Insulin injections encouraged Woolf to gain weight, and to manage his diabetes he needed to consume regular, high-protein, low-carbohydrate meals—meats were recommended—which also added pounds. Between 1931 and 1932 Woolf’s weight jumped by almost 10 percent, to 115, too high to ride most horses.

He faced a wrenching conflict. To perform in the sport he was born for, he had to be very thin, but to survive his disease, he had to maintain habits that made thinness virtually impossible. He tried to find a happy medium, taking his insulin regularly, eating thick steaks, and reducing the extra weight off. Genevieve worried about the reducing and tried to stop him, but he appears to have found ways to do it anyway. He was an avid follower of Frenchy Hawley’s methods. Though Frenchy’s concepts of reducing were in some cases medieval, they were generally safer than those the jockeys dreamed up on their own, so Woolf probably benefited as a result. But his reducing, combined with the blunt-instrument character of diabetes treatment in the 1930s, made controlling his blood sugar extremely difficult. At times he seemed to hover on the edge of passing out. Trainer George Mohr remembered that Woolf sometimes rode while appearing strangely ashen, while Woolf’s friend Sonny Greenberg recalled incidents in which he found the rider slumped in the jockeys’ room, too ill to speak.

So Woolf made another concession to his disease. He began to restrict his riding to top horses assigned high imposts. Occasionally, as a favor to an old gyp trainer friend, he would agree to ride a cheap horse. Woolf weighed a lot more than the imposts assigned to most of these horses, but somehow he was able to circumvent the rule requiring riders to be within five pounds of the assignment. His skills negated the handicap; he once won on a horse carrying fifteen pounds more than his impost.

But these sojourns on cheap horses were rarities. Usually he rode only about four times a week, nearly all classy horses, rarely more than one a day. Over the course of a year, he rode one hundred and fifty to two hundred mounts, compared with as many as one thousand for other top riders. Incredibly, in spite of his small number of total mounts, his soaring win percentage invariably placed him near the top of the national jockey rankings for purse money won. In one season Eddie Arcaro nosed him out for the money-winning title, but only by riding three times as many horses.¹⁷ Woolf took to calling Arcaro “the Desperate Dude.”¹⁸

Woolf’s habit of minimal riding for maximum purses allowed him to survive as a jockey, but he knew he was walking a very fine line. In his era, even simple lacerations often left diabetics with savage infections that necessitated limb and digit amputations, a consequence of the disease’s ravaging effect on circulation and immunity. To minimize the risk of being cut in a spill, he tried to avoid very young, inexperienced horses. On the rare occasions when he rode a green horse, he used a custom-made, reinforced saddle and slip-proof girth.¹⁹ But Woolf knew that infection and amputation were the least of his worries. If he played the balance of diabetes management and reducing wrong, he could faint in the saddle while moving at forty miles per hour. It was probably the only thing that ever really scared him.

At roughly the same time that Woolf started his potentially deadly gamble, Pollard engaged in a gamble of his own. It began with a simple morning workout on a horse whose name has long since been forgotten. As Pollard rode the horse down the track that morning, another horse passed close by. Something—maybe a rock or a clump of dirt—flew up from under the animal’s hooves and struck Pollard in the head.

In the glimmer of an instant, for the price of a 50-cent galloping fee he was probably never paid, Pollard lost the sight in his right eye forever.²⁰

Had they known of Pollard’s blindness, the stewards would rightly have banned him from racing. With virtually no depth perception and no ability to see horses to his outside, he was far more vulnerable to positioning errors. He could unwittingly charge straight into a wreck. It was an injury that should have ended his career.

But Pollard, like Woolf, was not willing to hang it up. If anything, he was bolder than ever in the saddle, either to conceal his blindness or simply because he couldn’t see just how close he was cutting it. “Red is not one of our great riders, but the only word he knows is yes,” wrote a columnist who didn’t know of Pollard’s blindness.²¹ “He’ll try to thread a needle with a horse as the flying field turns down the last bend for home, and you must salute him for his courage, if not his judgment.” Pollard took an awesome risk. He kept his blindness secret and kept on riding.

Just after Pollard rode Gallant Sir to win the 1934 Agua Caliente Handicap, Mexico banned gambling.²² The colorful racing world that had spun itself around Tijuana withered and blew off into the sagebrush deserts. Pollard and Woolf returned to the United States, where racing had been relegalized, and their careers began to diverge.

On Christmas Day 1934 Santa Anita Park opened for the first time. Woolf turned the place upside down, riding an out-of-the-clouds long shot named Azucar, a former steeplechaser, to a smashing victory in the first Santa Anita Handicap. It was one of the greatest rides anyone had ever seen. After Woolf dismounted, Azucar butted him out of the way, ran over a spectator, slashed the NBC Radio wire—cutting off the national broadcast—and dragged his terrified groom down the track like a toboggan. The Iceman watched him go from the winner’s circle, a floral wreath wrapped around his shoulders, smiling his cool Gary Cooper smile as a mob of admirers cheered for him. The Iceman had arrived.

As Woolf ascended, Pollard began to fail. Perhaps his partial blindness was the reason. After Gallant Sir, he didn’t ride another stakes winner for years. Then even his modest weekday mounts began losing. He moved around North America, through Chicago, New York, Canada, riding the tough horses, the sour ones, and the nervous ones, but his statistics continued to slip.

Somewhere along the way, Pollard crossed paths with a jockey agent named Yummy, a round, toad-eyed, linty man, built low.²³ Yummy had a pronounced harelip that slurred his speech badly. He raised his voice to a pounding level to compensate, but this only made people cringe. He kept his cash in his shoe and lived year-round in the Turkish baths of whatever city he happened through. Like Pollard, he seemed to have lost the need to belong to any place in particular. The best Yummy could do for Pollard was chase his hopelessly beaten mounts down the grandstand rail, hollering and frightening spectators. But he was fanatically loyal, and he had a car. The two began kicking around the country together.

In August 1936 they turned up at Ohio’s Thistle Down Park. Any hopes Pollard had of redeeming himself there were quickly silenced. His win percentage dropped to a lamentable 6 percent.²⁴ He rode, on average, fewer than two winners a month. Around the track, people whispered that he was finished. He was drifting into the great slipstream in which many promising jockeys are lost, their talents never tried for lack of the skilled trainer, the wise owner, the “big horse.”

On August 16 Pollard and Yummy climbed into Yummy’s car, pulled out of the track, and hit the highway. Somewhere along the way, they smacked the car into something. Whatever it was they hit, it didn’t have a lot of give to it; the car was showered all over the road.²⁵ They bailed out into blistering heat. There beside the hulk of the ruined car, countless miles from anywhere, Pollard was standing in a metaphor for his own life. At twenty-six, he was frightened and empty. The car was totaled, the money was gone, and there were no prospects ahead of him. He and Yummy picked through the wreckage for their most essential belongings, 27 cents and a half pint of a foul brandy they called “bow-wow wine.”²⁶ Pollard probably salvaged his books and his rosary. There was a sugar cube kicking around in his pocket. They abandoned the car and hung their thumbs in the northbound lane.

It was late afternoon when they rolled up Woodward Avenue in Detroit. The city was stacked up in a hot, close grid, and the summer lay heavy over it. The ruinous decade had scarred the city, as it had every other: poor boxes on the street, people living on railcars. Near the intersection of Woodward and Eight Mile Road there was a cemetery. Pollard and Yummy called for the driver to stop. On the other side of the avenue stood the gate to a racetrack, the Detroit Fair Grounds. Pollard and Yummy hopped down, turned their backs to the gravestones, and walked in.

Across the track, Tom Smith was leaning against the easternmost barn, turning a straw in his teeth. In the stall behind him was Seabiscuit. Smith had been sitting by the horse for two days, thinking on him, watching him, trying to inhabit him. Something rattled in the horse’s mind that made him edgy and angry. He had been enjoying a reign of terror since they brought him to Detroit, trying to take big chunks out of the grooms, and no one wanted to go within a pitchfork’s length of him. No man had ever understood him, and the horse now turned against anyone who tried. Smith was thinking that he needed a strong and intuitive jockey for this one.

Up the backstretch, Yummy was zigging and zagging his way through barns with his big paw out, booming his pitch—“Name’s Yummy, not Dummy”—and coming out empty-handed. No one wanted Pollard. He and Pollard were dirty and tired and shaky from the wreck. Evening was falling, and it was time to start thinking about where to get their next meal and bed down for the night. The bottle of bow-wow wine was probably long dry.

A groom pointed to a gray man sitting in front of the barn where the Howard horses were kept. Agent and jockey turned east and walked toward Smith.

Yummy reloaded and made a run at him. Smith waved him off, eyeing the redhead and retrieving a name from years back: Cougar. He recalled the grave lines of the jockey’s profile from the days when they had crossed paths somewhere out West. He looked at the brooding face and the boxer’s physique and thought: Maybe. He offered his hand. Pollard took it. Smith smiled.

He gestured toward the stall behind him. Pollard leaned over Seabiscuit’s half door. The horse had his back to him, a dark mass shifting in the straw. Pollard pushed his hand into his pocket and pulled it out again with his fingers closed. He extended his arm and opened his hand: the cube of sugar. From the back of the stall, there came a tentative sound of nostrils drawing the air, weighing the scent. A black muzzle materialized, licked up the sugar, and touched the jockey’s shoulder.²⁷

The scattered lives of Red Pollard, Tom Smith, and Charles Howard had come to an intersection. Their crowded hour had begun.

PART II

Tom Smith and Seabiscuit

(USC LIBRARY, DEPARTMENT OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS)

Chapter 7

LEARN YOUR HORSE

The grooms were walking around with their faces fixed in permanent winces. Every time they passed Seabiscuit’s stall, the horse lunged at them, mouth wide open, ears flat back, eyes in a sinister pinch, and he meant business. Heaven help the poor kid who had to go in there, muck the floor, and curry the horse. Everyone was wondering what Smith possibly could have been thinking. The horse was a train wreck. He paced in his stall incessantly. He broke into a lather at the sight of a saddle. He was two hundred pounds underweight and chronically tired. He was so thin, said one observer, that his hips could have made a passable hat rack, but he refused to eat.¹ And that left foreleg didn’t look good.

As he did with every new horse, Smith pored over Seabiscuit when he was with him and mulled him over when he was not.² The first thing he had to try to do, the trainer decided, was defuse the horse. Ignoring the snapping jaws and pinned ears, he showered him with affection and carrots. He then tried one of the oldest remedies for unhappy horses: animal companionship. Motley collections of stray animals have always populated racetracks, and being the social creatures they are, horses usually befriend them. All sorts of animals, from German shepherds to chickens, have become the stable companions of racehorses. A three-legged cat lived with Fitzsimmons’s horses; the trainer dismantled a piece of harness and crafted a tiny wooden leg for him, then watched as the cat learned to snare mice with one paw and “blackjack” them with the other.³ At a track in Arizona a monkey was a popular mascot until he began turning on all the shed-row faucets and tearing the shingles off the roof.

Smith took the goat route.⁴ He dug up a nanny named Whiskers and parked her in Seabiscuit’s stall. Shortly after dinnertime, the grooms found Seabiscuit walking in circles, clutching the distraught goat in his teeth and shaking her back and forth. He heaved her over his half door and plopped her down in the barn aisle. The grooms ran to her rescue.

Smith opted for a companion who could take a little more punishment. Down the shed row he kept a lead horse he called Pumpkin. As broad as a Sherman tank and yellow as a daisy, Pumpkin—or “Punkins,” as the hands called him—had once been a Montana cow pony. Out on the range, the horse had experienced everything, including a bull goring that had left a gouge in his rump. He was a veteran, meeting every calamity with a cheerful steadiness. He was, in the parlance of horsemen, “bombproof.” Smith recognized the value of a horse like this and brought him along with his racing string to work as a lead pony, Smith’s track mount, and general stable calmer-downer. Pumpkin was amiable to every horse he met and became a surrogate parent to the flighty ones. He worked a sedative effect on the whole barn. After Seabiscuit evicted the goat, Smith hauled in Pumpkin. A brief mutual nose-sniffing produced no ill-will, so Smith decided to make Seabiscuit Pumpkin’s new assignment. He housed Pumpkin in one stall, Seabiscuit in the next, and tore down the wall between. The horses conversed and developed a fast friendship. They would live and work together for the rest of their lives.

The experiment with Pumpkin worked so well that Smith began collecting other stable companions for Seabiscuit. Somewhere along the way, a little spotted stray dog fell in with the Howard barn and began to travel with it. Named Pocatell, the dog had curiously upright ears that were round as platters and roughly three times normal size. Pocatell took a liking to Seabiscuit and began sleeping in his stall at night. Jo Jo, a small spider monkey of undetermined origin, had the same preference for Seabiscuit’s company.⁵ Sleeping with Pumpkin a few feet away, Jo Jo in the crook of his neck, and Pocatell on his belly, Seabiscuit began to relax.

The next hurdle was the horse’s sore and underweight body. Smith mixed up a homemade liniment and painted it on Seabiscuit’s legs. To keep the mixture from rubbing off when the horse lay in his straw and to protect his dinged-up legs from additional bumps and bruises, the trainer instituted a routine of keeping the horse in knee-high, inches-thick cotton bandages, once compared to World War I puttees. Smith also paid very close attention to Seabiscuit’s fuel. He fed the colt a high-quality strain of timothy hay, cultivated in Northern California, which he had come across during his first days as a trainer. For oats, he ladled out carefully measured portions of a fine white variety grown in the Sacramento Valley. After reading an article describing the nutritional intake of the University of Washington crew team, Smith made sure the horse received feed with a high calcium content.⁶ For bedding, he spread out a thick mattress of dust-free rice straw.

Once Seabiscuit was settled in at Detroit, Smith took the colt to the track to stretch his legs. It was a disaster. Seabiscuit didn’t run, he rampaged. When the rider asked him for speed, the horse slowed down. When he tried to rein him in, the horse bolted, thrashing around like a hooked marlin. Asked to go left, he’d dodge right; tugged right, he’d dart left. The beleaguered rider could do no better than cling to the horse’s neck for dear life. Smith watched, his eyes following the colt as he careened across the track, running as a moth flies.

Smith knew what he was seeing. Seabiscuit’s competitive instincts had been turned backward. Instead of directing his efforts against his opponents, he was directing them against the handlers who tried to force him to run. He habitually met every command with resistance. He was feeding off the fight, gaining satisfaction from the distress and rage of the man on his back. Smith knew how to stop it. He had to take coercion out of the equation and let the horse discover the pleasure of speed. He called out to the rider: Let him go.⁷

The rider did as told, and Seabiscuit took off with him, trying once to hurdle the infield fence but meeting with no resistance from the reins. He made a complete circuit at top speed, but Smith issued no orders to stop him, so around he went again, dipping and swerving.

After galloping all-out for two miles, weaving all over the track, Seabiscuit was exhausted. He stopped himself and stood on the track, panting. The rider simply sat there, letting him choose what to do. There was nowhere to go but home. Seabiscuit turned and walked back to the barn of his own volition. Smith greeted him with a carrot. Neither Smith nor his exercise rider had raised a hand to him, but the colt had learned the lesson that would transform him from a rogue to a pliant, happy horse: He would never again be forced to do what he didn’t want to do. He never again fought a rider.

After that wild ride, Smith put Pollard up on Seabiscuit for the first time to see how he would handle the horse. Pollard rode the horse around, studying him. Seabiscuit wouldn’t try much for him. Pollard turned him and brought him back to the barn. Trainer and jockey conferred. Pollard told Smith that the whip, used so liberally by Fitzsimmons, had to be put away. It should be used, he said, only in times of great urgency. Pollard saw that if this horse was pushed around, all he would do was push back. Smith knew he had found the right jockey.

Smith and Pollard made a point of allowing Seabiscuit to do as he pleased.⁹ Smith issued orders that the horse never be disturbed while sleeping, for any reason. Riders and grooms would sometimes stand around for hours, waiting for the horse to wake up before they could get to work. Seabiscuit milked it for all it was worth. “He wakes up in the morning like a sly old codger,” said Pollard. “Y’know, the Biscuit is like an old gentleman, and he hates to get up with the rising sun. When you go to his stall, he lays over like a limp, old rag and peeks out at you with one eye to see whether you get what he’s trying to drive over—that he’s sick as a dog. He’d get away with it if he could, but wise old Tom Smith knows him like a book.”

Pollard and the other exercise riders were given instructions to simply lean on his neck, sitting still and leaving the reins loose, so that the horse could choose his own pace. By making sure that all workouts ended at the finish line, Smith taught Seabiscuit that he needed to be ahead of other horses by the time he crossed the wire. Racetracks are ringed with poles that tell riders what fraction of a mile remains before the finish wire. Pollard found that with every pole he passed, the horse would run harder. Pollard didn’t need to hold him back, or “rate” him, in the early part of workouts; the horse knew that the homestretch was where the real running was done. “Why rate him?” Pollard would later say.⁸ “He knows the poles better than I do.”

Over the next weeks, Pollard and Smith discovered that obstreperousness was only one of Seabiscuit’s bad traits. He amused himself by propping in mid-workout, decelerating rapidly and vaulting his jockey up onto his neck. He also harbored a peculiar ardor for the inner rail. He refused to run at all unless he was practically on top of it, a consequence, Smith believed, of Fitzsimmons’s practice of invariably working the horse along the inside. When he was guided away from the rail, Seabiscuit would slow down and do just about anything to get back over to it, including abruptly ducking inside. This created two problems. First, the area by the inner rail was the lowest part of the slightly banked oval, so it tended to hold the most water, making it the slowest, most tiring part of the track during and after rainstorms. Second, he was most likely to get caught in traffic jams on the rail. Any horse who refused to swing wide could get into serious trouble.

Hoping to focus the horse’s mind on his job and reduce the distractions of the rail, Smith fitted Seabiscuit with a set of blinkers that restricted his vision to the track straight ahead of him. He took the horse out to gallop on a morning when track officials, trying to protect the overused inside of the course, had put out “dogs,” sawhorses lining the rail path to keep exercising horses to the outside. By galloping the horse to the outside of the dogs, Smith hoped to wean him from the rail. Seabiscuit thwarted his efforts, ducking into the rail in the gaps between dogs, swerving out to avoid them, then cutting in again.¹⁰ Smith kept at it, eventually making progress. Unable to eliminate the rail obsession completely, the trainer made use of it. As Seabiscuit was apt to fight any direct attempts to rate him, Smith told his riders to adjust the horse’s speed with steering.¹¹ When a rider wanted Seabiscuit to speed up, he would swing him toward the rail; when he wanted him to ease off, he’d nudge him to the outside.

The most difficult quirk was Seabiscuit’s behavior in the starting gate.¹² Within its metal confines he raised holy hell, throwing himself around, exhausting the assistant starters, and reminding everyone of Hard Tack. To stop the colt’s gate rages, Smith used a daring method. He led him out to the gate each morning, walked him inside it, and asked him to halt. Risking life and limb, Smith positioned himself directly in front of the horse, facing him. When Seabiscuit began banging around to get out, Smith held his ground, raised his hand, and tapped the horse firmly on the chest and shoulders until he stood still. When the horse stopped, so did Smith. When the horse moved, Smith tapped him again. Morning after morning, he was out at the gate with the horse, repeating the lesson. “You got to go at a horse slowly teaching him most anything,” Smith explained later.¹³ “Easy, firm repetition does it.” The effect was mesmerizing. The horse began to relax in the gate. “He caught on quick enough,” said Smith. “He’s wise as an old owl.” Eventually, Smith was able to leave Seabiscuit standing in there for as long as ten minutes without the horse turning a hair.

Smith also made a point of giving Seabiscuit a structured life. The horse got breakfast when he woke up, usually at four-thirty, followed by stall mucking and grooming at five, and a lengthy gallop with Pumpkin at eight. For horses, “downshifting” from strenuous exercise is risky. If they are brought to idleness too soon after running all-out—in old cowboy parlance, being “rid hard and put away wet”—their major muscle groups can seize up in an agonizing spasm called “tying up.” In addition, they can develop colic, a potentially fatal digestive crisis. Because of this, horses must be brought down from exercise gradually, slowly decelerating over about a half mile after a race and then undergoing a long walk. For Seabiscuit, this meant that after each workout he was covered in a blanket and hotwalked for about half an hour, until he was cool and dry. Then he was given a warm bath, dried, and led back into his stall, where his legs were painted in liniment and wrapped in protective bandages. He had lunch at eleven, hay snacks all afternoon, dinner at five. After that, the horse went to sleep, with his groom, Ollie, on a pallet in the stall with him. Seabiscuit fell into the schedule completely. Rain or shine, Smith was there to check on him at about eight every night before turning in.

Smith gave Seabiscuit time to learn to trust him and Pollard. Seabiscuit learned.¹⁴ When he heard Pollard’s deep voice coming down the shed row, he would poke his head over the half door to greet him. When Pollard, who called the horse Pops, sat outside the stall, reading the paper while Seabiscuit was cooled out, the horse would tug his hot walker off course to snuffle his jockey’s hands. When Smith led him out of the stall, he didn’t even need a lead rope; the horse would follow his trainer wherever he went, nuzzling his pockets. Smith spoke to the horse in nearly inaudible tones, calling him Son and touching him lightly when he needed him to turn. Seabiscuit understood him and always did as asked. In moments of uncertainty, the horse would pause and look for Smith. When he found his trainer, the horse would relax. Smith taught him that he could trust his trainer and rider, and this became the foundation for the trials the three would share over the next five years. “[Smith] let horses get confidence in him,” remembered Keith Stucki, one of the horse’s exercise riders. “He was the best horseman I’ve ever seen.”¹⁵

With long, careful schooling, Seabiscuit began to figure things out. Once he was no longer being coerced, his instincts bubbled back to the surface. His innate love of running returned. Pollard used the whip not as an implement of force, but as a signal: one glancing swat on the rump at the eighth pole, another a few feet from home, a cue that it was time to hustle. Seabiscuit began to wait for it and respond with lightning quickness. “So long as you treat him like a gentleman,” said Pollard, “he’ll run his heart out for you.” Though the horse was still goofing off and pulling tricks in his workouts, his speed was excellent.

After two weeks, Smith was ready to send him to the races. Howard agreed.

In late August they tried him in a good stakes race in Detroit. He had the bad luck of drawing into an event that featured the best filly in the country, Myrtlewood.¹⁶ Green to the core, Seabiscuit was all over the track, streaking out with the early leaders as they tried to keep up with Myrtlewood. On the backstretch, he was going along smoothly when, without warning, he threw his forelegs forward and propped, decelerating rapidly and dropping back through the field. Ahead of him, Myrtlewood drove to an insurmountable lead, with local star Professor Paul rallying in vain to catch her.

Seabiscuit’s temperamental outburst had left him hopelessly beaten, but as Pollard angled him into the stretch and asked him to get his mind back on running, Smith witnessed something he would never forget. Seabiscuit began to rip over the track, cutting into Myrtlewood’s lead even as she flew through fractions faster than any ever run at the Detroit Fair Grounds. He was much too late to overtake the filly or Professor Paul, but his rally carried him to fourth place, just four lengths behind Myrtlewood, who had broken the track record. Even more encouraging, in the homestretch, Seabiscuit’s ears were up, a signal that the horse was running within himself. “He showed me two great qualifications that day,” Smith remembered later. “He showed me speed, and he showed me courage. He was in trouble, and the way he pricked his ears, I knew if I could get the true speed out of him, I would have a champion.”

Pollard knew it too. Leaping off of Seabiscuit’s back, he ran over to Howard.

“Mr. Howard,” he sang out, “that horse can win the Santa Anita!”¹⁷

Howard laughed.

In his next start, on September 2 in the Roamer Handicap, Seabiscuit had nothing but bad luck. He took the early lead, then swung very wide on the far turn, falling behind into fourth. Pollard tried to rally him, but he was blocked by traffic until deep in the stretch, when he shook loose and flew up, almost catching Professor Paul for the win. Smith was pleased. The horse, he thought, was ready for sterner stuff.

On September 7 Smith led Seabiscuit out for the Governor’s Handicap. The race had no national importance, but in Detroit it was the big event of the racing season. Seabiscuit was sent off at long odds, for good reason: Also entered in the race were Professor Paul and Azucar, George Woolf’s Santa Anita Handicap winner, under a new rider and not quite his old self. Twenty-eight thousand fans, the biggest throng in Michigan racing history, showed up to see it, among them Charles and Marcela Howard.

They were treated to a spellbinder. Just after the start, Pollard tucked Seabiscuit in behind early leader Biography, who cut a brisk pace. Around the first turn and down the long backstretch, Pollard held Seabiscuit just behind Biography. Leaning into the far turn, Pollard saw a hole along the rail. He threaded Seabiscuit through, and in a few strides he had seized the lead. As Biography accelerated to stay with him, Professor Paul swept up on the grandstand side. In the center of the track, Azucar began to uncurl his long legs and accelerate, grinding away at the lead. In that position, the four horses bent around the turn and hit the homestretch. Pollard, in the lingo of jockeys, asked Seabiscuit the question.

Seabiscuit, for the first time in his life, answered. Pollard dropped his belly down in the saddle and rode as hard as he could. The quartet of horses blazed down the stretch at a terrific clip, with Seabiscuit a half length in front. Biography was the first to crack. Professor Paul, carrying just ninety-nine pounds, ten fewer than Seabiscuit, was skipping along under the light load, inching in on the lead, while Azucar, on the far outside, was driving at them. In midstretch, Professor Paul’s blinkered head was at Pollard’s hip with Azucar just behind them. A few feet later, Professor Paul was past Pollard’s elbow and still gaining. Then Azucar gave way. It was down to Seabiscuit and Professor Paul. The latter was cutting the lead down with every lunge. With the crowd on its feet, Pollard spread himself flat over Seabiscuit’s withers, reins clutched in his left hand, right hand pressed flat to Seabiscuit’s neck, head turned and eyes fixed on Professor Paul’s broad blaze. A few feet from the wire, Professor Paul reached Seabiscuit’s throat. He was too late. Seabiscuit had won.

Red Pollard had just won his fourth stakes race in eleven long years in the saddle. He was radiant. He galloped Seabiscuit out to the cheers from the crowd, then turned him back toward the grandstand. Beneath him, Seabiscuit bounced along with his tail fanned out high in the air. He played with the bit and wagged an ear at the photographers who stood by the rail, snapping his picture for the morning papers. Pollard steered him back to the winner’s stand, leapt off, and ran to Howard, who beamed like a schoolboy. It was only a good stakes race at a minor-league track, but it might as well have been the hundred-grander.

The ceremonies began. On the winner’s stand, which was swathed in a huge American flag and crammed with suited dignitaries, Marcela smiled demurely for the lieutenant governor, who extended a huge silver loving cup. Pollard, his skullcap off, his hair dark with sweat and his head tilted so his good eye focused on the camera, stood behind her, dwarfed by the cup. Smith, grim and spectral, stood alongside him. His mouth was set in its habitual glower, the corners bent downward in perfect convexity, and his ashen head blended seamlessly into the white clouds overhead. Howard, giddy and grinning, was nearly crowded right off the stand. The photo opportunity over, they smoothed a new blanket, emblazoned with the words GOVERNOR’S HANDICAP DETROIT, over Seabiscuit’s back, and Howard held Seabiscuit’s nose in his hands as a new set of photographs was snapped. Smith stood with them, ignoring the popping flashbulbs to let his eyes comb over his horse. Seabiscuit stood square under his head-to-toe blanket, posed in the stance of the conqueror, head high, ears pricked, eyes roaming the horizon, nostrils flexing with each breath, jaw rolling the bit around with cool confidence.

He was a new horse.

In the fiftieth start of his life, Seabiscuit finally understood the game. Smith and Pollard had unearthed in him, in Smith’s words, “more natural inclination to run than any horse I have ever seen.”¹⁸ Behind his frown, Smith was pleased.

The colt was transformed. In the barn he became a disarmingly affectionate glutton, “as gentlemanly a horse,” marveled Smith, “as I ever handled.”¹⁹ On the track, once the forum for rebellion, he displayed blistering speed and bulldog tenacity. Smith wasn’t ready to put the screws to him just yet. He was beginning to think that Pollard was right about the horse’s chances in the Santa Anita Handicap.

The prospect of running Seabiscuit in the hundred-grander, and in similar races, gave Smith a new issue to consider: weight. For racetracks, survival depends upon attracting bettors. For bettors, the least attractive race is one in which the favorites finish in the top positions, producing low payoffs for winning bets. To make races more competitive, tracks schedule “handicap” races, in which a racing secretary, also called a track handicapper, assigns more accomplished horses higher weights, or imposts, than less accomplished horses. This gives long shots a better chance, and thus encourages more wagering. Not all races are handicaps—in the Triple Crown, for example, all male horses carry 126 pounds—but most top races for older horses, including the Santa Anita Handicap, are handicaps. Though Seabiscuit was now amply good enough for the Triple Crown, and probably would have swept it, he had missed his chance; the series is only open to three-year-olds, and he was about to turn four. Smith was aiming him for the handicap division and the hundred-grander. The imposts for the big race were not yet assigned, and Smith wanted to keep his horse’s talent a secret for as long as he could so that the racing secretary would assign him low weights. Smith kept the horse in the small pond of Detroit, where Seabiscuit followed the Governor’s Handicap win with an impressive score in the Hendrie Handicap. Smith then shipped him down to Cincinnati’s River Downs, where the horse narrowly missed winning two more minor stakes.

It was at Cincinnati that Seabiscuit’s handlers first realized how fanatically competitive the horse was. Those unfamiliar with horses might scoff at the notion of equine pride as a silly anthropomorphism, but the behavior is unmistakable. Those who make their lives among horses see it every day. Horses who lose their riders during races almost always try to win anyway, charging to the lead and sometimes bucking with pleasure as they pass the last opponent. Weanling herds stampede around their paddocks several times a day, running all-out to beat one another. Even old stallions, decades away from the track, still duel with one another up and down the fences of breeding farms. As George Woolf noted, losers show clear signs of dejection and frustration, even shame; winners prick their ears and swagger. “You don’t have to tell good horses when they win or lose,” he said.²⁰ “They know. I guess they come by it kinda natural.” Humans aren’t the only creatures to seek mastery and rebel at being mastered. The fire that had kept Seabiscuit frustrated and unruly now fueled a bounding will to win.

It first surfaced in the midst of a scorching workout alongside Howard’s excellent sprinter, Exhibit.²¹ Seabiscuit had him beaten, but instead of pulling away, he eased himself up and galloped alongside, going just fast enough to keep Exhibit a notch behind. Exhibit tried his hardest, but Seabiscuit kept adjusting his speed to maintain the short advantage. He appeared to be taunting Exhibit. The two kept it up for a few furlongs before Exhibit abruptly pulled himself up. From that day forward, he refused to work with Seabiscuit.

The scene would be reenacted countless times on the racetrack in the next few years, and it would become Seabiscuit’s trademark. The horse seemed to take sadistic pleasure in harassing and humiliating his rivals, slowing down to mock them as he passed, snorting in their faces, and pulling up when in front so other horses could draw alongside, then dashing their hopes with a killing burst of speed. Where other horses relied solely on speed to win, Seabiscuit used intimidation.

Finding workmates was immediately problematic. One by one, Seabiscuit disposed of the Howard horses in morning workouts, merrily abusing them as he ran. Horses all over the barn became his mortal enemies. Others were heartbroken; Seabiscuit could suck the joy out of any good racehorse’s career. A typical example was a fine Argentine import named Sabueso.²² He managed to beat Seabiscuit in a short blowout one morning and returned to the barn cocky and full of himself. Pollard vowed revenge. In another meeting a short while later, he boasted, “I poured Seabiscuit at him.” Seabiscuit humiliated Sabueso.

Sabueso refused to eat and didn’t sleep for several days. “We had a terrible time straightening him out,” Pollard remembered. “He sulked and pouted as if to say, ‘I wish I was back in the Argentine.’” Smith finally resorted to convincing Sabueso that Seabiscuit had left the string. He housed the two horses as far apart as possible, and whenever Seabiscuit was led down Sabueso’s shed row, Pollard or Smith would shut the stall doors so Sabueso wouldn’t see him. “I guess the Argentine must think the big horse has gone away,” said Pollard. “At any rate, he’s all right now. A good horse, too. A little chunk of granite. But make no mistakes—he ain’t no Seabiscuit.”

Seabiscuit’s psychological warfare raised more problems than simple wounded pride. If he became too absorbed in rubbing a particular horse’s nose in his defeat, he risked being unable to regain his momentum when the closers came after him. Fortunately, though taunting was one of Seabiscuit’s greatest pleasures, once he was challenged, the games ended. In a fight he was all business. As Smith watched him in racing combat, images from his mustang days assembled in his head. “Did you ever see two stallions fight?” he would later ask.²³ “They look about evenly matched—most times they are—but one of ’em has that last reserve of courage and energy which licks the other. Seabiscuit has it.”

After the performance against Exhibit, Smith thought Seabiscuit was ready to move up a notch. The upstart West had the new Santa Anita Handicap, but the East, seat of racing’s elite governing bodies and home to all of America’s venerable old races and stables, had prestige. In October 1936 Seabiscuit climbed down from a railcar and stepped onto Empire City Racetrack in New York. He was not yet good enough to shoot for the East’s great races, so Smith entered him in the Scarsdale Handicap, a midlevel stakes race. Few spectators cared that Seabiscuit, the second-longest shot on the board, was in the field.

The horse needed just a minute and forty-four seconds to change their minds. Fighting his way through one of the wildest contests of the season, Pollard swung Seabiscuit clear of a set of chain-reaction collisions on the far turn, circled the field, and sent his mount running in a frantic effort to catch the leaders. In a hub-scraping finish Seabiscuit dropped his head and won by inches. The finish photo captured the scene: a dense cluster of horses stretched out for the wire, ears flat and lips peeled back in extreme effort. Ahead of them all, ears tipped forward with a jaunty expression, was Seabiscuit’s heavy, homely head. Easy.

One week later, Howard met with Smith. “Let’s head for California,” he said.²⁴ “A little wind off San Francisco Bay would do us good.” Smith agreed, thinking Seabiscuit could use a rest.

The trick was getting the horse there. In the 1930s, long-distance horse-shipping could only be done via railcar. A cross-country journey was a harrowing ordeal, five days of clanging, rocking, and bumping in a confined space. Train travel was so exhausting and upsetting to most Thoroughbreds that few could be taken outside their region. With Seabiscuit, Smith had reason to worry. Back at Saratoga, when he caught sight of the train to Detroit, the colt had panicked so badly that sweat had streamed from his belly.

While the other Howard horses filed onto standard horse-class cars, Seabiscuit had earned himself a luxury berth: a full end of a specially modified private Pullman railcar. Half of the car was knee-deep in straw, half was left unbedded so he could stretch his legs. Smith watched to see how Seabiscuit would behave. The horse stepped in and lay down. He would sleep during most of the journey.²⁵ Smith climbed into the rear car, coming forward at each stop to check on his horse.

They were retracing Charles Howard’s youthful journey, thirty years later.

“We’re coming back,” the old bicycle man told his friends. “And when we do, hang on to your hats.”²⁶

Seabiscuit and Rosemont drive toward the wire together in the 1937 hundred-grander.

(© BETTMANN/CORBIS)

Chapter 8

FIFTEEN STRIDES

The train sighed into Tanforan on a cool Wednesday morning in November 1936. Seabiscuit clopped onto the unloading ramp and paused halfway down, looking over his new home state. There wasn’t much to see. The California sunlight had the pewter cast of a declining season. One or two stable hands crisscrossed the tamped-down earth before the siding. Horses murmured over the grounds.

A couple of reporters stood around, looking indifferently at Howard’s new horse. They knew that the colt was aiming for the February 27 Santa Anita Handicap, but he hadn’t done enough to merit serious consideration. Their thoughts were occupied by weightier names: world-record holder Indian Broom; speed demon Special Agent; and above them all, the magnificent Rosemont, king of the East and conqueror of 1935 Triple Crown winner Omaha. Eastern horses rarely came to the West in those days, but the size of the purse had brought Rosemont over the Rockies. With Rosemont in the race, no one had any reason to believe that the horse Tom Smith was leading down the platform would be anything more than an also-ran.

The reporters jotted down a word or two on Seabiscuit’s arrival and moved off. Smith settled the horse in a comfortable stall and retired to his own little room right above it.

Smith liked the anonymity. The New York trip had told him that he had a very good horse in his barn, and until the weights were assigned for the hundred-grander, he intended to keep him hidden. So the trainer tucked Seabiscuit away on the Tanforan backstretch. He didn’t even let his stable hands know how good he thought the horse was. Quietly, slowly, he schooled the horse, fed him well, built his trust. Seabiscuit’s ribs filled out—he had put on two hundred pounds in the three months since he had joined Smith—and his manners had improved.¹ When he came out on the track, he bounced up and down in eagerness to get going. Smith knew Seabiscuit was improving rapidly, but when he sent him out for workouts before the track clockers, he gave him only easy gallops that veiled his speed. No one took much notice of him.

One afternoon when the track was deserted, Smith snuck him out. Smith and Pollard had stripped away the temperamental barriers. It was time to see how fast the colt could go. Smith loaded weight onto his back, boosted an exercise rider aboard, and turned him loose.

He watched as Seabiscuit’s body flattened down, his speed building, humming over the rail. Smith ticked off the seconds in his head. Something is happening. Lacking competition, racehorses in workouts rarely approach the speeds they achieve in races. But Smith had never seen a horse—any horse—flash this kind of speed, not in a workout, not in a race. Perhaps Smith thought his eyes were failing him, the clock in his head winding out of time. Coming up, a mile to go. He pulled his stopwatch out and pumped the trigger as the horse ripped past the marker. Seabiscuit kept rolling, faster and faster, covering more than fifty feet per second. His trainer watched intently, the surprise of it pushing up through him. Seabiscuit’s speed was not flagging. A thought drummed in Smith’s mind: He’s burning the top right off the racetrack.^1,2 Seabiscuit banked into the turn. There was a supple geometry to his arc, a fish bending through a current. Where virtually all horses decelerate and often drift out as they try to negotiate corners, Seabiscuit was capable of holding a tight line while accelerating dramatically. No horse has ever run a turn like this one.

When the colt flashed under the wire, Smith looked down at his hand. Seabiscuit had worked a mile in 1:36. The track record was 1:38. At that speed, Seabiscuit would have trounced the track record holder by more than a dozen lengths.²

Tom Smith was wide awake. In sixty years lived alongside thousands of horses, he had never seen anything like this. It was no fluke: in another clandestine workout not long after, the colt would tie a thirty-year-old world record for seven eighths of a mile, running it in 1:22.³

Smith took Seabiscuit back to the barn, his secret seething in his head. For the first time, he grasped the awesome responsibility that lay in his hands.

The old cowpuncher was scared to death.⁴

Smith wasn’t about to let anyone know what he had seen in that workout. Not yet. The weights weren’t out for the hundred-grander. He would keep Seabiscuit in San Francisco, where he could work in peace until he was ready for Santa Anita. Howard wanted to show his colt off to his hometown anyway.

On November 28, 1936, after nearly a month of legging up at Tanforan, Seabiscuit was trucked ten miles down the pike to run in Bay Meadows’ mile-long Bay Bridge Handicap. The field was the best the track had to offer, including Velociter, the former track record holder for the race’s mile distance, and the terrific mare Uppermost, the only horse to better Velociter’s time. Though his two main rivals had established themselves over the Bay Meadows course, Seabiscuit, by virtue of his Scarsdale Handicap win, was given the high weight of 116 pounds, 2 more than Uppermost and 9 more than Velociter.

Seabiscuit, a little stir-crazy after a full month on the sidelines, pushed off so hard at the starting bell’s ring that he shoveled a big hunk of ground right out from under his hind hooves, dropping nearly to his knees. At the same moment he was bumped hard by the horse to his left. Pollard somehow managed to stay aboard while his colt regained his footing. By then, the field was six lengths up the track.

Starting his race all alone, Pollard tried to turn the incident to his advantage, cutting in to the rail for a ground-saving trip while far ahead of him, Velociter and Uppermost cruised to the lead. Pollard unleashed Seabiscuit’s rally immediately, rushing up behind the field in hopes of finding an avenue through the pack. As the first turn approached, the horses farther out from the rail hustled inward and cut Seabiscuit off. With nowhere to go, Pollard waited. They pulled toward the backstretch, and Pollard saw a narrow hole open between horses and tried to send Seabiscuit through it. He didn’t make it, and had to snatch up the reins and yank Seabiscuit back to prevent him from clipping the heels of the horses coming together in front of him. Trapped again, Pollard waited until the field straightened out. A hole opened. Pollard told Seabiscuit to take it, and the horse darted in.

Seabiscuit shot through the pack, swung out, and drew ahead of Uppermost, claiming second on the outside. Only front-running Velociter remained to be caught. Tugging his right rein, Pollard fanned his colt out and hung on as Seabiscuit gunned Velociter down. All alone again, but this time in front, Pollard leaned back and slowed Seabiscuit for the last fifty yards. They cantered down the lane and hit the wire, winners by five lengths.

A thrill went through the crowd. Seabiscuit had equaled his Tanforan workout time of 1:36 for the mile, officially breaking the track record. Two clockers who had started their watches when Seabiscuit actually left the gate stared at their watch hands in disbelief. They had caught Seabiscuit running the fifth-fastest mile ever run, just three fifths of a second off the world record.

Back at the barn, the stable hands were shocked.⁵ They had no idea that the horse was so fast. Only Smith was unsurprised, but he was not happy that the news was out.

On Sunday, December 12, Team Seabiscuit re-assembled in the Bay Meadows paddock for the mile-and-three-sixteenths World’s Fair Handicap, the crowning stakes race of the track meeting. The field, including two major stakes winners, was the most formidable Seabiscuit had ever faced. Just after Pollard swung aboard, a paddock official waved him back so another horse could precede him in the post parade. Howard yelled across the paddock to the horse’s owner, “This is your last chance to be in front!” The crowd gave Howard a hearty round of applause.

Determined not to be left behind as they had been in the Bay Bridge Handicap, Pollard shot Seabiscuit from the starting gate and sent him blowing past the field. Seabiscuit streaked out to a twelve-length lead. The panicked jockeys behind him launched frantic rallies to catch him, but they could only cut the lead down to eight lengths. To wild cheering, Seabiscuit jogged down the homestretch all by himself. Pollard, laughing as he stood in the stirrups and leaned his full weight against the reins, did just about everything he could to slow Seabiscuit down. He wasn’t much of a match for his colt, who tugged away at the bridle, begging to run.

When they returned to the scales, Seabiscuit wasn’t even breathing hard. He had eclipsed another track record, running less than a second off the world record. His time was so fast that in the following year, no horse at Bay Meadows would come within three seconds of it. Pollard suddenly found himself in a sea of reporters. If he met the same field again, he sang out, he’d have time to ride Seabiscuit right off the track, canter him down to San Mateo for some Christmas shopping, swing by the post office for their fan mail, and still trot back in time to win the race.⁶

The Bay Meadows operators got the point: Seabiscuit was far too good for anything at their track. The message was underscored when the West Coast’s most prominent “future book” wagering operator, who was based in San Francisco, rated Seabiscuit above Rosemont for the hundred-grander. Hoping to keep Seabiscuit around for another race, the Bay Meadows racing secretary made an emergency trip out of town, hoping to scare up some of the Handicap favorites to face him at Bay Meadows.

Rosemont and the other big boys weren’t coming. Seabiscuit was going to have to go get them.

On December 18, Seabiscuit stepped onto the russet soil of Santa Anita for the first time. In Barn 38 Smith kicked down the wall between two stalls to create a palatial home for Seabiscuit and Pumpkin. The stable boys dubbed it the Kaiser Suite.

The locals at Santa Anita and the press outside the Bay Area greeted the raving headlines from San Francisco with incredulity. A prominent eastern handicapper called him “the most overrated horse in California.”⁷ The phrase “who did he beat?” appeared over and over in the press. “It is difficult to give him a rating above a $5,000 plater,” wrote one journalist, using the synonym for claimer. Seabiscuit was a horse who had to be seen to be believed.

Trouble dogged him from the moment he was vanned into Santa Anita. Smith had initially planned on running him Christmas Day, but the trainer thought the horse seemed slightly weary and decided to back off for a while. He found a replacement race in the New Year’s Stakes, but the track came up muddy. Smith didn’t want to risk Seabiscuit’s soundness by running on a slippery track, so he scratched him and moved his scheduled Santa Anita debut to January 16, 1937. On the appointed day, an ominous hive of an inch or so square popped up on the colt’s coat. Smith withdrew him again.

One hive became two, then three, then an army of angry lumps. Driven mad by itching, Seabiscuit began to lose his newfound calm. Unable to train, he began pacing in the stall again. Smith tried every remedy he knew, but the rash kept marching onward.⁸ Finally, after more than a week, the rash began to retreat. “Don’t tell me about bad breaks,” Howard grumbled.⁹ “Seabiscuit certainly gets them.”

The long layoff from racing, culminating in a week stuck itching in the barn, took its toll. Seabiscuit, already inclined toward portliness, was turning into one thousand pounds of flab. Smith looked the horse over and frowned. “Butterball,” he called him. Idleness wasn’t the only reason for the added weight. Seabiscuit’s groom, Ollie, had been feeding the horse enough rations to fatten up an elephant.¹⁰ Smith had asked him to limit the horse to dry mash, but Ollie had begun sneaking in warm oat-mash snacks when he thought Smith wasn’t looking. Smith considered firing Ollie, but the horse was so enamored of the groom that Smith decided otherwise. It was the beginning of a chronic problem for Seabiscuit, who loved eating so much that he often followed up his regular meals by consuming his own bedding.

Burning the flab off was going to be difficult. Smith was concerned that he’d have to work the horse to death to get the weight off. To get as much weight off as he could with each workout, he took a cue from the jockeys’ room and began zipping the horse into rubber-lined sweating hoods during the gallops, then wrapping him in hot blankets afterward. He strapped him into a muzzle to stop his snacking. But the biggest problem was Ollie. The groom simply wouldn’t do as asked.

Smith appealed to the highest court: Marcela Howard. She was the kind of woman who had a certain unspoken authority. She never had to raise her voice; she had a certain expression that communicated things well enough. Smith had seen it himself. She had once come into his barn and discovered jockey Farrell Jones lying on a cot in the cold, drafty tack room, desperately ill with an infection. Smith, who never missed a pimple on a horse but tended to be oblivious to the plight of his fellow man, hadn’t taken the slightest notice of the boy and whatever ominous hacking noises must have been coming from the tack room. Marcela was appalled. She fired that look around, Farrell got his medicine and blankets, and everyone felt ashamed of themselves. No one ever forgot it.

Smith asked Marcela to see what she could do about Seabiscuit’s clandestine munching. Marcela called on Ollie, and they had a talk. The gift snacks disappeared. Smith started conditioning his horse all over again.

———

By the time Smith was able to get Seabiscuit in racing shape, two months had passed since the World’s Fair Handicap. It was already the second week of February, the Santa Anita Handicap was a little more than two weeks away, and Seabiscuit was far behind in his preparation. If Smith could get the horse into a race on the weekend of February 9, he would have time enough to run him once more before the hundred-grander. The only suitable race that weekend was the seven-furlong Huntington Beach Handicap, in which Rosemont was set to run. Smith had avoided Rosemont earlier in the season not because he feared Seabiscuit would lose, but because he feared his horse would win, prompting the racing secretary to assign him heavy weight for the hundred-grander. That problem no longer existed; weights had finally been posted. Seabiscuit would carry 114 pounds, probably not as few as Smith had hoped for, but no backbreaker either. On February 9, Smith sent his horse out for the Huntington.

Without any urging from Pollard, Seabiscuit shot from the gate as he had in the World’s Fair, but this time there was a horse to go with him, Cloud D’Or. Pollard clucked once in Seabiscuit’s ear, and his colt hooked up with his rival on a dizzying pace, with Seabiscuit down on the deep, slow rail and Cloud D’Or on the outside. After half a mile, they were two and two-fifths seconds below the track record. At three quarters of a mile, they were just one second off the world record. They left the field far behind them, never to catch up.

In the homestretch, with a sixteenth of a mile to go, Seabiscuit had had enough fooling around and abruptly burst away from Cloud D’Or. Once safely in the lead, Pollard slowed him down, and Seabiscuit galloped in ahead by four and a half lengths. Rosemont labored in far behind. After they passed the wire, Pollard let Seabiscuit keep running to get more of a workout from the race. The horse galloped until he had completed a mile in 1:36, more than a second faster than any horse would run that distance at Santa Anita in the entire year. Again, Seabiscuit wasn’t even breathing hard in the winner’s circle.

“Heck, I’ve never let Seabiscuit out yet,” Pollard boasted after the race. “You’ll really see Seabiscuit do some running when I cut him loose in the big race.”

Smith knew he had the best horse in America.¹¹

Horsemen in the East didn’t know it yet. In the eastern race books, the horse was still a long shot for the hundred-grander. Seabiscuit’s final prep race, the San Antonio Handicap, seemed to confirm the easterners’ wisdom. Hung out in post position eleven—eleven positions out from the rail—Seabiscuit was bumped at the break, dropped back to fourteenth, then drifted extremely wide down the backstretch as Rosemont cruised ahead of him. Seabiscuit ran up on the heels of a group of horses and was forced to check sharply, then ran hopelessly wide again on the final turn. Finally loose in the stretch, Seabiscuit cut Rosemont’s eight-length lead in half but couldn’t catch him, finishing fifth. Rosemont won.

Quiet trepidation settled over the Howard barn in the week before the Santa Anita Handicap. Late in the week, a long, soaking shower doused the racing oval. When the rain stopped, asphalt-baking machines droned over the course, licking flames over the surface to dry the soil. Rosemont emerged from the barn three days before the race and scorched the track in his final workout. Reporters waited for Smith to give his horse a similar workout, but they never saw Seabiscuit doing anything more than stretching his legs. Rumors swirled around the track that Seabiscuit was lame. Rosemont’s stock rose; Seabiscuit’s dropped.

Smith had fooled them. At three o’clock one morning shortly before the race, he led Seabiscuit out to the track and gave him one last workout in peace and isolation. The horse ran beautifully.

On February 27, 1937, Charles and Marcela Howard arrived at Santa Anita to watch their pride and joy go for the hundred-grander. They were giddy with anticipation. “If Seabiscuit loses,” mused a friend, “Mrs. Howard is going to be so heartbroken that I’ll have to carry her out.¹² If he wins, Charley’ll be so excited that I’ll have to carry him.” Howard couldn’t keep still. He trotted up to the press box and made the wildly popular announcement that if his horse won, he’d send up a barrel of champagne for the reporters. He went down to the betting area, and seeing that the line was too long to wait, he grabbed a bettor and jammed five $1,000 bills into his hand.¹³ “Put it all on Seabiscuit’s nose, please,” he told the bewildered wagerer before trotting off again.

At a little past 4:00 P.M. Pollard and Seabiscuit parted from Smith at the paddock gate and walked out onto the track for the Santa Anita Handicap. A record crowd of sixty thousand fans had come to see eighteen horses try for the richest purse in the world. Millions more listened on radio.

As Pollard felt Seabiscuit’s hooves sink into the russet soil, he had reason to worry. The baking machines had not completely dried the surface. Rain and dirt had blended into a heavy goo along the rail; breaking from the three post, Seabiscuit would be right down in it. Far behind him in the post parade, jockey Harry Richards was contemplating a different set of obstacles for Rosemont. He had drawn the seventeenth post position. He was going to have the luxury of a hard, fast track, but his problem would be traffic. As a late runner, Rosemont would have to pick his way through the cluttered field.

The two jockeys virtually bookended the field as they moved to the post. Pollard feared nothing but Richards and Rosemont. Richards feared nothing but Pollard and Seabiscuit. The two horses stood motionless while the field was loaded around them.

At the sound of the bell, Seabiscuit bounded forward. To his outside, a crowd of horses rushed inward to gain optimal position. The field doubled over on itself, and the hinge was Seabiscuit, who was pinched back to ninth. In a cloud of horses, Pollard spotted daylight five feet or so off the rail. He banked Seabiscuit out into it, holding him out of the deep part of the track. He slipped up to fourth position, just off of front-running Special Agent. On the first turn Seabiscuit was crowded back down to the rail. As the field straightened into the backstretch, Pollard found another avenue and eased him outward again, to firmer ground. Ahead, Special Agent was setting a suicidal pace, but Pollard sensed how fast it was and was not going to be lured into it. He sat back and waited. Behind him, Rosemont was tugging along toward the back of the field, waiting for the speed horses to crumble.

With a half mile to go, Pollard positioned Seabiscuit in the clear and readied for his move. Behind him, Richards sensed that the moment had come to shoot for Seabiscuit. He began threading Rosemont through the field, cutting in and out, picking off horses one by one, talking in his horse’s ear as clumps of dirt cracked into his face. His luck was holding; every hole toward which he guided his horse held open just long enough for him to gallop through. On the far turn he reached Seabiscuit’s heels and began looking for a way around him. Ahead of him, Pollard crouched and watched Special Agent’s churning hindquarters, waiting for him to fold.

At the top of the stretch Special Agent faltered. Pollard pulled Seabiscuit’s nose to the outside and slapped him on the rump. Seabiscuit pounced. Richards saw him go and gunned Rosemont through the hole after him, but Seabiscuit had stolen a three-length advantage. Special Agent gave way grudgingly along the inside as Indian Broom rallied up the outside, not quite quick enough to keep up.¹⁴

Lengthening stride for the long run to the wire, Seabiscuit was alone on the lead in the dry, hard center of the track. Pollard had delivered a masterpiece of reinsmanship, avoiding the traps and saving ground while minimizing his run along the boggy rail. He had won the tactical battle with Richards. He was coming into the homestretch of the richest race in the world with a strong horse beneath him. Behind them were seventeen of the best horses in the nation. To the left and right, sixty thousand voices roared. Ahead was nothing but a long strip of red soil.

The rest of the field peeled away, scattered across thirty-two lengths of track behind them. It was down to Rosemont and Seabiscuit.

Seabiscuit was moving fastest. He charged down the stretch in front with Pollard up over his neck, moving with him, driving him on. Rosemont was obscured behind him. He was gaining only by increments. Seabiscuit sailed through midstretch a full length ahead of Rosemont. Up in the stands, the Howards and Smith were thinking the same thing: Rosemont is too far behind. Seabiscuit is going to win.

Without warning, horse and rider lost focus. Abruptly, inexplicably, Pollard wavered. He lay his whip down on Seabiscuit’s shoulder and left it there.

Seabiscuit paused. Perhaps he slowed in hopes of finding an opponent to toy with. Or maybe he sensed Pollard’s hesitation. His composure, which Smith had patiently schooled into him over six months, began to unravel. Seabiscuit suddenly took a sharp left turn, veering ten feet across the track and back down into the deep going, straightening himself out just before hitting the rail. He had given away several feet of his lead. The cadence of his stride dropped. What had been a seamless union was now only a man and a horse, jangling against each other.

From between Rosemont’s ears, Richards saw Seabiscuit’s form disintegrate. He looked toward the wire. It seemed close enough to touch, but Rosemont still wasn’t past Seabiscuit’s saddlecloth.¹⁵ He had been riding on instinct, reflex, but now his heart caught in his throat: I am too late. Desperate, he flung himself over Rosemont’s neck, booting and whipping and screaming, “Faster, baby, faster!” Striding high in the center of the track, Rosemont was suddenly animated by Richards’s raging desire.¹⁶ He dropped his head and dug in. Seabiscuit’s lead, stride by stride, slipped away.

For a few seconds at the most critical moment of their careers, Pollard and Seabiscuit faltered. For fifteen strides, more than the length of a football field, Pollard remained virtually motionless. Rosemont was some ten feet to his outside, leaving plenty of room for Pollard to swing Seabiscuit out of the rail-path’s slow going, but Pollard didn’t take the opportunity. From behind his half-moon blinker cups, Seabiscuit could see nothing but an empty track ahead of him, nor is it likely that he could hear Rosemont over the roar from the grandstand. Or perhaps he was waiting for him. His left ear swung around lazily, as if he were paying attention to something in the infield. His stride slowed. His mind seemed scattered. The lead was vanishing. A length. Six feet. A neck. The wire was rushing at them. The crowd was shrieking.

With just a few yards to go, Pollard broke out of his limbo. He burst into frenzied motion. Seabiscuit’s ears snapped back and he dived forward. But Rosemont had momentum. The lead shrank to nothing. Rosemont caught Seabiscuit, then took a lead of inches. Seabiscuit was accelerating, his rhythm building, his mind narrowed down to his task at the urgent call of his rider. But Richards was driving harder, scratching and yelling and pleading for Rosemont to run. Seabiscuit cut the advantage away. They drew even again.

Rosemont and Seabiscuit flew under the wire together.

Up in their box, the Howards leapt up. Charles ran to the Turf Club bar, calling for champagne for everyone. Voices sang out and corks popped and a wild celebration began.¹⁷

Gradually, the revelers went silent. The crowd had stopped cheering. The stewards posted no winner. They were waiting for the photo. The exhausted horses returned to be unsaddled, and the fans sat in agonized anticipation. Two minutes passed. In the hush, a sibilant sound attended the finish photo as it slid down to the stewards. There was a terrible pause. The numbers blinked up on the board.

Rosemont had won.

A howl went up from the grandstand. Thousands of spectators were certain that the stewards had it wrong, that Seabiscuit had been robbed. But the photo was unequivocal: Rosemont’s long bay muzzle hung there in the picture, just a wink ahead of Seabiscuit’s. “Dame Fortune,” wrote announcer Joe Hernandez, “made a mistake and kissed the wrong horse—Rosemont—in the glorious end of the Santa Anita Handicap.”¹⁸

Charles and Marcela collected themselves. The length of Rosemont’s nose had cost them $70,700. They continued passing out the champagne, brave smiles on their faces.

Pollard didn’t need to look at the tote board. He knew he had lost from the instant the noses hit the line. Wrung to exhaustion and deathly pale, he slid from Seabiscuit’s back. He walked over to Richards, who was being smothered in kisses by his tearful wife. Pollard’s face was blank, his voice barely above a whisper. All around him, people regarded him with expressions of cool accusation.

“Congratulations, Harry, you rode a swell race,” Pollard said.

“Thanks,” said Richards, his face covered in lipstick and his voice breaking; he had shouted it away urging Rosemont on. “But it was very close.”

“Close, yes,” said Pollard almost inaudibly, “but you won.”¹⁹

Pollard saw Howard hovering nearby, waiting for him. The jockey went to him.

“What happened?” Howard asked gently. Ashen and spent, Pollard said that the rail had been slow, and that he had been unable to get outside without fouling Rosemont. If he and Rosemont had switched positions, he was sure Seabiscuit would have won.

It was a thin excuse. Pollard must have known that to save his professional standing, he would have to offer more than that, say something that would explain how he had allowed Rosemont to come to him without fighting back until the last moment. Already, harsh words were being hung on him: arrogant, inept, overconfident. He could not have mistaken the reproach on the faces of those around him. His reputation was tumbling. But Pollard gave the public nothing to make them reconsider.

Perhaps he couldn’t. He had a secret to keep, a gamble he had made years earlier and remade with each race. But he could no longer think that its risks affected only himself.

Perhaps Pollard didn’t see Rosemont coming because of the blindness of his right eye.

It is unlikely that he could have heard Rosemont over the din from the crowd. Rosemont’s surge, unexpected and sudden, may have eluded Pollard until very late in the race. Pollard did not begin urging Seabiscuit in earnest until Rosemont was alongside him, just forward enough for Pollard to see him with his left eye, upon turning his head. One good eye offers little depth perception, so he may not have been able to judge whether Rosemont was far enough to his right to allow Seabiscuit to move outward.

If this explanation is correct, then Pollard was trapped. He was publicly accused of inexcusable failure in the most important race of his career, but he could not defend himself. Had he let on that he was blind in one eye, his career would have been over. Like most jockeys in the 1930s, he had nowhere else to go, nothing else to live on, nothing else he loved. For Red Pollard, there was no road back to Edmonton. If his blindness was the cause of the loss, his frustration and guilt must have been consuming.

Howard accepted Pollard’s explanation without criticism. Neither he nor Smith blamed him.²⁰

Almost everyone else did.

———

(AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS)

1 This thought, like all others recorded in this book, is expressed exactly as the subject later described it.

2 An age-old, widely-followed formula holds that one-fifth of a second equals one length. But this formula is obviously flawed; a sprinter travels many more feet per second than a distance runner. The above figure and all others in this book are calculated separately for each race, using the horses’ actual feet-per-second speed. In this case, it took the track record holder 1:38 (98 seconds) to travel 5,280 feet, one mile. That’s 53.87 feet per second. He was two seconds slower than Seabiscuit, which translates into 107.75 feet. The average Thoroughbred is 8.5 feet long. 107.75 divided by 8.5 is 12.67 lengths.

Chapter 9

GRAVITY

For six months Tom Smith had been holding Seabiscuit in his closed fist. He had inched him up through back alleys and smaller races, bypassing the nationally spotlighted races in favor of slow cultivation and parochial seclusion. It wasn’t until the Santa Anita Handicap, with the whole world watching, that Smith had opened his hand.

The world had been waiting for him. In the winter of 1937, America was in the seventh year of the most catastrophic decade in its history. The economy had come crashing down, and millions upon millions of people had been torn loose from their jobs, their savings, their homes. A nation that drew its audacity from the quintessentially American belief that success is open to anyone willing to work for it was disillusioned by seemingly intractable poverty. The most brash of peoples was seized by despair, fatalism, and fear.

The sweeping devastation was giving rise to powerful new social forces. The first was a burgeoning industry of escapism. America was desperate to lose itself in anything that offered affirmation. The nation’s corner theaters hosted 85 million people a week for 25-cent viewings of an endless array of cheery musicals and screwball comedies.¹ On the radio, the idealized world of One Man’s Family and the just and reassuring tales of The Lone Ranger were runaway hits. Downtrodden Americans gravitated strongly toward the Horatio Alger protagonist, the lowly bred Everyman who rises from anonymity and hopelessness. They looked for him in spectator sports, which were enjoying explosive growth. With the relegalization of wagering, no sport was growing faster than Thoroughbred racing.

Necessity spurred technological innovations that offered the public unprecedented access to its heroes. People accustomed to reading comparatively dry rehashes of events were now enthralled by vivid scenes rolling across the new Movietone newsreels. A public that had grown up with news illustrations and hazy photo layouts was now treated to breathtaking action shots facilitated by vastly improved photographic equipment. These images were now rapidly available thanks to wirephoto services, which had debuted in Life in the month that Pollard, Howard, and Smith formed their partnership.

But it was radio that had the greatest impact.² In the 1920s the cost of a radio had been prohibitive—$120 or more—and all that bought was a box of unassembled parts. In unelectrified rural areas, radios ran on pricey, short-lived batteries. But with the 1930s came the advent of factory-built console, tabletop, and automobile radio sets, available for as little as $5. Thanks to President Roosevelt’s Rural Electrification Administration, begun in 1936, electricity came to the quarter of the population that lived on farmlands.³ Rural families typically made the radio their second electric purchase, after the clothes iron. By 1935, when Seabiscuit began racing, two thirds of the nation’s homes had radio. At the pinnacle of his career, that figure had jumped to 90 percent, plus eight million sets in cars. Enabling virtually all citizens to experience noteworthy events simultaneously and in entertaining form, radio created a vast common culture in America, arguably the first true mass culture the world had ever seen. Racing, a sport whose sustained dramatic action was ideally suited to narration, became a staple of the airwave. The Santa Anita Handicap, with its giant purse and world-class athletes, competing in what was rapidly becoming the nation’s most heavily attended sport, became one of the premier radio events of the year.

In February 1937, all of these new social and technological forces were converging. The modern age of celebrity was dawning. The new machine of fame stood waiting. All it needed was the subject himself.

At that singular hour, Seabiscuit, the Cinderella horse, flew over the line in the Santa Anita Handicap. Something clicked: Here he was.

Immediately, the reporters infested everything. Smith swatted at them. They staked out the barn, constantly asking Smith to pull the horse out of his stall for photo sessions and even to let them sit on his back, as if he were a carnival pony. They stood by the rail in noisy clumps during morning workouts, snapping pictures and buzzing in Smith’s ear. They photographed the Howards everywhere they went, at the betting windows, at dinner, getting in and out of their Buick. One paper ran a large shot of Marcela in the act of blowing her nose. Smith, Pollard, and the Howards were soon intimately familiar with the strange gravity of celebrity. The earth seemed to dip under Seabiscuit’s hoof-falls, pulling the world in toward him and everyone around him.

The paradox of all this attention was that many of the turf writers who covered Seabiscuit knew next to nothing about horses and racing. Pari-mutuel racing was spanking new in California and many other places, so there were few established racing writers. Much of the coverage was left to complete novices on loan from other beats. Because Seabiscuit’s popularity was so broad-based, reporters from publications that had nothing whatsoever to do with sports covered him. Many newsmen were completely ignorant of standard training practices. Some were in so far over their heads that they resorted to invention, fabricating preposterous stories or quotations out of thin air. One columnist wrote that Tom Smith fed Seabiscuit two quarts of Golden Rod beer before each race; if the horse doesn’t get his beer, he wrote, he “whinnies and stomps to indicate displeasure.”⁴ Worse, there were more than a few conspiracy theorists in the bunch. Racing had recently emerged from an era of corruption, and though incidents of foul play were now extremely rare, reporters tended to be overly suspicious of horsemen, accepted rumors of wrongdoing with credulity, and adopted a studied cynicism.

Pair an intrusive, usually ignorant, and often suspicious press corps with an intensely private trainer, and you have a volatile mix. Smith viewed the press as parasitic. To foil it, he elevated obstruction to an art form. His first line of defense was frowning terseness.⁵ Once, when asked to describe Seabiscuit at length, he replied, “He’s a horse,” and walked away.⁶ It was typical of Smith to stroll off in silence while reporters were in mid-question. At other times he would respond to a question by staring straight at a reporter with a blank expression for as long as three minutes, saying nothing. “Tom Smith,” lamented a reporter, “is by no means a long distance conversationalist.⁷ Ten words in a row for him would constitute a course record.” Talking to Smith, remembered one racetracker, “was like talking to a post.” His stable agent, Sonny Greenberg, compared him to a mummy. The smart ones learned to keep quiet and let Smith initiate a conversation, which he did every once in a while. The dumb ones pecked at him and got nothing but ulcers.

Smith also went to great lengths to keep Seabiscuit’s training private. To mollify reporters, he would take Seabiscuit out onto the track during the heavily attended morning hours, but only for slow workouts or jogs. In the afternoons, when the reporters were watching the races, he would sneak the horse out for his real workouts on the training track or another track altogether.⁸ If anyone happened to be standing around, he’d do his best to keep them from learning anything interesting. Once, when a man wandered up to the rail of the otherwise deserted track and pulled out a stopwatch to time the horse’s workout, Smith asked to borrow the watch, held it while the horse galloped, reset it, and handed it back.

“How did it go?” asked the man.

“Looked all right to me—it seems to be a nice watch,” said Smith.

“Not the watch,” said the man, “Seabiscuit’s work. How fast did he go?”

“Damned if I know.”⁹

The secret workouts had three purposes. First, they concealed the horse’s superb form from track racing secretaries, who assigned imposts. Second, through an ingenious method devised by Smith, they helped the horse stay in racing trim. Seabiscuit was more prone to weight gain than any horse Smith had ever handled. Because he believed that the quickest way to ruin a horse was to overwork him, Smith resorted to creative solutions to overcome Seabiscuit’s weight problem. On mornings when an afternoon workout was planned, he would set the horse’s bridle and saddle out where he could see them, withhold breakfast, skip his normal morning workout, and do everything else that was typical of a race day.¹⁰ Seeing the tack and thinking he was racing that day, Seabiscuit would become keyed up, lose interest in eating, and fret weight off. Smith would then take him out to work in the afternoon, just as if he were racing. The method worked, and Seabiscuit kept his weight down.

The final benefit of the secret workouts was sadistic pleasure. Smith took immense satisfaction in making reporters and clockers miserable. The old man had an offbeat sense of humor. He once electrified a park bench with wires and tacks, ran a trigger wire down the shed row, hid himself in a stall, and spent the day shocking the hell out of every weary hot-walker who tried to sit down and rest.¹¹ Once he became a major subject for the press, nothing was more amusing to him than creating situations that left his pursuers confused and frustrated. They gave him limitless opportunity; Seabiscuit was one of the biggest stories in the country, so they just kept coming back for more punishment. For people trying to make a living covering him, Smith was thoroughly maddening. “Turf writers and clockers swear by Tom Smith,” moaned a reporter, “and very often they just swear.”¹²

The secret workouts worked for Seabiscuit, but because Smith refused to explain himself to the press, they created a serious misapprehension. The rarity of Seabiscuit’s public appearances fueled rumors that the horse was unsound, rumors that were reinforced by the horse’s choppy gait. Smith did little to correct them. “That horse of yours can’t walk,” said one spectator as Seabiscuit bumped past. “Runs, though,” Smith replied.¹³ Though the horse was dollar sound at this stage of his career, reporters given to hyperbole began regularly referring to him as a “cripple.” The stories were accepted as fact, and soon the word attached to Seabiscuit for good. It was a misconception that would create serious headaches for Smith later.

And Smith couldn’t fool everyone. Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle columnist Oscar Otis was one of the few truly knowledgeable turf scribes and dean of the western racing writers. Almost immediately, Otis was onto Smith. Shortly before the Santa Anita Handicap, Otis discovered Smith working Seabiscuit at three o’clock in the morning. “Seabiscuit and Greta Garbo can be coupled in the betting from now on,” he wrote in the Times.¹⁴ “Both want to be let alone.” The reporters and clockers now knew Smith was up to something. Most of them didn’t like Smith any better than he liked them, and they resolved to catch him in the act. Smith was determined to thwart them. The battle was joined.

Unlike Smith, Howard relished the attention. Celebrity was his natural habitat. He was not content with mere greatness for his horse. For Seabiscuit, he wanted superstardom, in his own age and in history. He understood that this could not be achieved through racing exploits alone. He had to win over the public. After the 1937 Santa Anita Handicap, Howard began a conquest of the popular imagination.

His first effort was to maximize his horse’s exposure, plotting an exhaustive cross-country racing campaign that was probably unprecedented in scope, adopting a take-all-comers attitude in choosing Seabiscuit’s races and opponents, and even running full-page ads celebrating Seabiscuit’s wins. Understanding that the press, as the public’s proxy, was the most important agent in his campaign, Howard wouldn’t leave the reporters alone. He practically lived with them, bounding up the press-box stairs before and after races to make himself available for questions and photo ops, dashing down to the press pool when the horse’s train pulled into a station.¹⁵ He made sure that every journalist was aware of Seabiscuit’s itinerary.¹⁶ He and his wife indulged every photographer and cheerfully fielded calls from reporters at any time, day or night. Howard went to great lengths to manipulate those covering his horse. He read every word written about Seabiscuit and wrote long letters to reporters. He kept all their phone numbers on hand and called them personally to sway their opinions and make each one feel like a privileged insider with a sensational scoop. He used them to put pressure on racing officials and owners he couldn’t influence with charm alone. He offered Seabiscuit mementoes for newspaper raffles and sent oversized Seabiscuit Christmas cards to scores of reporters. He even presented members of the press with valuable gifts, including Seabiscuit’s shoes cast in silver.¹⁷ It became a little unclear who was stalking whom.

Even as he sought mastery over the press, Howard was its servant. He understood that his influence was not limitless, and if he made a move that failed to conform to journalistic expectations, the image that he had painstakingly cultivated could be ruined. In the years ahead, there would be critical moments in which his pursuit of image conflicted with his horse’s interests. For Howard, they would present some of the most difficult quandaries of his public life.

Howard started marketing his horse in earnest on the morning after the hundred-grander. He made things easy for the reporters, posing questions out loud to himself, then answering them. “Are we downhearted over getting licked by Rosemont in that hundred-grander?” he asked. “No!” To underscore his point, he sent a gigantic barrel of ice-packed champagne to the press box, complete with a card.¹⁸ “To the good health of the press box,” it read. “We tried our best.—Seabiscuit.” He had promised to send up the champagne only if the horse won, but “it was so close,” he said, “I thought I’d send it up anyway.” The reporters had a grand afternoon sipping bubbly and raising enthusiastic toasts to Seabiscuit.

The newsmen may have been drinking to the health of Howard and Seabiscuit, but no one was toasting Pollard. Up until the Santa Anita Handicap the redhead had been basking in the attention, boasting of his horse’s infallibility, and entertaining the reporters with his quick wit. He would later say, quoting Henry Austin Dobson, that “fame is a food that dead men eat/I have no stomach for such meat.” In truth, he was delighted with his newfound celebrity. The reporters returned his affection. In a discipline in which athletes bored newsmen to death with clichés and blandly politic statements, Pollard was a singularly fresh interview, articulate, irreverent, and self-deprecating. “He’ll probably win if I don’t fall off,” he told them before a major race.¹⁹ “I fall off a lot of horses, though, you know.”

But no one was ready to overlook Pollard’s ride, the biggest story to emerge from the hundred-grander. When Pollard returned to the jockeys’ room following the loss to Rosemont, he confronted the other side of fame. With Richards a few feet away, happily fielding his invitation to the Santa Anita Turf Club Ball, the traditional party held to honor hundred-grander winners, Pollard was bombarded with harsh questions. Why hadn’t he used the whip late in the race? Had he thought the race was won? He tried to defend his ride, protesting in vain that he had indeed used his whip and that he was stuck on the slow part of the track, but no one seemed to be listening.

The next morning the excoriation continued. On the track there were whispers that Pollard had been drunk during the race. The papers hyped his seeming lapse of concentration. Grantland Rice, the preeminent sportswriter in the country, accused him of gross overconfidence. But it was Oscar Otis whose criticism cut the deepest.²⁰ Though he praised Pollard’s riding early in the race and his courage in handling the defeat, Otis, who knew Pollard as Jack, was unequivocal in his assessment of blame. “Jockey Harry Richards outrode Jack Pollard at the wire, otherwise Seabiscuit, streaking along in midstretch with a length lead, must surely have won,” he wrote in the Los Angeles Times. “With riders reversed, Seabiscuit would have won by half a length. Jack Pollard did not go to the whip near the wire until too late. The defeat may be chalked up to Mr. Pollard.”

The criticism infuriated Smith, who thought that the horse’s swerve down into the rail was the real reason for the loss, a factor unremarked in the press. Smith took Pollard aside and assured him that his critics were wrong. Few things could inspire Smith to actually speak at length. Unjust sniping at Pollard was one of them. He startled reporters with several complete sentences. “Pollard deserves at least half the credit for the brilliant showing of Seabiscuit in the Santa Anita Handicap.²¹ He is the only boy who knows his peculiarities, his idiosyncrasies, who knows how to get the best of him. Criticism of Pollard is unjust. He rode the horse perfectly.”

It didn’t do any good.

A pall hung over Barn 38. Ollie, the groom, was openly miserable. Howard’s usual cheer was forced. Smith was even less friendly than usual. Mulling over the loss to Rosemont, he took out Seabiscuit’s blinkers and a pocketknife and cut small holes in the back of each eye cup, giving the horse two rearview windows. No horse was going to sneak up on him again.

Only Seabiscuit was buoyant. He came out of the race full of fight. Pollard took him out for a spin two days after the race, and the horse pulled so hard that the jockey returned with angry blisters on his hands. Seabiscuit was screaming to run, and the $10,000 San Juan Capistrano, the stakes finale of the Santa Anita winter meeting, was the perfect spot.²²

On March 6, 1937, Pollard and Seabiscuit walked onto the course for the race. Smith and the Howards looked out over the crowd and saw for the first time how famous Seabiscuit had become. Forty-five thousand rowdy fans had packed the track to see him run, and they had made him the heavy favorite. Though Rosemont had passed on the race in favor of a journey east, it was still a formidable field. Indian Broom, who had been running beyond his ideal distance when he finished third in the mile-and-a-quarter Santa Anita Handicap, was the world record holder at the San Juan Capistrano distance of a mile and an eighth. Special Agent, who like Indian Broom was owned by the A.C.T. Stock Farm, was the track record holder at a mile and a sixteenth.

The A.C.T. riders were in cahoots to beat Seabiscuit. Special Agent’s rider planned to slip away to an insurmountable lead early in the race, while George Woolf, on Indian Broom, would lay behind Seabiscuit, hoping that Pollard’s colt would wear himself out chasing Special Agent and leave him free to pounce on him late, as Rosemont had. Pollard was in a tricky spot. Hot pursuit would be Seabiscuit’s downfall, but holding back might hand the race to Special Agent.

Pollard wrapped the reins in loops around his fingers and waited in the gate. At the break, Special Agent bolted out ahead of him, while Woolf dropped Indian Broom behind. Pollard could feel that the pace Special Agent was setting was too fast, so he held Seabiscuit right behind him, just close enough to keep him from stealing away but just far enough behind to keep Seabiscuit’s speed in reserve. Special Agent’s rider hustled him furiously; Pollard tracked him like a tiger. Rounding into the bend for home, Pollard let a loop of the reins slip through his fingers. Seabiscuit ate up the length of rein, bounding past Special Agent and leaving Woolf and Indian Broom flat-footed. The race caller yelled, “Here comes Seabiscuit!” and a joyful shout rose over the track. Seabiscuit buried the field. With Pollard standing on his back, pulling him in, he flew down the lane to win by seven lengths, smashing the track record.

Cheering swept down in waves from the stands. A spontaneous call was echoing over the sea of heads: “Bring on Rosemont!”

Rosemont had returned east. Smith wanted to go get him, but Howard wasn’t ready yet. He was working out a glory tour in his head, and he wanted his hometown of San Francisco to see his horse once more. Rosemont could wait. They returned north, to Tanforan.

Smith was getting wound up. He had tucked Seabiscuit into a steel-doored stall and cordoned off the barn area, but the reporters were driving him to distraction. And he was worried about the weight assignments his horse’s success would bring. On April 3, he swung Pollard onto Seabiscuit and secured enough lead pads under the saddle to bring the horse’s impost to a whopping 130 pounds. As dusk fell, he led the two out onto the emptiness of Tanforan. Smith stood at the finish line as Pollard turned Seabiscuit loose for a nine-furlong workout. Seabiscuit inhaled the track. As he flashed under the wire in the darkness, Smith waved him down.

Smith thought he had pulled off the workout in secret. But somewhere on the oval’s apron, a San Francisco Examiner photographer had stepped out of the darkness and snapped the horse’s picture. Worse, an owner who happened to be passing by saw the horse working and pulled out his stopwatch. Seabiscuit had worked faster than any horse had raced the entire season. The story was all over the sports pages.

Foiled by the press once again, Smith was ready to crank things up another notch. A coincidence gave him a new way to thwart his pursuers. One afternoon in early April, Smith and Howard discovered Grog, Seabiscuit’s old stable pal in the Fitzsimmons barn, doddering along in a claiming race at Tanforan.²³ He had changed hands as often as a dollar bill and was now running under the colors of a Hollywood screenwriter. Howard had become fiercely sentimental about all sons of Hard Tack. “Never sell a Hard Tack short” he liked to say. He had nearly achieved his goal of buying every single Hard Tack yearling on the market. He wanted to take Grog in. Smith agreed, and they claimed the horse and moved him in next to Seabiscuit. Within two weeks Smith had Grog and Pollard back in the winner’s circle.

It is possible that Smith saw something promising in the $4,000 claimer. But the trainer’s interest probably had less to do with Grog’s speed than with his appearance. Grog and Seabiscuit were practically identical, as they had been as youngsters. Only Smith and his grooms could distinguish one from the other. Grog gave Smith another weapon in his war with the press.

One morning shortly after buying Grog, Smith logged the colt’s name on the work tab, then sent Seabiscuit out to work in his place. With no one on the grounds the least bit interested in watching a claimer, the horse proceeded to work six furlongs in an unbelievably fast 1:11⅖. Someone told the reporters about the workout time, and they were puzzled. With a rocket in his saddle and wings on his sides Grog couldn’t possibly have clocked such a time, but the reporters weren’t sure of that, given what Smith had done for Seabiscuit. Someone suggested that the working horse was really Seabiscuit. Smith was, as usual, mum. “If that was Grog the boys took for Seabiscuit the other morning then let me caution you thus,” wrote the turf reporter known as Jolly Roger, who wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle. “Look out for Grog.”

Smith had a field day. On some mornings, he sent Grog out to gallop in Seabiscuit’s name at standard morning workout periods, then snuck the real Seabiscuit out to exercise at night. On other days, just to mix things up, he worked Seabiscuit in the morning under his own name. The reporters were immediately and thoroughly confused, and some took to spying on Smith. Jolly Roger, for one, began climbing up to the attic window of the track cook’s house to try to catch Seabiscuit working at night.²⁴

Smith carried the deception to the stable area. When the newsmen asked him to produce Seabiscuit for photo shoots, he would turn to his new groom, Whitey Allison—so called because of his unnerving white eye—and ask him to “bring the old Biscuit out.”²⁵ Whitey would trot out Grog, who was sometimes housed in Seabiscuit’s stall to make the ruse more convincing. Hoodwinked onlookers invariably asked to climb on the horse, and Smith, with hospitality that should have aroused suspicion, always agreed. Newsmen, bragging that they had ridden the great Seabiscuit, unwittingly printed images of the lowly Grog in countless magazines and newspapers. Even Howard became one of Smith’s victims. One unfortunate artist whom Howard sent to paint Seabiscuit’s portrait never learned that the horse he immortalized was actually Grog.²⁶

The stable hands got into the spirit of things. They found that as easy as it was to convince people that Grog was Seabiscuit, it was even easier to convince them that the real Seabiscuit was not Seabiscuit. The horse’s bad-legged, cow-pony appearance made fooling people a cinch. Once, while Whitey and exercise rider Keith Stucki were rubbing Seabiscuit down after a workout, Whitey noticed a man eyeing the horse.²⁷ The man stepped up, looked the horse over without recognition, and frowned at his knees.

“When a horse is broke down like that, what do you do with him?” he asked.

“Well,” replied Whitey, “we usually sell him to somebody that comes along and wants to buy him.”

“And what would a horse like this bring?”

“Oh, five or six hundred dollars,” said Whitey. “He ought to be worth that.” At the time, Seabiscuit was insured for $100,000, more than any other horse in America.²⁸

Intrigued at the cheap price, the man walked around to the other side of the horse. He saw the horse’s halter plate, engraved with Seabiscuit’s name.

“Sure,” said the man dismissively, “with Seabiscuit’s halter on.”

———

San Francisco was overjoyed to see Seabiscuit again. Responding to banner headlines that read, SEABISCUIT GOES TODAY!, the largest crowd in the history of Northern California racing packed into Tanforan to witness the Marchbank Handicap, Seabiscuit’s rematch with Indian Broom and Special Agent. Pollard was again spectacular. Instructed by Smith to wait behind Special Agent’s lead, he quickly saw that the pacesetter was blocked and was not going to be able to get to the front. Pollard dove for it himself, took control of the race, then eased Seabiscuit back. Hauling a load of 124 pounds, Seabiscuit clipped past the quarter-mile mark in 22⅘ seconds, six furlongs in a breathtaking 1:10 ⅗, then a mile in 1:36, each fraction well below the track record for those distances. Then he slowed down dramatically. The crowd gasped. When the field caught him, Seabiscuit bounced away again, winning by three lengths under a stranglehold. As the newsmen wondered aloud if Man o’ War himself could have beaten Seabiscuit, Howard clattered in. Everyone looked up.

“Say!” Howard panted, winded from bounding up the stairs. “Who finished second and third?”

Trouble surfaced at Bay Meadows a few weeks later. Seabiscuit was entered in the prestigious Bay Meadows Handicap, but the track handicapper delivered bad news: Seabiscuit received a 127-pound impost. Smith dug his heels in.²⁹ Knowing that they would soon be off to the East, he didn’t want to demonstrate to handicappers that his horse was a terrific weight carrier.³⁰ But Howard insisted, and prevailed.

Race day dawned with gale force winds. With the gusts swirling around him, Pollard arrived at the track. He was in shocking condition. He had been reducing drastically to make weight for another horse, and was barely able to stand. Once in the jockeys’ room, he collapsed.³¹ He was unconscious through most of the afternoon. When he was still out cold half an hour before the race, the stewards debated whether or not to call Howard in and get him to choose another rider. A few minutes before post time, Pollard finally rose. He insisted, adamantly, that he was strong enough to ride. The stewards reluctantly let him go.

Seabiscuit seemed to sense Pollard’s weakness. At the starting gate he broke through over and over again, delaying the start for three minutes. He raced tentatively, and with the winds buffeting him through the homestretch, won by a modest margin over his stablemate Exhibit. In the final sixteenth of a mile Pollard seemed as if he was about to pass out again, but he hung on for the win.

Pollard rode back to the winner’s circle and somehow managed to complete the ceremonies. Since the Santa Anita Handicap, his riding on Seabiscuit had been impeccable. But he had not gotten past the loss in the hundred-grander. The public condemnation was corrosive. The press would not let go of it.

At Bay Meadows his anger boiled over. While walking on the track, Pollard saw Oscar Otis making his way across the parking lot. Otis had praised Pollard in print since his initial condemnation of his ride in the Santa Anita Handicap, even suggesting that he may have been wrong in attributing the loss to the jockey. But Pollard’s animosity still burned. He turned off the track and into the parking lot, where he stopped Otis and confronted him. They traded angry words.

Pollard, surely overwrought from the reducing, lost control. He picked up a newspaper, folded it into a rigid baton, and clubbed Otis once across the face.³² Otis, a much larger man, dropped to the ground under the tremendous force of Pollard’s arm. His face injured, he lay on the pavement, stunned. Pollard turned and walked away.

Seabiscuit may have been a public and media darling in the West, but in the prestigious eastern racing circles he still wasn’t taken seriously. Smith was itching to go east and teach the old guard a thing or two. Howard conceded that now was the time. There wasn’t anything left to beat in California anyway. Pollard, too, needed a change of scenery and a chance to redeem himself. A week after the Bay Meadows Handicap, Seabiscuit and Pumpkin walked up the ramp of the Pullman car and settled into the straw to sleep. Smith stocked a rear car with all the oats, hay, and straw Seabiscuit would need—he didn’t trust eastern feed—then climbed in with his horse, unfolding a cot at Seabiscuit’s feet.

There were giants to slay in the East that summer. Rosemont was there, waiting to meet Seabiscuit in the venerable Brooklyn Handicap. So was Aneroid, rawhide-tough king of the eastern handicap ranks. And there was someone else, a horse greater than the others.

His name was War Admiral.

War Admiral and jockey Charley Kurtsinger

(© BETTMANN/CORBIS)

Chapter 10

WAR ADMIRAL

Samuel Riddle bore a startling resemblance to the illustrated figure on a Monopoly board. He had all the appurtenances—the black hat, the white moustache, heaps of old eastern money. Everything but the smile. Riddle was a dyspeptic man. In the summer of 1937 he was seventy-five years old, and his unsmiling face was arguably the most famous in racing. Riddle was the eastern racing establishment.

In 1918 he had plunked down $5,000 at an auction and walked away with the most extraordinary creature the sport had ever seen, Man o’ War. The horse proceeded to run the legs off everything that came near him. To some observers, the only sour note in Man o’ War’s career was Riddle himself. In their view, the man had campaigned his horse too conservatively. When racing officials offered a fantastic pot of $50,000 for Riddle to pit his colt against Exterminator, the only horse who might have made Man o’ War work for his winnings, Riddle declined. He held his horse out of the Kentucky Derby, in part because of a disdain for “western” tracks and in part because he felt that early May was too soon to send a horse over a grueling mile-and-a-quarter. In 1920, Riddle retired the colt at only three years of age. Man o’ War had run just twenty-one races—winning twenty—and faced only forty-eight opponents. Riddle did not want to subject the horse to the extremely high imposts he was slated to carry.

Man o’ War had made Riddle world famous, but the owner disliked the press as much as Charles Howard loved it. Some of the newsroom boys returned Riddle’s animosity, but the fact that he owned some of the fastest and most noteworthy horses on earth led to a certain uneasy détente. The owner didn’t help things when he stood up before a throng of people, reporters included, and told them that when it came to horses, the press knew just two things: “One end bites and the other end kicks.”¹

Man o’ War became a franchise of sorts for his owner, producing a long string of gifted runners whose winner’s circle visits made Riddle one of the most photographed men in sport. But while many of Man o’ War’s get were the best of their generations, none compared to their sire.² Then, in the spring of 1934, horsemen started gathering by a fence at Riddle’s breeding farm, gazing into a paddock and making the kind of awed noises that people make when a flaming meteor plunges out of the heavens and plows into someone’s backyard. A regally bred mare named Brushup had foaled a near-black colt, a son of Man o’ War, and they couldn’t take their eyes off of him. It was just the look of him. Even at a standstill, he was a glittering thing. He was the picture of exquisite, streamlined elegance, light and fine and quick. He moved like a bird: flickering, darting, fluttering. The horsemen gaped. Someone mused that when this one was done with racing, no one would remember Man o’ War. It was the kind of statement horsemen usually snort at, but no one who looked in at this colt was laughing.

The foal grew up and Riddle named him War Admiral. He had the same imperious, lordly way of his father. He would not tolerate stillness. He was so keyed to go that if a paddock official rang the saddling bell, he would lunge from his stall and drag his handlers toward the track. Once at the gate, he spun and fought, tossed the starters aside, lunged through false starts.

But then the starter would set the field off, War Admiral would drop down and skim over the track, and everyone would forgive him for his imperiousness. Function followed form. War Admiral had awesome, frightening speed. Once under way, he was too fast for his rivals, too fast even for strategy. He dashed his opponents against their limitations the instant they left the starting gate, leaving them to ebb out like spilling water behind him. In the spring of 1937, he displayed such overwhelming acceleration and stamina that he was never off the lead at any stage of any race. No horse could touch him.

After War Admiral, fuming and frustrated, held up the start for eight minutes, victory in the Kentucky Derby came easily to him. The Preakness followed. The Belmont, the final conquest of the Triple Crown, set his name in stone. He repeatedly crashed through the gate, delaying the start for nearly nine minutes. When for one brief second the colt was motionless, the starter hit the bell. War Admiral burst out with such power that his hindquarters overran his forequarters. He couldn’t get his front hooves out of the way in time, and the toe of his hind shoe gouged into his right forehoof. He reared upward, yanking his hoof free. In doing so, he sheared off an inch-square hunk of his forehoof, leaving it lying on the track by the gate. His jockey, Charley Kurtsinger, had no idea what had happened; War Admiral gave no indication. He lunged forward on the bleeding leg, blew past the entire field in ten leaps, and charged on, a lurid spray of blood flying out behind him as he ran.

No one could catch him. He took the victory, the Triple Crown, his father’s track record, and an American speed record. When Kurtsinger slid off in the winner’s circle and reached down to unlatch the girth, he was horrified to discover his colt’s belly and hoof dripping with blood. The onlookers shivered.

Tom Smith and Red Pollard, just in from the West with Seabiscuit, were in the Belmont stands to see War Admiral’s epic performance. Smith knew the immense import of what he was seeing. He returned to Seabiscuit’s barn at Aqueduct Racecourse that night and penned a letter to Charles Howard. “Saw War Admiral,” Tom wrote. “He can really run.”

Samuel Riddle held lightning in his hands again. By the summer of 1937, as War Admiral sat on the sidelines waiting for his hoof to grow back, it was clear that nothing in his age group could stay with him. War Admiral, like Man o’ War, awaited a horse who would take the true measure of his greatness.

It never would have occurred to anyone in the East that this horse would be Seabiscuit. When they had last seen him, he was a midlevel stakes winner in the hands of a trainer no one had heard of and a jockey no one remembered. The horse had spent most of his career in the claiming or cheap allowance ranks, and the most accomplished trainer in America had given up on him. His winter victories said little of his quality, as they had been achieved on the suspect terrain of the West. On the morning of June 26, 1937, the day Seabiscuit was to begin his assault on the East’s prestigious races by running in the Brooklyn Handicap, a New York columnist summed up eastern opinion of him with two words: “Glorified plater.”

A record crowd of twenty thousand jammed in to see Seabiscuit meet Rosemont and local hero Aneroid in the Brooklyn. As Seabiscuit came to the paddock, Smith looked over the mass of noisy humanity and frowned. He called over to Seabiscuit’s exercise rider, Keith Stucki, and asked him to position Pumpkin between Seabiscuit and the fans. Stucki did as asked, and Pumpkin’s enormous frame sidled over to create an artificial paddock wall. Smith saddled the horse in peace and sent him off.

At the bell, Seabiscuit shot straight to the front and set a blistering pace around the first turn and down the backstretch. As the far turn neared, Rosemont began to roll toward him, and the crowd shouted its approval. Entering the far turn, Rosemont caught him, and for a moment they ran together. After a few strides, Rosemont faltered. Seabiscuit bounded away, but the race wasn’t won yet. From the outside came Aneroid, swooping around the turn. He collared Seabiscuit with a quarter mile to go. Neither horse would give. Seabiscuit and Aneroid matched strides down the homestretch, with Aneroid whittling away at Seabiscuit’s lead, inch by inch. With a furlong to go, Aneroid’s head bobbed in front, just as Rosemont’s had done a few months before. Through the reins, Pollard felt Seabiscuit’s mouth harden down on the bit: resolution. With a second to go, Seabiscuit burst ahead and thrust his nose over the line. The wreckage of the field was strewn out behind them. Rosemont was among them, ten lengths back.

Pollard cantered Seabiscuit back to the grandstand, posed for the win photos, then slid the saddle off and handed the horse to Stucki, who was up on Pumpkin. Smith asked Stucki to take Seabiscuit back to the barns, keeping him at a trot the whole way. Stucki led the horse past the shouting fans and up through the shed rows. The cheering died out, and they were alone, trotting past row after row of barns. They drew near the Fitzsimmons barn, Seabiscuit’s old home.³ A silent procession of stable hands came out and solemnly gazed at the horse they had let slip away. Regret was evident on every face. Stucki said nothing and kept going.

In New York, the trees swayed. Seabiscuit’s eastern critics were, in the words of Jolly Roger, “numbed to quietude.” Their respect was grudging. Back in California, they had known it all along. The Western Union office in San Francisco was overwhelmed with hundreds of congratulatory telegrams for the Howards, including those from Bing Crosby, Al Jolson, and Fred Astaire. The papers were full of Seabiscuit, proclaimed on that coast to be the best horse in America. Back East, they weren’t ready to grant him that much. The easterners believed they still had one horse that could whip the Howards’ “plater.” Around the backstretch, the murmurs began. “A single steed rests between him and the full championship,” continued Jolly Roger.⁴ “War Admiral.”

July arrived and on Seabiscuit went, back to Empire City, where he won the mile-and-three-sixteenths Butler Handicap while conceding between seven and twenty-two pounds to the rest of the field. Two weeks later, he humiliated his opponents down in the Yonkers Handicap under a staggering 129 pounds, breaking a mile-and-one-sixteenth track record that had stood for twenty-three years.

In August, Seabiscuit went to Suffolk Downs to run in the prestigious Massachusetts Handicap. There, he hooked up in a murderous head-to-head duel with a filly named Fair Knightess, who was carrying 108 pounds to Seabiscuit’s 130. Screaming around the track side by side, she and Seabiscuit disposed of Aneroid, then left the field far behind. Deep in the homestretch, Fair Knightess finally began to weaken. Seabiscuit shook loose to win, clipping two fifths of a second off the track record. Fair Knightess finished just two lengths behind him, fighting to the last. Seabiscuit cantered back to wild applause. Pollard leapt from his back and ran up the jockeys’ room stairs, shouting, “Hail the conquerin’ hero comes!⁵ Well, boys, I finally got my picture took!”

The festivities moved from the track to the New England Turf Writers Association’s annual dinner. Howard received a trophy, then Pollard came up to the stage to receive a commemorative whip. “I’ll raise high and hit hard with it,” he quipped. The audience, anesthetized by highballs, made no response. Pollard started clapping loudly, and the crowd looked up. “Hell!” he shouted. “Let’s have some applause in this place!”⁶

The Howards couldn’t stop thinking about Fair Knightess’s dazzling performance. Sometime after the dinner, Howard contacted the filly’s owner and offered an exorbitant sum for her. Shortly after, Fair Knightess was led over to the Howard barn and moved into a stall down the row from Seabiscuit. She proved to be one of the few horses who could keep up with Seabiscuit in morning workouts, and unlike the colts, she didn’t get demoralized when he taunted her, giving it right back to him. When Fair Knightess’s racing days were over, Howard wanted to breed her to Seabiscuit.

A single thought occupied the minds of everyone in racing. Seabiscuit and War Admiral had to meet. Seabiscuit had beaten everything else the East had to offer. What’s more, a heated money-earning race had developed. Seabiscuit’s 1937 earnings were now $142,030, about $2,000 behind War Admiral, who was the leading money winner for the season. Both horses were chasing the all-time career mark of $376,744, set by Sun Beau in 1931. War Admiral’s hoof had grown back, and he was back in training. All of the sport began talking of a match race. Even Bing Crosby, owner of a promising colt named High Strike, began goading Howard. CONGRATULATIONS, he wrote in a telegram to Howard after the Massachusetts Handicap.⁸PACIFIC COAST CLAMORING FOR MATCH RACE HIGH STRIKE WAR ADMIRAL SEA BISCUIT IN THAT ORDER. Howard loved the idea.

Across the country, turf writers began agitating for the match. The Los Angeles Daily News began a running poll on who would win.⁷ Seabiscuit held a slight edge. Racetracks all over the nation began bidding for the race. Down in Florida, Hialeah officials began talking of $100,000 for a match on George Washington’s birthday. Arlington Park in Chicago also bandied around the idea. Then, in late August, Bay Meadows wired a formal proposal to Howard and Samuel Riddle, offering $40,000 for a fall match, with Seabiscuit weighted at 126 pounds to 120 for the year-younger War Admiral. Howard accepted. Riddle would not commit. The match-race idea withered on the vine.

Then Riddle surprised everyone. After strong urging from Santa Anita founder Doc Strub, he agreed to enter War Admiral in the 1938 hundred-grander, Seabiscuit’s career objective. The press jumped on it.

Smith was skeptical. He knew enough about Riddle to believe that the old owner would never subject his skittish colt to a five-day rail journey to race in what he viewed as the sport’s minor leagues. Smith believed they were going to have to hunt War Admiral on his own turf.

Seabiscuit had won seven consecutive stakes races. The all-time record was eight. Howard wanted to break the record, but he had a tough choice to make. As Smith had foreseen, since his stellar performance in the 1937 Santa Anita Handicap Seabiscuit had been assigned the highest weight in virtually every race, at times carrying over twenty pounds more than his rivals. By the rule of thumb that every two to three pounds slows a horse by a length at eight to ten furlongs (a mile to a mile-and-a-quarter), and every pound costs him a length at ten furlongs or more, Seabiscuit was running with massive handicaps. The highter the impost, the greater the risk of injury, a significant concern for Seabiscuit, who had a history of leg trouble. Many top horses before him, such as his grandsire, Man o’ War, had been retired prematurely to avoid high imposts. Others who had continued to campaign under high weight, such as Equipoise and Discovery, had lost repeatedly.

Howard was willing to accept higher weight, to a point. “Seabiscuit,” he said, “is not a truck.” He set a limit of 130 pounds, choosing that weight because it was the most the racing secretary would be permitted to assign in the 1938 Santa Anita Handicap. Should Seabiscuit win that event, Howard stated, he would be willing to accept higher imposts. One hundred and thirty was an enormous impost—many of history’s greatest horses had failed to win under it—but Howard’s statement was not well received. Several columnists accused him of lacking the courage and sportsmanship to truly test his horse. The charge cut deep.

The issue came to a head that September. Seabiscuit had been entered in both the Hawthorne Gold Cup in Chicago and the Narragansett Special in Rhode Island. The races were both scheduled for September 11. Narragansett assigned Seabiscuit a leaden 132 pounds, while Hawthorne gave him 128. Howard agonized over the decision. He didn’t want to burden Seabiscuit with 132 pounds, but he knew that going the way of the lighter weight would draw criticism. Howard opted to break his 130-maximum rule and promised that Seabiscuit would run at Narragansett under 132 pounds.

On the race’s eve, a downpour rendered the track at Narragansett a quagmire. Seabiscuit had a reputation for being a terrible mudder. The charge was an exaggeration, but his performances were compromised by a wet surface. According to Pollard, Seabiscuit ran with a nervous, quick, belly-down stride that made mud-running difficult. “You know how Jack Dempsey used to punch, short, snappy jolts?” Pollard asked. “This is exactly how the Biscuit runs. On a muddy track Biscuit can’t use those short steps. In mud, a horse has to leap, and that’s not the Biscuit’s style.⁹ It would get him utterly untracked and he could do nothing.” Pollard, in his odd way, urged others to forgive the horse this one flaw. “We have to give him a break,” he said to journalist David Alexander, his close friend. “There’s more than one thing I can’t do and there are a lot more things than that that you can’t do or you wouldn’t be in the newspaper business. You’d be a jockey and a scholar and a connoisseur of femininity, like I am.”

Psychological reasons also played a role. Seabiscuit hated to be pelted in the face with mud thrown up by other horses. “He just made up his mind that he didn’t like it,” Smith explained, “and he’s got a pretty definite mind. Alone, he could work well on the worst kind of a track, but when it splattered in his face, and particularly in his ears, he wanted no part of it. Oh, he’d go on, try—he wouldn’t have quit in a Wyoming hail storm where they come down as big as golf balls—but he couldn’t, somehow, give his best. And why punish him unnecessarily?”

Smith was also concerned about soundness. At Santa Anita the horse had slipped and kicked himself during a mud workout. Knowing that his colt had had some leg trouble in the past, Smith wanted to avoid mud whenever possible.

But Howard had made a promise to run at Narragansett, and had he scratched the horse so late, it would have looked as if he had never intended to run. He was again forced to choose between his image and his trainer’s wishes, and Howard was a man who had great difficulty compromising his image. So, swimming in fetlock-deep slop and conceding as many as twenty-four pounds to his adversaries, Seabiscuit finished third, snapping his historic win streak.

Howard couldn’t win. “The consensus was that Seabiscuit should not have been started in the mud,” wrote Oscar Otis, echoing the words of many columnists. “Why he was started anyway is not known, but it seems a shame that his unbeaten record for the eastern invasion was not kept unsullied.”

Gradually, the sniping died off. But they hadn’t seen the last of muddy tracks or hard choices.

On October 12, 1937, after a month’s rest, Seabiscuit resumed his winning ways in smashing style, bounding home first under 130 pounds in the rich Continental Handicap at New York’s Jamaica Race Track. The victory bumped him up to the top spot in the 1937 earnings race. With $152,780, he was now some $8,000 ahead of War Admiral. As he streaked under the wire, the fans began chanting, “Bring on your War Admiral!”¹⁰

Smith and the Howards knew that War Admiral was not going to come to them. They shipped down to Maryland, where War Admiral was completing his training for his return to racing, and prepared to meet him there. There were three possibilities for a meeting: Laurel Racecourse’s Washington Handicap on October 30, Pimlico Racecourse’s Pimlico Special on November 3, and Pimlico’s Riggs Handicap on November 5. Both horses were entered in all three. A meeting now seemed certain.

For Smith, the trip to Maryland was gratifying. His accomplishments with Seabiscuit were the wonder of the racing world, and the man who had been considered an obscure oddball a year before now enjoyed cult status among his peers. Across the backstretch, other trainers began to mix up homemade liniments, trying to brew what they called Smith’s “magic salves.” Everyone wanted to know what sort of shoes he was putting on his horses. They began to watch everything he did and query him about his training practices, from feed to workouts.¹¹ One enterprising promoter even offered to pay Smith to hold training tutorials.

Smith was incredulous. He insisted that the training community was missing the point. It wasn’t the shoes or the liniments. “We have a great horse,” he said. “That’s all there is to it. And we tried to use common sense in training him and in racing him.”

There was one admirer whom Smith didn’t brush off. On October 16 he led a blanketed Seabiscuit into the paddock for the Laurel Handicap. Twenty thousand people crammed into the track to see him. As Smith walked Seabiscuit into the paddock stall, a stooped man emerged from the crowd and approached him.

“I’m Fitzsimmons,” he said, as if Smith didn’t know. “I want to ask you a favor.”

Smith, a little starstruck, listened.

“Mr. Smith, I am very fond of Seabiscuit, and I would consider it an honor if you would permit me to hold him while he is being saddled.”

Smith’s eyes shone as he handed Fitzsimmons the reins. He quietly saddled Seabiscuit while Fitzsimmons stood at the head of the horse he had lost. In a few moments the horse was ready, and Fitzsimmons passed the reins back and stepped away.¹² Smith turned back to his horse and collected himself. It was, he would say later, the greatest moment of his life.

Ten minutes later Seabiscuit finished in a dead heat for first with a horse named Heelfly, who carried fifteen fewer pounds. In the jockeys’ room, Pollard surely never heard the end of it: George Woolf had ridden Heelfly.

The meeting with War Admiral, slated for the Washington Handicap, was just two weeks away.

A storm front rolled in and stalled over Maryland, drenching the track day after day. Smith urged Howard to pass on the entry in the Washington Handicap. Howard, ever the optimist, insisted that the track would be dry, and entered the horse. He was wrong. The morning of the race, an inspection of the track revealed a boggy surface, especially along the rail, where Seabiscuit preferred to run. This time they would not be pressured into starting. Seabiscuit was scratched. With Smith watching from the track apron, War Admiral led from wire to wire, winning easily.

After the race, Howard learned that members of the Riddle barn were publicly mocking him for being afraid of War Admiral.¹³ He was furious. Though both horses were still entered in the Pimlico Special and Riggs Handicaps, each race would feature a full field. Howard and Smith much preferred that the horses meet in a definitive one-on-one match, in which no other horses could cause interference or otherwise affect the outcome. Howard again tried to arrange a match race.

The man he approached was Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, Jr. A dead ringer for actor Jimmy Stewart, Vanderbilt was a gangly twenty-five-year-old whose gentle, self-effacing manner belied his fabulous wealth.¹⁴ His father was heir to the Vanderbilt railroad and oceanic shipping fortune; his mother’s father had invented the fantastically lucrative Bromo-Seltzer. In May 1915, when a German submarine torpedoed the Lusitania and sent the liner and Alfred’s father to the bottom of the Atlantic, two-year-old Alfred had inherited $5.8 million in government bonds, a fortune augmented by $2 million more and a sprawling Maryland property when he turned twenty-one in 1933. Dubbed the nation’s most eligible bachelor, Vanderbilt eschewed the debauchery that would have tempted other men fresh out of their teens and into a bottomless bank account. He had fallen madly and intractably in love with horse racing from the moment he saw his first race as a child, and knew where he wanted his money to go. He bought controlling interest in Baltimore’s legendary but struggling Pimlico Racecourse and set out to restore its glory. In spite of his youth, he proved to be an imaginative and effective businessman. He revolutionized Pimlico, installing a public-address system and a modern starting gate and leveling out the large hill in the infield that had given the track its nickname—“Old Hilltop”—but obstructed the view of the races. By the fall of 1937 Pimlico was beginning to make a comeback, but progress was slow. Vanderbilt wanted a headliner.

Howard recognized Vanderbilt’s tremendous influence and powers of persuasion, and knew that Pimlico needed his horse. He proposed that Vanderbilt try to host a meeting between Seabiscuit and War Admiral. He told him that he’d take a match at any distance from a mile to a mile and a quarter, anytime the track was fast. He offered to run against the colt for a small purse or simply for a winner’s cup. “I believe Seabiscuit can beat War Admiral,” he said.¹⁵ “Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m willing to run against him to test the theory. It is all up to Mr. Riddle.” Vanderbilt approached the elder horseman with an offer for a match race for $50,000. Riddle declined.

Howard was left with either the Pimlico Special or the Riggs. At first, it appeared that both horses would run in the former, and Maryland geared up for the meeting of the two titans. Again, the weather intervened. Ten straight days of downpour kept Seabiscuit in the barn, taking the edge off of his form. Smith again scratched him.

On race day, Smith walked out to the track to see War Admiral run. The Triple Crown winner was a hellion, repeatedly barging through the gate and dragging the assistant starter with him. War Admiral was growing so violent that he was endangering himself and everyone nearby. Head starter Jim Milton tried a new tack. He brought the colt around to the front of the gate, had the assistant place a pair of tongs on the horse’s lips to distract him, then had him backed into the stall.¹⁶ It worked. War Admiral quieted down and Milton was finally able to break the field in good order.

Across the track, Smith lifted his binoculars and watched as War Admiral pulled around the far turn, meeting with unexpected pressure from Masked General, who carried twenty-eight fewer pounds. Smith saw Masked General level his eye right at War Admiral. It lasted only a moment, but that was all Smith needed to notice something unusual. For the first time in his career, War Admiral hesitated. Smith thought: He is befuddled.¹⁷ War Admiral’s jockey, Charley Kurtsinger, also seemed confused. An instant later, War Admiral pulled himself together and won, regaining the lead in the money-winning race. But Smith took note. He believed he had found a way to beat War Admiral. After the race, he was smiling.

“Seabiscuit,” someone heard him saying, “will lick him sure.”¹⁸

Riddle was furious with Milton for using the tongs on War Admiral, despite the fact that one of his own employees had reportedly given them to Milton to be used on the colt if he acted up. Riddle had been harboring a grudge against Pimlico since 1926, when the track’s racing secretary had assigned his colt Crusader 126 pounds in a major race—Crusader lost to a horse carrying 93 pounds.¹⁹ The tongs incident was the last straw. Riddle didn’t want Milton going anywhere near his horse again, and vowed never to run another horse at Pimlico. He had Conway shelve War Admiral for the season.

Two days later, Seabiscuit ran in the Riggs Handicap, over the same distance as the Pimlico Special. Members of the Riddle barn came out to the track to watch him. They were treated to quite a spectacle. Seabiscuit annihilated the field, breaking the track record while carrying 130 pounds, two more than War Admiral had lugged in the Pimlico Special. With the victory, Seabiscuit took back the lead in the earnings race, amassing about $9,000 more than War Admiral.

Vanderbilt worked on Riddle for a few days to get the owner to rescind his boycott of Pimlico and bring his colt back to meet Seabiscuit. Howard kept his horses in town in case something came of it.²⁰ For a few days, Vanderbilt thought Riddle would reconsider and run War Admiral in the Bowie Handicap. He talked Howard into committing to the race, even though it was at the marathon distance of one-and-five-eighths miles, farther than Smith wanted to send Seabiscuit. But by race day, it was clear that War Admiral wasn’t coming.²² Trainloads of fans were pouring in for the race, and Howard didn’t want to disappoint them, so he agreed to send Seabiscuit out anyway. Carrying 130 pounds, Seabiscuit endured a rough trip and lost by a nose to the brilliant race mare Esposa, who carried fifteen fewer pounds and set a track record. With that, the Pimlico season ended.

In mid-November Smith loaded Seabiscuit and the rest of his stable, blanketed in red and white stable colors, into three cars of a train bound for California. The train rolled up the East Coast. It paused at Belmont Park in New York while Howard completed a transaction. Bing Crosby had long been deeply impressed with Howard’s racing success—he once suggested to his wife that they name their son Seabiscuit—but every attempt to emulate his friend ended in spectacular failure. In 1937 Bing joined forces with Howard’s polo-playing son Lin to form the Binglin Stock Farm, hoping that Lin’s considerable horsemanship could turn his luck around. That fall, while in Argentina for a polo tournament, Lin had stumbled upon some promising racehorses. He had purchased several, shipping them by sea to New York. Charles Howard had agreed to pick them up and bring them to California with his own horses. Lin and Bing told the elder Howard that he could pick out one that he liked and buy him.

Howard and Smith came down to the docks to see the horses. Two stood out from the rest. One was Kajak, later renamed Kayak II. Big, black, and gorgeous, he was barely halter broken and fought every attempt to handle him. The other was a mature horse, Ligaroti, Argentina’s champion miler. Smith was particularly enamored of Ligaroti. Howard liked both horses. He chose to buy Kayak.

After tacking on additional railcars to bear the Binglin horses west, the Seabiscuit train rolled out of the East, across the plains and over the Rockies, desolate and white and still in their early, deep winter. When the train paused at little towns along the route, fans gathered in the cold to peer in the windows and catch a glimpse of Seabiscuit.

Ahead, a celebration awaited the travelers. Howard had telephoned Oscar Otis to tell him that Seabiscuit was coming back, and Otis had printed the news.²¹ Five hundred enthusiastic fans were preparing to rise early and come to the track to give the hometown hero a noisy welcome.²³ City and state dignitaries would be there to pair their images with the hottest celebrity in the nation. Even the jaded horsemen would take a respite from their labors to see him, eating their breakfasts outdoors on the benches near the siding. To joyful applause and popping flashbulbs, the horse would draw up in his railcar. He would step from his three-foot-deep bed of straw, give Smith an affectionate bump with his nose, and leave the train bucking. The men around him would be triumphant and relieved. Even Smith would be in an optimistic, relatively chatty mood, stringing several hundred words together in what the papers would call “a great moral victory for the reporters present.”

But there were long, cold miles to go before they were home. The train rolled through country where the temperature was fourteen degrees below zero. Storm after storm buffeted the train and buried the landscape in snow. The going was treacherous and frightening.

When the train’s water pipes froze, Howard left Marcela in the sleeper car to join Seabiscuit. It was a habit he had learned, looking to the horse to steady himself. He found Seabiscuit warm and drowsy under a double layer of blankets, swaying on his feet as the cars snaked over the mountains. In the icy, rocking train, Howard sat with his horse over the journey home.

It was going to be a long, cold winter.

Critically injured, Red Pollard is carried off the track at Santa Anita, February 19, 1938.

(USC LIBRARY, DEPARTMENT OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS)

Chapter 11

NO POLLARD, NO SEABISCUIT

It was December 7, 1937, and Red Pollard was winging around the far turn at Tanforan. He was riding Howard’s colt Exhibit, circling the field in a weekday sprint race.¹ He was ticking past horses one by one, watching them waver and fail as his colt powered by. At the juncture between turn and homestretch, he collared the last of the front-runners, Half Time, who was laboring along the rail. Ripping down the center of the track, Pollard saw a wide-open lane in front of him. He knew he had more than enough horse under him to last to the wire.

Suddenly, Exhibit bolted inward, shying from something to his right. Pollard’s weight sank hard into his right stirrup, and he pushed off against it, trying to avoid falling over Exhibit’s shoulder and down into the dirt. Exhibit veered toward Half Time. As he careened left, Pollard must have heard the hard irregular pounding of Half Time’s forehooves as his jockey, standing bolt upright in panic, sawed on the reins, trying to back his horse out of the way before Exhibit crashed into him. Half Time’s head came up, and he dropped out of the pocket an instant before Exhibit’s broad rump bulled into it. Pollard got his weight back under him, straightened the horse’s course, and galloped him under the wire first.

Half Time’s jockey was off his horse and up to the stewards in seconds. Exhibit was promptly disqualified, and the stewards scheduled a meeting to determine if Pollard would have to serve a suspension for the incident. Pollard must have expected to be taken off his weekday mounts for a few days. Though the jockey was probably not at fault for Exhibit’s change of course, it was common for stewards to briefly suspend riders caught in his situation to guard against foul play.

But no one expected the Tanforan stewards to do what they did. Perhaps they were erring on the side of overpunishment out of concern for the sport’s image. Or maybe they wanted to take a strike against Pollard, who delighted in sassing them. He had nicknamed a particularly tyrannical, humorless, and rosy steward “Pink Whiskers,” a sobriquet that was soon used by all the jockeys. Whatever their motivation, the stewards buried him. Handing out the toughest sentence of the season, they not only suspended Pollard from riding for the rest of the Tanforan meeting, they asked the state racing board, which usually followed their recommendations, to suspend him from riding at any California track for the rest of 1937. Nor was that all. It was customary for stewards to allow suspended jockeys to ride in stakes races except in cases of fraud, of which Pollard was not accused, but the Tanforan stewards scheduled a later meeting to consider taking this privilege away from him as well.

The news stunned the Howard barn. Seabiscuit was set to meet War Admiral in the Santa Anita Handicap on March 5, and his preparations were just getting into high gear. His first prep race was the San Francisco Handicap, to be run on December 15, during Pollard’s suspension. Howard was livid. For the Howards, the jockey had long ago ceased being a mere employee. He was more like a son. For Charles, Pollard may have become a surrogate for little Frankie, the boy he had lost. Both Charles and Marcela fretted like nervous parents over the jockey’s welfare. Marcela called the jockey by his childhood name, Johnny; though Pollard was approaching thirty, Charles hadn’t been able to break his habit of referring to him as a boy. Any insult to Pollard was received by the Howards as a slight to themselves.

Howard’s anger over the suspension went beyond loyalty. Riding Seabiscuit was a nuanced task. No other jockey had ever ridden him successfully, and Howard believed no one else could. More important, he knew that Pollard was the jockey best able to protect his horse’s idiosyncratic body from injury. “If Pollard rides Seabiscuit,” he explained to the press, “I know he will bring the horse back intact, and that is my chief concern.”

“Nobody,” he said, “fits my horse better than that boy.”

When Pollard returned from his meeting with the stewards that night, there was more bad news. The Turf and Sport Digest sportswriter poll had named War Admiral Horse of the Year, outballoting Seabiscuit 621 to 602.²Horse and Horseman magazine, which polled horsemen, not sportswriters, had named Seabiscuit Horse of the Year, but the Turf and Sport vote was regarded as the deciding one. There were consolation prizes—Turf and Sport was going to present Seabiscuit with a special plaque commending his performances, and by unanimous vote, they had named him Handicap Champion—but these weren’t the honors the Howard barn craved. And Smith had been right about War Admiral: Riddle’s camp announced that the horse would not be coming to the Santa Anita Handicap after all. He was off to Florida’s Hialeah Racetrack, where he was greeted with near hysteria, generating a bigger stir than any Florida visitor save President Roosevelt. Instead of meeting Seabiscuit, War Admiral would face a soft field in Hialeah’s Widener Handicap.

The next morning, Howard issued his response to Pollard’s suspension.

“No Pollard, no Seabiscuit.”

The stewards did not like being threatened. After leaning toward allowing Pollard to ride in his stakes engagements, they changed their minds. He was suspended from all mounts. Howard struck back. As the state racing board prepared to decide whether or not Pollard’s suspension would be extended to year’s end, Howard scratched Seabiscuit and Fair Knightess from the San Francisco Handicap. Seabiscuit’s next scheduled start was in the Christmas Day Handicap, but Howard made it clear that he would pull Seabiscuit from that race, and any other, if Pollard’s suspension were extended. The crisis was escalating rapidly, and Pollard was getting alarmed. He didn’t want the horse to miss any races on his account. He approached Howard with a compromise: Get George Woolf to ride Seabiscuit. Howard wouldn’t consider it. He trusted no other rider on his horse. He was going to take the state officials to the mat.

On December 22 the chairman of the California Horse Racing Commission gathered reporters together and issued the board’s decree: Red Pollard was banned from riding all horses, including stakes mounts, until January 1, 1938. Five minutes later Charles Howard stormed into the racing secretary’s office at Santa Anita and announced that Seabiscuit would not run on Christmas.

Seabiscuit idled. He was entered in the New Year’s Handicap, held on the day Pollard’s suspension would end, but that was more than a week away. Smith had to keep him fit through workouts. Every reporter and clocker on the West Coast wanted to sit in on them, and Smith was determined to keep them away. His war with the press resumed.

The enemy, Smith discovered, was getting smarter. Knowing that Smith had a history of giving his horse moonlight workouts, the newsmen first tried showing up at ungodly hours of the morning. When he led Seabiscuit and Fair Knightess out for what was supposed to be a secret predawn workout veiled in thick fog, Smith discovered a thicket of clockers and reporters waiting for him.³ Because visibility was so low, they had formed a human chain stretching all the way around the track, each man clocking a portion of Seabiscuit’s workout. In spite of the pea-soup fog, they caught the Biscuit spinning six furlongs in 1:14, a solid workout.

Smith tried plan b: working Seabiscuit in the afternoons on Mondays, when Santa Anita was closed to racing and the clockers and reporters had gone home. His adversaries guessed his tactic and hung around Santa Anita hour after hour on the following Monday.⁴ Seabiscuit didn’t show. One by one, the reporters bailed out. As dusk fell, the last one drove away. Seconds later Smith and Seabiscuit trotted out onto the track. The horse worked in solitude. The next day the clockers and press got word that they had been duped.

The Howards blew time any way they could. They showed up at the barn every morning at seven sharp, Howard with sugar cubes, Marcela with Wee Biscuit, a toy Scottish terrier given to her during a visit to Bing Crosby’s house. The reporters were almost always in tow, and Howard usually created some amusement for them to write up or photograph, including talking Smith into dipping Seabiscuit’s hoof in ink and stamping their Christmas cards.⁵ In the afternoons, the Howards would walk up to their box for the races. Howard made sport of cornering journalists who had criticized Seabiscuit. Summoning them to the box, he and his whole family would rise together and ask in unison, “Tell us what you have against Seabiscuit.” On one of those afternoons, Marcela brought Alfred Vanderbilt up to join them. She introduced him to her cousin, a gorgeous young woman named Manuela Hudson. Vanderbilt was dazzled. A romance began, and Alfred and Manuela were soon engaged. Vanderbilt owed the Howards a favor.

Everyone was waiting for the impost announcement for the New Year’s Handicap. They had reason to worry. Howard’s insistence that his horse would not run under more than 130 pounds had put track handicappers in a bind. California racing rules mandated that no horse carry fewer than 100 pounds, and Seabiscuit was clearly more than 30 pounds better than most horses on the West Coast.⁶ But Seabiscuit was a fail-safe moneymaker, drawing record crowds and wagering virtually everywhere he showed his face. If tracks wanted the attendance, revenue, and exposure that a superstar like Seabiscuit brought, they had to obey Howard’s wishes. But if they gave him 130 or fewer pounds, they risked the ire of rival horsemen and the excoriation of journalists.

All week before the weights for the New Year’s Handicap were announced, Howard made warning noises about his 130-pound limit. On the Tuesday before the race, the weights were released. Smith and Howard groaned. Seabiscuit was weighted at 132 pounds. Seabiscuit was getting heavy and stall-crazy and desperately needed a race. That night, while playing in his stall, he reared up and smacked his head against the stall door. He came down with a nasty gash a millimeter above his right eye. Smith stitched him up, installed a safety door, and damned the racing secretary. Unable to stomach running with 132 pounds, he scratched the horse. Next among race possibilities was the San Pasqual Handicap, but again, the secretary assigned him 132 pounds. Howard and Smith again scratched him. Howard started referring to the racing secretary as “public enemy number one.” Only two races remained on Seabiscuit’s schedule before the Santa Anita Handicap, the San Carlos on February 19 and the San Antonio on February 26. Seabiscuit was very, very late in his preparation.

A peculiar madness was seizing the press box and clockers’ stand. There were more than a dozen clockers at the track, yet not one had seen Seabiscuit in a single workout since Santa Anita opened in December. Unable to catch him on their stopwatches, some of them began to circulate old rumors that Seabiscuit was lame.⁷ The rumors were quickly picked up by the press, which set out to investigate. While leading Seabiscuit out for walks, Smith stared in amazement as newsmen got down on their hands and knees to see if the horse had a game leg.⁸ Howard watched and laughed. Other journalists began seeing ghosts, reporting imaginary sightings of Seabiscuit working late at night. “The ‘mystery’ of Seabiscuit,” wrote David Alexander, “seems to have been bothering a lot of the boys here to the point of a nervous breakdown.”⁹

January 31 started out as an ordinary Monday for the clockers. They watched the waves of horses coming and going from the track at their usual early-morning times. As Santa Anita was closed on Mondays, they would normally have gone home in midmorning, when the workouts were over. But they still hadn’t timed a single workout for Seabiscuit since he arrived at Santa Anita a month before. They settled in to wait him out. Gradually, attrition thinned the ranks. By lunchtime, only two hardy clockers remained. A handful of reporters gutted out the wait with them. Their hopes dimmed as they watched a rainstorm approaching. They knew that Seabiscuit didn’t work on wet tracks.

Shortly after lunch, just before the rains hit, the clockers were startled by an improbable spectacle. Two men and two horses materialized from under the purple storm clouds, walked up the track, and reined up in front of the press box. It was Tom Smith, on a broad yellow horse. Alongside him, Red Pollard sat in his customary seat atop the familiar little bay horse. The clockers gaped: Smith was waving at them.

They lunged for their stopwatches. Smith, seeing that the track was standing at attention, cantered the horses once around, then pulled up at the finish line while Pollard and his mount peeled off for a workout. With Pollard sitting motionless in the saddle, they reeled off rapid fractions, clipping under the wire after six furlongs. Smith took the horse back to the barn. The reporters bounced along behind, teasing Smith for letting himself get caught. Smith, for some reason not his usual surly self, laughed with them, saying he hadn’t been aware that the clockers and reporters were still there. “I figured I’d just steal the march on everybody,” he said. “Doggone those clockers.¹⁰ I’ll fool them yet.” The next morning the papers were full of the news.

But a year of dealing with Tom Smith had gotten to some of the reporters. Paranoia was setting in. Something wasn’t right. Wasn’t it suspicious that Smith had waved at them? Didn’t Seabiscuit seem to be blowing a little too hard after the work? Wasn’t it odd that Smith was so amiable about having been caught? Had anyone ever seen him smile before? Could it be that the horse was not Seabiscuit after all? In the press corps only the Los Angeles Evening Herald’s Jack McDonald was willing to speculate publicly, and only in his headline: HOWARD HORSE PULLED UP “GROGGY” AFTER FAST WORK.¹¹

Back in Barn 38, Smith must have read that headline and smiled.

The laughter subsided immediately. A few days after Seabiscuit’s six-furlong workout, a tipster contacted the local district attorney’s office with a startling claim: On the backstretch at Santa Anita a man was preparing to harm Seabiscuit. His name was James Manning, and he had infiltrated the barn area with plans to break into Seabiscuit’s stall and shove a sponge up his nostril, impeding his breathing. Manning had been sent by a group of men from the East Coast who wanted to ensure that Seabiscuit would lose the Santa Anita Handicap. Because Seabiscuit’s fans had made him the prohibitive favorite in the race, his rivals had become relative long shots. If the race-fixing conspirators could stop Seabiscuit, they could take advantage of the other horses’ long odds, cash in huge bets, and disappear.

The district attorney took the tip seriously. Manning was quickly hunted down and arrested before he could reach Seabiscuit’s stall. In interrogation, he confessed. Because the police had caught him before he could carry out his crime, prosecutors didn’t have much to charge him with. They settled for a charge of vagrancy and gave him the option of being expelled from the state or serving jail time. Manning chose the former. Police escorted him to the border and booted him across.

The news broke on February 1 with front-page banner headlines. A ripple of horror spread across the backstretch. “Sponging,” an old race-fixing technique from racing’s corrupt days, threatened horses’ lives.¹² The ensuing partial strangulation frequently triggered systemic, stress-related diseases that were often fatal. And unless a horseman was actively looking for the sponge, it could go undetected for weeks.

Smith put Manning out of his mind and went back to tormenting the clockers. By mid-February the reporters had figured out that when Howard went to the training track Seabiscuit was soon to follow, and they had taken to trailing the owner around. Smith used this to his advantage. During the races he sent Howard over to his box at the main Santa Anita track as a decoy while he led Seabiscuit over to the training track nearby.¹³ Just before Seabiscuit worked out, Howard excused himself from his box for a moment. Sprinting to the training track, he stayed for the one and a half minutes necessary for Seabiscuit to blaze through a mile workout. A moment later he was back in his box. He’d been gone so briefly that no one suspected he’d done anything more interesting than visit the men’s room.

The workout demonstrated that the horse was ready for the February 19 San Carlos Handicap, and for once the track secretary relented, assigning him 130 pounds. Pollard, finally released from his suspension, was itching to ride him. On the day before the race, everything seemed to be coming together.

But again, luck ran out. All night long, rain pounded the track. The next morning the course was a swamp, and Smith scratched his horse for the fourth straight time. Fair Knightess, a better mudder, was left in the race, and Pollard opted to ride her instead.¹⁴ The decision was the pivot point of his life.

As the San Carlos field leaned around the far turn, Pollard was bent over the back of Fair Knightess, who was racing along the rail in fourth. Around him, close enough to touch, was a dense phalanx of horses moving at terrific speed: Indian Broom on the rail, Pompoon on the outside, Mandingham right on Fair Knightess’s tail. Just inches ahead of Fair Knightess was He Did, the horse famous for having sideswiped Seabiscuit’s old stablemate Granville at the start of the 1936 Kentucky Derby, knocking his jockey off. Midway around the far turn at Santa Anita, He Did did it again.

Leading the dense pack of horses around the turn, He Did took an awkward, sagging step. For an instant, he lost his momentum. The formation of runners collapsed, and horses began to rack up behind him. With nowhere to go and no time to stop herself, Fair Knightess charged straight into the bottleneck. Pollard must have seen He Did’s dark hindquarters suddenly in his face, too close. He had no time to react. Fair Knightess reached forward just as He Did kicked out with his heels.

Jockeys say there is a small, bright sound when hooves clip against each other, a cheery portent of the wreck that is likely to follow. Pollard must have heard it. Fair Knightess’s forelegs were kicked out from under her. Unable to catch herself, she pitched into a somersault at forty miles per hour. Under Pollard her head and neck dropped away as the ground heaved up. Pollard went down with her, his helpless form following the line of her fall, over her back and neck and vanishing under her crashing body. She came down onto him with terrific force and skidded to a stop.

Behind her, jockey Maurice Peters, aboard Mandingham, saw her plow into the track and knew he could not avoid her. Mandingham saw her too, and gathered himself up to make a desperate leap over her as she lay on the track. Perhaps, for an instant, it seemed as if he would make it. But just as he reared up and launched himself into the air, Fair Knightess thrust her forelegs out in front of her and lifted herself up directly into Mandingham’s path. Mandingham slammed into her. The force of the collision knocked Fair Knightess down the track and flipped her upside down. Pollard, lying just beyond her, couldn’t get out of her way. Her full weight came down on his chest. Mandingham flew over Fair Knightess, his legs tangling with hers. He bent in the air like a thrashing fish and spun into the ground shoulder first. Peters rode him down.

From the grandstand came a heavy sound. Then all fell silent. Peters, his ankle sprained, lifted himself up. Mandingham rose, his shoulder bruised and his foreleg gashed by Fair Knightess’s hoof but otherwise uninjured. Fair Knightess lay where she was. Peters limped over to Pollard and looked down.

The left side of Pollard’s chest was crushed.

Charles Howard saw Pollard go down, staring in horror as Fair Knightess’s flailing legs rolled skyward over him. He stared at the crumpled form, the great overturned animal—in an instant he and Marcela were running blindly, pushing through the crowd. They sprinted through the mud to Pollard’s side. The jockey was barely conscious, his mouth wide open. He was carried to the track infirmary. An ambulance arrived. The Howards climbed in and rode with Pollard to St. Luke’s Hospital in Pasadena.

Behind them, Smith sank down into the dirt beside Fair Knightess, who did not rise. Her back had been horribly wrenched. Her hind end was paralyzed.¹⁵ Smith somehow got her pulled into a van and taken back to the barn, where she lay helpless. Smith ordered X rays. If her back was broken, it was over. He stayed at the barn and worked over her to save her life.

At the hospital, the news was grim. Pollard’s chest had virtually caved in. He had several broken ribs, a collarbone shattered into countless fragments, severe internal injuries, a broken shoulder, and a concussion. For several hours, he barely clung to life. Newspapers all over the country shouted the news. Some reported that Pollard had been killed. Up in Edmonton, his father stumbled into his house before his children, clutching a newspaper. Pollard’s sister Edie saw the headline: SEABISCUIT’S JOCKEY NEAR DEATH.

Three days passed. Pollard hovered. Smith and Howard sat by his bed. Finally, the jockey stabilized. The reporters slipped into his hospital room. Flashbulbs popped in his pale, unshaven face. His arm hung up in traction. Pollard didn’t look at the reporters. He stared without expression at the half-page newspaper photos of himself, taken an instant before the wreck, showing him coiled over Fair Knightess’s withers.

Doctors told him he wouldn’t ride again for at least a year.

In the jockey’s risky universe, everyone understood that some rider was going to profit from Pollard’s loss. The redhead was not even out of danger before Howard and Smith were tailed by jockeys and agents seeking the mount. Howard couldn’t think about them. All he could think of was Pollard’s injuries, incurred on his horse. He couldn’t bring himself to run Seabiscuit in the Santa Anita Handicap.

Howard and Smith went to the hospital, and Pollard made himself clear. The horse had to run without him. After some consideration, Howard agreed. They had to find a new jockey. Again, Pollard asked Howard to hire George Woolf.¹⁶ Smith thought it was a good idea. Woolf had already committed to ride a horse named Today in the hundred-grander and its final prep race, the San Antonio Handicap, but there was a chance they could get him out of the contract. Howard favored eastern rider Sonny Workman, but Lin and Bing had already signed him on to ride Ligaroti. Smith, who operated under the assumption that all easterners were up to no good, didn’t trust Workman anyway. With the decision up in the air and the San Antonio less than a week away, Howard, Smith, and Pollard parted. Howard made his announcement. “Seabiscuit will run if I have to ride him myself,” he said.¹⁷ “Of course, that might put a little too much weight on Seabiscuit.”

With that, the flood began. Howard and Smith were besieged with telegrams and calls from jockeys all over the country. As Howard walked through the track, riders swirled around him like snowflurries. He and Smith conducted interviews in the tack room. Smith decided that if he couldn’t have Woolf, he wanted a rough-and-tumble, freckle-faced western rider named Noel “Spec” Richardson, a close friend of Pollard and Woolf. Howard couldn’t make up his mind.

Meanwhile, Smith honed Seabiscuit. The fact that the trainer was working the horse on Mondays was now the worst-kept secret in racing; when he led the horse onto the track on the Monday after Pollard’s accident, two thousand cheering fans greeted him. Smith asked Farrell Jones, who would be up for the workout, to wear his bulkiest leather jacket and use an extra-heavy saddle. All told, Jones, the saddle, and the jacket tipped the scales at 127 pounds. Smith then drilled Seabiscuit in tag-team fashion. Sending him off alongside sprinter Limpio, he stationed the other two stablemates, Advocator and Chanceview, at preassigned places around the track. Limpio took off with Seabiscuit, and the two dueled through sprinter fractions. After half a mile, Advocator hooked up with Seabiscuit as Limpio dropped away, exhausted. In another half mile, Chanceview relieved Advocator, gunning alongside Seabiscuit for a final eighth of a mile. The final time was superb. It was a solid, taxing workout, whittling ten pounds off of Seabiscuit’s frame. Howard was buoyant. He began making side bets with friends that Seabiscuit would smash the track record in the San Antonio. Smith agreed that the horse was better than ever. “I have the big horse as good as hands can make him,” he said.¹⁸ “Now it’s up to the rider to get him home in front.”

Who that rider would be was still undecided. On the day before the San Antonio, Smith and Howard put Sonny Workman up on their colt Ariel Cross for a race.¹⁹ He rode beautifully, and Ariel Cross won. There had been a rider switch on Ligaroti—perhaps Howard had talked his son into going with another jockey—and Workman was suddenly available for the San Antonio and Santa Anita Handicaps. Smith still didn’t want him going anywhere near Seabiscuit, but it wasn’t up to him. The next morning Howard hired Workman, but only for the San Antonio. If he rode well in the race, it was implied, Workman had the mount on Seabiscuit in the hundred-grander. Smith took Workman to Pollard’s hospital bed for a tutorial on the subtleties of riding Seabiscuit.

It was there that the confusion began. Pollard told Workman all about Seabiscuit’s oddities. The redhead stressed one point: Do not use the whip. It is not clear why he gave this advice, since he usually gave the horse two taps during races. He was probably concerned that Workman, being unfamiliar with Seabiscuit, would overdo it and antagonize the horse. Knowing that the horse, when forced, tended to become obstreperous, Pollard may have decided to err on the side of caution and advise Workman to withhold the whip.

The next afternoon Smith and Howard stood on the grass in the infield and gave Workman their own instructions. They told him to use his judgment on strategy, but to give Seabiscuit two swats with his whip, once at the top of the stretch and once seventy yards from the wire. Smith was apparently unaware that his advice conflicted with Pollard’s. Workman opted to follow the rider’s instructions.

The San Antonio was a terrible place to make a season debut after a long layoff.²⁰ The track, though fast, was thick. The field was formidable, featuring Seabiscuit’s old rivals Aneroid and Indian Broom, plus Today, with Woolf up. Seabiscuit was carrying 130 pounds, 12 more than second-high weight Aneroid and as much as 20 more than other horses in the field. The man on his back was a stranger, unfamiliar with his quirks, with only a few hours of preparation and conflicting advice on how to ride him. It was a formula for disaster.

As Seabiscuit cantered to the post for the San Antonio, Pollard lay on his hospital cot at St. Luke’s. He was in severe pain. Nurses had stacked sandbags all along his left side to prevent him from turning over on his broken chest. His left arm was in traction, a pulley slung to his wrist. His right, pinching a cigarette, was stretched out for the knob on a radio, which the nurses had perched on a stack of magazines. He fiddled with the tuning knob, trying to find the station that would air the race. Turf writer Sid Ziff, from the Los Angeles Evening Herald, slipped into the room. Pollard greeted him with a pained smile. “Good old Biscuit,” he said, “he’ll break the world record today.” He surveyed his arm and winced. “It doesn’t matter that I’m here, Sonny Workman’s up out there. Sonny’s a great jockey.” He lay back and fell silent, listening to radio caller Clem McCarthy tell his audience about the crash of Fair Knightess.²¹ He stubbed out his cigarette. He was agitated and unhappy. He was out of place, here on the cot while his horse ran without him.

Miles away, Seabiscuit was coming unwound. Workman couldn’t get him settled down. The horse reverted to his rebellious habits in the starting gate, bulling forward and raising a fuss. He reared, flung the starter aside, and broke through the front of the gate. They loaded him again, but Workman couldn’t quiet him. The frustrated assistant starter began waving a rope back and forth in front of the horse’s face to distract him. Just before the bell rang, Seabiscuit lunged. The assistant starter caught him and shoved him backward at the same instant that the field sprang away. Seabiscuit came out late, only to be bumped by a straggling horse to his outside. By the time he recovered, he was in seventh, four lengths behind Aneroid and Indian Broom.

Pollard jerked partially upright, his hair mussed from the pillow. “Biscuit!” he shouted. “Get going, Biscuit!” He wiggled closer to the radio. Word came that Seabiscuit was inching forward, and he relaxed a little.

Workman held Seabiscuit back, around the first turn and down the long backstretch. On the far turn, he began sweeping around the field. As Seabiscuit pulled into the stretch, only Indian Broom and Aneroid remained to be caught. “Here comes Seabiscuit!” shouted McCarthy, and the crowd noise echoed into Pollard’s hospital room. “Go get those bums, Seabiscuit!” Pollard sang out. “Get ’em, you old devil!”

In the stands, Smith was focusing on Workman’s hands.²² The jockey was not cocking his whip. He thought he didn’t need to. Seabiscuit was picking off horses and running freely beneath him. In midstretch he collared Indian Broom, then took aim at Aneroid, who was alone on the lead but weakening. They clipped past the seventy-yard pole. Seabiscuit was lopping a foot off of Aneroid’s lead with every stride, but room was running out. Workman thought he would get there. Smith felt the anger rising in him. He could see that the horse was fooling around, playing with Aneroid. Workman didn’t seem to notice. He just sat there. The whip lay flat on Seabiscuit’s neck.

“Aneroid is leading, still leading,” chanted McCarthy. Pollard rose up as if in the saddle, yanking at the pulley holding his arm. The sheets slid from his body and the sandbags tumbled free as he bent before the radio. “Go get him, Biscuit!” he pleaded. “You broke his heart once. Break it again.” He crouched over the bed, as if moving over his horse. His forehead was puckered in sweat.

Smith was livid. The whip was sitting there in Workman’s hand. Seabiscuit’s ears were flicking around; the horse seemed to be waiting for the signal to go for the kill. It never came. Aneroid was driving with everything he had, and Seabiscuit was just jogging with him, a cat batting a stunned mouse. He was having a fine time. His head was still behind. He edged up a little as the wire came, but he was too late. Aneroid won by a short neck.

Pollard wilted into his pillows, drenched in sweat. “It isn’t right,” he said.

A nurse rushed in and began hoisting the sandbags back on the bed. “Who finished second?” she asked.

“Biscuit did.”

“I told you you should have been on him,” she replied.

“Maybe,” said Pollard. “Only Workman gave him a good ride.… It wasn’t his fault.”

A moment later Pollard was tense again. “By God, maybe there is some way I can get this shoulder fixed up for next Saturday. [Do] you think so? If only I could. I can try.” He smiled. “That’s talking like a child, isn’t it?” he said.

The nurse left. Pollard’s shoulder began to throb. He realized that he had wrenched it during the race. He reached for a black cord pinned to his sheet and buzzed the nurse’s station. When the nurse returned, he pleaded with her to sneak him a beer. “Just one, nursie,” he said. “I sure desire one. I just went through hell.”

Pollard had always been, like virtually everyone else at the track, a social drinker, imbibing just enough to be happy and noisy on weekend outings with other jockeys but not enough to become dependent. But analgesia was in its infancy in the 1930s. Pollard’s injuries, involving fragmented bones that ground together each time he moved, were agonizing, and medicine offered few practical solutions. He must have been suffering just as much emotionally. For the first time since he was fifteen, Pollard was deprived of the intoxicating rush of riding.

Alcohol brought relief. Pollard began drinking more regularly and heavily. He was on the road to alcoholism.

At Santa Anita the press came down hard on Workman. He admitted his mistake. Pollard supported him publicly. Howard announced that he was satisfied with Workman and that the jockey would retain the mount for the Santa Anita Handicap.

He spoke too soon. Smith was hopping mad. He couldn’t believe that Workman hadn’t noticed Seabiscuit pricking his ears, an unmistakable sign that a horse is not concentrating. And he was furious that the jockey had disobeyed his instructions. Sitting in his tack room two days after the race, he vented his frustrations. “Workman must have ridden according to other orders. He didn’t obey mine,” he sniped. “Seabiscuit will win the Santa Anita Handicap. He is the best horse. He is fit and he is ready. All I want is a jockey who will obey my orders.”²³ Howard, uncomfortable with Smith’s excoriation of Workman, made a point of praising the jockey to reporters. He wanted to stay with Workman, arguing that the rider wouldn’t make the same mistake twice. Smith dug in: Workman had to go. Workman went, bitterly complaining that he had ridden the horse exactly as Pollard had told him to.

On February 28 Smith tacked up Seabiscuit and guided him to the track before a Monday crowd. Howard and Alfred Vanderbilt joined them. Vanderbilt was presenting Seabiscuit with the Horse and Horseman plaque for Horse of the Year. They had no jockey to complete the picture, so Smith boosted Farrell Jones up on Seabiscuit. After a parade before the crowd and a brief, somewhat subdued ceremony in which Vanderbilt called Seabiscuit “the greatest horse of the year in America,” they took Seabiscuit back to his stall. Everybody knew that the Horse and Horseman award wasn’t the one that counted.

One good thing had happened to Seabiscuit in the San Antonio. Today, with George Woolf aboard, had run a miserable race. Knowing that Pollard was going to bat for him with Seabiscuit’s connections, Woolf had been trying everything he could think of to get out of his contract to ride Today in the hundred-grander, including offering $1,000 to the horse’s owner.²⁴ The skill of a man like Woolf was worth a lot more than $1,000 in a $100,000 race, and the owner turned down the offer. But in the San Antonio Today ran so abysmally that his trainer concluded he had no chance in the Santa Anita Handicap. He released Woolf from his obligations. Smith and Pollard were positive that Woolf was the right man for Seabiscuit. Howard wanted proof.

Woolf gave him just that. In a meeting a few hours after the Horse and Horseman award presentation, the Iceman offered Smith and Howard a glimpse into the mind of a riding genius.²⁵ He laid out all of Seabiscuit’s predilections and weaknesses in great detail. Howard was dumbfounded. Woolf knew more about his horse than he did. Howard asked him how he could possibly have known so much. Woolf replied that his seat to the rear of Seabiscuit in several of his winning races had given him a good spot from which to study the horse and he had simply taken the opportunity. He also recalled in surprising detail his one unpleasant ride on Seabiscuit three years earlier, when the horse was still with Fitzsimmons. He described how he would ride the horse if given the chance. Howard and Smith were speechless. Woolf had just told them exactly what they were about to tell him. Woolf had the job.

Woolf left his new employers with a prediction. If the track was fast in the Santa Anita Handicap, he’d win it.

Woolf stopped off at a betting venue and bought a ticket on Seabiscuit, to win. Then he drove over to St. Luke’s Hospital and gave the ticket to Pollard. The two old friends sat together, talking of Seabiscuit. Woolf was deeply grateful for Pollard’s help in getting him the mount.

He made Pollard a promise. If Seabiscuit won, he’d split the riding fee with him; 10 percent of the $100,000 purse.²⁶

With a quarter of a mile to go, Seabiscuit (left) takes the lead in the 1938 Santa Anita Handicap. Stagehand (second from left) is directly behind him.

(© BETTMANN/CORBIS)

Chapter 12

ALL I NEED IS LUCK

It was raining again. Through the week before the 1938 Santa Anita Handicap, the barn roof hummed with the downpour. Los Angeles flooded. The city and track were completely cut off from all wire service. Smith sat on the damp shed row day and night, hovering around Seabiscuit, and slowly grew ill. Howard found him there, nursing a frightening cough. He urged him to see a doctor. Smith waved him away and stayed at work. As the days passed, the cough grew worse until Howard arrived one day and found Smith barely able to stand. Howard rushed to a telephone to summon an ambulance. But when it arrived, Smith refused to leave his horses. No amount of encouragement from Howard could get him to budge. The ambulance crew left, and Smith went back to work. Gradually, the cough quieted.

Everyone was jumpy. Seabiscuit snoozed behind an impenetrable wall of security.¹ A man slept inside his stall at night. Howard hired three guards to stand by the stall, one in the daytime, two at night. The second nighttime guard was under orders to keep the first one talking so neither of them would doze off. Smith had them all on a password system, and anyone who came near was aggressively questioned. A police dog named Silver, trained to pace up and down the shed row, stood patrol. Seabiscuit lived behind an electric stall door that Smith had designed and built himself. Consisting of wire mesh stretching from floor to ceiling, it was rigged to set off a siren if anyone tampered with it. “A brigade of Chicago gorillas armed with Tommy guns might be able to get to Seabiscuit—after shooting down everybody on the lot,” said Howard. “But one man trying to sponge Seabiscuit would have about as much chance as a kindergarten kid trying to jimmy his way into the United States mint with a fountain pen.”

Seabiscuit was safe, but Woolf was not. Two days before the race, the police informed him that someone was trying to kidnap him.² The unidentified perpetrators planned to injure him, drug him, or hold him hostage on the day of the race, preventing him from riding and leaving Howard and Smith little time to find a qualified jockey. Their hope was that without Woolf, Seabiscuit would lose, enabling wagers on long shots to pay off.

The frightening thing was that the kidnappers had not been identified. Anyone with whom Woolf came into contact could be after him. Woolf promptly hired two burly bodyguards. For two days they tailed him everywhere.

Friday morning the rains broke. The track was an oval of standing water. The superintendent dragged out the asphalt-baking machines and slowly dried the course. The post positions were drawn. Seabiscuit was again unlucky. He drew post thirteen, well outside in the nineteen-horse field.

On the night before the race, Woolf and his bodyguards joined Smith at Pollard’s bedside. The three talked long and late of the race, the most formidable of Seabiscuit’s life. Every single top horse in training, save War Admiral, was in the field. Seabiscuit’s 130-pound assignment was by far the highest weight. A colt named Stagehand, the early favorite for the 1938 Kentucky Derby, had been assigned just 100 pounds, the lowest possible impost. He had slipped into the race with such a light assignment by virtue of a peculiarity in the race’s weight system. To make it easier for the handlers of top horses to plan for their race, Santa Anita officials had assigned the weights two months before, on December 15. On that date, Stagehand’s 100-pound impost was justified; he was only two years old, had never won or even run particularly well in any race, and he was about to begin 1938 as a claimer. His opening odds were 150 to 1. But since December he had turned three and reeled off four sensational victories, including one in the $50,000 Santa Anita Derby, making his hundred-grander weight assignment grossly unfair. The impost was so low that trainer Earl Sande had to send all the way to Miami to get a tiny smudge of a man named Nick Wall, the only top rider in the country who could make the weight.³

A thirty-pound weight concession to Stagehand might be insurmountable, and Woolf knew it. Stagehand was the horse to beat.

On the morning of the 1938 Santa Anita Handicap, the Howards drove over to St. Luke’s Hospital. Pollard, wan and frail, sat in a wheelchair and waited for them. In what must have been an excruciating effort, he had pulled a neat white dress shirt and tie over his ravaged chest. He had combed his hair, shaved, and slid a dark suit jacket over one arm, leaving the other jacket arm to hang free over his sling. Two weeks before, as he swung his leg over Fair Knightess’s back, he had looked boyish for his twenty-eight years. Now he was suddenly and permanently old. The Howards brought him to their car and saw him inside. Pollard had no business being out of bed at all, but he had talked his doctors into letting him attend the race on the condition that two of them, plus a nurse, go with him.

They rolled him into Santa Anita. Seventy thousand fans swarmed the plant. Marcela accompanied Pollard up through the grandstand. At the top they stopped. A long catwalk, arching over the crowd, stood between them and the announcer’s booth. The chair would not fit on it. Slowly, painfully, Pollard rose from the chair and limped along the catwalk, pursued by his doctors and nurse.

Someone in the crowd below looked up and recognized him. He nudged another fan and pointed to the jockey, and suddenly the whole crowd was gazing up at him. Someone yelled his name and began to clap. One clapper became two, then three. Soon the whole grandstand was cheering wildly. Pollard straightened himself up and bowed.⁴

Pollard and Marcela arrived at the end of the catwalk, and the cheering subsided. Everyone must have expected Marcela to drop the redhead off there; ahead of her was the press box, den of the exclusively male radio and newspaper corps. No woman had ever entered it without being summarily booted out.

To general surprise, Marcela strode right in.⁵ As usual, she pulled it off. If anyone objected to her presence, no one said so; one admiring reporter proposed giving her a medal for bravery. But she didn’t stay long. She had planned to watch the race with Pollard in the announcer’s booth, where Clem McCarthy would call the race for national radio. But she was losing her nerve. The booth was on the roof of the track, up a twelve-foot ladder, but it wasn’t the climb that worried her. She was terrified that in the excitement of the race she would scream into the caller’s microphone.

“I can’t stand this,” she said. Her hands were shaking. “It’s not the race that’s got me at the moment. Waiting for the start is going to be bad enough, but that microphone in there is worse.”

She turned and fled toward the catwalk. Gliding up ahead of her was Bing Crosby, decked out to see his Ligaroti contest the race. The Seabiscuit and Ligaroti camps had developed a lively, good-natured rivalry; Lin Howard had placed a bank-breaking side bet with his father over which horse would finish ahead of the other.⁶ Bing snagged Marcela’s arm.

“Marcela,” he cooed, “you come right in here and tell the people how far Seabiscuit is going to beat Ligaroti.”

“That’ll be easy,” she replied, relaxing some and turning back to the reporters. “By about a quarter of a mile.” Crosby led her back in and she started up the ladder, the wind snapping her dress around her legs. Somehow, they hoisted Pollard up the ladder. Marcela sat down with him. They tried to distract each other from their trepidation.

At the door of the jockeys’ room, Woolf shed his bodyguards. His mind was full of Stagehand. He made a mental note. Stagehand would carry the same colors as his nearly identical full brother, Sceneshifter, but to enable the race caller to discriminate between them, Stagehand’s jockey was to wear a white cap, Sceneshifter’s a red one.⁷ Woolf walked down to the paddock, where Clem McCarthy awaited him, microphone in hand for a live interview. All I need is luck, Woolf told a rapt audience.⁸ Seabiscuit will do the rest.

Howard and Smith saw Seabiscuit and Woolf onto the track, then filed up into Howard’s private box. They would say nothing to each other for the next 121 seconds.

As Seabiscuit broke from the gate, he was immediately bashed inward by Count Atlas, a hopeless long shot emerging from the stall to his right. Seabiscuit was knocked nearly to the ground. As he staggered sideways, Count Atlas sped up in front of him, then abruptly cut left and slowed down, pushing back into him again. Seabiscuit stumbled badly, his head ducking, and Woolf was vaulted up onto his neck. For a terrible moment, Woolf clung to Seabiscuit’s neck, a millimeter from falling off, then regained his balance. As he shinnied back in the saddle, Count Atlas leaned hard into Seabiscuit, buffeting his right side as the field bounded away from them. For a sixteenth of a mile, Count Atlas lay over on Seabiscuit’s shoulder, his head and neck thrust to the left, preventing Seabiscuit from moving up. Woolf was enraged. Seabiscuit was struggling to push Count Atlas off of him, the front-runners were disappearing in the distance, and his chances of winning were all but dashed.

Swinging his whip high in the air, Woolf walloped it down as hard as he could on the buttocks of Count Atlas’s jockey, Johnny Adams, then lifted it up and smacked it down again. Down on the rail, obscured by the pack of horses, he could not be seen by the stewards or the crowd. But Adams, who would ride back to the scales sporting angry welts, certainly felt it. He jerked Count Atlas’s head to the right. Seabiscuit broke free.

Finally back in his stirrups and straightened out, Woolf despaired over his position. Seabiscuit was in twelfth place, eight lengths behind the leaders. He was trapped in a pack of stragglers. Woolf had no option but to wait for a hole to break ahead of him. He sat still, his eyes pinned on the white cap bobbing ahead.

On the backstretch, a slender, jagged avenue through a cluster of horses opened before him. Woolf saw the white cap slipping out of reach and feared that this narrow path would be his only chance to break loose. With horses surging in and out, it was likely to vanish in an instant. To seize this opportunity, Woolf would have to reach for everything Seabiscuit had. Accelerating hard under high weight burns vast reserves of energy. Horses carrying the kind of weight Seabiscuit was packing cannot afford to lose momentum. If Woolf sent his mount to top speed, he knew he was going to have to keep him going until the end of the race. A general rule of racing is that virtually no horse can sustain his maximum speed for more than three eighths of a mile. The Santa Anita Handicap was a grueling mile and a quarter, and Seabiscuit still had more than three quarters of a mile to go. Woolf faced a critical decision. If he took the lane opening ahead of him, Seabiscuit would almost certainly become exhausted in the homestretch, leaving himself vulnerable to closers. If he waited, Stagehand might be long gone by the time he launched his bid. Woolf made his choice. He pointed Seabiscuit’s nose at the gap and asked him to go through.

The response was explosive. Pent up from trailing the field, Seabiscuit spun through the gap like a bullet rifling down a barrel. Woolf balanced over his neck and steered him deftly through the pack, on the hunt for the white cap. The quarters were so close and the speed so high that the jockey had to cut sharply in and out to avoid running up into the hind legs of horses. As Seabiscuit streaked past the three-quarter pole, several clockers saw what was happening and jammed their thumbs down on their stopwatches. In the announcer’s booth, McCarthy caught sight of the horse. “Seabiscuit! He’s coming through! He’s cutting the others down like a whirlwind!”

Woolf rolled up alongside the jockey in the white cap. He didn’t have a chance to look at him. Seabiscuit was moving so fast that the jockey and his mount were behind him in an instant. Seabiscuit overtook a pack of horses and stretched out for front-running Aneroid, his last obstacle. The two ran side by side. They flew to the quarter pole, still sustaining a fearsome clip. The clockers banged their thumbs down on their stopwatches. The hands stared back at them: 44⅕.

In the middle stage of a grueling distance race, Seabiscuit had broken the half-mile world record by two seconds, the equivalent of more than thirteen lengths.⁹ It may be the greatest display of raw speed ever seen in Thoroughbred racing.

Scorching around the far turn, Seabiscuit had the lead. The crowd was on its feet. Woolf had gambled everything, and it seemed to have worked. The field was in disarray behind him, dropping back in an undulating mass.

From the far outside, Woolf felt something coming. He turned in the saddle and looked back. It was a lone horse, shaking loose from the pack and driving toward Seabiscuit as Rosemont had done a year before. Woolf studied the horse’s head, then straightened out. He knew that face: a long aristocratic nose, mahogany deepening to black at the muzzle. But the silks on the rider didn’t match. He had to be wrong. He swung his head back and looked again. There was no mistake.

It was Stagehand.

The realization shivered through Woolf: The caps of Stagehand and Sceneshifter had been switched.¹¹ All the way around the track, the horse Woolf thought he had been chasing had in fact been behind him, stalking him. Woolf had spent Seabiscuit’s rally much too early, in pursuit of the wrong horse.

Up in the grandstand, Stagehand’s trainer, Earl Sande, realized what was happening. “We’ve got the race!” he shouted.¹⁴ Nick Wall, aboard Stagehand, thought he had it too. He had sat behind Seabiscuit, watched him dash off on the backstretch, and thought that Woolf had lost his head. He was sure that Seabiscuit was finished. Wall was sitting on a fresh, perfectly conditioned horse, under a feather impost, just dropping down into his run. He thought: I am going to gallop by him and win as I please.¹²

Streaking down the homestretch, Woolf was a crimson blur on Seabiscuit’s back, lifting him, holding him together, begging him for more, dropping flat to lie under the wind. Wall wound Stagehand up to top speed, his eyes fixed on Woolf’s back. He couldn’t understand it: His horse was tearing over the track, but he was barely gaining. Gradually, he snipped away at the distance between them. They drew even. Seabiscuit disappeared, his compact body eclipsed from the crowd’s view by Stagehand’s long, dark form. It seemed that Stagehand would surely rush right by and that Seabiscuit would reappear in his wake. Up in the stands, Pollard thought it was over.¹⁵