Seabiscuit: An American Legend

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

But Seabiscuit did not appear. For as long as they lived, spectators would regard what they saw next as the most extraordinary feat they ever witnessed in sport.¹⁶ They recognized it all at once: Seabiscuit, under a tremendous load, having already run at world-record speed for most of the race, accelerated. He surged forward with such power that it was as if, said one witness, “he were breaking from the gate again.” Stagehand could not shake him.

The crowd was in a frenzy. McCarthy, one of the few commentators who had not mistaken Stagehand for Sceneshifter, was screaming himself hoarse.¹⁰ “It’s Seabiscuit and Stagehand. They’re coming away. It’s all between them … They’re almost here! Stagehand is running stronger. … But Seabiscuit won’t yield! How he tries!”

It was too much for Pollard. He twisted in his chair and gasped for air, terrified, overjoyed. He was choking on it. His heart was thumping so hard in his chest that for a moment he wondered if it would fail, if he would die right there in the announcer’s booth, the race still playing out beneath him. Marcela went white and shrieked.¹³ Someone behind her, remembering the microphone, clapped a hand over her mouth.¹⁷ Below them, Howard stood absolutely still. His binoculars had fallen from his hands.

The rest of the field dropped into the distance. Stagehand and Seabiscuit drove side by side, blazing through a final quarter in 24⅘ seconds, astounding for a distance race. Wall was hammering Stagehand at Seabiscuit, but Seabiscuit was hanging up against him and giving it right back, ferocious, head down, ears pinned. Woolf was strung flat over Seabiscuit’s back, driving for all his worth. As the wire neared, the horses’ heads bobbed out of time, so that the lead was traded every few feet. They hit the line together.

Again, no one was sure who had won. There was the long wait, the murmuring crowd, the timer blinking a new track record, and again, the soft whir of the finish photo slipping down to the stewards. The photo was murky, indistinct. The stewards made their ruling.

The winner was Stagehand.

Atop the grandstand, Marcela and Red huddled together and wept. The jockey pulled himself up and smiled. “He tried with every ounce, with every muscle in his body,” he later said. “I am proud of my horse.”

Howard and Smith sat cold and still in their box. By two noses in two runnings of the race he and his wife most wanted to win, Howard had lost $182,150, and Seabiscuit had been denied the title of history’s greatest money winner. Howard pushed out a faint laugh. “Hell,” he said. “We can’t win all the time.”

The press box wilted. Seabiscuit had delivered what many of them thought was the greatest performance in racing history, and had lost simply because of a fluke in the weight system, and a foul from another horse. “The best horse,” wrote turf scribe Salvator, “was unjustly beaten.”

Stagehand cantered back to the winner’s circle. “That’s the greatest racehorse in the world,” Nick Wall would say of Seabiscuit.¹⁸ “He had enough trouble to stop a locomotive.… At equal weights, there’s nothing that wears racing plates that’s a mortal to beat him.”

Seabiscuit returned to the grandstand, where Smith and the Howards awaited him. Woolf was rigid with rage. He slid down and dragged his kangaroo-leather saddle off of Seabiscuit, so angry over the foul from Count Atlas that he could barely speak. It was the first time in his ten-year career that he had been beaten in a photo finish of a stakes race.

Howard looked at Seabiscuit. The horse’s head was high, and light played in his eyes. He didn’t know he had lost. Howard felt confidence swell in himself once more.

“We’ll try again,” he said.¹⁹ “Next time we’ll win it.”

Seabiscuit, Tom Smith, and C. S. Howard

(© BETTMANN/CORBIS)

Chapter 13

HARDBALL

A few minutes after Seabiscuit lost, the Howards reeled out of Santa Anita, changed into formal attire, raised their chins once again, and walked into the Santa Anita Turf Club Ball, held in honor of Stagehand’s victory. There was a buzz in the room. Hours before, beneath the swaying palms of Florida’s Hialeah Park, War Admiral had logged his tenth consecutive victory, winning the Widener Handicap with ease. The Triple Crown winner had become so unruly that before many of his races, the battered assistant starters gave up on loading him into the gate and instead let him walk up to the break on the far outside of the gate while the other horses started from a standstill inside it. But once under way, he was better than ever. In the Widener, he had delivered a smashing performance, and everyone was comparing it to Seabiscuit’s extraordinary run in the Santa Anita Handicap. The two horses were the talk of the ball and the nation. The next morning magazines and newspapers all over the country would be running side-by-side photographs of War Admiral’s victory and Seabiscuit’s defeat. Scores of sports columns in publications of every stripe focused on the merits of the two horses. The prospect of a meeting between the two was becoming an international obsession. All evening, reporters circled around Howard, asking if he’d be willing to match his horse against Riddle’s colt. Howard, as always, said yes.

After the ball the operators of California’s new Hollywood Park approached him with a formal match race proposal.¹ Howard told them that if they could get Riddle on board, Seabiscuit was in. The officials agreed to consult Riddle at his home in Pennsylvania. Howard waited to see what would happen. Again, nothing did.

Howard’s patience had run out. For a year he had practically pleaded for a match on any terms, but Riddle remained uninterested. Riddle did not believe that Seabiscuit was in War Admiral’s league and may have felt that by agreeing to run against a western horse in a match race, he would be demeaning his colt. Even if he had held a higher opinion of Seabiscuit, he had nothing to gain from a match race. War Admiral had already won the Horse of the Year title without having to meet Seabiscuit. Because of the championship voters’ pronounced bias toward eastern horses in general and War Admiral in particular, Seabiscuit almost certainly could not dethrone the Horse of the Year without beating him on the track. War Admiral was sucking up a fortune in purse money and barely needed to extend himself against the horses he did run against—in many of his races only two or three owners were willing to send their horses out to face him. Riddle had no reason to disrupt his colt’s schedule to take on Seabiscuit and accept a risk, however small, that a fluke would cost his horse the championship. If Seabiscuit showed up for one of War Admiral’s scheduled full-field races, that was fine, but Riddle could see no reason why he should agree to a match.

Howard was in the opposite position. Like Riddle, he understood that Seabiscuit had to conquer War Admiral on the track to be deemed his superior in the championship voting and in history. With so much riding on the meeting, he and Smith did not want their horse to meet War Admiral in a full-field race, in which he would run the risk of a third horse interfering with him, as Count Atlas had done in the hundred-grander. The risk of interference was not the same for each horse. War Admiral’s early speed was so overpowering that he was nearly always able to blast out to a lone lead, on the rail and away from other horses, and the walk-up starts ensured that he broke by himself, unhindered by his opponents. In contrast, Seabiscuit broke with the rest of the field, and as a pace-stalker, he had to make his run from out of the crowded pack. Howard needed a match race, and he was ready to force the issue.

His target was a bespectacled former journalist named Herbert Bayard Swope, chairman of the New York Racing Commission, the governing body of War Admiral’s home turf. If anyone could get the match arranged, Swope could. One afternoon in early March of 1938 Howard sat down with Swope and told him that he wanted Seabiscuit to meet War Admiral, and he wanted Swope to use his influence to arrange it. Swope suggested that he enter Seabiscuit in the Suburban Handicap at Belmont Park, in which War Admiral would meet a full field, and said he would try to get the purse raised from $20,000 to $50,000. It was not the scenario that Howard wanted, but he sensed it was not yet time to push the issue. He told Swope to work on it, and if things moved forward, they could talk again. Swope agreed.

In the aftermath of the Santa Anita Handicap, everyone at the track was buzzing about the foul Count Atlas had committed against Seabiscuit. Several reporters, remembering the foiled attempts to kidnap Woolf and tamper with Seabiscuit, speculated that the foul was the result of a race-fixing conspiracy. Santa Anita had made films of the race, but the stewards had not looked at them. A group of newspapermen petitioned the stewards to see the films.² Expecting to see only Count Atlas fouling Seabiscuit, the newspapermen saw that and something more. They gave the films back with hearty encouragement that the stewards have a look. The stewards watched the race.

The film showed it clearly: Woolf had lifted his whip up and repeatedly cracked Johnny Adams on the flanks. Woolf was called on the carpet. When asked if he had hit Adams, he said sure he had, explaining that Adams had been laying his horse over on Seabiscuit. Woolf was suspended for the rest of the meet. Adams was not penalized.

Howard was furious. “If Woolf did not protect Seabiscuit,” he seethed, “it was a cinch the stewards wouldn’t. I notice that while Woolf has been set down, Adams still rides. Hence I think that it was up to Woolf to protect his own mount. It was unfortunate that he had to strike Adams, but there was no recourse. I don’t blame Woolf for not standing idly by and allowing another rider to ruin his chances in a $100,000 race.

“Guess we’ll have to teach the Biscuit to act up at the post—to kick and rear and plunge and otherwise misbehave himself,” he said bitterly. “Then he’ll be allowed to start outside the gate, where he can break free without risk of interference. That’s War Admiral’s act, and it seems to be an effective one. When they’re out to get your horse you’re a lot better off having him away from the crowd, I’m beginning to think.”³

His words fell upon deaf ears. Howard had to find a new jockey, and right away. He had accepted an invitation to run Seabiscuit in Tijuana during Woolf’s suspension. In 1934, when Mexico banned gambling, the lively Tijuana that Woolf and Pollard had known faded. The recent relegalization of racing had done little to bring back the town’s glory days. Agua Caliente Race Track, built for $3 million in 1929 but sold for just $140,000 in 1936, remained a shadow of its former self. Then Caliente official Gene Normile came up with the idea of renewing the track’s namesake championship race and inviting Seabiscuit down for it. There was no surer sell in all of sports. Howard could hardly refuse. After the hundred-grander, Santa Anita’s racing secretary had assigned Seabiscuit 135 pounds for the San Juan Capistrano, his next scheduled race. Howard never considered running his horse under such an impost, and Normile made the choice easier. Because Mexican racing officials were not bound by the mandate that every horse carry at least 100 pounds, they could give Seabiscuit 130 while assigning other horses fewer than 100 if they needed to. Howard accepted. Although still angry over Woolf’s suspension, Howard didn’t want to court more trouble with California racing officials by hiring Woolf for the Mexican race. California was still Seabiscuit’s home base. With Smith’s approval, Howard hired Spec Richardson to ride.

Normile had pulled off a coup in getting Seabiscuit to come down for the Agua Caliente Handicap, but now he faced another quandary. No one was willing to run against Howard’s horse. Normile sweetened the pot for second through fifth places and offered extraordinary breaks in the weights, giving them between twenty-two and thirty-two fewer pounds than Seabiscuit. That did the trick: seven other horses were entered to try for second place.

Team Seabiscuit arrived in high style. Howard motored down in the first of eight Buick limousine coaches packed with thirty of his closest friends. Seabiscuit rolled in, the fans massing by the sides of his van like snowdrifts. The van door slid open, the horse appeared, the flashbulbs crackled, and the crowd pushed forward. Accompanied by two Pinkerton guards, Seabiscuit swept down the ramp and into the mob. He struck a handsome pose and held it.⁴ He had been posed so often that he seemed to know what was wanted of him when the press corps buzzed around, prompting the reporters to dub him “Movie Star.” As always, he dutifully raised his head, pricked his ears, fanned his tail, and stood square when he saw the cameras raised. When he heard the shutters click, he relaxed. The track photographer asked for a profile shot, and Seabiscuit was turned for it. Each time the man prepared to snap the shot, the horse cocked his head and looked at the camera. The photographer tried hiding in the bushes while his assistant distracted the horse, but again Seabiscuit swung his head around to stare at him. After eight minutes, Smith pulled out a carrot and thrust it in the hand of the assistant. “Here,” he said. “He loves these. Hold it just out of reach and let your man take the picture.” It worked.

Pollard was finally well enough to travel and returned to the town in which he had once reigned supreme. He found it shriveled and spent. The great racetrack was now a hollow, rattling place. Most of the bars and shops that had sprung up around it had shuttered their doors. The pulsing avenues down which Woolf had steered his purring Studebakers and Cords were wind-whipped and quiet. Even the Molino Rojo girls were gone. The home of glorious smoke-blowing women had been born again, transformed into, of all things, a schoolhouse. It would later become a church. One of the few healthy businesses in town was the sad trade in divorces, handled quickly and easily in cold offices that had once been noisy saloons.

But for one afternoon in the spring of 1938, Seabiscuit resurrected the old Tijuana and Agua Caliente.⁵ Long before “Seabiscuit Day,” the Americans began arriving. Hotels filled up with Seabiscuit fans hailing from all over the United States. Officials, recognizing that they were playing host to the most adored visitor ever to cross city limits, rushed to prepare. The railroads scheduled special trains to carry the masses of humanity southward. Crews worked to widen all roads leading in from California. The track installed additional mutuel windows, constructed about a dozen bookmaking facilities in the infield, opened up all vacant areas of the clubhouse, and hired an army of extra personnel. Though the parking lot could hold fifteen thousand automobiles, officials knew that that wouldn’t be nearly enough. They began clearing out space for additional parking.

Their efforts didn’t make much difference. Just after dawn on race day, March 27, the first headlights blinked over the border crossing. By noon, the Road to Hell was snarled with Seabiscuit fans. Border police were swamped, trying in vain to ease the gridlock by dividing traffic into four lanes. Within a few hours, cars had backed up from the track entrance all the way to the border. At the track, the additional parking was used up early in the day, and spectators began leaving their cars on the shoulders of the road and hiking in. When the shoulders filled up, they fanned out into the city golf club, then right onto residential lawns. Long before the first race, the track was filled well beyond capacity with the largest attendance in its history. The congregation at the paddock alone was greater than the track’s total attendance the day before.

The mob devoured all the food in the clubhouse. They set an all-time wagering record and bet Seabiscuit down to the lowest odds ever seen at Caliente. The grandstand was soon so crammed that just before the race, masses of suffocating fans spilled over the fence and onto the racetrack. Unable to wedge them back into the grandstand, officials herded them into the infield. Police were stationed along the rails to prevent fans from seeping back onto the track in front of the horses. Photographers circled the course, their cameras ready.

The race was over the instant it began. Seabiscuit bounded out of the gate in front and galloped away from his competition. Bored, he began swinging his head around. According to Richardson, each time the horse passed a photographer, he would prick up his ears and hoist his tail until the rider reminded him of what he was there for. To enthusiastic applause, Seabiscuit cantered home. Richardson had a miserable time trying to pull him to a stop and turn him back toward the winner’s circle, where Howard, Smith, and Bing Crosby awaited him. Someone swore that as Bing handed the trophy to Howard, Tom Smith smiled. It was only a rumor.

The crowds swarmed onto the roads once again, pausing to clean out Caesar’s restaurant of every morsel of food well before the dinner hour. Cars were still stacked up at the border long into the night. It took two days for the town to clean up.

On March 29, 1938, two days after the Caliente triumph, the Seabiscuit train drew into Tanforan. Several hundred fans were waiting. Howard traveled over to Bay Meadows. There he received a wire from Swope, who had a pleasant surprise. He had been true to his word. He had sold Belmont chief Joseph Widener on a full-field meeting between Seabiscuit and War Admiral in the Suburban Handicap on Memorial Day, May 30, with an augmented purse of $50,000. Now that the issue was in the works and Belmont was moving forward, Howard sensed that it was time to play hardball. He picked up the phone and called Swope.

After agitating for so long for the race, he said no to Swope’s proposal. He made a string of demands. He wanted a one-on-one race. He wanted it run at Belmont, over a mile and a quarter, but not on Memorial Day, which would conflict with Seabiscuit’s schedule. He suggested sometime between September 15 and October 1. He wanted the horses to carry equal weights, proposing 126 pounds but leaving himself open to any weight Riddle wanted, so long as both horses carried the same. And he wanted a much, much bigger purse. When Swope heard Howard’s figure, he must have blanched.

One hundred thousand dollars.

Howard wasn’t kidding. If Swope failed to get that much, Howard said, he could take Seabiscuit to a certain western track, which had already offered such a sum. Howard, who had long felt victimized by eastern disdain for western racing, now tried to exploit it. “Belmont Park, the country’s leading racetrack,” he said, “should be willing to at least meet that figure.”

It was an audacious play. He was asking for a king’s ransom, and he was bluffing. Hollywood Park had indeed mentioned $100,000, but Howard knew that Samuel Riddle would never take his horse west to race. He was counting on Swope’s ignorance of that fact.

Howard knew he had to find a way to give Riddle a strong interest in running, so he had done his homework. He approached Riddle as he approached the marketplace, tailoring the proposal to the owner’s desires. Horses have strong preferences for particular courses, and Belmont was War Admiral’s home track, the site of his greatest performance. A mile and a quarter was War Admiral’s optimal distance. Howard had learned that Riddle shared his ambition to break Sun Beau’s all-time earnings record by season’s end; the $100,000 purse would be highly appealing. And he knew that Riddle was deeply concerned about the weight his horse was asked to carry. Before the Widener Handicap, War Admiral had never carried more than 128 pounds. Riddle set a limit of 130, ranted at the Hialeah racing secretary when the horse received just that, then balked when another track’s secretary assigned the horse 132 pounds for a later race. The weight issue was putting War Admiral’s schedule in doubt, and Howard’s offer to run under any weight provided an alternative. Riddle’s image, never wonderful, also stood to benefit. With this proposal, he would be able to accept every one of Howard’s conditions, casting himself as the good guy who was sportingly making concessions to his demanding opponent, even though it was he who was getting the bargain. Finally, Howard’s proposal gave Riddle a built-in excuse. If War Admiral lost, Riddle could always say that Howard had dictated the terms of the race. It was an offer that was very hard to refuse.

It also must have been very hard to make. In his drive to bring Riddle to the table, Howard was gambling with his own horse’s chances. Howard much preferred that the race be held in the West. If it were held at Belmont, Seabiscuit would have to endure a five-day, 3,200-mile train trip to get there. Belmont posed another problem. Seabiscuit had run there only once, under Fitzsimmons’s care, and he had been humiliated. Smith warned Howard that Belmont’s mile-and-a-half circumference was so large that the race would be run around just one turn, instead of the two turns necessary to complete a mile and one quarter at every other track in America. One of Seabiscuit’s major weapons was his supremacy at running turns; racing around just one turn at Belmont would deprive him of one of his strengths.⁷ There was a strong possibility that if Howard secured the match race on these terms, his horse would be too compromised to win. It was a daring play, but Howard felt it was his only chance.

Swope must have swallowed hard. Howard had masterminded a situation that made refusal costly. Led to believe that Howard had very different conditions in mind, Swope had already sent Belmont officials scurrying to arrange a meeting between the two horses, and if the deal fell through now, his reputation within the organization might be tarnished. The reaction of the public was another problem. News of the race negotiations had broken the day before—Howard had undoubtedly leaked it to the press—and the response was nationwide jubilation.⁶ Telegrams applauding the proposal were flooding the Racing Commission offices. The papers were full of stories and cartoons about the prospect of the match. The phone in Swope’s office never stopped ringing. Belmont was already talking with CBS Radio, which was offering to broadcast the race live worldwide, predicting that twenty million sets would be tuned to it. If the deal died now, there might be a public backlash against Belmont. Finally, Howard had raised the mortifying possibility that the most spectacular draws in racing would stage their epic meeting in the West, costing Belmont the opportunity to host what promised to be one of the greatest and most heavily attended sporting events ever held.

Swope was trapped. He returned with a complete proposal that met Howard’s demands to the letter. He even agreed to the $100,000 purse, winner-take-all.

Swope rushed to complete the deal. He contacted Riddle, who did not immediately get back to him. With Belmont head Joseph Widener committed to the idea, the only remaining hurdle before the track could make an official offer was C. V. Whitney, a powerful member of the Westchester Racing Association’s board of directors, the governing body for Belmont. The formal vote on the proposal would be made at the April 12 board meeting, but as the majority of voters could be expected to follow Whitney’s lead, his opinion was everything. Swaying him was a tall order; a staunch opponent of match races and big purses, he was likely to come out against the plan. On April 6 Widener sent the proposal by wireless to Whitney, who was on his boat, fishing off the shores of Bermuda. Widener could not reach him.

The delay proved critical. All over the United States, track managers realized that Belmont had beaten them to the punch. They hustled to put together match proposals, and Howard and Riddle were suddenly bombarded with offers. On the same day that Widener was attempting to contact Whitney to finalize a race plan, Chicago’s Arlington Park made a formal proposal to Howard and Riddle for a $100,000 match race in July, months before the Belmont race date. Howard, playing them against Belmont, said he was open to any proposals.

All eyes turned to Riddle. He was, at long last, willing to negotiate. On April 6 he shipped War Admiral to Belmont. The next day he wired Swope to tell him he was coming to town the following morning. But he, too, seemed to be toying with Belmont. To Swope’s distress, Riddle sent a similar telegram to an Arlington official, who rushed to New York to meet with him the same day. Judging from his comments to his associates, his remarks about Chicago’s infernal July weather, and his general aversion to racing in “the West,” Riddle was almost certainly not considering the Arlington offer. But he was not above making Swope sweat it out. “Why not have two races, one at Arlington, the other at Belmont?” he said. “That should please everyone.”

Swope was appalled. If both races were agreed upon, Belmont’s race would be of far less interest, especially if the first event proved decisive. Complaining that “the Chicago people” were muscling in on his match race, Swope went into overdrive. He sent a flurry of wires to Howard, extolling the superb racing strip, mild fall weather, and general beauty of New York. Howard telephoned him back, reminding him that it was $100,000 or nothing. Riddle sat down with Swope. As Howard had foreseen, he loved the conditions. His only suggestion was that the race be held sooner than September, as the form of either horse might tail off before then. Swope took his request under consideration. Riddle told the Arlington officials to hold their offer open.

The critical date, April 12, neared. Everyone waited for Whitney. En route from Bermuda, he was the focus of intense pressure. The press worked on him, talking of how much revenue New York would lose if Whitney turned it down, and inviting the fans, who at this point were in agonies of anticipation, to lay the blame squarely on his shoulders if the race fell through. On the morning before the meeting, Howard cranked up the pressure. “You can tell them Seabiscuit will meet War Admiral anywhere, weight for age, track fast, from a quarter mile to a couple of miles,” he said.⁸ “I have been willing for a long time. Personally, I want to know which is the best horse. And there are a million racing patrons who would like to know the answer to the same question.”

“When these two meet,” he continued, “whether it be at Belmont Park, Bay Meadows, Tanforan or Pumpkin Corners, they can bet me until the bell rings.”

While the world awaited Whitney, an event at Tanforan introduced a new wrinkle in the match plans. Only two months after being rescued as they lay side by side on the track at Santa Anita, Red Pollard and Fair Knightess emerged from the dim interiors of the Howard barn and made their first steps back out on the racetrack. The mare, brought back from temporary paralysis by Smith’s exhaustive labors, moved stiffly and hesitantly through an easy canter. She was finally out of danger. Pollard, too, was tentative. Though he presented himself as fully healed, he was barely using his left arm and his ribs were still bound in tape. Smith let him make his own choices and slipped him up on Seabiscuit’s back for a few light gallops. The jockey held up well. Howard contacted his personal physicians, who scheduled Pollard for X rays on April 13.

On April 12 Whitney finally materialized at the board meeting. Out in California, Howard waited for news. After a long interval, he was handed a telegram from Whitney. The board had voted unanimously in favor of the proposal. The race would be one-on-one, though not officially a match race; by antiquated racing rules, a match had to be a purseless race. There was one change: Complying with Riddle’s wishes, they would schedule the race for Memorial Day, May 30, not September. Would Howard accept? Howard telephoned him back just as Riddle walked into Whitney’s office. The three men settled in to an impromptu meeting. Howard agreed to the new date but inserted a new condition: Pollard must ride. If he was not able to, the race was off. They broke without final agreement.

Over the telephone late that night, Riddle and Swope talked it out. Riddle had a habit of raising his voice to a blasting volume when on the phone. He was booming so loudly that a man in the room with Swope said he would have had to leap out the window to avoid hearing every word. In the end Riddle barked his assent. “You know very well,” he bellowed at Swope, “my horse will beat the stuffing out of him.”⁹ After having demanded, and received, the concession that the race be held in the spring, Riddle grumbled that his horse would really do better against an older horse in the fall. Nevertheless, he said, he was willing to go ahead with a spring race.

The following day Pollard stripped for his X rays. Howard’s physicians went over them. The fractures had healed. With a lot of conditioning, the jockey might be able to ride in May.

Howard picked up the telephone at his Burlingame home and gave Swope his acceptance. The Arlington officials bowed out gracefully. The news rippled over the world. The race, anticipated to be the greatest in the sport’s history, was on.

Before the meeting, there was another race to be run. Bay Meadows had arranged to hold a charity day for crippled children on the April 16 date of its namesake handicap, and Howard couldn’t say no. After Seabiscuit’s extraordinarily easy win in Tijuana, the Bay Meadows racing secretary had proposed assigning him 136 pounds, but Howard had intercepted him and charmed 3 pounds off of his horse’s impost. Still, 133 pounds was the highest weight any horse had ever lugged in modern California racing, and every other horse in the field would be carrying at least 20 fewer pounds.¹⁰ The only one who was happy about it was Woolf. Despondent over Seabiscuit’s loss in the Santa Anita Handicap and seizing the opportunity to eat as his diabetes dictated while his suspension was in effect, he had gorged himself on steaks and ballooned up to 128 pounds. With tack, he only just made the weight.

The entire earth seemed to wedge itself into Bay Meadows to see Seabiscuit run. The track, flooded with by far the largest crowd ever to attend a horse race in San Francisco, was overwhelmed. Officials shunted thousands into the infield but still found the track so packed that people could barely move. The grandstand became an undulating, endless sea of earth-tone fedoras and ladies’ spring hats. Fans lay on, stood over, and clung to every support structure, making the track appear as if it were constructed entirely of spectators.

They ran out of programs before the third race. The supply of hot dog buns, a key barometer of fan enthusiasm, was completely exhausted by early afternoon. Attendants served the dogs up on rye bread, and when that ran out, hungry fans had to hold their dogs in old newspapers and then discarded mutuel tickets. Though officials lengthened the time between races considerably, the wagering lines were so long that many bettors never caught a glimpse of a pari-mutuel window. “One unfortunate citizen,” wrote a reporter, “got in line to buy a win ticket on Patty Cake in the sixth and was considerably bewildered to find himself coming out of the melee at the end of the seventh with a hot dog.” The gridlock in the parking lot was so intractable that, even though the races ended at 6:30 P.M., it would be well into Sunday morning before everyone got out of the track.

It was all worth it. Seabiscuit buried the field, demolishing the track record by 1⅖ seconds. The fans went wild, taking up a raucous cheer: “Bring on War Admiral! Bring on War Admiral!”

For Woolf, the win was bittersweet. It was, he believed, the last time he would ever sit astride this little horse. He slid from the saddle, pulled the wreath of flowers from around Seabiscuit’s neck, and wrapped it around his own shoulders. The Howards stood on each side of him, laughing with the crowd. Woolf didn’t smile. He paused a moment, the camera flashes flickering off his cheeks. Pollard was looking down on him from the press box.¹¹ Woolf consigned the horse back to him. He walked back to the jockeys’ room, slipped out of the Howard silks, and hung them up.

A few days after the Bay Meadows Handicap, Seabiscuit’s train clattered to a stop at the Tanforan siding for the long trek east. Team Seabiscuit was slated to stop off in Maryland to fulfill a promise to Alfred Vanderbilt to run in Pimlico’s Dixie Handicap, then go on to meet War Admiral in New York. Grooms tramped on and off the train, loading a full car to the roof with rice-straw bedding, oats, and timothy hay. A multitude stood by to see Seabiscuit off. Howard pulled up in a long Buick packed with admirers. He stepped out with a big cake in hand and gave it to the grooms, who quickly devoured it, then said good-bye to his horse. He would follow him east later. Fans brought heaps of flowers, and a woman stepped forward and braided ribbons into Seabiscuit’s mane while he posed for the inevitable photographers. The ceremony over, Seabiscuit clopped into his railcar, stacked chest-deep in straw. Pumpkin followed. Smith climbed in with them and set up his customary cot beside Seabiscuit. The train pushed off.¹² A continent away, War Admiral stood in his stall at Belmont, waiting.

As the train lurched into motion, Seabiscuit was suddenly agitated. He began circling around and around the car in distress. Unable to stop him, Smith dug up a copy of Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang magazine and began reading aloud. Seabiscuit listened.¹³ The circling stopped. As Smith read on, the horse sank down into the bedding and slept. Smith drew up a stool and sat by him.

The trainer had a dark feeling. Since the Bay Meadows Handicap he’d had a nagging sense that the horse was not quite right. Though Seabiscuit had won the race easily, running the final quarter in a blazing twenty-four seconds flat and obliterating the track record by 1⅖ seconds, he had dragged early in the race. Woolf had needed to hustle him to keep up with the front-runners. Howard had shrugged off the slow early fractions, attributing them to the difficulty of accelerating under 133 pounds, but Smith was uneasy. It wasn’t just that the horse seemed a hair off form. The trainer was worried about match race strategy.

From his years holding Irwin’s horses for relay races and matches, Smith knew something about one-on-one races: If one horse could steal a commanding early lead, he almost always won. Clearly, superior breaking speed in a match race was almost always a trump card. Against ordinary horses, Seabiscuit had enough early speed, but War Admiral was no ordinary horse. He was one of the fastest-breaking horses racing had ever seen. Conventional racing wisdom holds that a horse’s natural running style cannot be altered. But to have any chance against War Admiral, Smith knew he was going to have to make the habitually pace-stalking Seabiscuit, who had to fight the inertia of a much blockier heavier body, into a rocket-fast breaker.

As the train snaked eastward, Smith abruptly made a change in plans. He didn’t want Seabiscuit to run in the Dixie Handicap. He needed time to prepare for the race and feel out this sense of wrongness in the horse. Howard was reluctant to break his promise to Vanderbilt, but he was not about to overrule Smith when the trainer was so certain. The itinerary was changed. Seabiscuit was going straight to Belmont to prepare for War Admiral. They could make it up to Vanderbilt later.

Rocking on his stool as the train wound over the mountains, Smith began formulating a training plan. “We’ve got to tear off that guy’s epaulets,” he said aloud, “pull the ostrich feather out of his hat and break his sword in two early or we’ll never even get close enough to the Admiral to give him the sailor’s farewell.”¹⁴

Almost no one thought he could do it.

The prematch race photo session at Belmont Park, May 4, 1938: War Admiral …

(© BETTMANN/CORBIS)

… and Seabiscuit

(© BETTMANN/CORBIS)

Chapter 14

THE WISE WE BOYS

Seabiscuit slept for most of the trip to Belmont, rising only when reporters tramped aboard the train at the stops between San Francisco and New York.¹ The newsmen had learned how to buy access to their source; several of them came on board laden with carrots, which Seabiscuit fished from their pockets. “Whenever food showed,” Smith noted, “he was quick to get up.” When the human buffet cleared out of the train, down Seabiscuit would go again.

On April 26, the horse completed his 24,265th mile of career rail travel.² He was stretched out on his side in the straw when the Overland Limited drew up in New York. The big railcar door slid open and Seabiscuit got up, shook off the straw, and poked his head out. Two hundred people surged forward. Smith appeared and glared back at them from under the gray fedora. He led Seabiscuit down the ramp and stood for a moment, frowning as the horse blinked in the sun and yawned. Flashbulbs blinked and movie cameras whirred as Seabiscuit stood there, posing.

Several score of newsmen were scattered among the fans, eyeing the horse critically. Long before Seabiscuit arrived, the polls on the race had begun. Virtually every reporter and horseman in the East thought that War Admiral would prove to be Seabiscuit’s master. The New York bookies were having a tough time trying to find anyone willing to put a few bucks on Seabiscuit; 95 percent of the wagers were on War Admiral.³ Down in Louisville to cover the Kentucky Derby, Oscar Otis found that he was about the only journalist who thought Seabiscuit could win. Other reporters thought he was addled. “There’s going to be a pretty good horse race,” wrote the New York World Telegram, “until Seabiscuit flattens out like a rug at the sixteenth pole.” Seabiscuit, wrote another reporter, “was a hero in California and a pretty fair sort of horse in the midwest. In the east, however, he was just a ‘bum.’”

Smith led Seabiscuit down the gangplank, past lines of trees heavy with spring foliage, around the walking ring, then toward the barns. A cluster of people trailed him. Seabiscuit, wired from the journey, was bucking and kicking out behind, so they kept their distance. On the backstretch the horse passed War Admiral’s barn. On the wall near the Triple Crown winner’s stall was a little shrine to Man o’ War and Brushup, War Admiral’s mother. Below photos of the two horses hung a sign: THEY GAVE US WAR ADMIRAL. War Admiral’s trainer, George Conway, lingered by his horse’s stall. He was a tall, cardiganed old man, formal and quiet. He hovered over the grooms while they curried his horse and prowled along behind when the horse went to the track. War Admiral stood quietly as Seabiscuit clopped past. The two horses didn’t see each other. Seabiscuit moved on to Barn 43, to a freshly painted 168-square-foot stall with a cathedral ceiling. Howard had obtained special permission to knock down the wall between it and the next stall so that Pumpkin could take up his customary sidekick position.⁴

On April 28 Pollard completed his long drive across the country. He went to the barns to see Seabiscuit, then hung up his tack. Woolf was there with him; Howard had insisted that Pollard ride in the match, but he was covering his bases. Woolf’s presence was a constant reminder of Pollard’s shaky position. He needed no reminding. The papers were full of questions about Pollard’s ability and fitness. The newsmen gathered by the rails, watched Pollard ride, and commented on his obvious soreness. They began to wonder aloud what Howard was thinking. “It’s probably a matter of sentiment with Owner Howard to put Pollard in the pilot-house, and it might turn out to be a good idea, despite,” wrote reporter Jack James. “But right now it looks, from this distance, as just another ‘worst of it’ impost which our boy friend, the ’Biscuit, must carry to the post.”

The moment Pollard arrived at the track, the hard training began. Because the starting gates of the day had no doors, the only breaking signal horses received was the ring of a bell. Smith wanted to sharpen Seabiscuit’s response to it. He began by fashioning a homemade starting bell. He boosted Pollard onto Seabiscuit, picked up the starting bell and a buggy whip, and without a word of explanation, led them to the training track. Pollard must have expected that they would go to the gate, but Smith led them right past it. The jockey had learned enough to know that asking Smith what was going on would have been fruitless. He rode out to the track in silence, looking down at the contraption clutched in Smith’s hand and wondering at the trainer’s judgment. “I thought Tom,” he remembered later, “had blown his topper.”⁵

Smith positioned Pollard and Seabiscuit on the track, then moved a few feet behind them. Pollard prepared himself for Smith’s orders. Smith lifted the buggy whip and flicked it over Seabiscuit’s flanks just as he hit the bell. The device raised a clanging racket, sounding, Pollard remembered later, “like all hell breaking loose.” The jockey burst into frantic urging and Seabiscuit lunged forward, breaking into a dead run. Pollard galloped Seabiscuit out, brought him back, and he and Smith repeated the drill over and over. The lesson was perfectly conceived classical conditioning. Seabiscuit, like any prey animal, was hard-wired to bound forward at the whip’s brush over his hindquarters, a simulation of a predator’s grasp. By pairing the touch of the whip with the sound of the bell, Smith was teaching Seabiscuit to associate one with the other so that he would have the same reaction to the first as to the second: run. Seabiscuit proved to be a superb student. After a few tries, he was reacting so quickly that he was gone before Smith could wave the whip. The horse was alert, buoyant, animated, all of his faculties alive to his rider. Pollard could feel it under him: electricity pulsing up into his hands.

The jockey, too, needed a little conditioning. To prepare Pollard for a rocket start, Smith sent him out for races on every front-running sprinter in the Howard barn. Smith didn’t care about the race results; all he wanted was swift starts and the fastest early fractions. The horses lost, but Pollard did as told, outbreaking the field in each race. His arm was loosening up every day, and for the first time since his fall with Fair Knightess, he began to look like the rider he had once been.

Seeing Pollard coming back into form, Smith changed training tactics. He took the rider and Seabiscuit out to the starting gate. Traditional gate schooling has always been a matter of standing still, teaching a horse to tolerate the huge, clattering metal contraption around him while he awaits the loading of other horses. But in the match race War Admiral would be his only competitor. Waiting would not be a problem. If Seabiscuit relaxed in the gate, War Admiral would leave him in his dust. The horse had to learn to be less patient, not more. Smith designed a new exercise. Sitting on Pumpkin by the gate, he ordered Pollard to rush Seabiscuit into the gate, pause for only an instant, then gallop out. Pollard did as told, and Seabiscuit bounded through. After a few repetitions Seabiscuit grew playful. He eagerly dove into the gate and streaked right through, then pivoted back for another run at it.

After a dozen or so starts, the horse was bouncing all over the track. It was time for a test. Starter George Cassidy stepped into the starter’s box and Smith brought Seabiscuit up. This time Pollard halted him in the gate. For a moment Seabiscuit stood still, perched on his toes, hind legs braced, ready to roll. Cassidy rang the bell. Pollard threw the reins up on Seabiscuit’s neck, and the two sprang out. Seabiscuit ran flat out for a sixteenth of a mile before Pollard pulled him up. Smith was satisfied that the horse understood the task before him. Seabiscuit skipped back to the barn, “obviously,” said one railbird, “in a marvelous humor.”

On May 11 Smith began the third phase of starting gate instruction. For horses, herd animals alert to clues of danger from each other, skittishness is contagious. War Admiral was a raging lion behind the gate, and Smith was concerned that Seabiscuit would take one look at his opponent’s tantrum and throw one of his own. He needed to expose Seabiscuit to a similarly unruly gate horse and inure him to the sight of it. He already had just the right horse for the job. Months earlier, Howard had purchased a colt named Chanceview from Alfred Vanderbilt. The horse had proved fairly useful as a stakes horse, but he was an incorrigible rogue at the starting gate. Smith brought them out together, turned Seabiscuit toward Chanceview, and let him watch while the colt banged around like a rodeo bronc. Smith drilled them in the gate until he was satisfied that Seabiscuit had seen every trick War Admiral might pull.⁶

The New York publicity machine heated up. On May 4 Seabiscuit and War Admiral were brought out on a grassy lawn before a pink flowering hedge to pose for an army of photographers. War Admiral emerged first. He was a splendid sight, his mane and tail braided in yellow ribbons, his coat glossy and his head high. He was in a mercurial Hastings temper, and a halter and chain looped over his bridle barely restrained him. As an attendant approached him with the saddle, he reared skyward, struck out with his forelegs, and began plunging around on the end of his lead. The saddle holder chased him around and around the enclosure. The man threw the saddle over the horse’s back, and War Admiral flung it right off. They tossed it on him again, only to have it come sailing back in their faces. “Don’t worry about that,” said his nervous jockey, Charley Kurtsinger. “As soon as he starts running he’s the easiest horse in the world to handle. All he wants is to get out in front and go.”

Finally, they got the saddle on and the girth cinched. Kurtsinger, dapper in Riddle’s legendary black and yellow silks, leapt onto his back, and again War Admiral flung himself around, bucking and thrashing and tearing divots out of the Belmont lawn. Kurtsinger gritted his teeth and hung on. The photographers began grumbling. “He’s just a lively horse,” trainer Conway said weakly as he was buffeted around.

A distant train whistle sounded. War Admiral spooked at it, jerking his head up. For one brief instant he stood still, ears pricked, head high, body stretched out in all its geometric magnificence. He was listening to the train. No one was foolish enough to try to pull off the ugly halter and nose chain to perfect the shot. The attendant on the end of the lead rope braced himself, Kurtsinger turned his head and grinned stiffly, and all the photographers snapped their shots.

Kurtsinger bailed out and War Admiral whirled off. Seabiscuit came out after him, sauntering in, wrote a reporter, “like he owned the place.” Pollard strode out with him, buttoned into Howard’s red and white silks.

The contrast between the two horses could not have been more glaring. Though a little lower at the withers and nearly half a foot shorter, nose to tail, Seabiscuit seemed a cumbersome giant in comparison. At 1,040 pounds, he outweighed War Admiral by 80 pounds, with six feet of girth and a markedly wider chest. But the big body was perched on legs a full two inches shorter. His neck was thick, his head heavy, his tail stubby, his boxing-glove knees crouched. Whitey had done his best to clean Seabiscuit up, braiding his mane, forelock, and tail, but the mane plaits didn’t lie right and stuck out like quills. The horse stood straddle-legged, as if perpetually bracing himself against a strong wind.

But to the weary photographers, Seabiscuit was a relief. He stood perfectly still as he was being saddled, and Pollard hopped on his back. The photographers lifted their cameras, and Seabiscuit pricked his ears and struck his horizon-gazing pose. He held the position, without quivering a muscle, for nearly five minutes as the photographers scurried around him, cameras grinding, shooting him from every angle. They brought the noisy newsreels right up to his nose, but he never moved.

From the day of his arrival in New York, Smith was Smith; the New York press corps couldn’t get a grunt out of him. “Tom Smith,” wrote a reporter, “says almost nothing, constantly.” The New York Herald Tribune found one reporter’s valiant attempt to get more than a monosyllabic answer out of him so amusing that it published a transcript of the entire nonconversation. Smith was cooperative in only one respect. Probably at Howard’s insistence, he let the press come into the barn to see the horse, albeit without narration from the trainer. This was a step better than George Conway. A similarly mute man described by one reporter as “lean, tall and indifferent,” Conway wouldn’t let photographers near the barn in the understandable fear that the jittery War Admiral would spook at the flashbulbs and whack his head. When Smith proved more welcoming, the reporters virtually moved into Barn 43, forcing the trainer to wade through them to get to his horse. When the horse left the barn, they tramped along en masse behind him, joining large throngs of spectators on the apron of the track. They hung around day and night, asking Smith if he really thought his horse could win.

By May 14, the honeymoon was over. “You won’t be seeing this horse much anymore,” Smith growled. He shooed the press out of the barn, slung a rope across the entrance, posted a guard, and retreated to his track cottage, sitting by an oil stove in a cramped room. Even Pollard, who had been jabbering gaily with reporters since his arrival, stopped talking. “Some suspect,” wrote Jolly Roger, “that Tom may have removed his tongue.” Team Seabiscuit effectively vanished. No one was allowed to see the horse. Pleas for information brought a vintage reply: “No.”

The reporters assumed that Smith was just being curmudgeonly, but there was likely more to it than that. In a workout three days earlier, Seabiscuit had needed 1:48 to negotiate a mile. Though the track was somewhat soggy that day, Seabiscuit had been capable of ticking off miles in 1:36 throughout his career with Smith. It had been an unusually rainy spring in New York, and the track was difficult to handle even when dry. But the surface alone couldn’t account for so sluggish a workout. The horse seemed off, yet Smith could find no problem. There was still plenty of time before the race, but the trainer was increasingly concerned. He knew that any sign that Seabiscuit was not himself would only make the press more intrusive. He parked himself in the cottage and kept his mouth shut. More than ever before, he sought to hide the horse’s training, taking him out at 4:00 A.M. He got away with it until one morning when he was a little late leading the horse off the track. A group of clockers arriving for work at four-thirty saw Smith leading a winded Seabiscuit back to the barn. Smith moved the work times to 8:00 P.M. For the time being, no one caught him, but the press now knew he was fooling them.

The absence of news about the year’s biggest story drove the reporters to distraction. At first they wrote whatever came to mind. One dreamed up an “interview” with Seabiscuit, in which the horse disowned his year-younger half-uncle, War Admiral. Life magazine ran a full-page photo layout of Seabiscuit’s facial expressions. One bored clocker resorted to timing Smith as he walked down the track, catching him at a clip of thirty-five minutes for the half mile. Veteran turf writer John Lardner printed the information, “but this,” he admitted, “had little or no bearing on the race.”

The New York press corps went into a huddle. They dubbed their conflict with Smith “the Battle of Long Island.” If Smith was going to be silent, so would they; they opted not to write another word about Seabiscuit. It was a bold move, but a bad one. An angry public outcry followed, and the plan was quickly scrapped. So they formed a conspiracy. They banded together to create the “Wise We Boys,” a network of reporters and clockers operating in concert to catch Seabiscuit training.⁷ Someone followed Smith every hour of the day, and each reporter received assignments on where and when to be posted. Clockers were stationed at the track twenty-four hours a day, greeting one another with the phrase “What do you know?” Sentries were deployed in concentric circles around Barn 43, even, reportedly, perching in trees. Meetings were held to share information. It was, remembered one reporter, “an epic of espionage.”

The Wise We Boys’ most inspired decision was to send scouts to pick the brains of anyone who had witnessed Smith’s secret training methods in the past. They pooled their findings and made a critical discovery. During his sojourn in the East in 1937, Smith had been caught working Seabiscuit at night four times. While this information wouldn’t normally have been very useful, the reporters were able to pin down the exact times at which the workouts had been held. In every case, the horse had worked precisely at 8:00. Further investigation unearthed evidence that Smith had secretly worked Seabiscuit twice at Bay Meadows. Again, the time was 8:00 P.M. They had found Smith’s witching hour.

A fearless clocker volunteered to verify the finding. On the night of May 17 he scaled the grandstand and slid out onto the roof. Shinnying out onto a perilous but hidden spot, he gripped the roof with one hand and his stopwatch with the other. He waited. The track was flooded in moonlight. He could see every pole along the course, glowing in lunar blue.

At exactly 8:00, Smith emerged. He walked the length of the grandstand, checking for spies. Seeing no one, he pointed his flashlight at the barns and flicked it on and off twice. Seabiscuit emerged under a rider and cantered up to the far turn. As he dropped into a run, the clocker punched his watch. Seabiscuit rolled around the track, then slowed to a walk and returned to the barn. The clocker stopped his watch and crawled back down.

The next morning, papers across the nation ran the workout time, which was slow, and attributed it to Seabiscuit. Not one paper mentioned the circumstances, reporting the work exactly as if the horse had gone out in the standard manner. Smith said nothing.

The following afternoon Smith emerged from the barn to swing Pollard up on a horse for a race. As he stood in the paddock, a reporter’s voice sang out from the crowd.

“Is it true, Mr. Smith, you consider eight P.M. to be your lucky hour?”

“Tom answered,” wrote a delighted Jolly Roger, “with a grunt of something akin to rage.”

There was rejoicing among the Wise We Boys. “Score: Newsmen 1, Tom Smith 0,” trumpeted Jolly Roger in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Smith executed a flanking maneuver. A few days later, reporters and clockers were startled to see him leading Seabiscuit out in broad daylight. He was heading toward the training track, which abutted the main track’s clubhouse turn. Had Jean Harlow been dancing stark naked around the sixteenth pole, the press box could not have cleared out any faster. Thinking that Smith was surrendering and victory was at hand, the Wise We Boys grabbed their stopwatches and bolted from the booth, ran down through the bowels of the immense building and into the parking lot, piled into their cars, sped over to the training track, bailed out, and sprinted to the side of the course. There they sat, panting and congratulating one another, watching the gap in the track and waiting for Smith to lead Seabiscuit in and lay down his arms, like Lee at Appomattox.

Time passed. A breeze whistled over the empty track. Seabiscuit didn’t come. The laughter gradually died out.

By the time the boys at the training track realized that they had been had, it was all over. Seeing that he had emptied out the clockers’ stand and reporters’ booths, Smith had simply turned Seabiscuit around and worked him over on the main track. He had fooled every single clocker and newsman on the grounds.

Knowing he wouldn’t be able to pull that off twice, Smith tried his most ingenious move: hiding in plain sight. Since his pursuers were focused on discovering him working Seabiscuit late at night, before dawn, and on the training track, Smith scheduled a workout on the main track in the daytime, just after the last race. He knew that the clockers and reporters would never believe that he would do something so obvious, and would pay no attention to him.

Because Belmont rules stated that any workout in daylight after the last race had to be approved, Smith had to consult the stewards. He knew better than to walk over to the stewards’ stand—a reporter stood by to tail him wherever he went—so he called the office instead.

When the phone rang, the stewards were tied up in meetings. By fantastic coincidence, a reporter named Eddie Farrell happened to have just taken a seat by the phone while he waited to speak with the stewards. Hearing the ringing, a steward yelled into the office, asking Farrell if he would pick up the phone. Farrell answered with a simple hello.

“This is trainer Tom Smith speaking,” came the voice over the line. “I would like permission to work a horse after the last race.”

Farrell couldn’t believe his ears. He turned in his chair and called to the stewards. “Tom Smith would like permission to work a horse after the last race.”

“Tell him all right,” came the reply.

Farrell banged down the phone, dashed to the press box, rounded up the clockers, and delivered the news.

One half hour after the last race was run that evening, twenty-two giggling newsmen and clockers tiptoed to the top of the grandstand. They crammed into the press box and hid themselves, keeping the lights out and spying through peepholes. Grinning and giddy, they watched as Smith’s charge worked over a mile and an eighth. The following morning the papers were full of stories on Seabiscuit’s workout, but again, the reporters made no mention of the circumstances. “Score, newsmen 2, Tom Smith 0,” wrote Jolly Roger.

But there was something out of place about the incident. Some of the clockers, training their field glasses on Tom Smith’s face as he led the horse back to the barn, noticed a glaring incongruity. Tom Smith looked happy.

“I’m wondering,” Jolly Roger wrote later, “if that really was Seabiscuit the boys were looking at.” It occurred to him for the first time that Grog, who was supposed to be in California, hadn’t made an appearance out there in a good long time.

The question was still eating at him later as he sat at his spy post outside Smith’s cottage. Curious, he trained his field glasses on Smith through the cottage window. There sat the trainer, pushed up against the oil stove. Smith, Roger noted with despair, “had a slight, knowing smile.”

Had Smith known he was speaking to a reporter when he called the stewards’ office that afternoon? “I was just wondering which would be the winner in a contest such as this—an Indian fighter’s intuition or that wily old boy, coincidence,” Roger wrote later. “Personally, I’m coupling Seabiscuit and Intuition.”

At the murky press of daybreak on May 20, Pollard took Seabiscuit to the track, jogged him around to warm up, then walked him to the training track and into the starting gate. It was immediately clear that Seabiscuit wasn’t right. He started banging around the gate like Chanceview and refused to settle down. When the bell rang, he left it like a shot. Pollard flattened down for a hard mile workout. The first few furlongs went well, but gradually, Seabiscuit began to slow down. After a third quarter in 25⅖, Pollard reached back and delivered a crack with the whip. There was no response. The horse kept decelerating. After a final quarter in 27 ⅗, Pollard pulled him up.

The stopwatch told the tale. It had taken Seabiscuit 1:42 to negotiate eight furlongs on the training track, and that was under strong urging. Worst of all, it was by far the fastest mile the horse had worked since coming to Belmont. The reporters, for once, had caught the workout. “Somebody ought to tell him that he’s going to fight War Admiral,” one of them mused after watching Seabiscuit slog by. “If he goes into the ring that way against the Admiral, he’ll be batted out in a helluva hurry.”

The rumors that had been filtering down the backstretch, whispered in confidence between clockers and horsemen, suddenly became noisy public accusations: Something is wrong with Seabiscuit. The newsmen peppered the nation’s papers with stories about the slow workouts. People were hollering suspicious questions at Smith everywhere he went. The atmosphere was growing hostile. Smith needed a little Howard image control, but he was on his own. The Howards were on a cruise around Bermuda. They had visited briefly in early May, just before embarking on the ship. Howard, chattering gaily about how he had been mobbed on the train by Seabiscuit fans who were coming to New York for the race, swung by the barn for a quick once-over of his horse.

“He never looked better,” said Howard.⁸

“Right,” said Smith.

Then the Howards had sailed off. They had no idea that a problem had arisen since their departure or that Smith was in a terrible predicament. The reporters pestered the trainer over and over again: Is the horse okay? Seabiscuit, Smith said repeatedly, had “never been better.”

One week before the match, Pollard rode out onto the Belmont course for his final test before the match race. He was aboard Fair Knightess, who was making her first start since she and Pollard went down in the San Carlos three months before. In this, the Handspring Handicap, she was a long shot; no one had thought that Smith could get her back into racing condition after her injuries. Firing her out of the gate, Pollard sent her up alongside the favorite, then drew off to a commanding lead on the backstretch. No one could catch them. Pollard and Fair Knightess, who might have died together on the track at Santa Anita, cantered home easy winners. Pollard was ready to go.

Seabiscuit was not. Smith was shaken. The horse’s speed was gone, and Smith didn’t know why. The issue was being treated as a scandal. The New York Daily Mirror was demanding that racing officials step in and investigate the horse’s condition and either call off the race or assure the alarmed public that Seabiscuit was in good shape.⁹ Even Walter Winchell chimed in, questioning Seabiscuit’s fitness. Smith’s defenses were less and less convincing. Apparently in an effort to mollify the inflamed press, he let photographers back into the barn. If the horse was unsound, he said, he would never let him out of his stall to work out. The reporters wanted to see the horse in the daylight. Smith, his nerves at the breaking point, made an ominous statement implying that there would be no match race, then led the horse out.

Few seemed to have noticed what Smith had, which was that War Admiral looked even worse than Seabiscuit. On May 17, it had taken him a doddering 1:49 to negotiate a mile, a time even slower than Seabiscuit’s. Four days later, it took him 2:08⅕, trotting horse time, to run the race distance of a mile and a quarter. On May 23 he had seemed so uncharacteristically narcotized in starting-gate drills that a bystander had remarked, “You’d swear he was a dull-witted lead pony instead of the high-strung animal he is.” By many reports, Riddle and Conway were weighing whether or not to scratch their horse from the race, but they were waiting in hopes that Seabiscuit would be withdrawn first, saving them from being blamed for the massive disappointment. Smith was getting conflicting signals. Some people were telling him to stay in the race, that War Admiral was training so badly that Seabiscuit, bad form and all, could lick him. Others warned Smith that War Admiral’s bad works may have been designed to fool Smith about the colt’s condition.¹⁰ He didn’t know what to do, and the reporters wouldn’t stop pressuring him.

Was the horse lame?

“No.”

Was he not in shape?

“If the horse is not in shape, I’ll pull him out of there.”

Was he sick?

“He galloped yesterday. Sick horses don’t gallop. They act sick.”

It was time to make a decision, but the Howards were hundreds of miles away. Smith patched through an emergency call to their cruise ship: Come to Belmont.

The Howards couldn’t believe the state in which they found Belmont. Wild accusations were flying around, including one published charge that Smith was deliberately working the horse slowly in order to get long odds in the race. Everyone wanted to know if the horse would run. Howard was privately distressed but publicly reassuring and confident. To quiet the doubters, he gave his word that the public would be able to see Seabiscuit work a full ten furlongs—the race distance—at three-thirty on the afternoon of May 24.

On the morning of the appointed day, Smith took Seabiscuit to the track for a short morning gallop, in preparation for the afternoon’s public workout. He studied his horse’s action. His eyes fixed on the horse’s knees.

There it was: a faint whisper of soreness. It was subtle, but it was there.

Howard had a terrible decision to make. Seabiscuit probably could run in the race. At best, he would probably lose. At worst, he could be injured. Howard’s inclination was to scratch him, but the potential consequences were daunting.

Belmont officials, anticipating the largest crowd ever to attend a horse race in America, had worked themselves to exhaustion and spent $30,000 to publicize the race and prepare the track. In the Belmont grandstand, which, if stood on end, would nearly equal the height of the new Empire State Building, every seat was booked. Millions had been wagered. Silversmiths had already cast an elaborate trophy. Press coverage was at saturation levels. The buildup to the Memorial Day Indy 500, normally a huge sporting event, was all but squeezed out of the nation’s press; in the San Francisco Chronicle, coverage of the auto race was buried, alongside an interpretation of the tides. The horses were on the cover of Newsweek as well as the ubiquitous Radio Guide, which showed War Admiral galloping, Seabiscuit yawning. Billboards advertising the event rimmed every major road on Long Island. CBS Radio had taken out full-page ads to promote its international broadcast of the race. Several “Seabiscuit Limited” trains, packed to the doors, were already en route from the West Coast. Other chartered trains were coming from Kentucky, Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia. Bing Crosby had booked a plane east with a huge party of his friends. Swope, Widener, and Whitney had gone out on a narrow limb to give Howard what he had demanded, putting up an enormous purse and postponing the Suburban Handicap, a fixture of the biggest racing day of the spring, to accommodate the race. There was even talk of shipping old Man o’ War all the way from Kentucky to accompany his son and grandson to the post. The world awaited the race with rapt attention.

And should Howard decide to scratch the horse, he knew that it would only confirm the long-standing belief that his horse was a “cripple.” “Now the one time out of so many times that the critics appear to be right,” Howard said bitterly, “has to come just before a race like this.”¹¹

Hours before Seabiscuit was to undertake his public workout, Howard and Smith retreated to the cottage by the barn. Nearby, the grooms stood with the horse they called “Old Pop,” grim-faced, watching the door and saying nothing. Seabiscuit, oblivious, rooted around in his hay.

A passerby finally broke the silence.

“He looks all right.”

“Yes, he looks all right,” replied a groom.

“But he hasn’t been working very well, has he?”

“No, he hasn’t.”

In midafternoon, the cottage door opened. Smith emerged, went to Seabiscuit’s stall, and began preparing to send the horse out. Howard went to the stewards’ stand, to which he called C. V. Whitney, Joseph Widener, and Herbert Bayard Swope. At the track, crowds began to gather to see the workout.

Smith led Seabiscuit toward the course. Howard disappeared into the administrative offices to explain the problem to Swope and Whitney and get their opinion. A few minutes later, he walked out. A crush of reporters pushed up to him. His voice wavered as he began to speak.

It was three-thirty. Back on the track, Smith boosted Pollard up on Seabiscuit, swung his leg over Pumpkin’s back, and began moving down the course. The track announcer’s voice cut over the grandstand.

The race was off.¹²

The crowd sagged. Smith led Seabiscuit past the stunned fans and back into the barn.

At the stewards’ office, Howard gave his profound apologies to everyone, then took Marcela back to their lodgings at the Garden City Hotel. She wanted to cry in private.

Howard was mortified over the disaster he had created. And he was worried about his horse. “I don’t know if he’ll ever come out of his soreness,” he said.¹³ “We won’t patch him up and send him out there to break his heart trying to win.” The idea of retiring him and taking him home to Ridgewood began playing in his mind. Smith shook his head. The horse was not through yet. Smith could work through the lameness. Howard came to believe him. They began laying plans.

Howard was in a fix. His efforts to arrange a match at Belmont had not only fallen through, they had greatly diminished his chances of ever securing a meeting between the two horses. Riddle, who had never been more than lukewarm about it, could now say that he had tried to get the match race but that Howard had backed out. War Admiral could go into his scheduled retirement at season’s end without anyone accusing him of dodging the best competition. Belmont officials were snakebit. Howard did his best to warm them to the idea of rescheduling the match, even setting aside his heretofore paramount goal of breaking Sun Beau’s earnings mark. Forget the $100,000 purse, he said. Once Seabiscuit recovered, he would welcome a race at Belmont held merely on a sporting basis.¹⁴ Belmont officials grudgingly agreed to consider it, and there was talk of rescheduling the race for the fall meeting.

Riddle put an end to that. Belmont officials, trying to come up with some way to salvage the weekend, telephoned Riddle and offered War Admiral a berth in the Suburban Handicap, which had been moved to Saturday, May 28, to accommodate the match. Though War Admiral had been assigned 132 pounds, Riddle accepted. The day appeared to have been saved. Twenty-five thousand fans, many of whom had crossed the country expecting to see the race of the century, mobbed Belmont on race day. The papers were singing of Riddle’s sportsmanship in starting War Admiral in the race. The crowd, which had greeted Howard’s announcement with sympathy and understanding, was eager to see its consolation prize.

At the very last second, without any warning, Riddle and Conway refused to start War Admiral. They offered no explanation. Officials insisted that they give one, so they cited poor track condition. As the track was, by all accounts, perfect—the Suburban was run in record time—no one believed them.

War Admiral’s scratch appeared on the jockey board in the infield.¹⁵ Most of the reporters, and much of the crowd, believed that Riddle had simply balked at the 132-pound impost and didn’t care enough about the consequences of scratching to do the sportsmanlike thing. The crowd had run out of patience. A cacophony of boos and catcalls rolled down the grandstand for a full two minutes. Riddle, wrote one spectator, “was accused of everything under the sun save the shooting of Lincoln and the current recession.”

C. V. Whitney listened to the din and was livid. Asked if he would agree to a War Admiral–Seabiscuit rescheduling, he snapped.

“Not if I could buy them for a dime a dozen. I’ll never again consent to such a thing.”¹⁶

After seeing what Belmont had gone through, no other track managers were likely to agree to a race either. There was a rumor that Seabiscuit’s lameness was a ruse designed to avoid a loss to War Admiral, and an awful lot of people believed it. Howard had, it seemed, only one chance left. If no one was willing to arrange a match, he was going to have to follow War Admiral to his next scheduled contest, to pit Seabiscuit against him in a full-field race.

The next suitable venue was the Massachusetts Handicap on June 29. War Admiral was slated to run in it, and though Suffolk Downs’s officials made no effort to invite defending champion Seabiscuit, Howard had already entered him. Seabiscuit would have a full month to recover, ample time, said Smith, for him to work the soreness out of those knees.

Perhaps Riddle felt the sting of his public excoriation. On June 6, he ran his colt in Aqueduct’s Queen’s County Handicap despite a 132-pound impost. Many of the fans, eager to let Riddle know how they felt about the scratching of a week before, attempted to drown out any cheering with lusty howls.¹⁷ In spite of the mixed reception, War Admiral won. Then he loaded up and headed north to Suffolk Downs to prepare for the Massachusetts Handicap. On June 14, Smith and the Howards followed him. Pollard and his agent, Yummy, came with them. Woolf stayed behind. With Pollard in perfect condition, he thought they didn’t need him.

Seabiscuit and his walker visit with Pollard after a workout.

(© BETTMANN/CORBIS)

Chapter 15

FORTUNE’S FOOL

It was the early morning of June 23, 1938, workout hours. At Boston’s Suffolk Downs, horses skittered and blew over the track, slower ones making lazy loops around the oval, faster ones humming down the rail. In the clockers’ stand, men clicked stopwatches and jotted down numbers.

There was a pause, and all eyes refocused up the track. Around the turn came a long man on a low horse. The man was Red Pollard; the horse was Seabiscuit. The great rolling wheel of Red’s life had swung upward again, and he could not suppress his high spirits. He was riding in fine form, everything clicking, the broken bones mended, his timing right. Beneath him that morning was Seabiscuit, and Pollard could feel from the tension in the reins and the rhythm under him that Smith had worked his magic. The horse was, as they said, “sound as a Roosevelt dollar” and jumping out of his skin to run. He clicked past the track poles at a staccato pace. Pollard tipped back in the irons and Seabiscuit tugged on his hands, picking off six furlongs in 1:12⅕, marvelous time. The horse finished the mile sparkling and galloped out an eighth of a mile farther, still burning Pollard’s arms in his eagerness to continue.

A smile shimmered over Smith’s face. Six days to go until the Massachusetts Handicap. Bring on War Admiral.

Back at the barn, Pollard jumped off and handed the reins to a groom. He sat down in front of a shed row to rest and chat with friends. While sitting there, he caught sight of an old friend from his Tijuana days, owner Bert Blume, and the two began talking. Blume was in trouble. A rider had promised to gallop a green two-year-old named Modern Youth for him but hadn’t shown up. There were no other riders available. The workout was critical; the colt was scheduled to race and needed a blowout. The race in question was a forgettable weekday event for a trifling purse, but Blume was strapped for money. Pollard, Blume remembered later, “had been broke often enough to know what it was like.” And he had not forgotten a good turn Blume had done him back in his bush-league days.

“I’ll work the bum,” Pollard said. He hopped aboard the horse and trotted off. Had the rider given Blume a moment to consider the risk Pollard was taking in riding an immature colt just before a major race, Blume would not have let him go. But Pollard, as Blume noted, was impulsive with his generosity. He and Modern Youth were gone in an instant. All Blume could do was watch.

Flying past the three-eighths pole at breakneck speed, Modern Youth suddenly spooked, bolting to the right, and headed straight for the outer rail. Pollard couldn’t stop him. The colt plunged through the rail, somehow got his hooves back under him again, and fled for the barns. Pollard clung to his back, unable to regain control. The horse was running in a blind terror, streaking down the shed rows. He was probably doing thirty or so when he tried to cut between two barns. He was moving too fast to make it. He skidded sideways and slammed into the corner of a barn, then fell in a heap.

A sickening noise ran down the long line of barns. It was Pollard. He was screaming.

His right leg was nearly sheared off below the knee.¹

All along the backstretch, men dropped what they were doing and ran toward the sound. They found Pollard lying on the ground, writhing spastically. The flesh of his leg had been ripped away, exposing the bone. Pollard’s face was a rictus of agony, his lips peeled back over his teeth, and gusts of pain were rolling through his body and escaping through his mouth in deep guttural roars.

Someone ran for an ambulance, but the one that sat at the track during the day’s races had not yet arrived. Someone else called Smith, who rang for an ambulance and then sped toward the barns. The stable hands, despairing of getting help to the track fast enough, fetched the only transportation on hand, a little runabout truck that the track starter used to motor around the course. The truck had no passenger seat, and the back was cluttered with gate equipment. So while Pollard lay on the ground, his cries distilling down to long strings of barked obscenities, the panicked stable hands heaved the gear out of the runabout. They sprinted down the shed rows, gathering pommel pads, horse blankets, and rub rags, and threw them on the truck bed to serve as a makeshift gurney mattress. They hoisted the screaming rider up from the foot of the barn wall and gently laid him on the horse paraphernalia. The starter jumped into the driver’s seat while a host of stable hands climbed in around Pollard, who was swearing out every oath in his tremendous vocabulary. The little runabout chugged off onto the road.

Back at the barn, Blume was in tears. He sobbed uncontrollably for an hour and sank into a weeklong guilt-inspired bender. He never forgave himself.

Though Winthrop Hospital was only five minutes from the track, none of the stable hands knew where it was. The runabout driver steered the truck blindly through the streets, slowed by heavy traffic, trying to find someone to help Pollard. The jockey never stopped screaming. An excruciating forty-five minutes passed. Pollard was growing more and more frantic. Then, across lanes of traffic ahead, someone spotted a physician’s bungalow. The runabout puttered toward it.

Just then an ambulance screamed up behind the starter’s truck and pulled to a halt. Smith sprang out. After commandeering the ambulance at the track, he had been combing the streets for nearly an hour in search of the runabout. He found Pollard mad with pain, “hotter than a smoking .45,” went one account, “and not holding back.” They transferred their wailing patient into the ambulance. Smith climbed in beside him, and the driver hit the siren and slammed the pedal to the floor, darting in and out of lanes and swerving around cars. Along a road running perpendicular to a river, the traffic thickened, bogging the ambulance down. Pollard became wild, screeching and howling in the back.

“Tom!” he shouted. “Stop this wagon! I can’t stand it any longer. Stop it, I tell you!” His voice was so loud that passersby across the river turned to see what the commotion was. Smith, shaken by Pollard’s insistence, told the driver to stop.

Pollard sat up and began searching the lines of buildings. His eyes hit on one.

“STOP!” he bellowed. “That’s the place.” He pointed to a liquor store. “Tom, I tell you I cannot get to that hospital alive if you don’t get on over there and buy me a bottle of beer.”

Smith, a lifelong teetotaler who strongly disapproved of Pollard’s drinking, probably waved off the jockey’s plaintive wails for alcohol that morning. But his agent, Yummy, came through. Speeding to the hospital, he snuck a crock of bow-wow wine in to Pollard. He found the stricken rider distracting himself from his pain by firing off aphorisms from Ralph Waldo Emerson—“Old Waldo”—at the nurses.

Yummy saw Pollard’s leg and was horrified. Both bones of his lower leg were splintered. Yummy knew what the injuries meant. He reeled over by the telephones and wept. He spent the morning calling Pollard’s friends, crying into the phone as he broke the news. “The Cougar just got throwed off a horse he was working and busted his leg,” he sobbed to David Alexander. Yummy stayed by Pollard all day, despondent, greeting the worried friends who came to see him. He would still be there long after nightfall.

Someone contacted San Francisco and told the Howards what had happened. Howard got on the telephone and pulled every string he had. Almost immediately he had a team of the nation’s best orthopedic specialists on planes, flying in to Boston at his expense.² They examined Pollard’s leg. Somehow, they saved it from amputation, but it was a hollow victory.

Pollard, they announced, would probably never walk again. His career was declared over.

Smith wired the news to Woolf in New York, asking that he come up immediately. Woolf sped north.

Pollard stabilized. Woolf arrived to take his place on Seabiscuit. On the backstretch, there was only one reminder of the accident. At 6:00 one morning shortly after Pollard went down, a fully equipped ambulance rolled onto the racecourse, pulled over to the side, and parked. Suffolk Downs made sure that it would be there every morning from that day forward. No fallen rider, at least at Suffolk Downs, would have to go to the hospital in a starter’s runabout again.

At the Howard barn, life had to go on. Smith prepared Kayak, the horse Lin Howard had bought in Argentina and sold to his father, for a purse race at Suffolk. As soon as the colt had disembarked in California, Smith had sent him to the Burlingame Polo Grounds near the Howards’ house. He had put the best man he knew, his own son Jimmy, in charge of his breaking and early training. The son had clearly inherited his father’s instincts. Returned to the elder Smith once he matured, Kayak showed promise. A very difficult horse upon his arrival, he was now as tame as a kitten. In his first start, at New York’s Aqueduct Racecourse under Pollard on June 10, he had led into the stretch and lost narrowly, finishing second. Smith was starting to think that Kayak was going to be awfully good.

Seabiscuit took well to Woolf’s guidance. His workouts for the Massachusetts Handicap were brilliant. All traces of knee soreness were gone, and his action was smoother than ever. Smith sent him out one morning for a three-furlong workout. He lined Seabiscuit up at the three-eighths pole, positioned a sprinting stablemate fifty yards ahead and set them off at the same time. Seabiscuit mowed his stablemate down with incredible speed, running the first eighth in 11 seconds, a quarter in 23, and three eighths in 36. “If that isn’t running,” Smith later said, “I don’t know anything about horses.”³

War Admiral, meanwhile, was his usual combative self. Guarded by Spot, a surly Dalmatian who took hunks of flesh out of reporters who got too close, he stormed around the barn and fretted, pouted and balked in his workouts.⁴ At times he refused to run without a workmate. One day he backed himself up against a fence and froze there, Hard Tack–style, simply refusing to budge. His handlers scurried around, trying to coax him into moving. In the end the only way Conway was able to get him to move at all was to turn him the wrong way around the track.

On June 26 Smith was set to give Seabiscuit his last prerace workout. Outside was a driving rain. Charles and Marcela were due in that afternoon, so Smith delayed the workout. The rain fell all day. At four-thirty the Howards arrived. The track was a quagmire. Howard and Smith stepped out into the muck and worried. In normal conditions, they wouldn’t have worked the horse, but Seabiscuit couldn’t afford to miss another workout before meeting War Admiral. Smith led the horse out. Seabiscuit flew through the slop to clock six furlongs in 1:12⅖. Howard beamed.

On June 28, the day before the race, heavy rain was still raking the course. Entries were due by 10:30 A.M. At 9:30, War Admiral’s entry was made. Conway was confident. “He can beat anything on four feet,” he had told reporters upon arriving at Suffolk with the bucking, rearing War Admiral in hand, “and if anything beats him, we will know the miracle of the ages has happened.”⁵ Seabiscuit, he said, was “just one more horse to beat.”

Still Howard and Smith waited. The rain never let up. Smith went down to the track office with his entry but just stood there without entering the horse, watching the rain. Finally, just fourteen minutes before entries closed, he made the entry. The decision was not final; they could still scratch him at any point up to forty-five minutes before post time. “We’re still on the fence,” said Howard.⁶ If the track stayed loose and wet, the horse was in; if the rain stopped and the track turned into the kind of thick surface that would pull on Seabiscuit’s legs, he was out. Smith went back to the barn and readied Kayak for his purse race. The horse was superb, skipping over the mud to win. His time was excellent.

That night David Alexander and a host of radio technicians arrived at Pollard’s hospital room. NBC had asked Alexander to host a nationally aired, live interview with Woolf and Pollard, conducted from Pollard’s hospital room. Woolf would be on a hookup from a Boston broadcasting studio. Alexander found Pollard lying supine with his leg up in traction, his misery greatly assuaged by a leggy private nurse named Agnes. The technicians set up a makeshift radio studio around his bed. Concerned that Pollard’s famously mischievous ad-libs might get them kicked off the air, Alexander had come prepared. He presented Pollard with a complete script for the interview, leaving nothing to the jockey’s rich imagination or questionable vocabulary. At the studio, Woolf was given the same script.

At first the interview went as planned. Woolf read his lines, and Pollard read his responses. When they reached the section devoted to race tactics, Woolf dutifully recited his line asking Pollard how he should ride the race. Just then, Pollard’s script spilled to the floor. The pages fluttered everywhere. Alexander hurriedly tried to gather them up. He looked up, a mess of papers in hand, just as Pollard opened his mouth. In the jockey’s eyes, Alexander saw “an evil gleam.”

“Why, Georgie boy,” said Pollard to the eager ears of the entire nation, “get on the horse—face to the front—put one leg on each side of him, get someone to lead you into the gate, and then fuck it up like you usually do.”

For a moment the only sound reaching the NBC radio audience was a brief swish! as the radio technicians lunged for their controls.⁷ Woolf collapsed into peals of laughter. Alexander forged on with the interview, but the discussion he had planned so carefully had broken down completely. Woolf couldn’t stop laughing and was barely able to grunt out his responses.

NBC didn’t think it was so funny. The quip was a national scandal. The network, horrified at Pollard, wrote up a sanitized transcript of the interview.

The harrows worked the track all night. Howard kept the reporters up late. He was careful not to raise expectations. “My horse is sharper than a fishwife’s tongue, and I’m as anxious as the next man to see him race against War Admiral.⁸ But a ‘holding track’ definitely is against him, and if we have to miss Mr. Riddle’s horse today, we’ll catch up with him yet.”

In the morning the rain stopped. Seabiscuit was taken to the track for a final blowout. He ran beautifully. Smith took him back to the stall, inspected his legs, found them clean and cool, and bound them up in bandages for the rest of the morning. As midday rolled past, seventy thousand fans spilled out of the hotels and special trains and poured into the track. It was the second-largest crowd ever to attend a horse race in North America.⁹ Among the fans was Samuel Riddle. It had taken a special effort to get him to the track that afternoon. He was in poor health and had to come with the assistance of his physician, who sat with him.

Howard and Smith went out to make their final decision. They walked down the track from the finish line to the far turn. Their feet sank to the ankles, but the mud was loose. They looked for the “cupping” that told of a sticky track, but they didn’t find it. One hour before post time, fifteen minutes before the deadline for scratches, they decided to go. Seabiscuit’s number blinked up on the board. The race was on. Smith had never been more confident in his horse. Not normally a betting man, he cleaned out his pockets and put it all on Seabiscuit’s nose.

Forty minutes before post time, Smith walked into Seabiscuit’s stall. The bandages were unraveled from the horse’s legs. Smith slid his hands over the horse’s joints and tendons, feeling for the uniform cool firmness of a healthy leg. Halfway down one foreleg, his fingers tracing the bones and soft tissues of the lower leg, Smith paused. Seabiscuit was flinching. Smith looked hard at the spot. There was no break in the skin, and the hair lay flat. He touched it again. He felt a slender vein of heat, running from the ankle to the knee. The leg was injured. Smith realized that the horse must have kicked himself while galloping that morning. Because the skin had not been nicked and the heat had been slow to settle in, Smith had missed it. He could not race this horse.

But the trainer was too late. The deadline for scratches had passed five minutes before. Already the other horses, War Admiral included, were trickling to the paddock. Smith would have to appeal to the stewards for special permission to withdraw his horse. Clutching a scratch form, he left Seabiscuit in his stall and ran for the stewards’ stand.

He had to cut through the crowd to reach it, and the throng was packed in and tamped down. Minutes slipped by as Smith waded through the mass of spectators. Finally, he made it to the ladder that led to the stewards’ stand, suspended from the grandstand roof. He cleared the ladder and burst into the room. Seabiscuit, he announced, was injured and could not run. The stewards stared at him, incredulous.

No one moved. Smith realized that they didn’t believe him.

Smith’s high jinks with the press and Seabiscuit’s recent history of scratches had come back to haunt him. The stewards had probably heard rumors that Seabiscuit had not really been lame at Belmont, and they were determined not to be duped. Every one of them believed that Smith had simply decided to duck War Admiral and was using injury as an excuse.

Chief steward Tom Thorpe demanded that Smith run his horse. Smith refused. They traded charges and countercharges. A crowd of reporters gathered outside the room, looking in the windows. They could see Smith and the stewards making angry gestures at each other, but they couldn’t make out the words. Finally, Smith walked around the room, holding the scratch form straight out in front of him, offering it to each steward in turn. Each one glared back at him and refused to take it. Furious, Smith shredded up the form and stormed out. No one, he snapped, was going to force him to race an injured horse.

The stewards sat there and mulled over what to do. Outside, the crowd sensed that something was up. Every horse but Seabiscuit was in the paddock. A few people began to boo.

Howard was brought in. The stewards wanted him to overrule his trainer. Howard knew that another scratching would bring down an avalanche of criticism, but he would not second-guess Smith. He proposed a compromise. Bring in the track veterinarians to decide. The stewards agreed. If two track vets could confirm that the horse was really injured, Smith could scratch him. Otherwise, the horse had to run. With that, everyone dashed off to find two veterinarians. Post time was now a few minutes away. After a frantic hunt, two veterinarians were finally located and taken to the stall. They went over the horse and delivered their verdict.

Smith was right. A tendon running up the back of Seabiscuit’s left foreleg was strained. The horse, the veterinarians said, would probably never run again. The stewards backed down, but they were livid. In the jockeys’ room, Woolf unbuttoned his silks and took them off.

Seabiscuit’s number went dark on the tote board.¹⁰ The crowd began to boo. On national radio, commentators declared that Seabiscuit’s career was over. At the track, the announcer’s voice called out over the sea of heads, explaining Seabiscuit’s condition. With his first few words, the boos grew in intensity. The crowd was determined to drown out the poor announcer, who became progressively more frustrated. By the end of his message he was screaming into the mike, concluding in an angry bellow, “And this is positively the truth!”

Howard listened to the hooting and was horrified. He rushed to the press box to administer some image control but met a hostile audience. Chief steward Thorpe came in at the same time, venting his rage. “No one coaxed Howard to put his horse in the race because we figured something like this would happen,” he sniped. “I think it was poor sportsmanship.”

The crowd was howling epithets, the stewards were infuriated, the reporters were unsympathetic. For once, no amount of Howard charm could help. He reeled back to his box and sat down to a chorus of catcalls. Gradually, the din died off. Howard was deeply embarrassed, but did not regret what he’d done. “If I had raced him that day,” he remembered later, “I would have broken him down for good. I would have been a fool to do that, no matter what was said of me. The old boy had taken enough punishment in his lifetime without me piling any more on.”

On the track, the race was about to go. War Admiral crashed through the gate several times before settling down to break with the field. His black and yellow silks bobbed along with the pack, then fell back. Somewhere in the race he stepped in a dip in the ground, nearly fell face-first to the track, and emerged with a cut hoof. He labored home far behind the winner, Menow, diving for a photo finish for third place. He returned bleeding, only to have the judges deem that he had lost the photo for third. It was the first time he had ever finished out of the money. Riddle stood up and left. Howard felt a pang of pity for him and his horse. “It seems things are all going wrong, what with Red in the hospital and the Biscuit hurt,” he said.¹¹ “But then, Sam Riddle probably feels worse than we do right now.”

The crowd was sagging. The race caller, collecting himself and trying to salvage something out of the ruined afternoon, cheerily announced that the winning jockey, Nick Wall of Stagehand fame, was “an East Boston boy!” There was no response.

“If anyone proposes another match race between these two super horses,” wrote a reporter after the race, “henceforth, he will be tried in the morning for treason, mutiny, mopery and non compos mentis.”

After the race, the New England Turf Writers Association held its annual dinner. Their evening program reflected the general view of the Seabiscuit crew. On the program cover was a handsome shot of War Admiral. Seabiscuit’s photo was put on the back.

The next morning Smith packed Seabiscuit’s leg in poultices, bundled him up with the rest of the Howard horses, and got the hell out of Boston.

Hollywood Gold Cup, July 16, 1938

(© BETTMANN/CORBIS)

Chapter 16

I KNOW MY HORSE

Seabiscuit’s train chattered west. They were bound for Arlington Park, just outside Chicago, in hopes that they would find some peace there. They didn’t.

When the doors of the railcar slid open and Seabiscuit’s head poked out, Smith was down on the platform waiting for him, standing in a sea of hostile reporters. Unraced for two and a half months, the horse was supercharged. He swung his head around edgily, his ears wagging from under his protective shipping helmet. Smith called out, “Hey there, boy, take it easy,” and Seabiscuit caught sight of him, picking out his rigid form in the crush of men. He relaxed and walked down the gangplank with his usual ease.

Having heard the radio commentators state that Seabiscuit’s injuries were career-ending—statements that no one in the Seabiscuit camp had uttered—and having heard persistent rumors that Smith had lied about the horse, the reporters were immediately suspicious when they saw Seabiscuit step out, walking soundly. They made no secret of their cynicism. “Does he really have a sore tendon?” asked one. “Why was he scratched from the Massachusetts?” yelled another.

“My,” Smith replied, “but you must be having rainy weather around Chicago.”

Someone suggested that Arlington Park officials would demand that Smith work Seabiscuit in their presence before his next scheduled race, the July 4 Stars and Stripes Handicap, to see that there was no “monkey business.” Smith said that complying with such a demand was up to Howard. Then he swung up on Pumpkin, grasped Seabiscuit’s halter, and led him, bucking and antsy, away from the reporters.

Seabiscuit had indeed been injured, but the veterinarians had been wrong. The injury was not as serious as they had feared. Under Smith’s care, Seabiscuit’s leg cooled and healed. He was soon dead sound.

The public pressure on the Howard barn was enormous. After seeing Seabiscuit walk from the train, a local reporter stated that the rumor that his injury had been faked had been “confirmed.” Another called for the stewards to demand that Howard file a definitive guarantee that the horse would start. Arlington Park officials made a point of warning the public that if it rained, Seabiscuit probably would be scratched. But though the press and track officials were skeptical, the public was not. They bought up advance seats at an unprecedented pace, packed into special trains, and crammed into the track in record numbers to see the horse they called “the Great Traveler.”

Right on cue, rain swamped Arlington on race day. Seabiscuit had been assigned 130 pounds, as much as 25 more than his rivals. He would be running on a course that clearly had no time to dry out. The only exercise Smith had time to give him was one slow gallop, followed by a brief half-mile sprint. The horse, idle since the Bay Meadows Handicap in mid-April, was as big as a house. He had no chance of winning the Stars and Stripes, and everyone in his camp knew it. But the pressure from the stewards and the press was too much to bear. Howard announced that as long as it wasn’t raining at the time of the race, his horse would go.

The rain stopped, and the puddles on the track went still. Pumpkin, Howard, and Smith brought Seabiscuit to the paddock, and drew him up beside a swaying willow hedge. The crowds gathered ten deep for one hundred feet in each direction, a few spectators reaching through the slats of the fence to stroke Seabiscuit’s chest as Smith cinched the girth on Woolf’s kangaroo-leather saddle. Howard gave the nod and Woolf rode Seabiscuit out before a crowd of fifty thousand. Shuffled back to last in heavy traffic and carried hopelessly wide on the first turn, Seabiscuit slipped through the mud, but still passed eight horses to finish second. The crowd was quiet. “The Seabiscuit myth,” wrote a reporter, “is broken.”

Smith loaded the horse back onto the train. Woolf and Howard climbed up with him. They were going back to California.

The destination was not Santa Anita, but the new Hollywood Park. The track was offering a $50,000 purse for the inaugural Hollywood Gold Cup, a ten-furlong race that promised to become one of the sport’s premier events. The field was topped by a familiar face. Bing Crosby and Lin Howard’s Ligaroti was finally coming into excellent form. On the day that Seabiscuit lost the Stars and Stripes, the “Argentine Jumping Bean” had broken the track record in the American Handicap. In the race he had defeated Whichcee, who had been universally regarded as California’s second-best horse, behind Seabiscuit. Bing and Lin were overjoyed, and prepped him for the Hollywood Gold Cup. Lin was listed as the official trainer of the horse, but the actual conditioning had been done by Jimmy Smith, Tom’s son. Track officials had been pleading with Howard to bring his horse to the race and make it a family affair, and though Seabiscuit had been assigned 133 pounds, between 13 and 28 pounds more than his competition, Howard accepted. Seabiscuit’s stock was falling through the floor. No one in the Howard camp had any credibility left, and it was widely speculated that the horse’s great days were behind him. Seabiscuit had to run in a big race, and he had to win it.

The race was scheduled for July 16, giving Smith only a week to prepare Seabiscuit after his arrival in California. The trainer did his best to keep him fit on the long journey west. Whenever the train pulled into a stop, he backed Pumpkin into a corner of the railcar and trotted Seabiscuit around and around. Outside the train, admirers mobbed the platforms to watch him go. As the train pulled out, the fans cheered him on his way. With each stop, news that the horse was coming buzzed up the telegraph wires, and a new throng would gather farther along the route. In town after town, through Kansas, New Mexico, and Arizona, the story was the same. At Albuquerque, even the reservation population turned out. As Smith walked the horse by, an ancient Indian leaned up and looked the horse over.

“Racehorse?” he said. Smith nodded.

“Looks like a cow pony to me.”¹

Smith was pleased.

The rumors followed them west. The backstretch at Hollywood was thick with stories, chief among them that Seabiscuit was lame. The stewards listened and worried that they would be burned by Seabiscuit as Belmont and Suffolk Downs had been. They had some reason to be wary. Earlier in the meet, a much-anticipated meeting between Kentucky Derby winner Lawrin and Preakness winner Dauber had to be canceled at the last moment when Dauber suffered a minor injury. The event had been traumatic for the Hollywood Park officials and seemed to make them overly concerned about Smith.

On July 11, 1938, Smith walked Seabiscuit onto the track for his first workout at Hollywood. The trainer didn’t like the looks of the track, which was so deep and crumbly that it was playing at least a second slower than usual.² “It looked like they were trying to grow corn on the track,” he said.³

Before five hundred spectators, Seabiscuit breezed an easy mile under Woolf. He didn’t show a trace of lameness, prompting Smith to announce that the horse was ready to run in the Gold Cup. But no one was ready to believe that things were as they appeared. The rumors about Seabiscuit’s bad-leggedness continued to circulate, and the stewards’ anxiety escalated. Two days later Smith stacked Seabiscuit with 133 pounds, including Woolf, and turned them loose for another workout. With Woolf pulling hard on the reins, Seabiscuit went smoothly and soundly, looking so fit that even the clockers were singing his praises.

The pair of workouts should have been enough to dispel the rumors. They weren’t. As Smith led the horse back to the barn, someone gave him an incredible piece of news. The stewards had commissioned a veterinarian to go over to the Howard barn, pull Seabiscuit out, examine him, and determine whether or not Smith was lying about his horse’s condition.

The action was unprecedented; no one had ever seen stewards treat a trainer with such blatant distrust.⁴ It was all the more extraordinary given the record of the trainer in question; aside from Fair Knightess, Tom Smith had reportedly never had a horse in his care suffer a serious injury.⁵ But Smith had played around with his pursuers for too long. Ever since Oscar Otis had discovered the trainer working Seabiscuit by moonlight in 1937, racing officials had been growing increasingly frustrated. It had finally boiled over.

Standing in the barn next to his perfectly sound horse, Smith was dumbfounded. “Nobody is going to inspect this horse if I know anything about it,” he snapped. “He won’t go postward if I don’t think he’s in good shape. We wouldn’t have shipped Seabiscuit clear across the country if we didn’t believe he was in good shape. And now that he’s here, no clockers, newspapermen, or veterinarians are going to step in and tell me how to train my horse.”

His words fell flat. The veterinarian arrived at the stall, ready to examine the horse whether or not Smith gave him permission. Smith blocked his way.

“Nobody is going to examine Seabiscuit but me,” he snarled. He slammed the stall doors in the veterinarian’s face. The vet gave up and left.

After trying and failing to reach Howard to get him to talk Smith into the exam, the stewards asked Smith to work the horse in their presence, and cleared a slot for him between the third and fourth races on the afternoon of July 14. An assembly of clockers lined up to see the work. They sat there and aged a little, seeing nothing but an empty track. Hollywood Park general manager Jack Mackenzie tried to make an end run around Smith, running up to Howard’s box in hopes of winning his word that Seabiscuit was sound and would start. But Howard, like Smith and Seabiscuit, never showed up. Mackenzie camped out at the box all afternoon, then gave up and went to a telephone and tried to track Howard down. For once in his life, Howard was inaccessible.

That evening Smith finally emerged from the barn with Seabiscuit. Track representatives dropped in behind him, trailing him all over the track. After watching Seabiscuit work, they followed him around while he cooled out, searching for lameness that wasn’t there.

The conflict turned bizarre on the day before the race. Smith sent his stable agent, Sonny Greenberg, to the racing secretary’s office with an entry form. Mackenzie took one look at it and hit the roof. Smith had scrawled two words across it: “Doubtful starter.”

Mackenzie booted Greenberg back out the door with a demand to see Smith in person. Greenberg ran back to Smith.⁶ The trainer scrawled another note and sent Greenberg back to the track offices. The stewards read his message: “I have a previous engagement.”

That did it. Mackenzie was seething. Someone suggested that mercenaries be sent over to the Howard barn to forcibly haul Smith into the office. Setting that popular idea aside, the stewards fired the leg-weary Greenberg back to the barn again, bearing yet another message. “Seabiscuit will either be a positive starter tomorrow, or we will refuse his entry entirely.”

A few minutes later, Greenberg dragged himself back to the offices with Smith’s counterdemand: No one was to show up at his barn asking to examine the horse. The stewards complied, and Greenberg stumbled back to the Howard barn.

In late morning, the administrative office door swung open. The officials looked up, expecting to see Greenberg. It was Smith. The stewards sat blinking at him. “All right,” Smith said. “Take the ‘doubtful starter’ off the blank. Seabiscuit will run all right.”

Back at the barn, resting his sore legs, Greenberg saw Smith laughing. “The madder they got, the better he liked it,” Greenberg remembered. “He just done that for bein’ onery.”

On July 16 a record sixty thousand people pressed into Hollywood Park to see Seabiscuit try for the Gold Cup, while millions more crowded around radio sets to hear NBC’s national broadcast. The radio announcer spent fourteen of the fifteen minutes before the race talking about Seabiscuit. One question hummed through the crowd: Was Seabiscuit the same horse he was when he left California in April?

The fans cheered when Seabiscuit stepped out onto the track, then gave him two more ovations as he paraded to the post and loaded into the gate. Once in, Seabiscuit stood quietly. In stall number one, the quick-footed Specify began acting up, backing, ducking back and forth, and kicking at his handlers. He had been assigned just 109 pounds, and his jockey, Wayne Wright, had reduced himself half to death to make weight.⁷ Wright felt weak and woozy, and was having trouble holding the horse. A lot was riding on his being able to hold himself together: Specify’s owner, Bert Baroni, was so confident that Seabiscuit was lame that he had placed a $5,000 wager on his horse.

Standing under his 133 pounds in the hot sun, Seabiscuit waited. After several minutes and the efforts of three assistant starters, Specify finally stood still. Starter Eddie Thomas reached for the bell. An instant before he rang it, Specify lunged forward. Wright couldn’t hold him. Thomas hit the bell a millisecond later. Specify had lunged himself into a false start, but the race was on. Wright was under Baroni’s orders to restrain the horse, but he simply couldn’t. In a few strides, Specify was six lengths ahead of the field and running away with Wright.

Seabiscuit broke sluggishly and sank back through the field. Going into the first turn with only one horse behind him, Woolf asked Seabiscuit to move up. There was no response. From his post on the homestretch, Smith watched Seabiscuit’s action and gritted his teeth. As he had foreseen, the track was crumbling like sand under the horse’s hooves. In the saddle, Woolf could feel his mount fighting the surface. Seeing that he could not make up ground at this stage, the jockey changed his game plan, eased up, and settled in to wait. The fans grew concerned. Seabiscuit was dropping farther and farther out of the race. After half a mile, he was more than twelve lengths back and still sinking. Woolf was not moving at all, his chin in Seabiscuit’s mane, his eyes on the horses ahead, his hands still. In the grandstand, the crowd pleaded for Woolf to do something.

The Iceman wasn’t worried. “Let ’em run themselves out,” someone heard him saying into Seabiscuit’s ear.⁸ “It’s a long way to go.” Smith had given him orders to stay with Ligaroti, who was now galloping near him. Woolf knew that to put Seabiscuit into a drive to catch Specify would leave him vulnerable to a late rally by Ligaroti. He would not repeat the mistake he had made against Stagehand, moving too soon. He nudged his mount down onto the rail, where the going was smoother, and waited.

With eight horses ahead of him, Woolf couldn’t see what was happening out front. Seabiscuit was built low to the ground, so Woolf’s view was constantly obstructed by bigger horses. Somewhere in the backstretch, he lost sight of Ligaroti. He knew that there was a horse far out in front, but because the runner immediately ahead, Whichcee, was blocking his view, he couldn’t tell if it was Specify or Ligaroti. It was critical to know. If it was Ligaroti, a horse with a sustained stretch drive, he would have to move now and hope Seabiscuit could hold his rally. If it was the shorter-winded Specify, whom he expected to collapse in the homestretch, he could afford to wait.

Late in the backstretch, Woolf shifted Seabiscuit to the outside and craned around Whichcee. He caught sight of the horse out in front, but he still didn’t know who it was. He looked at the horse’s jockey. He was leading with his left hand. Woolf knew that among the local riders, only Wayne Wright was left-handed. So it had to be Specify. He studied Wright’s hands. He was holding the reins loosely, and they were flapping on Specify’s neck. It was all Woolf needed to see. Specify was at the top of his speed, with nothing in reserve. Woolf was sure that he would soon burn out. He began to edge Seabiscuit closer but didn’t ask him for his best, thinking that Ligaroti was tracking him. A tentative cheer rose out of the crowd. Seabiscuit was only making up ground in inches, and he was still at least eight lengths behind. Time was running out.

Leaning around the far turn, Woolf drew a bead on Specify again. Incredibly, the horse was still rolling. A pang of fear went through Woolf. Ligaroti was somewhere behind him; bumped and pinched hard on the backstretch, he had been knocked too far back, and would finish a fast-closing fourth. Woolf knew he could easily beat the others, but he was beginning to worry that he couldn’t catch Specify. Dropping flat in the saddle, he gave his mount two taps with the whip and clucked in his ear. Up in the booth, caller Joe Hernandez saw him do it, and shouted into the microphone. “And here comes Seabiscuit!”

For a moment Seabiscuit faltered, the ground breaking up under his hooves. But all at once, his turn speed emerged. He bent his body to the arc of the rail and punched into the belly of the field. At the top of the stretch, he shot out of the front of the pack. Specify came into view, still leading by four lengths. Whichcee was on his outside. Woolf looked back for Ligaroti just as his mount caught sight of Specify. Seabiscuit’s ears flipped back and flattened. Woolf didn’t need to tell his horse what to do. Seabiscuit lunged forward, cutting inside of Whichcee and gunning for Specify.

Woolf felt like he was flying. He put his whip away. “There was nothing to do,” he said later, “but give him his way.” Specify’s hindquarters neared, and Woolf pulled back a tick on his left rein to give Seabiscuit clear sailing. Seabiscuit swept up to Specify and finished him. He accelerated away and cruised under the wire all alone, breaking the track record.

As four pageboys struggled to haul the four-foot-high solid-gold trophy to Howard in the winner’s circle, Woolf was wreathed in flowers. “I thought it would be easy,” he said. “It was.” Howard laughed and smiled and stroked Seabiscuit’s nose. The awards presenter, the comely actress Anita Louise, handed Smith his trophy. The trainer’s uncharacteristically bashful response became the subject of a banner headline: SILENT TOM SMILES!⁹

Someone told Smith about Bert Baroni’s $5,000 bet that the supposedly lame Seabiscuit would lose to Specify. Smith laughed so hard, said a witness, “I thought he’d bust.”¹

Seabiscuit, sound, brilliantly fast, and impeccably prepared, had spoken on Smith’s behalf. The reporters had been wrong, and they knew it. Up in the press box, they stayed late to bang out praises and apologies. Down on the track, the cheering went on and on.

After the last race of the day was run and the track had cleared, darkness gathered under the shed rows of the Hollywood backstretch. Virtually everyone was gone but Smith, standing alone with Seabiscuit.

“The clockers told me the horse wasn’t right,” a passerby heard the old trainer say, “and the handicappers said he wasn’t in condition.

“But I know my horse.”¹⁰

———

In one of the wildest and most controversial horse races ever run, Seabiscuit (A) and Ligaroti barrel down the Del Mar homestretch as Spec Richardson, on Ligaroti, repeatedly fouls George Woolf, on Seabiscuit

.

(SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE)

1 For Baroni, losing to Seabiscuit must have been particularly galling. In 1935, when Seabiscuit was two and floundering in low-dollar claiming races, Baroni had contemplated purchasing him for a yard sale price, but shied away from those ugly forelegs. Baroni’s luck wasn’t all bad; the horse he decided to buy instead, the $3,500 claimer Top Row, won the hundred-grander in 1936 and amassed total career earnings of more than $200,000.

Chapter 17

THE DINGBUSTINGEST CONTEST YOU EVER CLAPPED AN EYE ON

Lin Howard was in one of those moods during which crazy ideas sound perfectly sensible. A bullish, handsome man with decisive eyebrows and more hair than he could find use for, Lin had a great deal of money and a habit of having things go his way. So many things in his life had gone his way that it no longer occurred to him not to be in a festive mood, and he spent much of his time celebrating the general goodness of things and sitting with old friends telling fat happy lies. But things had not gone Lin’s way lately, and he was not accustomed to the feeling.

Lin wanted in the worst way to whip his father at racing, to knock his Seabiscuit down a peg or two, and he believed he had the horse to do it in Ligaroti.¹ He was sure enough about it to have made some account-closing bets on the horse, at least one as a side wager with his father, and he was a great deal poorer for it. The last race really ate at him. Ligaroti had been at Seabiscuit’s throat in the Hollywood Gold Cup when another horse had bumped him right out of his game. He had streaked down the stretch to finish fourth and had come back a week later to score a smashing victory over Whichcee in a Hollywood stakes race, firmly establishing himself as the second-best horse in the West. Bing Crosby and Lin were certain that with a weight break and a clean trip, Ligaroti had Seabiscuit’s measure. Charles Howard didn’t see it that way. Since the race, he had been going around with pockets full of clippings about Seabiscuit. Anytime anyone came near him, he would wave the articles around and start gushing, like a new father. The senior Howard probably didn’t hold back when Lin was around. He was immensely proud of Lin’s success with Ligaroti, but he enjoyed tweaking his son, and he was good at it. He had once given Lin a book for Christmas entitled What You Know About Horses. The pages were blank.

One night shortly after the Hollywood Gold Cup, Lin was sitting at a restaurant table across from his father and Bing Crosby. They were apparently talking about the Gold Cup, and Lin was sitting there looking at his father and doing a slow burn. Bing wasn’t too happy either; his misadventures as a horse owner were becoming an embarrassment. An idea was kicking around in Lin’s head, and it seemed as good a time as any to toss it out there. Why not have a match race between Seabiscuit and Ligaroti?

Charles snorted.

Crosby lit up. The year before, he had invested $600,000 in the building of a new track, Del Mar, a magnificent seaside racing palace near San Diego.² Del Mar was a Bing paradise, featuring good racing by day and dinner, dancing, and crooning by night. But in its second year Del Mar needed a boost; daily attendance averaged just six thousand. A match race featuring Seabiscuit was just what the track needed. Crosby knew he could talk the board of directors into footing a big purse for the event. Crosby and Lin worked on Howard for the rest of the meal.

Howard began to see the merits of the race. For one, a sizable purse could get Seabiscuit that much closer to Sun Beau’s money-winning mark; he was still $85,000 short. In addition, Smith might enjoy pitting his horse against one trained by his son, Jimmy, just as Howard would enjoy facing off against Lin. And Lin wouldn’t let up on the needling. Howard gave in.

Lin wanted to make it interesting. He dared his father to make a side bet with him.³ Howard shook him off. He told him he couldn’t bear to take any more money from his own son.

Crosby hustled off to make the arrangements. He returned with a fair deal. Del Mar would put up a winner-take-all purse of $25,000, 14 percent of the entire purse budget for the track’s meeting. Seabiscuit would carry 130 pounds, Ligaroti 115. The race, slated for August 12, would be run over a mile and an eighth. Woolf would ride Seabiscuit, Spec Richardson would ride Ligaroti. Charles and Lin flipped a coin to determine post position. Charles won the toss and picked the rail.

At Del Mar the reporters followed Smith everywhere, but all they got out of him was a gusty “Ugh!”⁴ Unable to catch Seabiscuit working, the newsmen took a page from the Wise We Boys and staked out tactical positions around the track. Smith somehow evaded them. Someone wondered aloud if Seabiscuit was working “camouflaged as a diesel tractor.”⁵ In the afternoon, racegoers streamed past Seabiscuit’s stall. “It looked like a parade,” Smith growled. When the races were on, Seabiscuit could see the fields go down the backstretch and would try to climb out of his stall to run with them. Smith had had enough and secreted the horse away to a new stall. The press couldn’t find it.

In the week before the race, Howard took an unusual phone call. The caller was a track official, who told him that a New York bettor had sent $5,000 to wager on Ligaroti, challenging Howard to put up $15,000 against it. Howard was surely amazed at such a huge wager from a complete stranger, but he was not one to back down from a challenge. It took him a while to learn that he had been suckered. The mysterious “New York bettor” was in fact Lin, who had talked the track official into placing the call.

Meanwhile, Lin and Crosby were hard at work putting on a horse race Hollywood-style.⁶ Crosby arranged to have a large section of the clubhouse roped off and patrolled by guards, with admission restricted to Ligaroti rooters—the “I’m for Ligaroti” section. He went out on a promotional tour to gather a cast of thousands, contacting four hundred friends, mostly movie people, and talking them into coming to the track to cheer his horse on. He appointed Dave Butler, director of Shirley Temple films, head cheerleader, fitting him with a turtleneck emblazoned with the initials BL, for Binglin. He had four hundred Ligaroti pennants printed up in the horse’s colors, cerise and white polka dots, and attached to canes for waving. Turf scribe Jack McDonald surveyed the production and wondered if the net effect would be to inspire Ligaroti or scare him to death.⁷

Crosby flooded the region with publicity. All over town, posters went up that read:

DEL MAR

AUGUST 12, 1938

SEABISCUIT VS. LIGAROTI

———

CHARLES HOWARD

VS. BING CROSBY

FATHER VS. SON

THE ICEMAN WOOLF

VS. SPEC RICHARDSON

AMERICA VS. ARGENTINA

———

ONE OF THE

GREATEST MATCH RACES

OF ALL TIME

From the race’s conception, the press viewed it with skepticism. Sportswriters argued that the rich event was a farce arranged to pad Seabiscuit’s bankroll. Del Mar, conscious of the potential conflict of interest for the Howards and Smiths, barred public wagering on the race. But the press’s distrust and the absence of gambling did nothing to cool the enthusiasm of racing fans. On the sweltering race day, special trains and buses poured in from San Diego and Los Angeles, filling the track with well over twenty thousand people, many more than the track’s official capacity. Lin plastered a twenty-foot LIGAROTI sign on the wall behind the “I’m for Ligaroti” section, and scores of Crosby’s movie friends, including Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, Spencer Tracy and Ray Milland, took up their cerise and white pennants and filed in. “Is there anyone left in Hollywood?” wondered a spectator. Dave Butler led a chorus of Ligaroti cheers, and the crowd grew boisterous.

Crosby perched on the roof with Oscar Otis, who would call the race for a national radio broadcast. In the jockeys’ room, Woolf suited up to man the helm on Seabiscuit while Richardson slipped on Ligaroti’s polka dots. Just before the race, Woolf and Richardson made a deal. No matter who won, they would “save,” or split, the purse between them.

———

It began as an exhilarating display of pure speed. To a gleeful shriek from the crowd, Seabiscuit and Ligaroti ripped out of the gate side by side. There was no clever strategy in either camp; each rider wanted the lead immediately. It was Seabiscuit who got it, tearing toward the first turn with his head in front. He couldn’t shake Ligaroti off. They rounded the first turn and barreled into the backstretch locked together. Inch by inch, Ligaroti edged closer, then thrust his nose in front. A few strides later, Seabiscuit edged back to the lead again. After six furlongs, they were one-fifth of a second below the track record. The mile marker clipped by, and the tote board flashed the fraction: 1:36⅕. They had run two seconds faster than the track record.

They couldn’t, it seemed, keep up such a pace. With the crowd leaping and yelling, the two horses skimmed the far turn and straightened away for the run for the wire. Richardson was playing every card he had, hollering in Woolf’s ear to try to distract him or provoke him into fouling himself out of the race.

With an eighth of a mile to go, Richardson felt Ligaroti beginning to weaken. The colt sagged inward, muscling his shoulder and hip into the smaller Seabiscuit. Hemmed in between Ligaroti and the rail, Seabiscuit had nowhere to go. He was driven to the left and for an awful moment nearly tumbled over the rail. He straightened himself out, grimly stood his ground, and held his head in front. Richardson kept right on yelling.

Seabiscuit had Ligaroti beaten. Richardson knew it. Desperate, the jockey resorted to an old bush-league tactic. Reaching across the gap between the two horses, he grabbed Seabiscuit’s saddlecloth and pulled back hard. Woolf couldn’t believe it. “What are you doing, Spec?” he shouted.⁸ Richardson didn’t let go.

Seabiscuit was now towing Ligaroti down the homestretch. Woolf couldn’t break him free. Anchored by Richardson’s grasp, Ligaroti began to haul himself forward. The two horses drew together again, running stride for stride with Seabiscuit’s head still in front. On their backs, Woolf and Richardson struggled. With seventy yards to go, Richardson abruptly released the saddlecloth and grabbed Woolf’s whip hand. Woolf twisted around in the saddle, trying to snatch his wrist free. It was here, Richardson later said, that he locked his leg over Woolf’s leg. If Seabiscuit moved up, Woolf would be scraped off his saddle and slammed into the track. The Howards’ sporting gesture had disintegrated into a back-alley brawl.⁹

With just a few yards to go, Woolf was frantic. Seabiscuit was fighting hard, but in Richardson’s grasp, he could not break away. The wire was looming overhead, and Ligaroti was lunging for the lead. Races in that day were not yet filmed with head-on and side-shot patrol cameras to police for riding infractions, so there was a good chance that Ligaroti would not be disqualified if his nose hit the wire first. Woolf could not move Seabiscuit up. He had to move Ligaroti back.

With twenty yards to go, Woolf tore his hand free, threw out his right arm and grabbed Ligaroti’s bridle, just above the bit. Just as the wire passed overhead, he pulled back, lifting the horse’s head up and to the left as Seabiscuit’s head bobbed forward. Seabiscuit flew under the wire first. Lugging 130 pounds, Ligaroti, and Richardson, Seabiscuit had run nine furlongs in 1:49. He had broken the track record by four seconds, the equivalent of some twenty-five lengths.

Up on the clubhouse, Oscar Otis looked quizzically at the finish line. He had seen Ligaroti’s head jerk up oddly at the wire. A jubilant celebration was going on all around him; almost no one else had noticed anything amiss. The reporters were raving. One called it “the dingbustingest contest you ever clapped an eye on … a ripsnorting race.”¹⁰ But the stewards, standing on an infield platform right above the finish line, had seen everything. The INQUIRY sign blipped up on the board.

Richardson galloped back first, jumped off the horse, bounded up the stairs three at a time, and muddied up the stewards’ stand carpets. Shouting passionately and waving his arms as he spoke, Richardson charged that Woolf had fouled him. The stewards called Woolf in. With his usual frankness, the Iceman admitted everything he had done but explained why he had done it. The stewards sent the jockeys outside while they conferred. The crowd buzzed in confusion.

Woolf and Richardson waited side by side on the track, Woolf with his hands on his hips, Richardson with his arms folded on the rail. Each one peered angrily out of the corner of his eye at the other, and neither said a word. Woolf was sure that Richardson was about to smack him.

The ruling came down. The foul was not allowed, and the result was allowed to stand. The baffled reporters asked the stewards why they had held an inquiry at all, but the stewards refused to explain themselves.

Clearly, something was up: Woolf and Richardson were told not to accept any more mounts pending a meeting by the stewards.

The riders stomped to the jockeys’ room, snapping at each other. The newsmen, in agonies of curiosity, tailed them. They overheard Richardson accusing Woolf of grabbing his bridle, and Woolf retorting that Richardson had grabbed his whip. Woolf said if Richardson had just stopped shouting for one single instant to concentrate on riding, he might have gotten his horse’s nose in front.^11,12

Down in the winner’s circle, Crosby could smell disaster. Standing with Marcela, he waited, sober-faced and distracted, as his wife—universally known as “Mrs. Bing”—gamely presented the winner’s trophy to Charles. Lin and his father, laughing, shook hands. With the ceremony over, Crosby rushed after Woolf and Richardson. He found them on the verge of blows in the jockeys’ room, with all the reporters watching. Desperate to avoid bad publicity, Crosby stepped between them and told them to hold their tongues. Marcela, more excited than she had ever been over a race, downed several aspirin.¹³

The next morning the stewards called Woolf and Richardson in and threw the book at them. Not only were both suspended for the rest of the meeting, but the officials recommended that the state racing board ban them from all California tracks until January 1, 1939. It was a punishment tough enough to demand explanation, but the stewards still refused to reveal what had happened. In their zeal to avoid resurrecting the sport’s reputation for chicanery, they tried to bury the incident. Asked to release official photos, they declined. “I want the newspapers to forget this thing,” said the presiding steward.¹⁴ “Consequently, I have no further information to give.”

A more suggestive comment could hardly have been made. The press covering the race was already suspicious and scandal-hungry, and assumed that the stewards were hiding something shocking. Wild speculation was the order of the day. Someone was bound to make a public accusation of wrongdoing.¹⁵ Someone did.

It began four days after the race, with a San Diego Sun story trumpeted in an enormous front-page banner headline in two-inch-high letters: “INSIDE” ON BISCUIT RACE BARED. Anonymously written, the story charged that Woolf admitted he had been told not to win by too much, to “make it look close” and “make a race of it.¹⁶” Richardson, the story alleged, knew that Seabiscuit was being held back and tried to take advantage of it to steal the race so he could cash in on a $1,500 bet on Ligaroti. Woolf then had to resort to dirty riding to thwart Richardson. The article speculated that the stewards’ “secret investigation” may have revealed “the identity of the race figure who gave Woolf his orders,” but that the officials were not telling the public.

At first glance, it seems surprising that the story caused the stir it did. The uproar was not over the rough riding in the race—which was truly outrageous—but over a supposed shadowy conspiracy around it. Yet, however much the tone of the article suggested otherwise, even if true, the allegations were trivial. As long as Woolf intended to win, there would have been nothing wrong with minimizing his winning margin. At most, it would have created a more entertaining spectacle and saved Bing, Lin, and Jimmy Smith from the humiliation of seeing their horse routed. Likewise, there certainly was nothing wrong with Richardson trying to win the race. But the paper presented these allegations as scandalous bombshells, calling them “startling disclosures.” In an era in which the sport’s corrupt years were still a fresh memory, it was enough to set the ball rolling. The story was picked up by the wire services and distributed nationwide.

A massive controversy ensued. Richardson immediately denied placing any bet, and Woolf denied that he had ever made any such statement, or even spoken to any reporter. Though the allegations did not point to race-fixing, in the sensational atmosphere following the unexplained suspension of two jockeys, the race was now being referred to as a “frameup” and a “fix.”¹⁷ Resting in the Del Mar Hotel, Howard saw the Sun story and exploded. He had long tolerated false allegations with tactful restraint, but he saw this as a strike against his honesty and an attempt to group him with the race-fixers from the sport’s past. It brought him beyond rage.¹⁸

Summoning a host of reporters to the hotel lobby, he lost his ever-genial composure for the first and only time in his public life. Barely able to contain his fury, he emphatically denied that he or Smith had given Woolf any such orders. He called the story “dirty and libelous.” “The whole thing is not worthy of denial,” he hissed, “excepting that it is so vicious that it cannot be overlooked.” He said that he had told Woolf to gun to the lead and get far enough ahead of Ligaroti to move to the outside; letting Seabiscuit’s rival assume the rail would prevent Ligaroti, who often drifted in, from bumping him. It was only because Ligaroti was so fast, Howard said, that Woolf was unable to execute the plan. Most compelling was his final point: Given that both his splits and final time for the race were record-shattering, the idea that Seabiscuit had been restrained was preposterous.

“Any fool writing racing ought to know that a race run in 1:49, with the first mile in 1:36⅕ and which was the time caught by numerous private clockers as well as the official track timer, couldn’t be fixed in that manner,” he said, glaring at the reporters. “I am deeply chagrined that any editor would accept a story without verification in which such obviously erroneous information is contained.… If the man who wrote that story had any sense, he would know you couldn’t ‘boat’ a race run in that fast time.”

Howard challenged the anonymous writer to produce proof of his charges and angrily defied anyone in the room to give him a plausible argument for how the allegations could have been possible. He concluded by addressing the implications that he was a race-fixer. “If Seabiscuit, or any other of my horses, can’t win on their merits, I’d retire from racing today.”

Howard followed up the press conference by publishing a signed statement that Woolf had not been told to check Seabiscuit. He wrote at least one prominent reporter personally, arguing that the race itself was testimony to the absurdity of the Sun’s charges and enclosing the finish photo of the race—the reporter had evidently questioned whether or not Seabiscuit had crossed the line first. In his letter, Howard pointed to what he thought was the motivation behind the attack on his integrity: the rivalry with War Admiral. “I realize,” he wrote, “that there are a few people in the East who are becoming quite alarmed over the prospect of Seabiscuit ending up as the top winner of the American turf.”¹⁹

Back at Del Mar, officials supported Howard, stating that the accusations that Seabiscuit had been restrained, or that Howard or Smith had told Woolf to do so, were ludicrous. But they couldn’t stop the flood of charges. A movement began to deny Howard the purse money or prevent it from being officially credited to Seabiscuit.

The California Turf Writers Association, recognizing that a lack of official information had created this absurd situation, demanded that the stewards clear things up. The morning after Howard’s speech, the Del Mar officials finally issued a statement explaining in detail exactly what had transpired during the race: Richardson had grabbed Woolf’s saddlecloth, then his whip, then Woolf had grabbed Ligaroti’s bridle. They emphasized their agreement that without the fouling, Seabiscuit would have won anyway.

Though the accusations died off quickly after the stewards’ statement, Howard was still in a jam. He was jockeyless. Unsure of what to do, he suspended all of Seabiscuit’s engagements.

Lin inadvertently solved the problem for him. He firmly believed that Richardson had not fouled Woolf enough to merit banning him from the track for the rest of the year. He discovered that, evidently unbeknownst to anyone, someone had filmed the race. Lin bought the film and, before viewing it, asked the stewards and reporters to join him at a theater in Solana Beach to see it. Delighted at the chance to find out what really happened, a mob showed up. The lights dimmed and the film ran.²⁰

Lin turned crimson. The film showed Richardson committing every foul short of shooting Woolf off his horse. Woolf had clearly acted in self-defense. The press began to lobby to have the suspension overturned for Woolf. The state racing board, tired of the whole mess, realized that the race’s nonbetting status gave them an out because the public had not been defrauded. They opted to lift the suspensions on both jockeys after the Del Mar meeting concluded.

The moment the result was handed down, Howard contacted Woolf. Pack up your things, he told him. We’re going east to get War Admiral.

Smith led Seabiscuit along the road that wound up to the railroad siding. The train stood waiting, stocked for a long sojourn in the East. A flurry of Navy planes screamed overhead, almost low enough to part a man’s hair.²¹ The horse didn’t bat an eyelash. He tramped aboard the train and lay down. By the time Smith got settled in and the train whined into motion, Seabiscuit was fast asleep.

After drilling through walk-up starts with Smith’s homemade bell, Woolf and Seabiscuit streak over the Pimlico track in a workout on October 26, 1938.

(MORGAN COLLECTION/ARCHIVE PHOTOS)

Chapter 18

DEAL

The summer of 1938 gave way to fall. Through the window in his room at Boston’s Winthrop Hospital, Red Pollard watched the sky darken. He was not getting better. Surgeons had operated repeatedly on his crushed leg, rebreaking it and resetting it, but it would not heal.¹ Though nearly four months had passed since his injury, he could not stand. His powerful five foot, seven inch boxer’s body had dwindled to a virtual skeleton. He weighed eighty-six pounds.² His face had aged so dramatically that, on the twenty-ninth birthday he celebrated that November, he could easily have passed for sixty. He was so weak that basic tasks required tremendous effort. He kept a brave face before his friends, assuring them he would ride again, but they didn’t believe it and neither did he.

The brisk New England October blew into Massachusetts. Pollard brooded. He pored over “Old Waldo” Emerson and ruminated on the philosopher’s essay on “Compensation.”³ He thought about the career he had lost. He grasped for hope in Emerson’s vision of natural polarities, in which all things are balanced by their opposites—darkness by light, cold by heat, loss by gain.

A makeweight flying to the void

Supplemental asteroid

Or compensatory spark⁴

Shoots across the neutral dark

.

He was falling in love with his private nurse. Regally lovely, Agnes Conlon caught the eye of every young man in the hospital. The child of a well-heeled, status-oriented Back Bay family of antique dealers, she was far out of the league of a jockey with a seventh-grade formal education and no fixed address. She was also spoken for, the steady girlfriend of a local physician. In disposition, she was Pollard’s antithesis, governing her life with rigid reserve as he scattered his passions.

In their afternoons in the hospital, Pollard wooed her with quotes from Old Waldo while she tended to his leg.⁵ He apparently told her about his darkest secret, his blind eye. He trusted her completely.

Sometime that fall, Red proposed. Agnes’s family was horrified. “It was as if you suddenly decided to marry someone from the circus,” said his daughter, Norah Christianson. And Red was so emaciated and weak that Agnes was certain he was dying.⁶ But something about him was appealing. It would be said later by those who knew Agnes that Red was, for her, a liberation from herself. It seemed that there was a part of her that yearned to be as extravagant as he. Agnes did a crazy thing.

A letter from Red slid into the mailbox of the Pollard family home in Edmonton.⁷ Agnes had said yes. Old Waldo, Pollard told his friends, had been right after all.⁸

A few hundred miles south of Winthrop Hospital, Alfred Vanderbilt was busy cultivating a passion of his own. Fresh from his honeymoon with Marcela’s niece, the twenty-six-year-old operator of Baltimore’s Pimlico Racecourse had never given up on the idea of staging a War Admiral–Seabiscuit match race. When the meetings at Belmont and Suffolk Downs had fallen through, Vanderbilt had begun contemplating the idea again. He had bided his time all summer, waiting for the horses to reach their peaks and the demand for the race to build again.

September of ’38, the timing seemed right. While Seabiscuit had spent the summer pillaging the West, War Admiral had been plundering the East with four triumphs in succession. Then Riddle did something out of character. At a society dinner in mid-September, he announced that he would put up $25,000 as forfeit money for a race between his colt and Seabiscuit. Howard jumped at the offer. Knowing Riddle’s fickleness, he opted not to call him directly to negotiate in private; with only the two of them talking, there would be few consequences to backing out.⁹ Instead, Howard cranked up the pressure by bringing in the press. He cracked open his address book and began calling reporters, asking them to announce that he’d gladly meet Riddle’s sum, and War Admiral, anywhere and any time Riddle wanted. “We’re ready,” he said, “any time Samuel D. Riddle wants to send his horse against the Biscuit.”

Vanderbilt decided that the time was ripe to get Pimlico involved. He was playing with a weak hand. Pimlico could offer only a tiny fraction of the $100,000 purse Belmont had put up. Riddle posed another problem. He was still angry over Pimlico starter Jim Milton’s use of tongs on War Admiral the year before, and he was sticking to his vow never to run a horse at the track again.

Vanderbilt thought he could talk Riddle out of his boycott, but just as he was about to contact the owner, Riddle seemed to back out of his offer altogether. He announced that he would not allow any race to interfere with War Admiral’s set schedule, which called for him to appear in Belmont’s Jockey Club Gold Cup, then complete his season in two $7,500 races in New England. After that, the four-year-old horse would be retired.

Howard, who had already brought Seabiscuit to Belmont in hopes that a match could be arranged, was disconsolate. Neither he nor Smith wanted to run in the Jockey Club Gold Cup. They had never welcomed the idea of a full-field contest with War Admiral, and the October 1 race would interfere with a promise Howard had made to run Seabiscuit in the September 28 Havre de Grace Handicap in Maryland. Howard hoped to talk Belmont officials into another match, but they wanted no part of it. Any interest there might have been in a match declined further when Howard, knowing he could not scratch his horse at Belmont again, allowed him to run in the September 20 Manhattan Handicap under 128 pounds in the middle of a whirling rainstorm. Seabiscuit came home third, drenched to the bone, covered head to toe in mud, and miserable. Howard and Smith took Seabiscuit down to Maryland. Howard believed that his last chance for a match race had probably slipped away. Almost everyone agreed with him.

Except Vanderbilt. The young Marylander was an energetic diplomat and thought he could get a deal made. On September 28 Seabiscuit’s stock rose after an overwhelming victory in the Havre de Grace Handicap. Taking advantage of this, Vanderbilt launched a vigorous one-man campaign to find an agreement between the Howard and Riddle camps. Desperate for the race and knowing that Riddle was in control, Howard was game to any of Vanderbilt’s suggestions. So Vanderbilt began working on Riddle.

At first Vanderbilt had so much trouble just making contact with War Admiral’s owner that he nearly gave up. When he did track him down, Riddle was cool. For a fortnight, Vanderbilt besieged him with wires, calls, and requests for private meetings. He used a good measure of flattery, assuring Riddle that War Admiral would of course beat the stuffing out of Seabiscuit. Vanderbilt gave him a reasonable starting proposal: He would make the Pimlico Special, the prestigious stakes race that War Admiral had won in 1937, into a two-horse event. He knew the Special’s conditions would appeal to both owners, as both horses had won at Pimlico at the race’s 1³⁄₁₆-mile distance. Knowing that the attendance for such an event would completely swamp his little track, which had seating for just sixteen thousand, Vanderbilt proposed a date of November 1, a Tuesday, hoping that work commitments would limit the crowd to a manageable level.

Then there was the painful subject of the purse. Vanderbilt knew that both men wanted $100,000. He tried to maneuver them out of it. “I told them,” he remembered, “that this was just a little track and we couldn’t put up a lot of money.” He argued that running for a smaller purse was preferable, because fans would know the race was truly a matter of sport. “I told them,” Vanderbilt continued, “‘You’re not running for the money, you’re running in the most popular race you could have now.’” The argument appealed to Riddle and Howard, who probably expected Vanderbilt to offer something in the neighborhood of $75,000. They were in for a shock. The best Vanderbilt could do was $15,000. Vanderbilt was quick to point out to Riddle that $15,000 was exactly the sum of the two purses being offered in War Admiral’s scheduled races in New England, at least one of which he’d have to miss to make the match. To reassure each man of his opponent’s sincerity, Vanderbilt asked that each put up a forfeit fee of $5,000.

Riddle finally responded. “I’ll race if they’ll agree to my terms, but I don’t think they will.” Vanderbilt asked what those terms were. Riddle was willing to accept the purse, provided that each horse carry 120 pounds. He wanted starter Jim Milton booted out in favor of George Cassidy, the starter for War Admiral’s home track, Belmont. Finally, fearing that War Admiral would exhaust or injure himself fighting a conventional starting gate, and wanting to take advantage of his horse’s skill at breaking from a walk, Riddle insisted that the race be started from an antiquated, gateless walk-up.

The first demand was no problem. Howard would surely appreciate a relatively low and equal impost. The second was more difficult. Vanderbilt didn’t want to be strong-armed into dismissing Milton, whom he and virtually all observers agreed had done nothing wrong in his effort to load War Admiral in the gate the year before. But Milton, upon learning of Riddle’s wishes, solved the problem for him. He came to Vanderbilt and recused himself from the race.¹⁰ He knew that if War Admiral broke poorly, he would be accused of carrying out a grudge against Riddle. Vanderbilt accepted his decision, and Riddle got his wish.

The third demand seemed impossible to fulfill. Because horses who gain commanding early leads in match races generally win them, observers thought the bullet-breaking War Admiral held a considerable advantage over the historically slower-breaking Seabiscuit, even with a conventional start. With a walk-up, War Admiral would have the added edge of performing a start at which he was superb and experienced, while Seabiscuit would be trying it for the first time. There was almost universal agreement that if War Admiral broke from a walk-up, he would lead from wire to wire. But the issue was a deal breaker for Riddle. Vanderbilt had no choice but to put it before Howard and hope for the best.

In New York, where he had been lobbying Riddle in person, Vanderbilt had the proposal with Riddle’s demands typed up as a formal contract and sent to Howard. Howard moaned about the walk-up. He called Smith, who mulled it over. The trainer told him to demand that the start be made with a bell, not simply the traditional walk-up flag, and without assistant starters. The jockeys, he said, would have to be able to handle their horses without aid. Howard passed this on to Vanderbilt, who agreed. The contract came back. Howard had signed it and enclosed his $5,000 forfeit fee.

With one man down and one to go, Vanderbilt went to seal the deal. He showed up at Riddle’s New York hotel room, contract in hand. Riddle was gone. The owner had already departed for the train station, bound for Philadelphia. Vanderbilt jumped into a cab, sped across town, and dashed into Penn Station, where he caught up with Riddle just as he was about to board the train. Riddle was still wavering. Vanderbilt stood his ground and refused to let Riddle board the train until he had signed the paper. Riddle gave in, and Vanderbilt returned to Maryland to cheers from horsemen. The November 1 Pimlico Special, universally hailed as the race of the century, was on. Nothing, this time, was going to stop it from being run.

When news of the deal broke to an ecstatic public on October 5, horsemen were amazed that Howard had accepted the walk-up. One horseman, wrote The New Yorker’s Audax Minor, “wonders if Riddle forgot to ask for permission to bring his own judges, too.” Yet during the negotiations, Vanderbilt had noticed something strange. Howard, who had been loudly and publicly lamenting Riddle’s demand for the walk-up, seemed in private to be delighted. “Howard loved it,” Vanderbilt remembered. “He loved it.”

The reason was Tom Smith. Once again the old cowboy had something up his sleeve. All along, he had been secretly hoping that Riddle would demand the walk-up.¹¹ By some accounts, he had actually instructed Howard to make a few protests before ultimately agreeing to it so that no one would suspect his game plan. The best anyone thought Smith could hope for was for Seabiscuit to somehow stay reasonably close to War Admiral in the early stages of the race. Smith was far more ambitious. Sitting on a tack trunk with his friend Bill Buck during the match negotiations, he made an amazing statement. “I’m going to give them birds the biggest surprise they ever had in their lives.¹²

“I’m going to send Seabiscuit right out on the lead.”

Pollard was lying on his hospital bed, chatting with David Alexander, when the phone rang. It was Woolf, and he wanted to get Pollard’s opinion on the match.¹³ The Iceman, like virtually everyone else, disagreed with Smith. He thought War Admiral simply had more God-given speed than Seabiscuit, and that the Triple Crown winner would surely beat him off of the line. How, he asked Pollard, should he ride this race?

Pollard surprised him. If Woolf put the throttle to the floor right from the bell, he promised him, Seabiscuit would beat War Admiral to the first turn. He told Woolf to gun to the lead but to keep him in check on the backstretch. When jockey Kurtsinger launched War Admiral in his final drive for the wire, Pollard said, do something completely unexpected and probably unprecedented: Let him catch up.

It was a startling plan. “Maybe you would call it a kind of horse psychology,” Pollard explained to Alexander. “Once a horse gives Seabiscuit the old look-in-the-eye, he begins to run to parts unknown. He might loaf sometimes when he’s in front and thinks he’s got a race in the bag. But he gets gamer and gamer the tougher it gets.” Pollard was sure that if Woolf let War Admiral challenge him, Seabiscuit would run faster and try harder than if Woolf tried to hold the lead alone. “Seabiscuit is the gamer horse. I know that.” From there on in, the instructions were simple. Once War Admiral hooked Seabiscuit, “race him into the ground.”

Everything hinged on two assumptions to which virtually no one outside the Seabiscuit camp would have ever agreed: that Seabiscuit had the speed to beat War Admiral off the line, and that he had enough gameness to fight back and win when his jockey sacrificed his lead. On the first point, Woolf was quickly convinced. The second was more difficult. Pollard knew that what he was asking his friend to do went against every tenet of reinsmanship.

“Most jockeys would have thought me nuts,” he told Alexander after hanging up. “When a horse drives on you at a time like that, it just seems logical to drive as hard as you can to stay in front. It’s instinct. I tell you that what I told Woolf to do was tough to do.” If Pollard was wrong about Seabiscuit, then his strategy would hand the victory to War Admiral. But Woolf recognized that his friend understood the horse better than he did. He came to view the race as Pollard did, as a test of toughness, and had never seen a horse as tenacious as Seabiscuit. “Seabiscuit’s like a hunk of steel—Solid.¹⁴ Strong,” he once said. “Admiral has speed, good speed … speed when unopposed. But he’s not game.” Of Seabiscuit he said, “you could kill him before he’d quit.”¹⁵

Woolf agreed to do exactly what Pollard told him to do. He and Smith brought Seabiscuit to Pimlico and went to work.

On the day after the match race deal was finalized, Smith walked up the Pimlico track to the starter’s stand. Climbing up to the bell, he rang it several times, studying the sound. It made a clang much like an alarm clock. He hopped down and went back to the barn, where he gathered up some redwood planks, a phone, and an alarm clock. Dismantling the clock and the phone, he rigged up a starting bell with the clock alarm and the telephone’s five-inch batteries, then cut the redwood into a box to hold the works and wired a trigger button to the outside. When the box was complete, Smith tacked up Seabiscuit and Pumpkin, pushed Woolf up onto the former, swung himself onto the latter, and took them toward the track, carrying the box with him.

On most mornings, War Admiral preceded Seabiscuit onto the course. Invariably, hundreds of people fanned out around the track apron to watch the Triple Crown winner, who had come to Pimlico after crushing the field in the Jockey Club Gold Cup. Trainer Conway stood on the sideline and watched his horse from afar as he circled around the course, legging up for the stout mile-and-three-sixteenths distance of the match. War Admiral was, as always, fretting and fussing and glorious.

As War Admiral was led back to Man o’ War’s old barn, Conway stepped back to watch Smith and Pumpkin trotting onto the track alongside Seabiscuit and Woolf. Smith took the horses up to the race’s starting point at the top of the homestretch. The crowd, which had been thinly dispersed around the track to see War Admiral’s distance workouts, migrated up to the turn after Seabiscuit and stood in a thick mass by the rail.

Spectators murmured among themselves at Smith’s homemade bell.¹⁶ They watched quizzically as Smith lined up his horse, stepped behind him, and hit the bell, sending Seabiscuit into a rocket start. Woolf hustled him deftly; having begun his career booting horses through walk-up match races in Indian country, he knew how to hit the gas on a horse. Most of the time, Woolf would only let the horse fly through a short sprint before pulling him up and circling back for another go. Day after day, Woolf and Smith repeated the drill, sometimes pairing him with Chanceview. The homemade bell worked perfectly, and the horse began blowing off the line with explosive power.

When the walk-ups were over, Smith would take the horse back to the barn. Just as always, in the afternoons most of the Eastern Seaboard streamed into the barn to stare at Seabiscuit. Smith didn’t seem to mind. “Can’t hurt a horse looking at him,” he said. Smith probably did think you could hurt Seabiscuit by looking at him. Which is why he made sure that the horse they were all gawking at was Grog.¹⁷

For the next month America hung in midair. The names War Admiral and Seabiscuit were on everyone’s lips, stories on the horses were in every paper, and the inflamed division between the horses’ supporters broadened and deepened into a fanatical contest of East versus West. One reader became so furious when journalist Nelson Dunstan switched his allegiance from Seabiscuit to War Admiral that he threatened to attack him. “Everybody,” Vanderbilt recalled, “cared about it.” Even President Roosevelt was swept up in the fervor. A rumor that he was going to “denounce one of the horses” during a Fireside Chat made the rounds, but he kept his allegiances secret. “The whole country is divided into two camps,” wrote Dave Boone in the San Francisco Chronicle. “People who never saw a horse race in their lives are taking sides. If the issue were deferred another week, there would be a civil war between the War Admiral Americans and the Seabiscuit Americans.”¹⁸

As October waned, the tension all over the backstretch heightened. Trainer Conway was a frayed wire, shouting at reporters to get the hell away from his horse. Vanderbilt, also wound up with stress, blew off steam in bruising morning football games with the exercise boys. Smith’s perpetual frown deepened. He distracted himself by working hard with Kayak, and sent him out to win two more races. Charley Kurtsinger tried to soothe his wife, who was terrified for him. Charley had only recently gotten out of the hospital after crashing with a horse at Saratoga in August, and his wife was now so afraid for him that she couldn’t bear to be at the track when he rode. The closest she could get to watching him was to sit in the track parking lot in their car. Charley promised her that if she came to the track to see him ride War Admiral, he’d win it for her.¹⁹

Charles and Marcela Howard were similarly jittery. Marcela slept with prayer beads on her pillow every night and attended Mass every morning. She and Charles hovered by the barns, waiting. They were there one afternoon a few days before the race when a sharp rainstorm brushed over the racing oval. Charles and Marcela stood together, watching the lightning crackle over the Maryland countryside. The storm died out and dispersed, and sunlight broke over the track. Marcela found it comforting. She whispered a poem:

“The storm is past, no more repining

²⁰

Behold! the gentle sun is shining”

“Yeah,” muttered Charles, “but the track is still too heavy for Seabiscuit.”

In the track offices, horsemen gathered for the post position draw. Both horses’ handlers wanted the rail, which, if the horse could hold it, would ensure the shortest trip around the track. If Seabiscuit got the rail, the experts believed he might have a glimmer of a chance. If War Admiral got it, they believed the race would be over before it began.

War Admiral drew the rail.

For Pollard, the days were bittersweet. David Alexander spent time with him and found him in jovial spirits. He was in love, he was about to try to start walking again, and he had been told that by early November he could leave the hospital. His engagement had brought his optimism back, and he was sure he would be able to ride again. A glance at his emaciated body, jutting out at harsh angles from under the sheets, testified to the contrary. He was up to his old pranks, sending a group of frostbitten horsemen on a wild-goose chase all over Boston in search of nonexistent “bull’s wool” socks.²¹ Alexander couldn’t get him to be serious. “George,” Pollard told him, “will probably mess everything up as usual and try to get beaten a nose, but even George isn’t bad enough to beat Seabiscuit in this one.”²²

But as he spoke, the pain of his situation pressed through to the surface. “Maybe I’m conceited and maybe I’m not, but there still isn’t anybody that can ride him like I can ride him,” he said. “I can’t tell you why. I just know how and he wants to run for me. I know that the minute I throw a leg over him, morning or afternoon. It looked for a while like I’d come out of here with a set of crutches as permanent equipment. Even if I’d have to use crutches, I still could have ridden the Biscuit.²³ Maybe I couldn’t ride any other horse, but I could have ridden him as long as there was somebody to shove me in the saddle.”

Before Alexander and Pollard parted, the redhead gave him a prediction. Seabiscuit, he said, was going to win by four.²⁴

The War Admiral camp remained supremely confident. Conway quietly built his colt’s endurance. Every day, he lingered by the rails to watch Seabiscuit’s peculiar regimens, following his movements without comment, then returned to War Admiral. Everyone in the Riddle barn knew Smith was trying to coax early speed from Seabiscuit, but the idea of a horse outbreaking War Admiral was unimaginable. “I don’t think Seabiscuit will give him much trouble,” jockey Kurtsinger said. “And I don’t care if Woolf elects to try to make a race of it. The Admiral will lick him any part of it.”

The Howard barn preferred that their opponents keep thinking that way. They remained cryptic about strategy.²⁵ Smith did little more than make a few grunts about Seabiscuit having good speed. Asked if War Admiral would set the pace, Marcela was coy. “That depends on whether or not he can outrun Seabiscuit in the first furlongs,” she said. “Maybe he can’t.” Pollard went right ahead and lied to reporters, telling them the barn strategy was to concede the lead to War Admiral and then try to run him down in the homestretch. After listening to Woolf and Pollard discussing strategy, David Alexander asked them if he could state in print that Seabiscuit would outgun War Admiral for the early lead. Both said yes, providing that Alexander didn’t quote them directly. “Both fully realized,” Alexander wrote later, “that War Admiral’s connections would pay no attention at all to the pipe dream of a mere newspaper columnist.” So Alexander published the prediction. All it did was inspire a hearty laugh in the press box.

The laughter burned Howard. On the day before the race, with all the training done, there seemed no harm in letting people know what he thought. Sitting in the Pimlico clubhouse surrounded by reporters, Howard made a flat statement.

“War Admiral won’t outbreak Seabiscuit,” he said tersely, “he won’t outgame him, and he won’t beat him.”²⁶

An uncomfortable silence followed. Someone politely changed the subject.

Sometime later that day, Woolf received a telegram. It was from Pollard: THERE IS ONE SURE WAY OF WINNING WITH THE BISCUIT. YOU RIDE WAR ADMIRAL.²⁷

Across the country that day, the ballots for year-end honors in Thoroughbred racing began arriving in journalists’ postboxes. The writers collected them, leaving the spaces for Horse of the Year blank. They would wait until Tuesday evening to fill them in.

That night, Baltimore glittered and rang with exuberant prerace parties, the next day’s racegoers singing out “Maryland, My Maryland” as they passed outside the track. Inside the Pimlico gates, it was hushed. A lone figure walked out onto the Pimlico dirt, clutching a flashlight. It was Woolf. The rainwater had not fully drained from the track, and he was concerned that Seabiscuit might struggle over the dampness. “Biscuit likes to hear his feet rattle” was how he put it. Turning down the lane, the jockey weaved back and forth, sweeping his flashlight beam from side to side, hunting for the driest, hardest path.

At the top of the homestretch Woolf stopped, testing the footing. In the soil beneath his feet, he could feel a firmer strip, the print of a tractor wheel that had lately rolled over the surface.²⁸ The path was obscured by harrow marks. Walking the full length of the track, Woolf found that it circled the entire oval, a few feet from the rail.

He knew what he would have to do when the bell rang the following afternoon. “I figures to myself,” he said later, “‘Woolf, get on that lane and follow it.’” In the darkness of the last night of October 1938, George Woolf walked the course until he had memorized the path of the tractor print. Then he quietly stepped off the track.

“I knew it,” he said later, “like an airplane pilot knows a radio beam.”

Midway through what is still widely regarded as the greatest horse race in history, Seabiscuit and War Admiral turn out of the backstretch and drive for the wire, November 1, 1938.

(© BETTMANN/CORBIS)

Chapter 19

THE SECOND CIVIL WAR

Beneath a translucent scrim of clouds at eight o’clock in the morning on November 1, 1938, Maryland Racing Commission chairman Jervis Spencer stepped out onto the smoky brown oval of Pimlico. With his hands pushed into the pockets of a gray overcoat, Spencer circled the track on foot, moving by a palette of colorful barns and turning leaves.¹ Horses galloped past him. Vanderbilt stood in the winner’s circle, awaiting the completion of the circuit. The course was rimmed in faces, all eyes on Spencer. Riddle and Howard had agreed that the chairman would be the final judge of the condition of the track; only if it was dry and fast would the race go. The issue was somewhat in doubt. As Woolf had noted in the darkness the night before, the week’s rains had soaked into the dirt. But several days of crisp fall air and heavy labor by Vanderbilt’s men had dried the surface well.

At eight-thirty Spencer stopped outside the winner’s circle, looked up at Vanderbilt, and nodded. He turned to a microphone, cleared his throat, and spoke.

“In my judgment, there is no question that the track will be fast for the race this afternoon. The race is on.”

As if somehow linked to the emotions of all present, the sun spilled out, bathing the overcoated men in warm Maryland sunshine. The coats came off and every man headed his own way. Vanderbilt walked out onto the track with a bucket, burning off a little nervous energy by picking up loose pebbles and clumps of dirt. Marcela Howard went off to host a prerace luncheon. A friend presented her with an exuberant Dalmatian as a gift. They named him Match in honor of the occasion and sent him over to the barn to cavort with Pocatell and Seabiscuit’s guard dog, Silver. Up in the track secretary’s office, a telegram arrived for Howard: PLEASE BET $200 FOR ME. OUR HORSE WILL WIN BY 5—POLLARD.² Howard placed the bet for him, tossing in $25,000 of his own money for good measure.³

He went to the backstretch and strolled around with Woolf. Somewhere along the shed rows, they came across Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons and stopped to talk about the race. Fitzsimmons liked Pollard’s strategy of pushing for the early lead, but like Smith, Woolf, and Pollard, he believed that the match was not going to be determined by speed. The deciding factor would be resolve.⁴ One of the horses was going to crack in the homestretch. The other would come home the undisputed champion of American racing.

Vanderbilt had hoped that scheduling his race for a Tuesday would keep attendance within Pimlico’s sixteen-thousand-seat capacity. It didn’t. By 10:00 A.M., six and a half hours before the race, a vast, agitated throng was already banging up against the fences. Vanderbilt swung the gates open and unleashed a human stampede. All morning long, automobiles and special trains disgorged thousands and thousands of passengers from every corner of the nation and the world; the assembly of foreign dignitaries alone equaled a normal day’s attendance. By midday, the grandstand and clubhouse were glutted, so Vanderbilt redirected fans by the thousands into the infield. The crowds kept coming in.

At three-thirty the horses began the long walk down the center of the track to the saddling paddock. War Admiral appeared first, spinning around in a white blanket, yellow ribbons in his tail. Two minutes later Smith and Pumpkin appeared with Seabiscuit, who was covered to the ears in a red blanket emblazoned with a white H. Thirty thousand people watched the horses from the grandstand and clubhouse. Ten thousand more teemed in the infield, lining up behind a small retaining fence about ten feet inside the track rail. Dozens of fans bristled over the tops of the steeplechase fences, leaving them teetering under the weight. A thick line of police fanned out to hold the masses back. Outside the track, some ten thousand fans who couldn’t get in gathered ten-deep around the track fence and stood upon every rooftop, fence, tree limb, and telephone pole as far as a mile from the start, hoping to catch a glimpse of the race.⁵

When the horses arrived in the paddock, they were greeted by the nervous faces of their handlers. The Howards fretted; Riddle looked small and old; Kurtsinger had the inward-focused look of someone at prayer. The saddling began. As Smith cinched the girth of Woolf’s kangaroo-leather saddle around Seabiscuit’s belly, Marcela stepped forward, clutching a medal of Saint Christopher, patron saint of travelers.⁷ Lifting up the horse’s saddlecloth, she pinned the medal to it.

“This will bring you luck,” she whispered. It was All Saints’ Day.

Into this edgy scene breezed George Woolf.⁶ In dazzling contrast to everyone else at Pimlico, the Iceman was utterly relaxed. A lump of chewing tobacco bulged in his cheek. He strode in, smacked Pumpkin on the rump, swung lightly aboard Seabiscuit, and spat in the air.

There was a nervous stir. The bell on the starter’s stand wouldn’t work.⁸ The only other official bell at the track was attached to the starting gate. With no other options, the officials asked if they could borrow Smith’s homemade bell. Smith said yes, and someone fetched the odd redwood box for starter Cassidy, who carried it up to his place at the top of the homestretch. Years later, Daily Racing Form reporter Pete Pedersen noted that “Tom’s eyes were sparkling mirrors” when he recalled this incident, making one wonder if the old cowboy had a hand in the bell’s demise.

Then another snag. Two assistant starters, almost certainly called in by War Admiral’s handlers, showed up to lead the horses to the walk-up. Their appearance was in direct violation of the agreement, and Smith spoke up. For once, he wanted War Admiral to be required to behave himself at the post. Smith traded testy words with the officials, and there was a long delay. “No assistants,” Smith snapped, “or no race.”⁹ The assistant starters backed off.

At four o’clock, the two horses parted a sea of humanity and stepped onto the track before a crowd, wrote Grantland Rice, “keyed to the highest tension I have ever seen in sport.”¹⁰ “Maryland, My Maryland” wafted over a strangely quiet grandstand. The spectators, wrote Rice, were “too full of tension, the type of tension that locks the human throat.”

War Admiral walked up the track first, twirling and bobbing. Blunt-bodied Seabiscuit plodded along behind, head down. He looked up once, scanned the crowd, then lowered his head again. One witness compared him to a milk-truck horse. Shirley Povich of The Washington Post thought he exhibited “complete, overwhelming and colossal indifference.” The appearance was deceiving. Woolf could feel it. In post parades, he was accustomed to the smooth levelness of Seabiscuit’s walk, the gentle gait of a horse that puts his hooves down carefully. But this day Woolf felt something new, a gathering beneath him, something springlike. The horse was coiling up.

As the horses strode up the track, NBC radioman Clem McCarthy grabbed his microphone and turned to run to his race-calling post atop the clubhouse. The crowd was so dense that he couldn’t get through. He struggled in vain against a current of bodies, then gave up, exhausted. He did the best he could, climbing up on the track’s outer rail by the wire and settling in to call the race from there. His voice crackled over the radio waves to an estimated forty million listeners, including President Roosevelt.^11,12 Drawn up next to his White House radio, F.D.R. was so absorbed in the broadcast that he kept a roomful of advisors waiting. He would not emerge until the race was over.

The reporters massed by the railings in the press box. War Admiral was the toast of the newsmen; every single Daily Racing Form handicapper had picked him to win, as had some 95 percent of the other writers. Only a small and militant sect of California writers was siding with Seabiscuit. Down in the stands, the allegiances were more muddied. War Admiral was the heavy favorite in the betting, but reporters mingling in the crowd found that most racegoers were rooting for the underdog.

Up in her box, Gladys Phipps gazed down on Seabiscuit with pride. Her hard-tested faith in nasty old Hard Tack had finally paid off. After Seabiscuit began winning with Smith, the renowned Claiborne Farm, which had once politely but firmly rejected Hard Tack, changed its mind. Phipps retrieved her stallion from under the mulberry trees at the little farm where she had left him and shipped him to Claiborne, where the managers boosted his stud fee from nothing to a respectable $250. When Seabiscuit took the East by storm, they doubled the fee. Now, as the Biscuit challenged War Admiral, Hard Tack’s fee was $1,000, comparable to that of some of the nation’s most prominent sires.

Nearby, Fitzsimmons watched the horses. He held a win ticket. It was on Seabiscuit.

As the track was one mile around and the race a mile and three sixteenths, the starting point was at the top of the homestretch, with the horses set to circle the course roughly one and one quarter times. As War Admiral walked to the line alongside the flagman and starter Cassidy, Woolf worked to fray the Triple Crown winner’s famously delicate nerves.^13,14 He put Seabiscuit into a long, lazy warm-up, sailing past his skittering rival and galloping off the wrong way around the track. Cassidy ordered him to bring his horse up. “Mr. Cassidy,” Woolf called back cheerily, “I have instructions to warm Seabiscuit up before the start.” Cassidy barked that he had not been forewarned of this. Woolf shrugged and kept right on going. He and Seabiscuit swung around the far turn and into the backstretch.¹⁵

At the five-eighths pole, Woolf stopped Seabiscuit and turned him toward the grandstand. For a long moment, man and horse stood out on the backstretch. It was quiet. The infield crowds massed up against the rail by the grandstand, leaving the backstretch oddly vacant; most everyone thought the only time the horses would run together would be in that first trip down the homestretch, before War Admiral’s speed put Seabiscuit away. Seabiscuit gazed at the throng, stirring gently in the sunshine; Woolf studied War Admiral, watching him unravel at the starting line, whirling in circles.

After an agonizing interval, Woolf cantered Seabiscuit back to the top of the homestretch. He drew up alongside War Admiral. The flagman raised his arm, and Cassidy poised his finger over the button of Smith’s bell. Seabiscuit and War Admiral walked forward together, each rider watching Cassidy. The immense crowd drew its breath.

At the last moment, something felt wrong to Woolf. He jerked his right rein and pulled Seabiscuit out. Kurtsinger reined up War Admiral, who bounced up and down in frustration. They lined up again and stepped forward, but this time it was Kurtsinger who reined out. The two horses trotted back to the turn. As they aligned for a third try, Woolf called over to Kurtsinger.

“Charley, we’ll never get a go like this.¹⁶ We can’t watch the starter and our horses at the same time. Let’s walk up there watching the horses, and when we get even, let’s break away ourselves. Cassidy will see us in line and will have to bang the bell.”

Kurtsinger nodded. The two walked up a third time, each jockey watching the nose of his rival’s mount. Woolf tightened his left rein, cocking Seabiscuit’s head toward War Admiral to let him focus on his opponent.

The horses were perfectly even. Woolf knew that this was it. As they approached Cassidy, Woolf suddenly blurted out, “Charley, look out because the Biscuit kicks like hell and I don’t want you or your horse to get hurt.”¹⁷

Kurtsinger stared at Woolf in befuddlement, then cleared his mind and trained his eyes back on Seabiscuit’s nose. The flagman’s hand hovered high in the air. Up in the Howard box, Marcela squeezed her eyes shut.

The two noses passed over the line together, the flag flashed down, and the hushed track clanged with the sound of Smith’s bell. War Admiral and Seabiscuit burst off the line at precisely the same instant.

The gathering Woolf had felt in Seabiscuit vented itself in a massive downward push. Lines of muscle along the horse’s back, flanks, and belly bulged with the effort, cutting sweeping stripes into his coat. His front end rose upward. Woolf threw himself forward as ballast, thrusting his feet straight back. Seabiscuit reached out and clawed at the ground in front of him, then pushed off again. Beside him, War Admiral scratched and tore at the track, hurling himself forward as hard as he could. Seabiscuit drove over the track, his forelegs pulling the homestretch under his body and flinging it back behind him. Woolf angled him inward, keeping him close to War Admiral, letting him look at his rival. For thirty yards, the two horses hurtled down the homestretch side by side, their cutting, irregular strides settling into long, open lunges, their speed building and building.

A pulse of astonishment swept over the crowd. War Admiral, straining with all he had, was losing ground. Seabiscuit’s nose forged past, then his throat, then his neck. McCarthy’s voice was suddenly shrill. “Seabiscuit is outrunning him!” War Admiral was kicking so hard that his hind legs were nearly thumping into his girth, but he couldn’t keep up.

An incredible realization sank into Kurtsinger’s mind: Seabiscuit is faster. Up in the press box, the California contingent roared.

After a sixteenth of a mile, Seabiscuit was half a length ahead and screaming along. He kept pouring it on, flicking his ears forward. The spectators were in a frenzy. As the horses were midway down the first pass through the homestretch, the crowd suddenly gushed over the infield retaining fence ten feet inside the track rail. Thousands of fans surged toward Woolf and Seabiscuit. Caught at the infield rail, they bent themselves over it, pounding and clapping and flailing their arms in Seabiscuit’s path. Seabiscuit, his ears flat and eyes forward, didn’t even seem to see them.

Neither did Woolf. He had his eyes on the tractor wheel imprint, but War Admiral was on it. Woolf had to get far enough in front to cross ahead of War Admiral and claim it. He let Seabiscuit roll. By the time he and his mount hit the finish line for the first time, they were two lengths in front. Woolf looked back left and right, cocked back his left rein, and slid Seabiscuit across War Admiral’s path until he felt the firm ground of the tractor imprint under him. He flattened his back, dropped his chin into Seabiscuit’s mane, and flew toward the turn.

Behind him, Kurtsinger was shell-shocked. His lips were pulled back and his teeth clenched. In a few seconds, Woolf and Seabiscuit had stolen the track from him, nullifying his post-position edge and his legendary early speed. Kurtsinger didn’t panic. War Admiral, though outfooted, was running well, and he had a Triple Crown winner’s staying power. Seabiscuit was well within reach. Conway had spent weeks training stamina into the horse, while Smith had not done much for Seabiscuit’s endurance. Seabiscuit was going much, much too fast for so grueling a race. He couldn’t possibly last. Kurtsinger made a new game plan. He would let Seabiscuit exhaust himself on the lead, then run him down. He eased War Admiral over until he was directly behind him, dragging off him, his mount’s nose caboosing Seabiscuit’s tail. He took hold of his horse and waited.

As the two horses banked into the first turn, Woolf remembered Pollard’s advice to reel Seabiscuit in. He eased back ever so slightly on the reins and felt the horse’s stride come up under him, shortening. His action was little more than a faint gesture, but it meant that Kurtsinger had to either slow down or commit to the outside. Kurtsinger chose the latter, nudging War Admiral out.

Seabiscuit cruised into the backstretch on a one-length lead, with Woolf holding his chin down. War Admiral chased him, his nose nodding up and down behind Seabiscuit’s right hip. The blur of faces along the rail thinned, then vanished altogether, and the din from the crowd quieted to a distant rumble. War Admiral and Seabiscuit were alone. With nothing but the long backstretch ahead of him, Woolf carried out Pollard’s instructions. Edging Seabiscuit a few feet out from the rail, he tipped his head back and called back to Kurtsinger: “Hey, get on up here with me!¹⁸ We’re supposed to have a horse race here! What are you doing lagging back there?”

Kurtsinger studied the ground ahead. Woolf was dangling the rail slot in front of him, inviting him to take it. Kurtsinger measured the gap between Seabiscuit and the rail and saw that War Admiral was narrow enough to get through. But Kurtsinger knew the Iceman well. He knew that the instant he drove his horse up to full speed and pointed him to the hole, Woolf would drop in toward the rail and slam the door on him, forcing him to change course and lose momentum. Kurtsinger tugged his right rein and moved War Admiral outside.

In a storied career of twenty-three races, through the Triple Crown and virtually every fabled race in the East, no one had ever seen all War Admiral could give.¹⁹ Kurtsinger asked the colt for the full measure. With five furlongs to go, he reached back and cracked War Admiral once across the hip. War Admiral responded emphatically. A shout rang out in the crowd, “Here he comes! Here he comes!” Woolf heard the wave of voices and knew what was happening. In a few strides, War Admiral swooped up alongside him, his head pressing Seabiscuit’s shoulder. A few more, and he was even. Kurtsinger thought: I’m going to win it. The grandstand was shaking.

Woolf loosened his fingers and let an inch or two of the reins slide through. Seabiscuit snatched up the rein, lowered his head, and accelerated. Pollard’s strategy, Woolf’s cunning, and Smith’s training had given Seabiscuit a chance in a race he otherwise could not have won. From here on in, it was up to the horse. He cocked an ear toward his rival, listening to him, watching him. He refused to let War Admiral pass. The battle was joined.

The horses stretched out over the track. Their strides, each twenty-one feet in length, fell in perfect synch. They rubbed shoulders and hips, heads snapping up and reaching out together, legs gathering up and unfolding in unison. The poles clipped by, blurring in the riders’ peripheral vision. The speed was impossible; at the mile mark, they were nearly a full second faster than a fifteen-year-old speed record. The track rail hummed up under them and unwound behind.

They ripped out of the backstretch and leaned together into the final turn, their strides still rising and falling together. The crowds by the rails thickened, their faces a pointillism of colors, the dappling sound of distinct voices now blending into a sustained shout. The horses strained onward. Kurtsinger began shouting at his horse, his voice whipped away behind him. He pushed on War Admiral’s neck and drove with all his strength, sweeping over his mount’s right side. War Admiral was slashing at the air, reaching deeper and deeper into himself. The stands were boiling over. A reporter, screaming and jumping, fell halfway out of the press box.²⁰ His colleagues caught his shirttails and hauled him back in. In the crowd below, several dozen spectators fainted from the excitement.²¹

The horses strained onward, arcing around the far turn and rushing at the crowd. Woolf was still, his eyes trained on War Admiral’s head. He could see that Seabiscuit was looking right at his opponent. War Admiral glared back at him, his eyes wide open. Woolf saw Seabiscuit’s ears flatten to his head and knew that the moment Fitzsimmons had spoken of was near. One horse was going to crack.

As forty thousand voices shouted them on, War Admiral found something more. He thrust his head in front.

Woolf glanced at War Admiral’s beautiful head, sweeping through the air like a sickle. He could see the depth of the colt’s effort in his large amber eye, rimmed in crimson and white. “His eye was rolling in its socket as if the horse was in agony,” Woolf later recalled.²²

An instant later, Woolf felt a subtle hesitation in his opponent, a wavering. He looked at War Admiral again. The colt’s tongue shot out the side of his mouth.²³ Seabiscuit had broken him.

Woolf dropped low over the saddle and called into Seabiscuit’s ear, asking him for everything he had. Seabiscuit gave it to him. War Admiral tried to answer, clinging to Seabiscuit for a few strides, but it was no use. He slid from Seabiscuit’s side as if gravity were pulling him backward. Seabiscuit’s ears flipped up. Woolf made a small motion with his hand.

“So long, Charley.”²⁴ He had coined a phrase that jockeys would use for decades.

Galloping low with Woolf flat over his back, Seabiscuit flew into the lane, the clean peninsula of track narrowing ahead as the crowd pushed forward. A steeplechase fence in the infield had collapsed, and a line of men had crashed through the line of police and now stood upright on the inner rail near the wire, bending down toward Seabiscuit and rooting him on.²⁵ Clem McCarthy’s voice was breaking into his microphone. “Seabiscuit by three! Seabiscuit by three!” He had never heard such cheering. Arms waved and mouths gaped open in incredulity as Seabiscuit came on, his ears wagging. Thousands of hands reached out from the infield, stretching to brush his shoulders as he blew past.

When he could no longer hear War Admiral’s hooves beating the track, Woolf looked back. He saw the black form some thirty-five feet behind, still struggling to catch him. He had been wrong about War Admiral; he was game. Woolf felt a stab of empathy. “I saw something in the Admiral’s eyes that was pitiful,” he would say later. “He looked all broken up.²⁶ I don’t think he will be good for another race. Horses, mister, can have crushed hearts just like humans.”

The Iceman straightened out and rode for the wire, his face down. Seabiscuit sailed into history four lengths in front, running easy.

Behind him, pandemonium ensued. Seabiscuit’s wake seemed to create an irresistible vacuum, sucking the fans in behind him. Thousands of men, women, and children vaulted over the rails, poured onto the track, and began running after him.²⁸ Police dashed over the track, but the fans simply ran past them, leaping and clapping. Ahead of them all, Woolf stood like a titan in the irons. He cupped his hand around his mouth and shouted something back at Kurtsinger.²⁷ His words were lost in the cheering.

Up in the Howard box, Marcela’s eyes opened and filled with tears. Howard, completely overcome, stood up and whooped. They smiled and bowed as hundreds of voices called out to them.

In his box nearby, Samuel Riddle lowered his binoculars, turned to the Howards, and smiled weakly. His eyes were wide and shining with the shock of it. He hurried from his box. “It was a good race,” he said.²⁹ The crowd solemnly cleared a path for him. One or two people put a hand on his shoulder as he passed.

Marcela sank back down, disconcerted. Howard wanted to take her to the winner’s circle, but she decided to stay where she was. Tears were streaming down her face. She sat, drying her eyes with a handkerchief and laughing at herself. Howard burst out of the box and sprinted downstairs as fast as he could go, babbling and shaking hands with everyone he saw. He dashed onto the track and immediately disappeared in the swirling masses of revelers. Smith and Vanderbilt joined him, and the three of them fought to stay on their feet as reporters and fans pushed and pulled on them. Howard, unable to control his jubilation, jumped up and down with the fans. Police ran every which way.

The final race time lit up the tote board. A second roar erupted from the crowd. Seabiscuit had run the mile and three sixteenths in 1:56 ⅗. No horse in Pimlico’s fabled and lengthy history, through thousands of races dating back to just after the Civil War, had ever run the distance so fast.

Woolf turned Seabiscuit and cantered him back into the mob. He was wrung out, “all in for breath,” said McCarthy, “and he’s almost as white as the sleeves of his jacket.” Woolf pulled Seabiscuit up to the grandstand, and the crowd enveloped them, shouting, “Georgie! Georgie!” McCarthy shoved his way up to the horse and propped a microphone on Seabiscuit’s withers. Woolf bent to it.

“I wish my old pal Red had been on him instead of me,” he said in his easy drawl.³⁰ “See ya, Red.”

Hundreds of hands touched Woolf’s legs and stroked Seabiscuit’s coat. The horse stood quietly in the center of the chaos, his tail in the air and his ribs heaving in and out as the waves of fans pushed up to his sides.³¹ Smith elbowed his way up, and someone asked him for a statement. “I said mine on the track,” the trainer said.³² The police fought their way in to them, then formed a square and drove the crowd outward, leaving Smith standing beside his horse. Pumpkin bulled in with a stable hand on his back. The police opened a narrow avenue into the winner’s circle. Smith grasped Seabiscuit’s rein and led his grand little horse down the avenue of guards. Smith kept his eyes straight ahead, chin up, his face proud and sober. He led Seabiscuit to Howard, who patted the horse’s nose and beamed.