8
newsmen got down on their hands and knees: “Seabiscuit Works Out,”
SB
, fall 1937.
9
“‘mystery’ of Seabiscuit …”: “The Post Parade,”
Morning Telegraph/Daily Racing Form
, February 10, 1938.
10
“Doggone those clockers …”: “Smith Feuds with Clockers,”
Los Angeles Times
, February 2, 1938.
11
HOWARD HORSE PULLED UP “GROGGY”:
“Howard Horse Pulled Up Groggy After Work,”
Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express
, January 31, 1938, FD.
12
“Sponging”: “Betting Coup,”
Los Angeles Examiner
, February 1, 1938; “Horse Is Well Guarded,”
Morning Telegraph/Daily Racing Form
, February 2, 1938.
13
Howard acts as decoy: “Seabiscuit Works Out,”
San Francisco Chronicle
, February 12, 1938.
14
Fair Knightess fall: “Santa Anita Jockey Hurt,”
San Francisco Chronicle
, February 20, 1938, p. 3H; “Before and After,”
SB
, n.d.; “Harry Richards Expected,”
SB
, mid-February 1938; “Pollard Will Be Idle,”
SB
, mid-February 1938; Moody,
Come On Seabiscuit
, p. 109.
15
hind end was paralyzed: “Harry Richards Expected,”
SB
, mid-February 1938.
16
Pollard asks Howard to hire Woolf: “Owner Refuses Entry,”
Los Angeles Examiner
, December 22, 1937,
FD
.
17
“Seabiscuit will run …”: “Howard Hunts New Jockey,”
San Francisco Examiner
, February 21, 1938, p. 16.
18
“as good as hands can make him …”: “Seabiscuit’s Sizzling Work,”
Morning Telegraph/Daily Racing Form
, February 21, 1938, FD.
19
Pollard meets with Workman: “Hit or Miss,”
Los Angeles Examiner
, March 4, 1938; “Biscuit Trainer Raps Jockey,”
San Francisco Examiner
, March 1, 1938.
20
San Antonio: “Workman Told to Hit Horse Twice,”
SB
, n.d; “Seabiscuit Beaten by a Neck,”
San Francisco Chronicle
, February 26, 1938, FD.
21
Pollard listens to San Antonio: “Pollard Defends Workman,”
Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express
, February 28, 1938, p. A12.
22
Smith watches San Antonio: “Biscuit Trainer Raps Jockey,”
San Francisco Examiner
, March 1, 1938.
23
“All I want is a jockey who will obey …”: “Biscuit Trainer Raps Jockey,”
San Francisco Examiner
, March 1, 1938.
24
Woolf offered $1,000 to get out of contract: “There They Go,”
SB
, 1937.
25
Woolf meets with Howard, Smith: “Ice Man Jockey,”
San Francisco Examiner
, March 1, 1938, FD.
26
he’d split the riding fee: “Woolf Offers to Split,”
SB
, March 1938; “Small Field …”
Los Angeles Examiner
, March 3, 1938.
CHAPTER 12
1
barn security: “Stagehand Winner,”
San Francisco Chronicle
, March 6, 1938; “Owner Debunks Yarn on Seabiscuit Sponging,”
SB
, February 2, 1938.
2
plot to kidnap Woolf: “Stagehand Winner,”
San Francisco Chronicle
, March 6, 1938.
3
trainer … had to send to Miami to get … Wall: “Seabiscuit Was Best Horse in Handicap,”
SB
, n.d.
4
Red bows: “Jockey Pollard Recovering,”
Morning Telegraph/Daily Racing Form, SB
, July 1938.
5
Marcela in press box, Bing: “Wonder Horse Nibbles,”
SB
, February 11, 1938; “Sports,”
New York Journal American
, May 1938.
6
bet between Howards: “As Bill Leiser Sees It,”
San Francisco Chronicle
, March 5, 1938, FD.
7
Stagehand and Sceneshifter’s caps: “Turf in Review,”
Morning Telegraph/Daily Racing Form
, January 8, 1949; “Bill Henry Says,”
Los Angeles Times, SB
, March 1938.
8
All I need is luck: Salvator, “Marginalia,”
Thoroughbred Record, SB
, March 1938, p.203.
9
half mile world record broken: Beckwith,
Seabiscuit
, p. 44.
10
McCarthy’s call of race: Salvator, “Marginalia,”
Thoroughbred Record, SB
, March 1938, p. 203.
11
George realizes error: “Turf in Review,”
Morning Telegraph/Daily Racing Form
, January 8, 1949.
12
I am going to gallop by him:
“Sports,”
New York Journal and American
, April 26, 1938.
13
Pollard and Marcela watch race: “Pollard Praises Stagehand,”
Los Angeles Examiner
, March 6, 1938, p. 7; “The Post Parade,”
Morning Telegraph/Daily Racing Form
, March 7, 1938; untitled,
San Francisco Examiner, SB
, March 1938; “Bill Henry Says,”
Los Angeles Times, SB
, March 1938.
14
“We’ve got the race!”: “Bill Henry Says,”
Los Angeles Times, SB
, March 1938.
15
Pollard thought it was over: “Hugh Bradley Says,”
New York Post, SB
, May 1938.
16
spectators would remember race for as long as they lived: Leonard Dorfman, telephone interview, November 12, 1999.
17
clapped a hand over Marcela’s mouth: untitled,
San Francisco Examiner, SB
, March 1938.
18
“the greatest racehorse in the world …”: “Sports,”
New York Journal American
, April 26, 1938.
19
“We’ll try again …”: Beckwith,
Seabiscuit
, p. 44.
CHAPTER 13
1
Howard asked about match: “Sports,”
New York Journal American, SB
, May 1938.
2
newsmen petition to see films: “Biscuit Jockey Blamed,”
SB
, March 10, 1938.
3
Howard protests suspension: “Seabiscuit Withdrawn,”
Los Angeles Times
, March 11, 1938; “Hit or Miss,”
Los Angeles Examiner
, March 11, 1938.
4
Seabiscuit poses: “Hit or Miss,”
Los Angeles Examiner
, March 31, 1938; “Sports Mirror,”
San Francisco Chronicle
, February 12, 1938, p. 12; Charles Hatton, “This Is a Horse,”
Turf and Sport Digest
, January 1939, pp. 16–32; “Hit or Miss,”
Los Angeles Examiner
, March 31, 1938; “Sports Mirror,”
San Francisco Chronicle
, February 12, 1943, p. 2H.
5
Agua Caliente: Jerry Brucker, “Seabiscuit’s Overlooked Chapter,”
Thoroughbred of California
, September 1986, pp. 18–27; “Lure of Handicap Day,”
Morning Telegraph/Daily Racing Form
, March 25, 1938; “Seabiscuit Top Heavy Race Favorite,”
Los Angeles Times
, March 26, 1938; “Crowd Sets New Mark,”
Los Angeles Examiner
, March 28, 1938; “20,000 Watch Seabiscuit,”
San Diego Union
, March 28, 1938; “The Inside Track,”
Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express
, March 28, 1938, p. A11; “Seabiscuit Goes North,”
Los Angeles Times
, March 28, 1938, FD; “Yea, Verily,”
SB
, n.d.
6
Match negotiations: “War Admiral and Seabiscuit March for $100,000 Proposed,”
Daily Racing Tab, SB
, April 1938; “War Admiral, Seabiscuit Duel Arranged,”
Baltimore
Sun, April 13, 1938; “Biscuit vs. War Admiral?”
San Francisco Chronicle, SB
, April 1938; “Three Big Offers,”
San Francisco Chronicle, SB
, n.d.; “Coast Seeks,”
San Francisco Examiner
, April 6, 1938; “Biscuit Runs in Bay Meadows Handicap,”
Los Angeles Examiner
, April 14, 1938,
FD;
Marvin Drager,
The Most Glorious Crown
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975), pp. 61–75.
7
Two turn concern: “Pimlico Next on List,”
San Francisco Chronicle, SB
, April 1938.
8
“Seabiscuit will meet War Admiral anywhere …”: “Board of Directors Meet Today on War Admiral–Seabiscuit Match Race,”
San Francisco Call-Bulletin, SB
, April 1938.
9
“beat the stuffing …”: “Sports,”
New York Journal American
, April 26, 1938.
10
highest weight in California: “Biscuit First, Then Rest,”
San Francisco Call-Bulletin
, April 16, 1938.
11
Pollard in press box: “Record Crowd Sees Seabiscuit,”
San Francisco Examiner, SB
, April 1938.
12
Seabiscuit leaves: “Seabiscuit Shoves Off,”
San Francisco Chronicle, SB
, April 1938.
13
Captain Billie’s Whizz Bang
magazine: “Biscuit Plays Duck,”
SB
, n.d.
14
“We’ve got to tear off that guy’s epaulets …”: Ibid.
CHAPTER 14
1
slept for most of the trip: “Biscuit Good Sleeper,”
San Francisco Examiner, SB
, May 1938.
2
24,265th mile of career rail travel: “Seabiscuit’s Travels,”
SB
, May 1, 1938.
3
95 percent of the wagers were on War Admiral: “Little Money Wagered on Seabiscuit,”
San Francisco Chronicle
, May 7, 1938,
FD
.
4
tears down wall between stalls: “Biscuit Will Duck Pimlico,”
San Francisco Chronicle, SB
, n.d.
5
“Tom had blown his topper …”: “Seabiscuit Gets Recognition at Last,”
San Francisco Examiner
, February 2, 1944.
6
gate training: “Off Fast!,”
San Francisco Chronicle, SB
, May 1938; “Biscuit Goes to School,”
San Francisco Chronicle
, May 11, 1938, FD.
7
Wise We Boys: “Silent Tom Smith,”
SB
, March 16, 1940; “Silent Tom Can’t Keep a Secret,”
San Francisco Chronicle
, May 21, 1938; “Howard Crosses Up Clockers,”
Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express
, May 17, 1938; “Biscuit Bows Out,” SB; “Bill Leiser,”
San Francisco Chronicle
, May 22, 1938, p. 3H; “Seabiscuit Tom,”
San Francisco Chronicle
, May 21, 1938, p. 1H; “Biscuit Bows Out,”
San Francisco Chronicle
, May 24, 1938,
FD
.
8
“He never looked better …”: “Howard Visits New York,”
SB
, n.d.
9
paper wants racing board to step in: “State Racing Board Inquiry Is Suggested,”
Daily Mirror
, May 23, 1938, FD.
10
War Admiral’s bad training: “Howard Tells of Seabiscuit Program,”
Los Angeles Evening Herald and Examiner
, June 16, 1938; “Biscuit’s Knee Good,”
San Francisco Call-Bulletin
, June 16, 1938, FD.
11
“Now the one time out of so many …”: “$100,000 Match Race Called Off,”
New York Journal American
, May 25, 1938.
12
scratch decision: “Down in Front,”
New York Herald Tribune
, May 26, 1938; “Biscuit Admiral …”
SB
, May 1938; “$100,000 Match Race Called Off,”
New York Journal American
, May 25, 1938.
13
“I don’t know if he’ll ever come out …”: “On the Line,”
Daily Mirror
, June 8, 1938.
14
Howard willing to race for no purse: “$100,000 Match Race Called Off,”
New York Journal American
, May 25, 1938.
15
War Admiral scratched: “By Joe Williams,”
New York World-Telegram
, May 31, 1938; “The Great Race,” Newsweek, June 6, 1938.
16
“I’ll never again consent to such a thing …”: Drager,
Most Glorious Crown
, p. 75.
17
spectators boo War Admiral: “On the Line,”
Daily Mirror
, June 8, 1938.
CHAPTER 15
1
Pollard’s accident: “Howard’s Ace Loses Regular Jockey,”
Providence Journal
, June 24, 1938; “There They Go,”
Daily Racing Tab, July
16, 1938; “King of Horses,”
Morning Telegraph/Daily Racing Form
, March 17, 1940; Alexander,
A Sound of Horses
, pp. 181–82; Edith Wilde, telephone interview, February 2, 1998.
2
Howard flies in orthopedists: Edith Wilde, telephone interview, February 2, 1998.
3
“If that isn’t running …”: “War Admiral’s Trainer Balks,” SB, n.d.
4
War Admiral … balked in workout: “War Minstrel Proves He Will Be ’Cap Contender,”
Boston Evening Transcript
, June 22, 1938.
5
“the miracle of the ages …”: “In Best Condition of Career,”
Boston Evening American
, June 15, 1938.
6
“We’re still on the fence …”: “War Admiral Runs at Suffolk,”
The New York Times June
29, 1938.
7
NBC radio interview: Alexander,
A Sound of Horses
, pp. 180–81; David Alexander, “Four Good Legs Between Them,”
Blood-Horse
, December 24, 1955, pp. 1558–1563; Jack Shettlesworth, telephone interview, March 1998.
8
“My horse is sharper than a fishwife’s …”: “Sports,”
New York Journal American
, June 29, 1938.
9
second-largest crowd ever to attend: “War Admiral ‘Just Another Horse,’”
Wilmington Journal June
30, 1938.
10
Massachusetts scratch: “Setting the Pace,”
New York Sun
, June 30, 1938; “New England Weathers 1938,”
Morning Telegraph/Daily Racing Form, SB
, n.d.; untitled article,
SB
, June 1938; “Seabiscuit’s Racing Career at End?”
SB
, June 1938; “The Race Track,”
New Yorker
, June 9, 1938.
11
“It seems things are all going wrong …”: “Menow Wins $50,000 Race,”
Boston Herald, June
30, 1938.
CHAPTER 16
1
“Looks like a cow pony …”: Beckwith,
Step and Go Together
, p. 117.
2
condition of track: “War Admiral Next,”
SB
, July 17, 1938.
3
“It looked like they were trying to grow corn …”: “Stewards Issue Ultimatum,”
SB
, July 15, 1938.
4
Stewards vs. Smith: “Seabiscuit Is Impressive,”
Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express
, July 13, 1938; “Seabiscuit’s Trainer Bans”
Los Angeles Times
, July 14, 1938; “The Morning After,”
Daily News, SB
, July 15, 1938; “Stewards Issue Ultimatum,”
SB
, July 15, 1938; “Seabiscuit in Late Breeze,”
Los Angeles Examiner
, July 15, 1938.
5
Smith … never had a horse in his care: “Starting Gate for Match Never Built,”
San Francisco Chronicle, SB
, May 1938.
6
Greenberg runs between barn and office: Sonny Greenberg, telephone interview, December 24, 1999; “Seabiscuit Runs at Hollywood,”
Los Angeles Times, SB
, mid-July 1938; “Seabiscuit to Run,”
Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express
, July 15, 1938; “Stewards Issue Ultimatum,”
SB
, July 16, 1938.
7
Wayne Wright reducing: Leonard Dorfman, telephone interview, November 12, 1999.
8
“Let ’em run themselves out …”: “Woolf Gives All Credit,”
SB
, July 1938; “The Inside Track,”
Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express
, July 1938; “Praise Woolf for Ride,”
Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express
, July 19, 1938, p. A12.
9
“SILENT TOM SMILES!”:
“Seabiscuit Wins Race,”
San Francisco Examiner
, July 17, 1938.
10
“I know my horse …”: “Seabiscuit Heads for Chicago,”
Evening News
, July 18, 1938, p. 15.
CHAPTER 17
1
Lin-Charles rivalry: Noble Threewit, telephone interview, January 17, 1998.
2
Bing invested $600,000: Giles E. Wright, “30 Years of Surf and Turf,” Blood-Horse, July 23, 1966, p. 1921.
3
Side bet: Michael C. Howard, telephone interview, January 18, 1997.
4
“Ugh!”:
“It’s Biscuit to Win,”
San Diego
Sun, August 11, 1938, p. 15.
5
“camouflaged as a diesel …”: Ibid.
6
Bing outfits track: “Rumors of Howard, Son Rift,”
San Francisco Call-Bulletin
, August 12, 1938.
7
scare him to death: Ibid.
8
“What are you doing, Spec?”: “Biscuit Race Riders Get Works,”
San Francisco Chronicle
, August 13, 1938,
FD
.
9
fouling: “At Last!,”
Los Angeles Examiner
, August 17, 1938, FD.
10
“the dingbustingest contest …”: “Pilots of Biscuit and Ligaroti Set Down for Rest of Meeting,”
Morning Telegraph/Daily Racing Form
, August 14, 1938, p. 1.
11
Woolf scolds Richardson on yelling during race: “Great Stakes Reinsman Honored Today,” George Woolf Memorial Pamphlet, February 10, 1949, p. 4.
12
newsmen hear Woolf and Richardson arguing: “Stewards Rule Woolf, Richardson off Del Mar,”
San Francisco Call-Bulletin
, August 13, 1938,
FD
.
13
Marcela … downed several aspirin: untitled article,
SB
, n.d.
14
“I want the newspapers to forget …”: “Riding Orders Poppycock,”
San Francisco Call-Bulletin
, August 17, 1938,
FD
.
15
public accusation of wrongdoing: “Inside on Biscuit Race Bared,”
San Diego Sun
, August 16, 1938.
16
“make it look close …”: “Hit or Miss,”
Los Angeles Examiner, SB
, August 1938.
17
race was now being referred to as a “frameup” and a “fix”: “Riding Orders Poppycock,”
San Francisco Call-Bulletin, August
17, 1938, FD; “Seabiscuit-Ligaroti Fixed Race,”
Los Angeles Times
, August 16, 1938,
FD;
“Seabiscuit’s Owner Denies Frameup!,”
San Francisco Chronicle
, August 16, 1938,
FD
.
18
Howard’s reaction: “Biscuit Owner Fights New Charges,”
Los Angeles Examiner
, August 16, 1938,
FD;
“What Nots,”
SB
, n.d.; “Seabiscuit-Ligaroti Fixed Race,”
Los Angeles Times
, August 16, 1938,
FD
.
19
“there are a few people in the East …”: “Sports,”
New York Journal American, SB
, August 1938.
20
viewing of film: “Just a Case of Jockeying,”
Los Angeles Times
, August 12, 1988, section III, p. 3; “Del Mar Cleans Up,” SB, September 8, 1938.
21
Navy planes: Beckwith,
Seabiscuit
, p. 30; Beckwith,
Step and Go Together
, p. 118.
CHAPTER 18
1
leg broken and reset twice: Alexander,
A Sound of Horses
, p. 185.
2
Eighty-six pounds: “Sports,”
New York Journal American, SB
, n.d.
3
Pollard’s reading: David Alexander, “Four Good Legs Between Them,”
Blood-Horse
, December 24, 1955, p. 1553.
4
“Compensatory spark …”: Carl Bode, ed.,
The Portable Emerson
(New York: Viking, 1984), p. 165.
5
Red woos Agnes: Norah Christianson, telephone interview, January 26, 1998.
6
Agnes was certain he was dying: Ibid.
7
letter from Red: Edith Wilde, telephone interview, February 2, 1998.
8
Old Waldo … had been right after all: Alexander,
A Sound of Horses
, p. 187.
9
Match negotiations: Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, Jr., telephone interview, January 29, 1997; “By Joe Williams,”
SB
, n.d.; Drager,
Most Glorious Crown
, pp. 61–75.
10
Milton excuses himself: “Milton Asks New Starter,”
SB
, October 6, 1938.
11
secret desire for walk-up: Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, Jr., telephone interview, January 29, 1997; “Thrilling Seabiscuit Story,”
San Francisco Examiner, SB
, November 1938; Tommy Bell, telephone interview, June 22, 1999.
12
“I’m going to give them birds the biggest surprise …”: Bill Buck, telephone interview, January 28, 1998.
13
Pollard and Woolf strategize: “The Post Parade,”
Morning Telegraph/Daily Racing Form
, November 3, 1938.
14
“Seabiscuit’s like a hunk of steel …”: “Starting Gate for Match Never Built,”
San Francisco Chronicle, SB
, May 1938.
15
“you could kill him before he’d quit”: Alan Goodrich, “All-Time Greatest Jockey,”
Sir!
, March 1951, p. 66.
16
Smith and homemade bell: “Smith Recalls Stipulation That Could’ve Stopped Seabiscuit Sale,”
Daily Racing Form
, February 13, 1953; “Tom Smith Reminisces About Woolf, ’Biscuit,”
Daily Racing Form
, February 1953; Bill Buck, telephone interview, January 28, 1998.
17
Grog in Seabiscuit’s stall: “Smithiana,”
Thoroughbred Record
, February 23, 1957.
18
“a civil war between the War Admiral Americans and the Seabiscuit Americans …”: “No Matter Who Wins,”
San Francisco Chronicle
, November 1, 1938, p. 1H.
19
Kurtsinger’s wife: “Seabiscuit Shows Speed in Workout,”
SB
, October 27, 1938.
20
“The storm is past
…”: “Passing By,”
SB
, November 1938.
21
“bull’s wool” socks: Edith Wilde, telephone interview, February 2, 1998.
22
“Even George isn’t bad enough …”: The Post Parade,”
Morning Telegraph
, October 11, 1938.
23
“I still could have ridden the Biscuit …”: Ibid.
24
Seabiscuit … to win by four: “The Post Parade,”
Morning Telegraph/Daily Racing Form
, November 3, 1938.
25
Howard barn on strategy: “The Post Parade,”
Morning Telegraph/Daily Racing Form
, October 30, 1938; “Blue Bloods of the Turf,”
Baltimore Evening Sun
, October 28, 1938, p. 30; Alexander,
A Sound of Horses, p
. 180.
26
“War Admiral won’t outbreak …”: Jimmy Loftus, “Talk o’ the Turf,”
Turf and Sport Digest
, December 1938, p. 32.
27
THERE IS ONE SURE WAY … : “Obituary: Red Pollard,”
Blood-Horse
, March 21, 1981, pp. 1771–72.
28
Woolf and tractor path: “Now It Can Be Told,”
Blood-Horse
, April 5, 1941, p.59.
CHAPTER 19
1
Spencer inspects track: “40,000 See Howard’s Champion,”
The Baltimore Sun
, November 2, 1938.
2
OUR HORSE WILL WIN BY 5 … : “Sports,”
New York Journal American, SB
, n.d.
3
$25,000 of his own money: “This Way,”
Washington Times
, November 2, 1938, p. 19.
4
Fitzsimmons’s prediction: “Seabiscuit’s Victory Over War Admiral,”
New York Press, SB
, November 1938.
5
fans outside track: “Biscuit Wins by Four,” New York
Daily News
, November 2, 1938, p. 62.
6
paddock scene: “Roamer’s Ramblings,”
Thoroughbred Record
, November 5, 1938, p.305.
7
St. Christopher medal: Jimmy Loftus, “Talk o’ the Turf,”
Turf and Sport Digest
, December 1938, p. 32; “Cohning Tower,”
SB
, November 1938.
8
Bell on stand broken: “Tom Smith Reminisces About Woolf, ’Biscuit,”
Daily Racing Form
, February 1953.
9
No assistants, … or no race: “Tom Smith Reminisces About Woolf, ’Biscuit,”
Daily Racing Form
, February 1953.
10
“keyed to the highest tension …”: Grantland Rice, “Seabiscuit vs. War Admiral,”
The Fireside Book of Horse Racing
, ed. David Woods (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963), p. 243.
11
forty million listeners: “Seabiscuit Stands Out,”
The Pay Off, SB
, November 1938.
12
Roosevelt listens to race: Stoneridge,
Great Horses of Our Time
, p. 27.
13
War Admiral favored in press box: “Woolf Shares Purse,”
San Francisco Chronicle, SB
, November 1938.
14
prerace: “Thrilling Seabiscuit Story,”
San Francisco Examiner, SB
, November 1938.
15
George canters Seabiscuit to backstretch: Ibid.
16
“we’ll never get a go …”: Loftus, “Talk o’ the Turf.”
17
“kicks like hell …”: “Thrilling Seabiscuit Story,”
San Francisco Examiner, SB
, November 1938.
18
“get on up here with me!”: Harold Washburn, telephone interview, November 9, 1998.
19
War Admiral never extended: “Seabiscuit Shows Speed in Workout,”
SB
, October 27, 1938.
20
writer falling from press box: Jack Mahon, “The Day the Biscuit Beat the Admiral,”
Turf and Sport Digest
, February 1974.
21
fans fainting: Mahon, “The Day the Biscuit Beat the Admiral.”
22
“His eye was rolling …”: Loftus, “Talk o’ the Turf,” p. 33.
23
tongue shot out the side of his mouth: “Thrilling Seabiscuit Story,”
San Francisco Examiner, SB
, November 1938.
24
“So long, Charley …”: Harold Washburn, telephone interview, November 9, 1998.
25
steeplechase fence collapsed: Ralph Theroux, telephone interview, February 1, 1999.
26
“He looked all broken up …”: “Winner Pays $6,”
San Francisco Chronicle
, November 2, 1938,
FD
; “Biscuit Choice,”
SB
, n.d.
27
George yells back at Kurtsinger:
1938 Pimlico Special
, downloaded video (New York: ABC Sports, May 14, 1996, accessed March 26, 1997); America Online, ABC Sports racing page.
28
fans vault rail:
1938 Pimlico Special
, video; America Online, ABC Sports racing page; “Seabiscuit Defeats Admiral,”
Daily Mirror
, November 2, 1938, p.34.
29
Riddle’s reaction: “In the Paddock,”
SB
, November 1938; “Wife of Biscuit’s Owner in Tears,”
SB
, November 1938.
30
“old pal Red …”: Audiotape, “Clem McCarthy’s Call of the Seabiscuit–War Admiral Match Race.”
31
paddock scene: “40,000 Watch Seabiscuit Defeat War Admiral,”
The New York Times
, November 1, 1938; “Seabiscuit Beats War Admiral,”
SB
, n.d.
32
“I said mine on the track …”: Ibid.
33
Kurtsinger whispers in War Admiral’s ear: “Rodger H. Pippen,”
SB
, n.d.
34
“If only Red …”: “Rider’s Views,”
SB
, November 1938.
35
Woolf, Kurtsinger postrace quotes: “He’s the Best Horse,”
San Francisco Examiner
, November 2, 1938; “Rival Jockey Lauds Biscuit,”
SB
, November 2, 1938.
36
Pollard after race: “The Post Parade,”
Morning Telegraph/Daily Racing Form
, November 3, 1938; “He’s the Best Horse,”
San Francisco Examiner
, November 2, 1938; “Rider’s Views,”
SB
, November 1938.
37
morning after: “War Admiral’s Trainer Balks,”
SB
, November 1938.
38
$1,500: “Woolf Shares Purse,”
San Francisco Chronicle, SB
, November 1938.
CHAPTER 20
1
Red rebreaks leg; George visits: “There They Go,”
SB
, December 1938.
2
Babcock fixes leg: Edith Wilde, telephone interview, February 2, 1998; “Howard May Retire Seabiscuit,”
Los Angeles Evening Herald and Examiner
, March 4, 1940, p. A16.
3
ice in Maryland: “Biscuit, Work Balked by Weather, to Quit Pimlico,”
Baltimore Evening Sun
, December 1, 1938.
4
crowds form in Columbia: “Seabiscuit Will Race at Santa Anita,”
SB
, n.d.
5
“All four of his legs are broken …”: “Seabiscuit Here in Fine Condition,”
Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express
, January 2, 1939, p. A10.
6
“dumb farmer of a reporter …”: “Smith Denies Biscuit Not in Good Shape,”
SB
, December 25, 1938.
7
“One hundred thirty-four is a lot of weight …”: “Seabiscuit Will Race at Santa Anita,”
SB
, n.d.
8
horse had drawn more newspaper coverage: “Looking ’Em Over,”
San Francisco News, SB
, January 1939; B. K. Beckwith,
Seabiscuit: The Saga of a Great Champion
(Willfred Crowell, 1940), p. 33.
9
“the affection that this inarticulate brown horse had aroused …”: “Hollywood,”
SB
, March 3, 1940.
10
arrival at Santa Anita: “Seabiscuit, Sound and Eager, at Santa Anita,”
SB
, January 2, 1939.
11
“No longer will there be any secrecy …”: “Seabiscuit’s People’s Horse, Says Boss,”
Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express, SB
, January 1939.
12
“Here comes the Biscuit”: “Rival Trainers, Owners,”
San Francisco Examiner, SB
, early 1939.
13
new turn-gripping shoes: “Seabiscuit Gets Special Type Shoe,”
Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express
, January 24, 1939, p. A12.
14
hiding Kayak: “Argentine Takes Worst,”
Los Angeles Examiner
, March 5, 1939; “Kayak Trainer Given Credit,”
Los Angeles Examiner
, March 3, 1939; Salvator, “Horse of the Month,”
Horse and Horseman
, April 1939, p. 22.
15
Smith worries over starting Seabiscuit: “Seabiscuit out of Cap,”
SB
, February 16, 1939.
16
two thousand pounds of force: George Pratt, e-mail interview, February 13, 1998.
17
Seabiscuit’s injury: “Champ Goes Lame,”
Los Angeles Examiner
, February 15, 1939; “Fear Seabiscuit’s Career at End,”
Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express
, February 15, 1939, p. B7; “X Ray Leg,”
SB
, February 1939; “Howard Star Pops Knee at Santa Anita,”
SB
, February 14, 1939; “Seabiscuit’s Condition Better,”
SB
, February 1939; “Seabiscuit Still a Puzzle,”
SB
, February 1939.
18
Woolf heard a sharp
crack!:
Moody,
Come On Seabiscuit
, p. 151.
19
“Why did you do it?”: “Seabiscuit Still a Puzzle,”
SB
, February 1939.
20
Postinjury scene at Howard barn: “Fear Seabiscuit’s Career at End,”
Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express
, February 15, 1939, p. B7; “Leg Injury,”
Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express
, February 15, 1939, p. B7; “Track Observers Predict,”
Pasadena Star News
, February 15, 1939, p. 16; “Howard Star Pops Knee at Santa Anita,”
SB
, February 14, 1939; “Seabiscuit’s Fate Still in Doubt,”
San Francisco Examiner
, February 15, 1939, FD; “Seabiscuit Still a Puzzle,”
SB
, February 1939; “Seabiscuit Scratched,”
SB
, February 1939; “Seabiscuit out of Cap,”
SB
, February 1939.
21
ruptured suspensory: “Seabiscuit to Stud,”
Blood-Horse
, March 18, 1939, p. 456.
22
Buenos Aires was at a standstill: “Kayak to Pass,”
SB
, March 6, 1939.
23
Howard reaction to ’39 hundred-grander win: “There They Go,”
SB
, March 1939.
24
Marcela felt hollow: Moody,
Come On Seabiscuit
, p. 153.
CHAPTER 21
1
“Then I reckon I’ll have to …”: Moody,
Come On Seabiscuit
, p. 153.
2
Howard stops going to track: “Biscuit May Come Back,”
Los Angeles Times, SB
, summer 1939.
3
“A long, hard pull …”: “Howard May Retire Seabiscuit,”
Los Angeles Evening Herald and Examiner
, March 4, 1940, p. A16.
4
“We were a couple of old cripples …”: Beckwith,
Step and Go Together
, p. 120.
5
horse and rider healed: Beckwith,
Seabiscuit
, p. 58.
6
chasing deer: Ibid.
7
“The Biscuit will come back …”: “Biscuit Secret Kept by Smith,”
San Francisco Examiner
, February 26, 1940, FD.
8
“The whole ranch became centered on the job …”: Beckwith,
Step and Go Together
, p. 121.
9
new stride: “Champ Ready,”
SB
, n.d.
10
“Our wheels went wrong together …”: “Obituary: Red Pollard,”
Blood-Horse
, March 21, 1981, p. 1773.
11
“You knew he wanted to race again …”: Beckwith,
Step and Go Together, p
. 121.
12
No elite horse had ever returned to top form: John Hervey,
American Race Horses 1940
(New York: Sagamore, 1941), pp. 200–201.
13
Agnes sure Red can’t father child: Norah Christianson, telephone interview, January 26, 1998.
CHAPTER 22
1
“I am training a cripple …”: “Big Three of Racing on List for Handicap,” December 6, 1939, p. 23, SB.
2
“We’ll run one-two anyway …”: “Smithiana,”
Thoroughbred Record, February
23, 1957.
3
Tommy Luther banned for “defiant and threatening attitude”: Farra,
Jockeying
, p. 63; Tommy Luther, telephone interview, February 2, 1998; John Giovanni, telephone interview, January 23, 1998.
4
Pollard won’t join jockey meetings: Tommy Luther, telephone interview, February 2, 1998.
5
Yummy fighting: “The Post Parade,”
Morning Telegraph/Daily Racing Form
, March 8, 1940.
6
Howard takes Pollard off filly: “The Post Parade,”
Morning Telegraph/Daily Racing Form
, February 3, 1940.
7
Pollard’s secret terror: Alexander,
A Sound of Horses
, p. 186.
8
Pollard criticized: Barry Whitehead, “Seabiscuit’s Santa Anita Handicap,”
Thoroughbred Record
, March 9, 1940, p. 195.
9
“My left-handed rooting section …”: “The Post Parade,”
Morning Telegraph/Daily Racing Form
, February 27, 1940.
10
“And none so poor …”: untitled,
Morning Telegraph, SB
, winter 1940.
11
Pollard’s drinking: Bill Buck, telephone interview, January 28, 1998; Alexander,
A Sound of Horses
, p. 187.
12
“I got to wear glued shoes …”: Ibid.
13
Yummy worried about drinking: Ibid.
14
Smith and Howard argue: Sonny Greenberg, telephone interview, December 24, 1999; “Both Barrels,”
San Francisco Call-Bulletin
, March 4, 1940,
FD
.
15
Woolf and Pollard argue: Farrell Jones, telephone interview, February 25, 1999.
16
“It’s raining, Charley …”: “The Post Parade,”
Morning Telegraph/Daily Racing Form
, February 1, 1940.
17
“For hire …”: Ibid.
18
all-jockey baseball team: “Seabiscuit May Soon Be Shortstop,”
San Francisco Chronicle, SB
, n.d.
19
“passing the ’Biscuit by …”: “Seabiscuit Is Still Big Question Mark,”
San Francisco News
, February 20, 1940.
20
Red weeps on track: “Seabiscuit Runs Third,”
San Francisco Chronicle
, February 10, 1940, p. 4H.
21
Red and Yummy to Caliente: “Me and the Biscuit,”
San Francisco Chronicle
, February 15, 1940, p. 4H.
22
Seabiscuit props: “Difference of Opinion,”
San Francisco Chronicle
, February 21, 1940, FD.
23
He has nothing left:
“Hundred Grand,”
San Francisco Chronicle
, February 18, 1940, p.2H.
24
propping as omen: “Difference of Opinion,”
San Francisco Chronicle
, February 21, 1940, FD.
25
Howard sends retainer to Haas: “Seabiscuit Charges to Victory,”
San Francisco Chronicle
, February 25, 1940; “Great Ride to Victory,”
SB
, February 25, 1940.
26
Pollard visits Alexander: Alexander,
A Sound of Horses
, pp. 186–87.
27
rabbit’s foot: “Racing Pays If You’re Lucky,”
San Francisco Chronicle
, winter 1940.
28
“It’s Seabiscuit, wire to wire …”: “A Cinch,”
SB
, February 25, 1940.
29
men doff hats to horse: “The Post Parade,”
Morning Telgraph/Daily Racing Form
, March 2, 1940.
30
“as a country boy can throw an apple …”: “The Biscuit—As Far as You Can Throw an Apple,”
San Francisco Chronicle
, February 25, 1940; “Great Ride to Victory,”
SB
, February 25, 1940.
31
sounder than he’d been in two years: “A Cinch,”
SB
, February 25, 1940.
32
“Just give us a fast track …”: “Pollard Confident,”
SB
, n.d.
CHAPTER 23
1
weather bureau calls: “Hollywood,”
SB
, March 3, 1940.
2
“Kayak’s four mud-running legs …”: “Rain Renews Seabiscuit’s Anita Jinx,”
San Francisco Call-Bulletin
, February 29, 1940, p. 21.
3
morning of race: Beckwith,
Seabiscuit
, pp. 10–13.
4
“Be with him …”: Beckwith,
Step and Go Together
, pp. 108–109.
5
prerace blowout: “Turnstiles Clicking,”
SB
, early March 1940; Beckwith,
Seabiscuit
, pp. 10–13.
6
scene at Santa Anita: Barry Whitehead, “Seabiscuit’s Santa Anita Handicap,”
Thoroughbred Record
, March 9, 1940, p. 195.
7
half a million words: “Turnstiles Clicking,”
SB
, early March 1940.
8
Saint Christopher medal: “Kayak Could Have Won,”
San Francisco Examiner
, March 3, 1940.
9
history’s largest crowd: “Seabiscuit Great in Victory,”
Los Angeles Examiner, SB
, March 1940.
10
“I’d seen Johnny’s leg …”: Alexander,
A Sound of Horses
, p. 188.
11
“sidled up to me …”: Ibid., pp. 187–88.
12
“You know the horse …”: “The Biscuit Is Too Tough!”
San Francisco Examiner
, March 5, 1940.
13
Howard at the paddock: “The Post Parade,”
Morning Telegraph/Daily Racing Form
, March 5, 1940; Alexander,
A Sound of Horses
, p. 188.
14
Alexander thought of Huck Finn: Ibid.
15
Marcela runs toward wagon: Beckwith,
Seabiscuit
, p. 61.
16
sprinters hard-pressed to equal time:
American Racing Manual 1938
(New York: Regal Press, 1938), pp. 196–360 (top sprint race times).
17
crying out a prayer: “I Just Sat and Watched,”
San Francisco Chronicle
, March 3, 1940, p.3H.
18
“Now
, Pop!”: “Sports,”
New York Journal American, SB
, n.d.
19
Hernandez’s voice cut over the crowd:
There They Go: Racing Calls by Joe Hernandez
, album released by Los Angeles Turf Club, n.d.
20
We are alone:
“I Just Sat and Watched,”
San Francisco Chronicle
, March 3, 1940, p.3H.
21
Marcela up on the water wagon: “The Post Parade,”
Morning Telegraph/Daily Racing Form
, March 5, 1940.
22
leaping, shouting reporters: “As Bill Leiser Sees It,”
San Francisco Chronicle
, March 1940, SB.
23
Haas had never heard such thunder: “Haas Impressed,”
SB
, March 1940.
24
Haas says he could not have beaten Seabiscuit: “Howard May Retire Seabiscuit,”
Los Angeles Evening Herald and Examiner
, March 4, 1940, p. A16.
25
crowd reaction: Whitehead, “Seabiscuit’s Santa Anita Handicap,” p. 195; “So Seabiscuit Took the Hundred Thousand,”
San Francisco Chronicle
, March 2, 1940, p. 3H; “Chalk Brigade Reaps Harvest,”
San Francisco Chronicle
, March 3, 1940; “Hollywood,”
SB
, March 3, 1940.
26
“Listen to this crowd roar!”:
There They Go: Racing Calls by Joe Hernandez
.
27
“like a man who temporarily had visited Olympus …”: “Sun Beau’s Mark,”
SB
, early March 1940.
28
“Best-smelling drink I ever tasted …”: Alexander,
A Sound of Horses, p
. 189.
29
Red takes shots at George: “To the Point,”
San Francisco Examiner
, March 3, 1940, section 2, p. 2.
30
“Ha-ray for Seabiscuit!”: “Extra Cheer for Biscuit,”
SB
, early March 1940.
31
“Oh … that I lived to see this day …”: “Can Challedon or Kayak Whip Him?”
San Francisco Chronicle
, March 3, 1940, FD.
32
“you put up a great ride …”: “Seabiscuit Gets Recognition at Last,”
San Francisco Examiner
, February 2, 1944.
33
“Little horse, what next?”: Stoneridge,
Great Horses of Our Time
, p. 34.
34
worth his weight in gold: “Seabiscuit First Worth Weight in Gold,”
SB
, March 1940.
35
“Seabiscuit is Mr. Howard’s horse …”: “Biscuit Trainer Hails,”
San Francisco Examiner
, March 12, 1940.
36
Howard calls Smith: “Silent Tom Smith,”
SB
, March 16, 1940.
37
gathering at the Derby: Alexander,
A Sound of Horses
, pp. 189–190.
EPILOGUE
1
Seabiscuit leaves Santa Anita: “Turf Champion Leaves,”
SB
, April 11, 1940.
2
“Seabiscuit … is the greatest horse …”: David Alexander, “New England Racing,”
Blood-Horse
, August 1, 1942, p. 159.
3
George sick, thin: “Turf in Review,”
Morning Telegraph/Daily Racing Form
, January 8, 1949.
4
“There was one thing special you can say about George …”: “Tom Smith Reminisces About Woolf, ’Biscuit,”
Daily Racing Form
, February 1953.
5
left lucky kangaroo-leather saddle in trunk: Jenifer Van Deinse, e-mail interview, March 27, 2000.
6
Woolf’s fall: “The Iceman Dies in California,”
Blood-Horse
, February 23, 1946, p. 86; Bill Buck, telephone interview, January 28, 1998; Sonny Greenberg, telephone interview, December 24, 1999; Wad Studley, telephone interview, February 6, 1999.
7
friends heard Woolf’s head hit track: Wad Studley, telephone interview, February 6, 1999.
8
George’s friends turned away: Ibid.
9
George’s funeral: Bill Buck, telephone interview, January 28, 1998; “Turfdom Pays Final Tribute to Woolf,”
Los Angeles Times
, January 8, 1946; Mike Griffin, telephone interview, January 23, 1998.
10
“who has Woolf’s book?”: “A Report on Pollard,”
Blood-Horse
, March 9, 1946, p. 669.
11
“George Woolf is at Santa Anita …”: Jack Shettlesworth, “Woolf Statue Unveiled,”
Thoroughbred Record
, February 19, 1949.
12
Elizabeth Arden Graham: Bolus,
Remembering the Derby
(Gretna, La.: Pelican Publishing Company, 1994), pp. 179–96; “Lady’s Day in Louisville,”
Time
, May 6, 1946, pp. 57–63.
13
Riddle speaks to Smith: “Tom Smith Reminisces About Woolf, ’Biscuit,”
Daily Racing Form
, February 1953.
14
Smith accused of drugging horse: “Tom Smith and His Atomizer,”
Blood-Horse
, November 17, 1945, pp. 1007–9; “Tom Smith Ruling Stands,”
Blood-Horse
, February 23, 1946, pp. 521–28.
15
Smith not deserving of punishment: “Lady’s Day in Louisville,” p. 63.
16
Graham hires attorney, Jimmy Smith: Bolus,
Remembering the Derby
, p. 188.
17
“Those bastards …”: Ibid.
18
training one filly: Leonard Dorfman, interview, November 12, 1999.
19
Almost no one comes to Smith’s funeral: Tommy Bell, telephone interview, June 22, 1999.
20
“I’ll never throw a leg over another horse …”: David Alexander, “Four Good Legs Between Them,”
Blood-Horse
, December 24, 1955, p. 1558.
21
“barnacle on wheels of progress …”: “Barnacle Red,”
Blood-Horse
, February 2, 1957, p.301.
22 Giangaspro’s death: Sam Renick, telephone interview, December 5, 1997.
23
Satos in the Kaiser Suite: “New Guests in Seabiscuit’s Stable,”
SB
, n.d.
24
Pollard tries to enlist: Alexander,
A Sound of Horses
, p. 184.
25
taken to hospital in laundry basket: Edith Wilde, telephone interview, February 2, 1998.
26
“me and Methuselah …”: “Obituary: Red Pollard,”
Blood-Horse
, March 21, 1981, p. 1773.
27
“Maybe I should have heeded …”: Alexander,
A Sound of Horses
, p. 183.
28
“I’m hanging up my blouse for good …”: Alexander, “Four Good Legs,” p. 1558.
29
“You Made Me What I Am …”: Alexander,
A Sound of Horses
, p. 178.
30
Pollard’s post-riding jobs: Ibid., p. 168.
31
Never beats alcoholism: Norah Christianson, telephone interview, January 26, 1998.
32
Red sat by, mute: Ibid.
33
hospital built atop Narragansett: Ibid.
34
No cause of death was ever found: Ibid.
35
“It was as if …”: Ibid.
36
Howard hangs sign on Redwood Highway: “Both Barrels,” SB.
37
Fifty thousand visitors: Jack McDonald, “Seabiscuit,”
Spur
, August 1983, p.33.
38
Fifteen hundred at a time: “Both Barrels,”
SB
, n.d.
39
Seabiscuit’s life at Ridgewood: Ibid.
40
Seabiscuit sleeps under tree: Bill Nichols, telephone interview, January 14, 1998.
41
herding cattle: Jane Goldstein, “Seabiscuit Cover-Up,”
Blood-Horse
, March 13, 1978, p.1244.
42
bomb shelter: “Seabiscuit Gets Own Bomb Shelter!,”
SB
, December 25, 1941.
43
ambulance: “Howards Give U.S. Ambulance,”
San Francisco Examiner
, October 16, year unknown,
SB
.
44
bomber: “Seabiscuit Bomber,”
SB
, n.d.; “Navy Bomber Crew Back,”
SB
, n.d.
45
gives Seabiscuit shoe to pilot: “Seabiscuit Shoe Races Across German Skies,”
SB
, n.d.
46
“there will never be another Seabiscuit”: Jack McDonald, “Seabiscuit,”
Spur
, August 1983, p. 33.
47
listened from car: Jack Shettlesworth, “The Melancholy Knell,”
Thoroughbred Record
, June 11, 1950, p. 24.
48
Howard rides Seabiscuit: Bill Nichols, telephone interview, January 14, 1998.
49
Marcela met her husband at breakfast: Carter Swart, “The Howards of San Francisco,”
Northern California Thoroughbred
, Fall 1981, p. 111.
50
“I never dreamed …”: McDonald, “Seabiscuit,” p. 33.
51
let the oak stand as the only marker: Michael C. Howard, telephone interview, January 18, 1997.
SEABISCUIT
LAURA HILLENBRAND
A Reader’s Guide
A Conversation with Laura Hillenbrand
William Nack, for almost three decades the turf writer first at Newsday newspaper on Long Island, N.Y. then at Sports Illustrated magazine, is the author of Secretariat, The Making of a Champion, a biography of the 1973 Triple Crown winner. Much like Laura Hillenbrand, Nack grew up riding, grooming, and messing with standardbred trail horses, and at a young age began cultivating a passion for the thoroughbred. In fact, on his way to the University of Illinois, where he majored in journalism, Nack spent one summer as a hot-walker and groom at old Arlington Park, north of Chicago. He shares with Hillenbrand a long-time interest in the history of thoroughbred horse racing, in which Seabiscuit and Secretariat played highly visible and central roles, and also a lifelong appreciation of language and literature.
WN: In the fall of 2000, while I was shopping at a supermarket in Washington, D.C., I got a call on my cell phone from Andrew Beyer, the Harvard-educated turf writer from The Washington Post. “I want to read something to you,” Andrew said. So I leaned against the coffee grinder and listened as he began: “In Tom Smith’s younger days, the Indians would watch him picking his way over the open plains, skirting the mustang herds. He was always alone, even back then, in the waning days of the nineteenth century.” Andrew read on a few more moments about The Biscuit’s trainer, the poetic recitation ending with, “His history had the ethereal quality of hoofprints in windblown snow.” When he finished, Andew blurted out, “Isn’t that just terrific?” And that’s how I was introduced to Seabiscuit. You had clearly created a world, and you had done so with a distinctly lyrical feel and touch. Where did you learn to write and who were your literary models?
LH: I think I decided I wanted to be a writer one summer afternoon in my childhood, when the neighborhood pool I was swimming in was temporarily closed due to lightning. I snatched up my towel and huddled on a big porch with the other kids, waiting out the storm. A man I had never seen before sat down on a plastic lawn chair near me, brought out an illustrated copy of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and offered to read it. Most of the kids left, but two or three of us stayed to listen, sitting crosslegged on the floor around him. As he read, I slipped so deeply into the narrative that the thunderstorm around me seemed to be rushing out of the words themselves. My head was ringing with those words as I walked home. I never knew who that man was, but I never really got over that day. As a kid, I read and wrote a great deal. I used to scribble short stories in notebooks, imitating the style of whatever I was reading at the time, then tear the pages out and bury them in my desk drawers. I was terrified of showing anyone my work, or even admitting that I wanted to be a writer. This didn’t really change until I attended Kenyon College, an ideal destination for anyone who aspires to write well. There, a woman named Megan Macomber, an English professor and writer of spectacular talent, took me aside and told me that writing was what I should be doing with my life. No one had ever said this to me before, and it had an enormous impact. She taught me so much about our language, and she teaches me still. She was one of the first people to whom I showed my manuscript of Seabiscuit, and her comments made it so much better. If you ask me what I am reading on any given day, it is most likely going to be a work from a great author from long ago. Every writer stands on the shoulders of the old authors who have shaped and refined language and storytelling. In my mind, almost no one today approaches their greatness in either style or insight. I split evenly between history and fiction. For me, the most influential books have been Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels, Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and The Old Man and the Sea, Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Bruce Catton’s Mr. Lincoln’s Army, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain. If I like something, I tend to read it again and again. I think I have read Pride and Prejudice—in my view the most perfect book in our language—eight times, and it has taught me something new each time.
The most important book I read while writing the book was Shaara’s masterpiece, The Killer Angels. I sought to accomplish in my book what Shaara accomplished in his: to recreate history with the texture of a novel. His is an historical novel with invented dialogue and scenes, while mine is straight history that adheres strictly to documented facts and quotations, but his book is a splendid example of how to illuminate character with telling detail. His book underscored for me the importance of searching for minutiae about my subjects that would say the most about who they were.
WN: I’ve been covering thoroughbred racing for almost thirty years, and while I knew about Seabiscuit, Smith, Charles Howard, and jockeys Red Pollard and George Woolf—I had read stories about the Seabiscuit-War Admiral match race—I had no idea that this cast of characters was so rich and colorful. And, really unforgettable. They were better than fiction. Where and how did you first get the idea that there was a book in the story of Seabiscuit—enough material, that is, to sustain a lengthy, non-fiction narrative?
LH: Before I wrote Seabiscuit, I was a magazine journalist. I always knew I would write a book, but I was waiting for an irresistible story to hit me between the eyes. In the fall of 1996, while working on an article on an unrelated subject, I happened to stumble upon material on Seabiscuit. I had always known the basics of the horse’s story, but knew little about the men around him. No one had ever told their stories before. That day I found just a tidbit of information, a few passages about how Charles Howard was a modern automobile man and Tom Smith was a plains cowboy. Something about that tugged at me, and I kept turning it over in my head. I thought it was fascinating that a man who had made his fortune replacing the horse with the automobile would find his true greatness by teaming up with a frontier horseman who had been rendered obsolete by the automobile.
I started poking around in more documents and doing a few interviews, and a spectacular story tumbled out of the research. What really sold me was the epic reach of the tale. By following the almost unbelievably dramatic stories of these men and this horse, tracing their paths through the widely varied, long-forgotten avenues of life from which they emerged, then traveling with them on Seabiscuit’s glory tours, you had a sweeping view of the breadth of American life in that era. I was obsessed almost immediately.
I submitted an article idea on Seabiscuit to American Heritage, which accepted it, and two weeks into my research I had so much information that I knew I had the book I had waited for. It had been worth the wait.
WN: You did a deft job at introducing all these characters, one after another, and then braiding them in and out of the narrative flow of the story. I ended up not having a favorite character in the book. I ended up liking all of them, for different reasons. All represented the pioneering spirit of the Old West, in a way, as rugged individualists who were tough and bold and devil-may-care guys—gamblers, at bottom, who were not afraid to roll the dice. Let’s talk about them. I very much liked Charles Howard, the Horatio Alger visionary who struck it rich. Did you find him appealing? He was Seabiscuit’s press agent, really, and he had himself a ball with that horse, don’t you think?
LH: Toward the end of his life, Howard was nicknamed Lucky Charlie, and it stuck. Howard was irritated by this, and once told a friend he was going to slug the next person to call him Lucky. His success wasn’t luck, he protested, and I think he was right. Howard was made not by luck, but by his own gifts. I think his achievements were a result of his ability to see possibility without concern for the package it came in, and his willingness to stake something on that possibility. He saw character before he saw anything else. If this story has a lesson, it’s that character reigns preeminent in determining potential. Howard was arguably the most important individual in this story because he was the one who saw the undiscovered greatness in horse, trainer, and jockey, assembled this motley crew, held it together, and positioned it to exploit its strengths. I admire him for that, and I adore him for his loyalty and generosity to the individuals around him. And yes, I think he had the time of his life with this horse. None of his other successes gave him so much pleasure.
WN: Many of the most engaging characters in racing have been jockeys, and you had two of the most engaging of all—Pollard, known as Cougar, and Woolf, known as The Iceman. Boy, what grist they provided for you! Pollard ended up like a man who’d been through a half dozen train wrecks. Woolf had his own physical problems that eventually led to his death. They had a great relationship, marked by humor and self-respect, which had its ups-and-downs in the end, right?
LH: I was so taken by the friendship between these two men. I found it amazing that the bond between them was so resilient, because they had every reason to pull away from each other. As professional rivals, they were set up in opposition to each other from their teen years on. For one to win, the other had to lose. To complicate things, George was blessed with staggering talent, while Red was not. This led to an enormous disparity in the quality of their lives on the track and off. Then Red found the “big horse,” a creature greater than anything George had ever ridden, and suddenly it was Red who was at the top of the heap. Yet their friendship remained undisturbed. What was most moving to me was Red’s generosity in obtaining the mount on Seabiscuit for George. He must have known that he was risking losing the mount for good. It testified to the depth of his friendship for George and the depth of his loyalty to Seabiscuit and the Howard team.
I think the fight George and Red had over Seabiscuit was an unavoidable event in such a relationship. Each man had a massive stake in redeeming himself aboard this horse: George wanted to make amends for having played a role in Seabiscuit’s injury; Red desperately needed to both reestablish his career, and win the race in which he had made a critical error three years earlier. I think that after more than ten years of rivalry, with so much on the line, it was inevitable that the tension between them would boil over. But in the end, it was the friendship—not the rivalry—that prevailed.
WN: Red Pollard was really your central character, at least of the two-legged variety. Certainly, he was the most diversely fascinating figure in the story, what with his courage in the face of injuries, his love-affair with Agnes, his belief in Seabiscuit, his battles with alcoholism, his humor, and his recitations from Shakespeare and Ralph Waldo Emerson—or Old Waldo, as Red called him. It is clear from the book that you liked him enormously. Why? What did you see in him?
LH: Red was in so many ways a heartbreaking figure. He was physically unsuited to riding. His intellect and erudition made him an oddball at the track, and he was incredibly accident-prone. While his peculiarities suited him to Seabiscuit, a kindred soul, he was by no means a great rider. After Seabiscuit, he was consistent only in failure. Racing punished and humiliated him. As I began to write about him, I felt only pity for this man whose ambitions so ridiculously exceeded what nature and fate bestowed upon him. But the longer I looked, the more pity gave way to admiration, even envy. For all his failures, Red lived exactly as he chose. Most of us don’t, and live narrower lives because of it. I see a beautiful dignity in him, cheerfully refusing to be defeated by all that defeats the rest of us—fear, derision, loss, pain, sheer ordinariness. He didn’t give a damn that he wasn’t winning. He just loved to ride, so he did, to hell with the consequences. For all his absurdity, Red was more free, and thus more fully alive, than anyone I have known. When I look at Red now, I don’t see the abandoned, crippled, quixotic man that most of his contemporaries saw. I see someone who was in many ways a larger man than the rest of us.
WN: Speaking of jockeys, I’ve always been struck by their collective willingness to suffer near-starvation and hot steam-baths to make weight. In fact, one of the most illuminating parts of your book deals with what jockeys go through to battle weight and keep riding. Particularly vivid was your account of how jockeys like Pollard and Woolf, down in Tijuana, Mexico in the 1930’s, used to dig holes in the giant mountain of manure and bury themselves in it to burn off weight, the fermenting dunghill being hotter than a sauna. How did you pull all those jockey horror stories together?
LH: Jockeys fascinate me. They are probably the most misunderstood and underestimated athletes in sports. They are also the most mysterious. I have always watched them with awe, wondering what could make a person torture his body to participate in a sport that almost guarantees severe injury. It is that wonder that propelled me through this section of research. I interviewed a number of jockeys from that era and relatives of riders involved in this story. I also collected virtually every jockey biography and autobiography ever written. I went out on ebay every day, typed in the word “jockey” and picked through the options, finding gems like a 1906 magazine article on the careers of jockeys. The result was a harvest of disturbing and sometimes hilarious tales, and a glimpse into a vein of life that is almost completely unknown to the public, even to many racegoers. I was worried about interrupting the flow of the narrative by shaping this material into its own chapter, but it was critical to make readers understand the grim realities of being a jockey, as well as the lure of the job, so that the weight of what Woolf and Pollard would endure later, could be felt.
WN: Tom Smith was the original Horse Whisperer, wasn’t he? Of all the book’s characters, he was by far the most enigmatic and mysterious. Inarticulate to the point of saying nothing at all among hominids, he was engaging and eloquent among herbivores. It was like he had wandered in from a Cormac McCarthy novel. Your history of the man was riveting. Was he not the most difficult of these characters to understand and draw?
LH: Tom was the most difficult subject to grasp. He spent nearly all of his life drifting through places that have vanished in history, and he said almost nothing to anyone about who he was, where he’d been, and why he did what he did. Throughout the years that I was writing this book, he loitered around the edges of my dreams, in his gray suit and gray felt fedora, watching me, saying nothing. At times I was frustrated by his reticence. But soon I came to feel that by remaining silent about himself, he was telling me what was important. What mattered about Tom was not what he said, but what he did, and all he did—almost literally—was nurture horses. I think he cared very much about what the world thought of him, and his place in history, but he let the horses speak for him. Horsemanship was the beginning and end of Tom Smith. So I came to understand him through his horses and what he did with them. These animals and their accomplishments were all he left behind, and I think he intended it that way.
WN: Your description of the Seabiscuit–War Admiral match race was masterfully done, filled with tension, drama, and suspense. It formed the aesthetic center of your book. And it seemed, in the time it took for the post parade and the running of the race, that everybody in America had an ear pressed to a radio, including President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who kept a passel of advisors waiting while he listened to Clem McCarthy’s call of the race. How did you pull all of this together for the narrative—from films of the race, or from contemporary accounts in print? It reads as though you enjoyed writing it more than any other part of the book.
LH: I loved writing this section of the book. I researched that race and the events leading up to it in hundreds of places. I read accounts of the race in every major newspaper and magazine of the era, plus quite a few minor ones. I listened to Clem McCarthy’s radio call, playing over and over again that unforgettable moment when George leans over the mike from Seabiscuit’s back and says, “I wish my old pal Red had been on him instead of me. See ya, Red.” I obtained films of the race, taken from multiple angles, and studied them. I scoured photo archives for shots taken during the race.
The individuals involved in the match left behind quite a bit of testimony about the race. I located candid interviews that George did, describing his walk over the track the night before the race, then the race itself, detailing every decision he made, everything he experienced, everything the horses experienced. He was a remarkably attentive and observant man; in many interviews after races he recounted the position of Seabiscuit’s ears, where the horse was looking at a stage of the race, the precise position of another jockey’s hands on the bridle. Journalist David Alexander spent a lot of time with Red before and after the match, sitting in on strategy sessions between George and Red, and he recorded everything. Kurtsinger, too, did some revealing interviews, so I was able to recount exactly what he was thinking as he rode. And reporters trailed Smith and the Howards everywhere, jotting down much of what they said and did.
There were also many living sources on this race. I placed ads in racing publications and cold-called dozens of racing organizations and officials in hopes of finding people who witnessed the race. Many people came forward to share intensely vivid memories of that day. One man mailed photographs he had taken as a boy when he snuck into the barn area to watch Seabiscuit and Pumpkin. What was most amazing was that nearly every one of the witnesses I spoke to still thought it was the greatest horse race they had ever seen. I can’t describe how moving it was to hear a hard boiled ninety-year-old horseman choke up as he relived what he saw that day. This race was the research mother lode. I had accounts from every possible vantage point, not only on the track and in the infield, grandstand, and press box, but in Red’s hospital room, Riddle’s box, Howard’s box, and the Oval Office. The wealth of information enabled me to tell the story of that race in great detail, and from any viewpoint I chose.
WN: One of the problems in doing historical non-fiction is finding people still alive who actually witnessed what you were writing about. You did find people who were around at the time, such as Alfred Vanderbilt, Jr., Seabiscuit’s exercise riders, and jockey Tommy Luther and his wife Helen. Did these voices bring fresh and special vibrancy and life to the narrative?
LH: So much of history goes unrecorded. Newspapers, magazines, and recordbooks, by virtue of lasting the longest and being most accessible, form the mainstay of the historian’s diet. They are indispensable, but because they are mainly concerned with basic facts, they are often one-dimensional. In these sources, historical figures have a certain sameness; what they said and did is dryly recorded, but their interesting edges are usually polished off.
This isn’t the way we experience history when we view it firsthand. We see all the small things that illustrate a person and an event—things that few people ever think to record, but that tell us a great deal about who the historical players are and why their actions are important. So much of what is truly interesting and illuminating in history resides only in memory, which outlives events for only a brief time. In researching Seabiscuit, I wanted to capture as many of those memories as possible before they were lost forever.
I caught many eyewitnesses to this story in the last months of their lives. These men and women put flesh on the bones of this tale. Without them, we would have known the basics of Seabiscuit’s career, but we never would have known about the girls of the Molino Rojo and the runaway manure mountain at Tijuana; Red’s secret blind eye; Frenchy Hawley’s explosive “Slim Jim” experiments, and many of the grisly details in the lives of jockeys; what Red said to George on that scandalous live national radio interview in 1938; Smith and Howard’s secret strategy for the War Admiral match race negotiations; life on the road with Ten Ton Irwin; how Tom taught Seabiscuit to outbreak War Admiral; the use of Grog as a ringer, and dozens of other things. These are the details that, for me, made my subjects and their time real and accessible. They made the story much more intimate. Memory is, of course, a fallible source, and everything had to be cross-checked, but over and over again, I was amazed at how accurately these people recalled the events. And aside from facts, these people communicated the emotions that attended the events, the feel of America in that era.
WN: You were faced with a real problem involving momentum in this book. There were two legitimate endings to it. The first, of course, was the end of the Seabiscuit–War Admiral match race, the culmination of the 1938 racing season and one of the greatest events in the history of American sport. The second was the 1940 Santa Anita Handicap, the last race of his career and the Big One that had always gotten away. You were faced with the problem of building dramatic tension right through the match race, an event that left readers breathless, and then rebuilding it again for the hundred grander—a tough writing job, to be sure, but you pulled it off. How did you come at this problem? Was it difficult to solve?
LH: I was concerned about the pacing through these two races, and the events in between. A year and four months passed between the match and the 1940 handicap, a space of time in which Seabiscuit tumbled from the top of the racing world to the depths of serious injury, then, slowly, climbed all the way back to the top again, alongside his crippled jockey. Part of what made this progression enthralling for those who followed it was the considerable time it took for it to happen. It was, as Pollard phrased it, “a long, hard pull,” and the slowly building tension of this time loaded his final race with emotional import for the participants and the public. But in terms of recounting it in print, so little happened in the space between the two races—compared to the dense sequence of events that had preceded that time—that I was worried that it would be hard to pace the book in a way that would impart the same exhilaration, almost hysteria, that the public felt upon witnessing the horse’s incomparable final performance.
To recapture the pacing of the story as it played out in 1939 and 1940, I delved as deeply as possible into the horse’s injury and first retirement. I worked as hard as I could to gather every detail about the day of the horse’s injury, and was able to find quite a bit. I wanted to provide the same kind of detail for the retirement period, but because the horse and the men spent it in a remote place, out of view of reporters, there was much less to be found. I was lucky in that I located people who were there, and Howard and Pollard later spoke of that time to the press and to their families. Hopefully, what I found was enough.
WN: How long did it take you to research and write Seabiscuit? When and where did you begin the project? When did you turn in the final draft?
LH: I began the research in the fall of 1996, while writing the article for American Heritage. The article became the framework for a book proposal, then the book itself. I spent the first two years working from an excruciatingly tiny apartment in Washington, D.C. It wasn’t the easiest place to work. My apartment was on the corner of a very busy intersection, less than one block from a firehouse and directly across the street from the Taiwanese consulate. That year, a tiny but surprisingly noisy group began camping out in front of the consulate, protesting Taiwanese policy. They set up a loudspeaker and played a rallying song, apparently in Chinese, sung by children. I have no idea what they were singing, but it sounded like, “Hidee-ho hidee-ho hidee-ho hidee-ho! Fight! Fight fight fight!” They played it over and over, hour after hour, day after day, as loud as they could get it, apparently to torment the consulate workers. Hearing this song just once set my teeth on edge; hearing it hundreds of times was maddening. The song became the soundtrack to my writing process. I parked a radio on my desk and worked while blasting music in an attempt to drown out the fight song outside, but it didn’t help much. I conducted most of my interviews from that apartment, via telephone. I kept having to ask my interviewees to stop talking for a moment while the sound outside died down. I taped and transcribed all of my interviews, but at times all I could hear on my tapes were horns, sirens and the infernal hidee-ho song. In 1998, my book deal made it possible for me to move out of the hidee-ho apartment and into a little house farther downtown, where I spent the next two years finishing up the book. I turned in the manuscript in September 2000.
WN: Much has been said and written about the illness that has plagued you for years, a condition apparently prompted by a case of food poisoning that you suffered in 1987: Chronic Fatigue Syndrome exacerbated by vertigo. Could you recall how and when you first came down with this condition? What are the symptoms?
LH: In the spring of 1987 I was a sophomore at Kenyon College, majoring in English and history. I was nineteen, healthy and fit, playing tennis and cycling several times a week. On the night of March 20th, while traveling back to Kenyon from spring break, I developed apparent food poisoning, and became sick enough that my roommates called paramedics. For three weeks, I couldn’t seem to shake the stomach upset. Then one morning, I awoke so weak that I was unable to sit up. It took me two hours to work up the strength to stand. I expected the exhaustion to pass, but it didn’t. For weeks, I couldn’t even make the short walk to the dining hall. There was no way for me to attend class or do my work, so I had to drop out of school. I spent the next eight months bedridden. I was under siege from constant infections, unremitting fever, chills, soaking night sweats, acute light sensitivity, balance and cognitive problems. In the first month alone I lost twenty pounds, weight I couldn’t afford to lose; I finally leveled off at one hundred pounds. I was diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome by the head of infectious diseases at Johns Hopkins.
Though my health has fluctuated since then, and at times I have enjoyed improvement, I’ve never recovered. There have been stretches, sometimes lasting several years, in which I have been totally bedridden. In early 1993, I developed extremely severe, chronic vertigo—a neurological abnormality apparently caused by CFS—which causes the sensation of spinning, pitching, and rolling. For two years, I was unable to read or write because of it. I have been dealing with the vertigo, on top of my other symptoms, on some level ever since, and it continues to make reading and writing very difficult.
WN: How did the illness affect your ability to write the book? Were there long periods when you could neither do research nor write? Did you get discouraged, at times? What kept you going?
LH: Writing this book was immensely important to me, but my illness made it very hard. I had to accept that there would be a large physical price to pay for undertaking this project, and that I would have to pare away the rest of my life to save my strength for what I wanted to do. For the four years that I researched and wrote this book, I did virtually nothing else. I devoted everything I had to it. I had my office set up so that there was a refrigerator, cereal boxes, bowls, spoons, and a giant jug of water right by my desk, allowing me to keep working without wasting energy on fixing meals. I stacked my research books in a semicircle on the floor around my chair so I wouldn’t have to get up to get them. I couldn’t travel to my sources, but found ways around that by making maximum use of the Library of Congress’ interlibrary loan service, the Internet, my fax machine, email, and, of course, my telephone. For the most part, my body held together. I worked whenever I had strength, sometimes at odd hours, and I often worked until completely exhausted and dizzy. There were days when it was almost impossible to move, but I usually found something I still had the strength to do. If I was too dizzy to write, I did interviews. If I was too weak to sift through books, I sat still and wrote. Sometimes I worked while in bed, lying on my back and scribbling on a pad with my eyes closed. Though it was hard to do this, there was never a point at which I became discouraged. These subjects were just too captivating for me to ever consider abandoning the project. The price I paid was steep. Within hours of turning in the manuscript, my health collapsed completely. The vertigo returned in force, and I was unable to read or write at all for several months. I also became markedly weaker and was rendered almost entirely housebound again. Well over a year later, I still haven’t completely recovered. But it was worth it.
As difficult as the illness made the writing and research process, I think I also have it to thank for spurring me into the project. Being sick has truncated my life dramatically, drastically narrowing the possibilities for me. For fifteen years, I have had very little contact with the world. The illness has left me very few avenues for achievement, or for connecting with people. Writing is my salvation, the one little area of my life where I can still reach out into the world and create something that will remain after I am gone. It enables me to define myself as a writer instead of as a sick person. Because of this, I felt an immensely powerful motivation for writing this book, and writing it as well as I could.
WN: No book on horse racing—and very few on any sport—has ever held the top spot on the New York Times best-seller list, as Seabiscuit did for six weeks. Had you ever imagined, when you began the project, that you would have the No. 1 best-seller in the nation? Looking back now, how would you describe the experience?
LH: Wildest dreams have a long reach. I think every writer dreams of having a No. 1 New York Times best-seller; I certainly did. But only a tiny percentage of books ever make the list, so you have to be realistic. I think every writer, especially a first-time author like me, has a set of reasonable expectations, goals they can be satisfied with. I tried to be very realistic. This was a story that, no matter how fascinating the human characters and events were, centered around a racehorse, and no racing book had ever been a major success. I thought this was a fantastic story, but that a lot of people would pass it up simply because of the subject matter.
When I first imagined making this story into a book, my hope was that I could find a small equine-topics publisher that would be interested in it. I hoped to be able to sell maybe 5000 copies, out of the trunk of my car if I had to. That was okay with me. I just wanted to tell this story. Even after Random House bought the book rights, and Universal Pictures the movie rights, I kept my aspirations very modest. So I really wasn’t prepared for the call I got in March, 2001 from my wonderful editor, Jon Karp, telling me that after only five days on sale, the book was already on the best-seller list, at No. 8. It was No. 2 the following week, and hit No. 1 the week after that.
That phone call began a very wild ride. After having lived in complete obscurity and isolation for so many years, I was suddenly on TV and radio, and in newspapers and magazines. In one day, I was interviewed seventeen times. Readers recognized me on the street. I received thousands of emails. My phone was ringing constantly. I got huge stacks of mail, including letters from both President Bushes. It was completely overwhelming. Physically, fulfilling the obligations that came with the success was very hard to do, but it was also indescribably gratifying. All the work had paid off.
The thing I will look back on with the most pleasure is the fact that these men and this horse are remembered again. They deserve to be. I hope they would be happy with the work I did.
Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion
Seabiscuit grew so popular as a cultural icon that in 1938, he commanded more space in American newspapers than any other public figure. Considering the temper of the times as well as the horse’s early career on the racetrack, what were the sources of The Biscuit’s enormous popularity during that benchmark period of U.S. history? Would he be as popular if he raced today? What did the public need that it found in this horse?
The Great Match Race between Seabiscuit and War Admiral in 1938 evoked heated partisan passions. These passions spilled over on radio and into the daily prints, with each colt leading a raucous legion of followers to the barrier at Pimlico Race Course that autumn day. What were the differences separating these two horses, and what did each competitor represent in the American experience that set one apart from the other?
All jockeys in the 1930s endured terrible hardships and hazards, starving themselves to make weight, then competing in an exceptionally dangerous sport. For George Woolf and Red Pollard, there were additional factors that compounded the difficulties and dangers of their jobs—diabetes for the former and half-blindness for the latter. Why, in spite of this, did they go on with their careers? What were the allures of race riding that led them to subject themselves to such risk and torment?
What was the role of the press and radio in the Seabiscuit phenomenon? How did Howard use the media to his advantage? How did the media help Seabiscuit’s career, and how was it a hindrance?
Seabiscuit possessed all the qualities for which the Thoroughbred has been prized since the English imported the breed’s three foundation sires from the Middle East three hundred years ago. What were those qualities? What made this horse a winner?
Horses of Seabiscuit’s stature, from Man o’ War in the 1920s to Cigar in the 1990s, have always generated a powerful gravitational field of their own, attracting crowds of people into their immediate orbit, shaping relationships among them, and even affecting the personalities of those nearest them. How did Seabiscuit shape and influence the lives of those around him?
Red Pollard, Tom Smith, and Charles Howard formed an unlikely partnership. In what ways were these men different? How did their differences serve as an asset to them?
What critical attribute did Howard, Smith, and Pollard share? How did this shared attribute serve as a key to their success?
In what ways was each man in the Seabiscuit partnership similar, in his own way, to Seabiscuit himself? How did these similarities help them cultivate the horse’s talents and cure his ailments and neuroses?
What lessons can be drawn from the successes of the Seabiscuit team? What does their story say about the role of character in life?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
LAURA HILLENBRAND has been writing about Thoroughbred racing since 1988 and has been a contributing writer/editor for EQUUS magazine since 1989. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times, American Heritage, ABC Sports Online, The Blood-Horse, Thoroughbred Times, The Backstretch, Turf, Sport Digest, and many other publications. She is a two-time winner of the Eclipse Award, the highest journalistic award in Thoroughbred racing. She is currently serving as a consultant on a Universal Studios movie based on this book. Born in Fairfax, Virginia, Laura attended Kenyon College and currently lives in Washington, D.C.
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PREFACE
ALL HE COULD SEE, IN EVERY DIRECTION, WAS WATER.
It was June 23, 1943. Somewhere on the endless expanse of the Pacific Ocean, Army Air Forces bombardier and Olympic runner Louie Zamperini lay across a small raft, drifting westward. Slumped alongside him was a sergeant, one of his planes’ gunners. On a separate raft, tethered to the first, lay another crewman, a gash zigzagging across his forehead. Their bodies, burned by the sun and stained yellow from the raft dye, had winnowed down to skeletons. Sharks glided in lazy loops around them, dragging their backs along the rafts, waiting.
The men had been adrift for twenty-seven days. Borne by an equatorial current, they had floated at least one thousand miles, deep into Japanese-controlled waters. The rafts were beginning to deteriorate into jelly, and gave off a sour, burning odor. The men’s bodies were pocked with salt sores, and their lips were so swollen that they pressed into their nostrils and chins. They spent their days with their eyes fixed on the sky, singing “White Christmas,” muttering about food. No one was even looking for them anymore. They were alone on sixty-four million square miles of ocean.
A month earlier, twenty-six-year-old Zamperini had been one of the greatest runners in the world, expected by many to be the first to break the four-minute mile, one of the most celebrated barriers in sport. Now his Olympian’s body had wasted to less than one hundred pounds and his famous legs could no longer lift him. Almost everyone outside of his family had given him up for dead.
On that morning of the twenty-seventh day, the men heard a distant, deep strumming. Every airman knew that sound: pistons. Their eyes caught a glint in the sky—a plane, high overhead. Zamperini fired two flares and shook powdered dye into the water, enveloping the rafts in a circle of vivid orange. The plane kept going, slowly disappearing. The men sagged. Then the sound returned, and the plane came back into view. The crew had seen them.
With arms shrunken to little more than bone and yellowed skin, the castaways waved and shouted, their voices thin from thirst. The plane dropped low and swept alongside the rafts. Zamperini saw the profiles of the crewmen, dark against bright blueness.
There was a terrific roaring sound. The water, and the rafts themselves, seemed to boil. It was machine gun fire. This was not an American rescue plane. It was a Japanese bomber.
The men pitched themselves into the water and hung together under the rafts, cringing as bullets punched through the rubber and sliced effervescent lines in the water around their faces. The firing blazed on, then sputtered out as the bomber overshot them. The men dragged themselves back onto the one raft that was still mostly inflated. The bomber banked sideways, circling toward them again. As it leveled off, Zamperini could see the muzzles of the machine guns, aimed directly at them.
Zamperini looked toward his crewmates. They were too weak to go back in the water. As they lay down on the floor of the raft, hands over their heads, Zamperini splashed overboard alone.
Somewhere beneath him, the sharks were done waiting. They bent their bodies in the water and swam toward the man under the raft.
One
The One-Boy Insurgency
IN THE PREDAWN DARKNESS OF AUGUST 26, 1929, IN THE back bedroom of a small house in Torrance, California, a twelve-year-old boy sat up in bed, listening. There was a sound coming from outside, growing ever louder. It was a huge, heavy rush, suggesting immensity, a great parting of air. It was coming from directly above the house. The boy swung his legs off his bed, raced down the stairs, slapped open the back door, and loped onto the grass. The yard was otherworldly, smothered in unnatural darkness, shivering with sound. The boy stood on the lawn beside his older brother, head thrown back, spellbound.
The sky had disappeared. An object that he could see only in silhouette, reaching across a massive arc of space, was suspended low in the air over the house. It was longer than two and a half football fields and as tall as a city. It was putting out the stars.
What he saw was the German dirigible Graf Zeppelin. At nearly 800 feet long and 110 feet high, it was the largest flying machine ever crafted. More luxurious than the finest airplane, gliding effortlessly over huge distances, built on a scale that left spectators gasping, it was, in the summer of ’29, the wonder of the world.
The airship was three days from completing a sensational feat of aeronautics, circumnavigation of the globe. The journey had begun on August 7, when the Zeppelin had slipped its tethers in Lakehurst, New Jersey, lifted up with a long, slow sigh, and headed for Manhattan. On Fifth Avenue that summer, demolition was soon to begin on the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, clearing the way for a skyscraper of unprecedented proportions, the Empire State Building. At Yankee Stadium, in the Bronx, players were debuting numbered uniforms: Lou Gehrig wore No. 4; Babe Ruth, about to hit his five hundredth home run, wore No. 3. On Wall Street, stock prices were racing toward an all-time high.
After a slow glide around the Statue of Liberty, the Zeppelin banked north, then turned out over the Atlantic. In time, land came below again: France, Switzerland, Germany. The ship passed over Nuremberg, where fringe politician Adolf Hitler, whose Nazi Party had been trounced in the 1928 elections, had just delivered a speech touting selective infanticide. Then it flew east of Frankfurt, where a Jewish woman named Edith Frank was caring for her newborn, a girl named Anne. Sailing northeast, the Zeppelin crossed over Russia. Siberian villagers, so isolated that they’d never even seen a train, fell to their knees at the sight of it.
On August 19, as some four million Japanese waved handkerchiefs and shouted “Banzai!” the Zeppelin circled Tokyo and sank onto a landing field. Four days later, as the German and Japanese anthems played, the ship rose into the grasp of a typhoon that whisked it over the Pacific at breathtaking speed, toward America. Passengers gazing from the windows saw only the ship’s shadow, following it along the clouds “like a huge shark swimming alongside.” When the clouds parted, the passengers glimpsed giant creatures, turning in the sea, that looked like monsters.
On August 25, the Zeppelin reached San Francisco. After being cheered down the California coast, it slid through sunset, into darkness and silence, and across midnight. As slow as the drifting wind, it passed over Torrance, where its only audience was a scattering of drowsy souls, among them the boy in his pajamas behind the house on Gramercy Avenue.
Standing under the airship, his feet bare in the grass, he was transfixed. It was, he would say, “fearfully beautiful.” He could feel the rumble of the craft’s engines tilling the air but couldn’t make out the silver skin, the sweeping ribs, the finned tail. He could see only the blackness of the space it inhabited. It was not a great presence but a great absence, a geometric ocean of darkness that seemed to swallow heaven itself.
———
The boy’s name was Louis Silvie Zamperini. The son of Italian immigrants, he had come into the world in Olean, New York, on January 26, 1917, eleven and a half pounds of baby under black hair as coarse as barbed wire. His father, Anthony, had been living on his own since age fourteen, first as a coal miner and boxer, then as a construction worker. His mother, Louise, was a petite, playful beauty, sixteen at marriage and eighteen when Louie was born. In their apartment, where only Italian was spoken, Louise and Anthony called their boy Toots.
From the moment he could walk, Louie couldn’t bear to be corralled. His siblings would recall him careening about, hurdling flora, fauna, and furniture. The instant Louise thumped him into a chair and told him to be still, he vanished. If she didn’t have her squirming boy clutched in her hands, she usually had no idea where he was.
In 1919, when two-year-old Louie was down with pneumonia, he climbed out his bedroom window, descended one story, and went on a naked tear down the street with a policeman chasing him and a crowd watching in amazement. Soon after, on a pediatrician’s advice, Louise and Anthony decided to move their children to the warmer climes of California. Sometime after their train pulled out of Grand Central Station, Louie bolted, ran the length of the train, and leapt from the caboose. Standing with his frantic mother as the train rolled backward in search of the lost boy, Louie’s older brother, Pete, spotted Louie strolling up the track in perfect serenity. Swept up in his mother’s arms, Louie smiled. “I knew you’d come back,” he said in Italian.
In California, Anthony landed a job as a railway electrician and bought a half-acre field on the edge of Torrance, population 1,800. He and Louise hammered up a one-room shack with no running water, an outhouse behind, and a roof that leaked so badly that they had to keep buckets on the beds. With only hook latches for locks, Louise took to sitting by the front door on an apple box with a rolling pin in her hand, ready to brain any prowlers who might threaten her children.
There, and at the Gramercy Avenue house where they settled a year later, Louise kept prowlers out, but couldn’t keep Louie in hand. Contesting a footrace across a busy highway, he just missed getting broadsided by a jalopy. At five, he started smoking, picking up discarded cigarette butts while walking to kindergarten. He began drinking one night when he was eight; he hid under the dinner table, snatched glasses of wine, drank them all dry, staggered outside, and fell into a rosebush.
On one day, Louise discovered that Louie had impaled his leg on a bamboo beam; on another she had to ask a neighbor to sew Louie’s severed toe back on. When Louie came home drenched in oil after scaling an oil rig, diving into a sump well, and nearly drowning, it took a gallon of turpentine and a lot of scrubbing before Anthony recognized his son again.
Thrilled by the crashing of boundaries, Louie was untamable. As he grew into his uncommonly clever mind, mere feats of daring were no longer satisfying. In Torrance, a one-boy insurgency was born.
———
If it was edible, Louie stole it. He skulked down alleys, a roll of lock-picking wire in his pocket. Housewives who stepped from their kitchens would return to find that their suppers had disappeared. Residents looking out their back windows might catch a glimpse of along-legged boy dashing down the alley, a whole cake balanced on his hands. When a local family left Louie off their dinner-party guest list, he broke into their house, bribed their Great Dane with a bone, and cleaned out their icebox. At another party he absconded with an entire keg of beer. When he discovered that the cooling tables at Meinzer’s Bakery stood within an arm’s length of the back door, he began picking the lock, snatching pies, eating until he was full, and reserving the rest as ammunition for ambushes. When rival thieves took up the racket, he suspended the stealing until the culprits were caught and the bakery owners dropped their guard. Then he ordered his friends to rob Meinzer’s again.
It is a testament to the content of Louie’s childhood that his stories about it usually ended with “… and then I ran like mad.” He was often chased by people he had robbed, and at least two people threatened to shoot him. To minimize the evidence found on him when the police habitually came his way, he set up loot-stashing sites around town, including a three-seater cave that he dug in a nearby forest. Under the Torrance High bleachers, Pete once found a stolen wine jug that Louie had hidden there. It was teeming with inebriated ants.
In the lobby of the Torrance theater, Louie stopped up the pay telephone’s coin slots with toilet paper. He returned regularly to feed wire behind the coins stacked up inside, hook the paper, and fill his palms with change. A metal dealer never guessed that the grinning Italian kid who often came by to sell him armfuls of copper scrap had stolen the same scrap from his lot the night before. Discovering, while scuffling with an enemy at a circus, that adults would give quarters to fighting kids to pacify them, Louie declared a truce with the enemy and they cruised around staging brawls before strangers.
To get even with a railcar conductor who wouldn’t stop for him, Louie greased the rails. When a teacher made him stand in a corner for spitballing, he deflated her car tires with toothpicks. After setting a legitimate Boy Scout state record in friction-fire ignition, he broke his record by soaking his tinder in gasoline and mixing it with match heads, causing a small explosion. He stole a neighbor’s coffee percolator tube, set up a sniper’s nest in a tree, crammed pepper-tree berries into his mouth, spat them through the tube, and sent the neighborhood girls running.
His magnum opus became legend. Late one night, Louie climbed the steeple of a Baptist church, rigged the bell with piano wire, strung the wire into a nearby tree, and roused the police, the fire department, and all of Torrance with apparently spontaneous pealing. The more credulous townsfolk called it a sign from God.
Only one thing scared him. When Louie was in late boyhood, a pilot landed a plane near Torrance and took Louie up for a flight. One might have expected such an intrepid child to be ecstatic, but the speed and altitude frightened him. From that day on, he wanted nothing to do with airplanes.
In a childhood of artful dodging, Louie made more than just mischief. He shaped who he would be in manhood. Confident that he was clever, resourceful, and bold enough to escape any predicament, he was almost incapable of discouragement. When history carried him into war, this resilient optimism would define him.
———
Louie was twenty months younger than his brother, who was everything he was not. Pete Zamperini was handsome, popular, impeccably groomed, polite to elders and avuncular to juniors, silky smooth with girls, and blessed with such sound judgment that even when he was a child, his parents consulted him on difficult decisions. He ushered his mother into her seat at dinner, turned in at seven, and tucked his alarm clock under his pillow so as not to wake Louie, with whom he shared a bed. He rose at two-thirty to run a three-hour paper route, and deposited all his earnings in the bank, which would swallow every penny when the Depression hit. He had a lovely singing voice and a gallant habit of carrying pins in his pant cuffs, in case his dance partners’ dress strap failed. He once saved a girl from drowning. Pete radiated a gentle but impressive authority that led everyone he met, even adults, to be swayed by his opinion. Even Louie, who made a religion out of heeding no one, did as Pete said.
Louie idolized Pete, who watched over him and their younger sisters, Sylvia and Virginia, with paternal protectiveness. But Louie was eclipsed, and he never heard the end of it. Sylvia would recall her mother tearfully telling Louie how she wished he could be more like Pete. What made it more galling was that Pete’s reputation was part myth. Though Pete earned grades little better than Louie’s failing ones, his principal assumed that he was a straight-A student. On the night of Torrance’s church bell miracle, a well-directed flashlight would have revealed Pete’s legs dangling from the tree alongside Louie’s. And Louie wasn’t always the only Zamperini boy who could be seen sprinting down the alley with food that had lately belonged to the neighbors. But it never occurred to anyone to suspect Pete of anything. “Pete never got caught,” said Sylvia. “Louie always got caught.”
Nothing about Louie fit with other kids. He was a puny boy, and in his first years in Torrance, his lungs were still compromised enough from the pneumonia that in picnic footraces, every girl in town could dust him. His features, which would later settle into pleasant collaboration, were growing at different rates, giving him a curious face that seemed designed by committee. His ears leaned sidelong off his head like holstered pistols, and above them waved a calamity of black hair that mortified him. He attacked it with his aunt Margie’s hot iron, hobbled it in a silk stocking every night, and slathered it with so much olive oil that flies trailed him to school. It did no good.
And then there was his ethnicity. In Torrance in the early 1920s, Italians were held in such disdain that when the Zamperinis arrived, the neighbors petitioned the city council to keep them out. Louie, who knew only a smattering of English until he was in grade school, couldn’t hide his pedigree. He survived kindergarten by keeping mum, but in first grade, when he blurted out “Brutte bastarde!” at another kid, his teachers caught on. They compounded his misery by holding him back a grade.
He was a marked boy. Bullies, drawn by his oddity and hoping to goad him into uttering Italian curses, pelted him with rocks, taunted him, punched him, and kicked him. He tried buying their mercy with his lunch, but they pummeled him anyway, leaving him bloody. He could have ended the beatings by running away or succumbing to tears, but he refused to do either. “You could beat him to death,” said Sylvia, “and he wouldn’t say ‘ouch’ or cry.” He just put his hands in front of his face and took it.
As Louie neared his teens, he took a hard turn. Aloof and bristling, he lurked around the edges of Torrance, his only friendships forged loosely with rough boys who followed his lead. He became so germophobic that he wouldn’t tolerate anyone coming near his food. Though he could be a sweet boy, he was often short-tempered and obstreperous. He feigned toughness, but was secretly tormented. Kids passing into parties would see him lingering outside, unable to work up the courage to walk in.
Frustrated at his inability to defend himself, he made a study of it. His father taught him how to work a punching bag and made him a barbell from two lead-filled coffee cans welded to a pipe. The next time a bully came at Louie, he ducked left and swung his right fist straight into the boy’s mouth. The bully shrieked, his tooth broken, and fled. The feeling of lightness that Louie experienced on his walk home was one he would never forget.
Over time, Louie’s temper grew wilder, his fuse shorter, his skills sharper. He socked a girl. He pushed a teacher. He pelted a policeman with rotten tomatoes. Kids who crossed him wound up with fat lips, and bullies learned to give him a wide berth. He once came upon Pete in their front yard, in a standoff with another boy. Both boys had their fists in front of their chins, each waiting for the other to swing. “Louie can’t stand it,” remembered Pete. “He’s standing there, ‘Hit him, Pete! Hit him, Pete!’ I’m waiting there, and all of a sudden Louie turns around and smacks this guy right in the gut. And then he runs!”
Anthony Zamperini was at his wits’ end. The police always seemed to be on the front porch, trying to talk sense into Louie. There were neighbors to be apologized to and damages to be compensated for with money that Anthony couldn’t spare. Adoring his son but exasperated by his behavior, Anthony delivered frequent, forceful spankings. Once, after he’d caught Louie wiggling through a window in the middle of the night, he delivered a kick to the rear so forceful that it lifted Louie off the floor. Louie absorbed the punishment in tearless silence, then committed the same crimes again, just to show he could.
Louie’s mother, Louise, took a different tack. Louie was a copy of herself, right down to the vivid blue eyes. When pushed, she shoved; sold a bad cut of meat, she’d march down to the butcher, frying pan in hand. Loving mischief, she spread icing over a cardboard box and presented it as a birthday cake to a neighbor, who promptly got the knife stuck. When Pete told her he’d drink his castor oil if she gave him a box of candy, she agreed, watched him drink it, then handed him an empty candy box. “You only asked for the box, honey,” she said with a smile. “That’s all I got.” And she understood Louie’s restiveness. One Halloween, she dressed as a boy and raced around town trick-or-treating with Louie and Pete. A gang of kids, thinking she was one of the local toughs, tackled her and tried to steal her pants. Little Louise Zamperini, mother of four, was deep in the melee when the cops picked her up for brawling.
Knowing that punishing Louie would only provoke his defiance, Louise took a surreptitious route toward reforming him. In search of an informant, she worked over Louie’s schoolmates with homemade pie and turned up a soft boy named Hugh, whose sweet tooth was Louie’s undoing. Louise suddenly knew everything Louie was up to, and her children wondered if she had developed psychic powers. Sure that Sylvia was snitching, Louie refused to sit at the supper table with her, eating his meals in spiteful solitude off the open oven door. He once became so enraged with her that he chased her around the block. Outrunning Louie for the only time in her life, Sylvia cut down the alley and dove into her father’s work shed. Louie flushed her out by feeding his three-foot-long pet snake into the crawl space. She then locked herself in the family car and didn’t come out for an entire afternoon. “It was a matter of life and death,” she said some seventy-five years later.
For all her efforts, Louise couldn’t change Louie. He ran away and wandered around San Diego for days, sleeping under a highway overpass. He tried to ride a steer in a pasture, got tossed onto the ragged edge of a fallen tree, and limped home with his gashed knee bound in a handkerchief. Twenty-seven stitches didn’t tame him. He hit one kid so hard that he broke his nose. He upended another boy and stuffed paper towels in his mouth. Parents forbade their kids from going near him. A farmer, furious over Louie’s robberies, loaded his shotgun with rock salt and blasted him in the tail. Louie beat one kid so badly, leaving him unconscious in a ditch, that he was afraid he’d killed him. When Louise saw the blood on Louie’s fists, she burst into tears.
———
As Louie prepared to start Torrance High, he was looking less like an impish kid and more like a dangerous young man. High school would be the end of his education. There was no money for college; Anthony’s paycheck ran out before the week’s end, forcing Louise to improvise meals out of eggplant, milk, stale bread, wild mushrooms, and rabbits that Louie and Pete shot in the fields. With flunking grades and no skills, Louie had no chance for a scholarship. It was unlikely that he could land a job. The Depression had come, and the unemployment rate was nearing 25 percent. Louie had no real ambitions. If asked what he wanted to be, his answer would have been “cowboy.”
In the 1930s, America was infatuated with the pseudoscience of eugenics and its promise of strengthening the human race by culling the “unfit” from the genetic pool. Along with the “feebleminded,” insane, and criminal, those so classified included women who had sex out of wedlock (considered a mental illness), orphans, the disabled, the poor, the homeless, epileptics, masturbators, the blind and the deaf, alcoholics, and girls whose genitals exceeded certain measurements. Some eugenicists advocated euthanasia, and in mental hospitals, this was quietly carried out on scores of people through “lethal neglect” or outright murder. At one Illinois mental hospital, new patients were dosed with milk from cows infected with tuberculosis, in the belief that only the undesirable would perish. As many as four in ten of these patients died. A more popular tool of eugenics was forced sterilization, employed on a raft of lost souls who, through misbehavior or misfortune, fell into the hands of state governments. By 1930, when Louie was entering his teens, California was enraptured with eugenics, and would ultimately sterilize some twenty thousand people.
When Louie was in his early teens, an event in Torrance brought reality home. A kid from Louie’s neighborhood was deemed feebleminded, institutionalized, and barely saved from sterilization through a frantic legal effort by his parents, funded by their Torrance neighbors. Tutored by Louie’s siblings, the boy earned straight A’s. Louie was never more than an inch from juvenile hall or jail, and as a serial troublemaker, a failing student, and a suspect Italian, he was just the sort of rogue that eugenicists wanted to cull. Suddenly understanding what he was risking, he felt deeply shaken.
The person that Louie had become was not, he knew, his authentic self. He made hesitant efforts to connect to others. He scrubbed the kitchen floor to surprise his mother, but she assumed that Pete had done it. While his father was out of town, Louie overhauled the engine on the family’s Marmon Roosevelt Straight-8 sedan. He baked biscuits and gave them away; when his mother, tired of the mess, booted him from her kitchen, he resumed baking in a neighbor’s house. He doled out nearly everything he stole. He was “bighearted,” said Pete. “Louie would give away anything, whether it was his or not.”
Each attempt he made to right himself ended wrong. He holed up alone, reading Zane Grey novels and wishing himself into them, a man and his horse on the frontier, broken off from the world. He haunted the theater for John Wayne movies, losing track of the plots while he stared at the western scenery. On some nights, he’d drag his bedding into the yard to sleep alone. On others, he’d lie awake in bed, beneath pinups of movie cowboy Tom Mix and his wonder horse, Tony, feeling snared on something from which he couldn’t kick free.
In the back bedroom he could hear trains passing. Lying beside his sleeping brother, he’d listen to the broad, low sound: faint, then rising, faint again, then a high, beckoning whistle, then gone. The sound of it brought goose bumps. Lost in longing, Louie imagined himself on a train, rolling into country he couldn’t see, growing smaller and more distant until he disappeared.
A Ballantine Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 2001 by Laura Hillenbrand
Reader’s Guide copyright © 2001 by Laura Hillenbrand and The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. Excerpts from Daily Racing Form copyright © 2002 by Daily Racing Form, Inc. Reprinted by permission.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Ballantine is a registered trademark and the Ballantine colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc. Random House Reader’s Circle and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
www.ballantinebooks.com
Library of Congress Control Number: 2002090323
eISBN: 978-0-345-46739-3
Title page photo by AP/Wide World Photos
v3.0
Table of Contents
CONTENTS
PREFACE
PART I
Chapter 1 THE DAY OF THE HORSE IS PAST
Chapter 2 THE LONE PLAINSMAN
Chapter 3 MEAN, RESTIVE, AND RAGGED
Chapter 4 THE COUGAR AND THE ICEMAN
Chapter 5 A BOOT ON ONE FOOT, A TOE TAG ON THE OTHER
Chapter 6 LIGHT AND SHADOW
PART II
Chapter 7 LEARN YOUR HORSE
Chapter 8 FIFTEEN STRIDES
Chapter 9 GRAVITY
Chapter 10 WAR ADMIRAL
Chapter 11 NO POLLARD, NO SEABISCUIT
Chapter 12 ALL I NEED IS LUCK
Chapter 13 HARDBALL
Chapter 14 THE WISE WE BOYS
Chapter 15 FORTUNE’S FOOL
Chapter 16 I KNOW MY HORSE
Chapter 17 THE DINGBUSTINGEST CONTEST YOU EVER CLAPPED AN EYE ON
Chapter 18 DEAL
Chapter 19 THE SECOND CIVIL WAR
PART III
Chapter 20 “ALL FOUR OF HIS LEGS ARE BROKEN”
Chapter 21 A LONG, HARD PULL
Chapter 22 FOUR GOOD LEGS BETWEEN US
Chapter 23 ONE HUNDRED GRAND
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
PREFACE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
EPILOGUE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PREFACE
One The One-Boy Insurgency
Table of Contents
CONTENTS
PREFACE
PART I
Chapter 1 THE DAY OF THE HORSE IS PAST
Chapter 2 THE LONE PLAINSMAN
Chapter 3 MEAN, RESTIVE, AND RAGGED
Chapter 4 THE COUGAR AND THE ICEMAN
Chapter 5 A BOOT ON ONE FOOT, A TOE TAG ON THE OTHER
Chapter 6 LIGHT AND SHADOW
PART II
Chapter 7 LEARN YOUR HORSE
Chapter 8 FIFTEEN STRIDES
Chapter 9 GRAVITY
Chapter 10 WAR ADMIRAL
Chapter 11 NO POLLARD, NO SEABISCUIT
Chapter 12 ALL I NEED IS LUCK
Chapter 13 HARDBALL
Chapter 14 THE WISE WE BOYS
Chapter 15 FORTUNE’S FOOL
Chapter 16 I KNOW MY HORSE
Chapter 17 THE DINGBUSTINGEST CONTEST YOU EVER CLAPPED AN EYE ON
Chapter 18 DEAL
Chapter 19 THE SECOND CIVIL WAR
PART III
Chapter 20 “ALL FOUR OF HIS LEGS ARE BROKEN”
Chapter 21 A LONG, HARD PULL
Chapter 22 FOUR GOOD LEGS BETWEEN US
Chapter 23 ONE HUNDRED GRAND
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
PREFACE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
EPILOGUE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PREFACE
One The One-Boy Insurgency
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