Seabiscuit: An American Legend

by Laura Hillenbrand

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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