Seabiscuit: An American Legend

by Laura Hillenbrand

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  It was going to be a long, cold winter.

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

  (USC LIBRARY, DEPARTMENT OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS)

  Chapter 11

  NO POLLARD, NO SEABISCUIT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “No Pollard, no Seabiscuit.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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