Seabiscuit: An American Legend

by Laura Hillenbrand

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

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

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

  “Biscuit did.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  (© BETTMANN/CORBIS)

  Chapter 12

  ALL I NEED IS LUCK

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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