Seabiscuit: An American Legend

by Laura Hillenbrand

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Chief steward Tom Thorpe demanded that Smith run his horse. Smith refused. They traded charges and countercharges. A crowd of reporters gathered outside the room, looking in the windows. They could see Smith and the stewards making angry gestures at each other, but they couldn’t make out the words. Finally, Smith walked around the room, holding the scratch form straight out in front of him, offering it to each steward in turn. Each one glared back at him and refused to take it. Furious, Smith shredded up the form and stormed out. No one, he snapped, was going to force him to race an injured horse.r />
  The stewards sat there and mulled over what to do. Outside, the crowd sensed that something was up. Every horse but Seabiscuit was in the paddock. A few people began to boo.

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

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

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