And then there was Woolf. Seeing that Howard might bar Pollard from riding, Smith had started letting Woolf gallop Seabiscuit. There was widespread speculation that either Woolf or Buddy Haas, Kayak’s jockey, would be signed on to ride Seabiscuit in the big race. Almost everyone at Santa Anita thought that anyone but Pollard should ride.8 Pollard called his naysayers “my left-handed rooting section.”9
Pollard watched Woolf canter off on Pops. Despair rushed up under him like a riptide. “And none so poor,” he muttered to a reporter, echoing Julius Caesar, “to do me reverence.”10
Pollard began to crumble under the pressure. He had become a binge drinker. He made a point of temperance during working hours—“Never let it be said,” he once told his friend Bill Buck, “that Pollard was drinking when he was riding”—but during off-hours he sometimes drank heavily.11 “Tonight’s the night,” he once shouted as he ran into Buck’s apartment near the end of a race season, “the Cougar howls!” When he drank, he endured monstrous hangovers and appeared to suffer from delirium tremens. “I got to wear glued shoes when I’m hung,” he said, “because I shake the nails out of the other kind.”12
Yummy was frightened for him.13 If Pollard began drinking too heavily, he would lose any chance he had to ride Seabiscuit. Yummy did everything he could to keep the jockey from going on benders. He asked Pollard to come stay with him at the Turkish baths. Pollard refused. So Yummy shadowed him everywhere. He made a point of knowing exactly where his client was twenty-four hours a day. He asked David Alexander to stay around Pollard as much as possible to keep him from overimbibing. In an apparent bargain to keep him dry until the race, Yummy made a deal with the rider. If Pollard won the hundred-grander, Yummy promised to sneak him a swig of bow-wow wine in the winner’s circle.
Pollard wasn’t the only one feeling the strain. Smith was racked with anxiety. “His whole life,” recalled Sonny Greenberg, “was gathered around Seabiscuit.” Howard, too, was at the breaking point. Over a five-year partnership, these two radically different men with often conflicting priorities had forged a surprisingly harmonious relationship, but decisions about Seabiscuit’s racing and training schedule had repeatedly caused tension between them. When under pressure, each man had a tendency to become more controlling, and never was the pressure higher than in the winter of 1940.
One morning at Santa Anita, Howard pushed Smith hard to take a course with Seabiscuit that Smith was not prepared to take, apparently to rush his very conservative training regimen. In front of a barnful of horsemen, Smith laid down the law. Let me train my horse as I see fit, he snapped, or find a new trainer.14 Everyone within earshot froze, listening for Howard’s response.
Howard said nothing and walked away.
January waned, and still Seabiscuit had not raced. Whichcee, Heelfly, all his rivals were preparing well. The rains didn’t relent. Smith couldn’t wait any longer. He took Seabiscuit and Kayak out for a hard workout on the training track. For once, Pollard was allowed to ride Seabiscuit for speed. In a driving rainstorm that sent everyone running, Seabiscuit and Kayak blistered six furlongs in 1:13 with Pollard leaning all the way back against the reins, his feet “on the dashboard.” Horse and jockey returned intact. A few days later Smith sent Seabiscuit back out again, and again his time was superb, 1:12⅖ for six furlongs. Pollard said the horse had never been sounder.
After the workout, Smith entered Seabiscuit in the San Felipe Handicap, scheduled for January 30. Pollard awaited a decision on whether or not he would be in the irons. Smith announced that Pollard would ride. But Howard added an escape clause: Pollard would ride only if he was fit to do so. If he wasn’t, Howard said, Woolf had the mount. He said nothing about the hundred-grander, now just a month away.
Woolf and Pollard fell into the first crisis of their friendship. To Pollard, the mount on Seabiscuit could not have been more important. The horse meant financial rescue, the ability to meet his responsibilities as father and husband, professional redemption, and the end of a long, public humiliation. But Woolf must have burned with the frustration of the nose loss in 1938, and the guilt for having possibly exacerbated the horse’s injury in 1939. In announcing publicly that it was Woolf or Pollard, Howard had inadvertently set the two against each other.
Somewhere along the backstretch, Woolf and Pollard had a bitter argument over Seabiscuit, nearly coming to blows.15 When they walked away, their friendship was broken.
January 29 dawned sunny and clear. Howard started the long walk to the track offices to enter his horse in the next day’s San Felipe. As he ambled around the course, the barometer in the track secretary’s office leaned toward rain. He entered the horse. Seeing that Seabiscuit was in, NBC Radio began setting up at Santa Anita to broadcast the race nationally. The barometer continued to sink. Overhead, the clouds furrowed. The next morning, just as Seabiscuit stepped on the track for his final blowout, it began to rain. Then it cleared again, and Howard went to the track and crossed his fingers.
After the third race, David Alexander interrupted Howard in the Turf Club.
“It’s raining, Charley.”16
“No!” Howard shouted, a little too loud. “Three times in a row! This just can’t happen.”
He stared out at the rain. “It might stop,” he said weakly.
It rained harder and harder. A half hour before the race, Howard and Smith got into a station wagon and toured the track. The rain pinged off the roof. The horse needed the work badly, but the track was just too muddy to risk it. When the scratch appeared on the board, the crowd booed. The sun promptly came back out.
The scratchings were becoming a joke. “For hire: One Rain-Maker Racehorse,” wrote David Alexander.17 “Answers to the name of Seabiscuit. Guaranteed to cause rainstorms wherever he goes. Capable of solving all irrigation problems of dust bowl farmers. Can vastly simplify Federal reclamation projects in all drought areas. All businesses now operating under Federal Bankruptcy Law 7-B can become liquid at once by employing services of this miraculous animal.… Clockers have given up timing Seabiscuit with a stopwatch. They’re using a barometer instead.”
The rain kept falling. A week later Seabiscuit had to be scratched again.
Howard was driven to distraction and needed something to keep himself busy. Overhearing a valet lamenting the lack of funds to create an all-jockey baseball team, he jumped in.18
“Let me take care of it,” he said. “What will it cost?” The valets came up with an estimate of $23.80 per jockey.
“Go to it,” said Howard. “Go first-class.”
Arriving to watch them play, Howard was delighted to see that the jockeys had memorialized his generosity by ordering their uniforms in Howard red and white, with the Howard signature triangle on them. Instead of their own names, the jockeys had stenciled the names of Howard’s horses on the back. Howard attended every game, playfully rooting for the opposition.
Days slipped by. The Santa Anita Handicap was just weeks away. Seabiscuit had not raced once. His fans were so eager to see him that when Smith decided to treat the fans by sending the horse out for a public workout between races one afternoon, a massive crowd of forty thousand people flocked to Santa Anita to see it. The exercise was not doing the trick. “He’s gaining weight,” moaned Smith, “and we aren’t feeding him enough to satisfy a full-grown canary bird.” Seabiscuit was far behind in his preparation. The chances of his making the hundred-grander were dimming every day. Woolf couldn’t wait any longer. Pressured by trainers who wanted his services in the race, he gave up and signed on to ride Heelfly.
The sky finally cleared for Seabiscuit on February 9, and Smith sent him out for his first race, the La Jolla Handicap. Pollard begged Howard for the mount, and the owner relented. It was Pollard and Seabiscuit’s first race together since 1937. It was not a happy reunion. Seabiscuit broke in a tangle. Pollard tried to rush him into contention, only to be pocketed in. As Pollard waited for a gap to run through, a horse blew past. It was Heelfly, with Woolf in the
stirrups. Pollard swung Seabiscuit out of the pack and asked him to chase Heelfly. There was no response. Seabiscuit finished third. Up in the press box, a San Francisco News reporter typed out the story. “We are afraid that on Handicap Day they’ll be passing the ’Biscuit, pappy, passing the ’Biscuit by.”19
Pollard slid slowly to the ground in front of the grandstand. He was crying.20
Smith came out to meet him. He looked over Seabiscuit’s legs. The horse was perfectly sound. Smith wasn’t worried about the loss. “I’m satisfied. He was a short horse,” he said, using the horseman’s term for an animal who is not fully fit. “He ran like one.”
Pollard pulled himself together. Over the weekend, Yummy took him down to his old haunt, Caliente.21 The visit gave the rider confidence. “Can we do it? I say we can,” he told Alexander. “It’s me and the Biscuit, for the big money.” Pollard handed Yummy a stack of dollars and sent him to a future book operator to place a bet on the Santa Anita Handicap. “Seabiscuit,” he told him. “To win.”
A week later, Kayak and Seabiscuit paraded out for the San Carlos Handicap, the same race in which Pollard and Fair Knightess had fallen two years before. The 1940 running turned out better, but not by much. Given clear sailing, neither horse could even get into contention. At the half-mile pole, Seabiscuit abruptly propped.22 Pollard managed to hang on, but when he asked him to run, again the horse didn’t respond. Pollard crouched over his neck, urging him on and getting nothing, watching helplessly as horses flew past. A heartbreaking thought crossed his mind: He has nothing left.23 The horse had never felt this way under him. As his old rival Specify flew to the victory, Seabiscuit labored in sixth, Kayak eighth. The crowd booed. “Seabiscuit seems definitely through as a top fighter,” wrote Jack McDonald. “Seabiscuit [is] apparently washed up.”
This time, Smith was rattled. He couldn’t understand what had happened. He wondered if his talents had failed him, if he had, in trying to compensate for months of undertraining, thrown too much work at his horse at once. He had two weeks to fix the problem and he wasn’t sure if he could.
Pollard left the track in despair. Around Santa Anita, people were blaming him for Seabiscuit’s losses, and he must have heard them. But as the days passed, something about the race kept pulling at him. At the half-mile pole, Seabiscuit had propped. He hadn’t done that since back in 1936, in the first race against Myrtlewood in Detroit. The horse hadn’t seemed tired before he did it, so it was strange that he tired abruptly afterward. Pollard began to wonder if the Biscuit had just been fooling around. Perhaps, he thought, he’d done it because he was feeling good and a little mischievous. Howard and the stable hands clung to the propping incident as a good omen.24 It was all they had.
Smith was adamant that Pollard was the man for the job. Howard couldn’t commit to it. Shortly before Seabiscuit’s final prep race, the San Antonio, Pollard learned that Howard had sent a $500 retainer check to jockey Buddy Haas, asking him to come west.25 Howard then made Seabiscuit’s entry for the Santa Anita Handicap.
He left the jockey space blank.
Later that week there was a rap at the door of David Alexander’s rental house in the Hollywood hills. It was Pollard. Alexander had never seen him in such a state. He was falling apart. He was, Alexander wrote, “nervous and worried and distraught.”
Alexander ushered Pollard into his den.26 He tried to make small talk, telling the jockey that Bing Crosby’s hit “Pennies from Heaven” was written in that den by earlier tenants.
“That’s what I need,” Pollard muttered. “Pennies from heaven. And I’ve got just one more ride to get ’em.”
“How’s Pops?” Alexander asked.
“Pops’s leg is no worse than usual, but how’s the Cougar?” Pollard replied. Alexander watched as Pollard pulled his trouser leg up. The jockey’s leg was purple. A broad welt ran the entire length of it. It looked, Alexander wrote, “like a charred, knobby broomstick.”
“One little tap,” Pollard said. “Just one. But it’s got to last for one more ride.”
He shrugged. “Old Pops and I have got four good legs between us,” he said. “Maybe that’s enough.”
They talked about Pollard’s fears. The leg was only part of it. Buddy Haas’s impending arrival had him overwrought.
“I’ve got to ride that horse.” Pollard’s voice had a deadly urgency to it.
Alexander promised Pollard that he would talk to Howard. The following day he tracked the owner down and asked him point-blank if he was going to take the mount away from Pollard.
“What would you and the other newspaper boys do if I rode Haas?” Howard asked.
Alexander said he couldn’t speak for the whole press corps, but “I said I would crucify him and use a whole keg full of nails for the job.”
“If Red breaks that leg again,” Howard said soberly, “it will cripple him for life.”
Alexander told him that maybe it was better to break a man’s leg than his heart.
February 23 was the day before the San Antonio. Howard was pacing around Santa Anita, a rabbit’s foot working overtime in his pocket.27 With only a week remaining before the Santa Anita Handicap, Seabiscuit had to run well or his attempted comeback would have to be deemed a failure. Kayak, too, had his reputation on the line. The whole barn was failing. Howard had never doubted his chances so much, and Smith had said nothing that reassured him.
A clerk met Howard on the bridge between the grandstand and clubhouse.
“Do you happen to have a rabbit’s foot, Mr. Howard?”
Howard said yes and pulled it out of his pocket.
“Give me that damn thing,” said the clerk. “It’s the unluckiest thing you can have on a racetrack.”
Howard handed it to him, and the clerk threw it away.
Beneath a hazy winter sky the following afternoon, Smith pushed Pollard up on Seabiscuit for the San Antonio, then went up to Howard’s box and sat down. Seabiscuit and Kayak walked out to the post. Smith said nothing, watching the horses. Howard worried. For what was surely the first time, he had not placed bets on his own horses. Marcela was so worried about jinxing the horses that she hadn’t come to the track.
Seabiscuit approached the starting gate. Smith studied his motion. He saw something there he hadn’t seen in a year. He leaned toward Howard and said five words: “It’s Seabiscuit, wire to wire.”28
Howard wheeled on Smith in amazement. He jumped up, ran to the betting booth, and emptied his pockets into the clerk’s hands.
The crowd of thirty-five thousand hushed, and the bell rang. Seabiscuit broke alertly and bounded up with the early leaders. The field flew off into the backstretch. In his box, Howard was in agonies. The crowd murmured and waited.
A minute later the field bent around the far turn and rushed at the grandstand. There was one horse in front and pouring it on. His silks were red. It was Seabiscuit. The crowd roared. Pollard and Seabiscuit glided down the lane all by themselves, reaching the wire in track-record-equaling time. Kayak was right behind him. It was Pollard’s first win since 1938. Howard swept down the steps to shake his hand.
As Pollard and his horse moved past the grandstand, hundreds of men spontaneously rose together and doffed their hats to him, their eyes shining.29 The cheering rolled over the track for more than fifteen minutes.
A few minutes later, Pollard sauntered out of the jocks’ room, smiling. “If the track is fast like it was today for next Saturday’s big race, we’ll win as far as a country boy can throw an apple,” he said.30 “We made our comeback together. I guess me and the Biscuit both needed those first two races, but we are ready to meet all comers now.” He went to the barn to check on Seabiscuit. Smith was there, marveling at the horse. He was sounder than he had been in two years.31
Howard had seen enough. Buddy Haas would ride Kayak. Pollard had won the mount on Seabiscuit. “Just give us a fast track,” Pollard said.32 “That’s all we want.”
Howard went home to celebrate. It began to rain.
Trapped behind a wall of horses on the final turn of the 1940 Santa Anita Handicap, Pollard and Seabiscuit make a desperate attempt to run between Whichcee (rail) and Wedding Call.
(© BETTMANN/CORBIS)
Chapter 23
ONE HUNDRED GRAND
Every night Smith drifted off to the sound of raindrops ringing off the barn roof. Every morning he woke to the same sound. The National Weather Service switchboard took more phone calls in that week than ever in its history, with nearly every caller asking if the skies would clear for Seabiscuit’s run at the Handicap that Saturday.1 The rain didn’t relent and Smith had no choice but to work the horse in the mud.
Early in the week, Smith brought Seabiscuit and Kayak out together. Howard stood by the barns and blinked at the clouds, a sarcastic smile on his face. He watched as the horses slogged through the mud, Seabiscuit dogging and taunting until Kayak pinned his ears and abruptly quit. They took the two horses back to the barn and cooled them out together. Kayak, clearly frustrated, took a lunge at Seabiscuit, dragging a groom with him. Smith was pleased. Seabiscuit was his old nasty self. Got to stop working these two together.
The rain kept falling. Smith kept working the horses. Kayak handled the mud well; Seabiscuit didn’t. “You know,” said Howard, “I wish one thing. It’s that Kayak’s four mud-running legs might be attached to Seabiscuit’s racing heart.2 Then I’d have something.” The tapping of rain carried his words away.
Two days before the race, the heavens finally relented. The drying irons rolled out. Fifty track workers slogged over the course, sponging the mud out of the puddles. Slowly, the track dried.
Early on the morning of March 2, race day, groom Harry Bradshaw came down the shed row, poured a helping of oats into Seabiscuit’s bucket, then stepped out from under the shed row roof.3 At last the sun was breaking through. Bradshaw turned his face toward it. “Be with him today,” he said.4
Seabiscuit: An American Legend Page 34
