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Seabiscuit: The True Story of Three Men and a Racehorse
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. “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 ad 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.”
The puzzle of the horse weighed on Fitzsimmons’s mind. One morning at Aqueduct, while standing by the track to watch Granville complete his preparations for the Kentucky Derby, reporters were surprised to hear Sunny Jim ruminating not on his stable star but on the unknown Seabiscuit. The colt was, said the trainer, “a pretty nice hoss, the kind that might take some time to get going, but would take a lot of beating when he did.”
As Fitzsimmons was warming up to Seabiscuit, Wheatley was cooling off. Gladys Phipps was convinced that even if Fitzsimmons could make a silk purse out of this sow’s ear, the horse was still much too small to make it in the more lucrative “handicap” division, in which he would have to carry heavier weights. The new crop of horses coming into the barn was a big one, and the stable string had to be culled. Seabiscuit topped the list of disposable horses, and Phipps was eager to find a buyer. Unable to do so, she tried to pawn the colt off as a polo pony. The prospective buyer took one look at the colt’s crooked legs and passed. Early that spring, before she left for a tour of Europe, Phipps set a $5,000 price on Seabiscuit, hoping he would be sold before she came back.
Fitzsimmons had bigger things to worry about. In early May, a few days before Seabiscuit earned $25 for finishing fourth in a race at Jamaica Race Track, Fitzsimmons and Granville shipped off to Churchill Downs to go for the $37,725 winner’s share of the purse in the Kentucky Derby. Coming into the race with an excellent shot at winning, Granville fumed, stormed, and lathered through the post parade and bounced and shimmied in the starting gate. When the bell rang, he was sideswiped by a horse named He Did and nearly went down. He dumped jockey Jimmy Stout and took off for a glorious solo gallop around the track. In Baltimore’s Preakness Stakes, Stout stuck to his stirrups but finished second to Derby winner Bold Venture, foiled by the brilliant reinsmanship of Seabiscuit’s onetime jockey, George Woolf. In early June, as Seabiscuit was being humiliated in a cheap stakes race in New Hampshire, Granville finally lived up to expectations by winning New York’s Belmont Stakes, the final jewel in the Triple Crown. He would be named Horse of the Year for 1936. With a competitor like Granville in his barn, Fitzsimmons now had no reason to be fretting over a colt like Seabiscuit.
In June, after being whipped by a total of more than twenty-five lengths in his previous three starts, Seabiscuit appeared at Massachusetts’s Suffolk Downs to compete against a lowly field vying for a $700 winner’s purse. There Tom Smith bent over the track rail and exchanged looks with him for the first time. Countless horsemen had run their eyes over that plain bay body. None of them had seen what Smith saw.
In a private box above Saratoga Race Course on August 3, 1936, Marcela and Charles Howard surveyed a field of generic $6,000 claimers. In town to bid on the yearling sales on behalf of Bing Crosby, they had stopped by the track to take in a few races. Charles pointed to an especially homely colt and asked his wife what she thought of him. She offered a wager of a cool drink that the horse would lose. He accepted the bet, and they watched as the colt led wire to wire. Marcela bought her husband a lemonade. Sitting together in the clubhouse that afternoon, husband and wife felt a pull of intuition. Howard contacted Smith and told him he had a horse he wanted him to look at, stabled in the Fitzsimmons barn. Smith was probably skeptical. That spring he had been shown nearly two dozen prospects and had frowned over every one of them.
Smith walked over to the Wheatley barn and presented himself to Fitzsimmons, asking to see the horse of whom Howard had spoken. Fitzsimmons walked the colt in question out of his stall. Smith recognized him immediately; it was Seabiscuit. Smith saw the bucked knees, the insistent pressure of ribs under skin, the weariness of the body. But he saw something else, too. He tracked down Howard.
“Better come and see him for yourself,” he said.
Led out of his stall with the two men standing by, Seabiscuit head-butted Howard. Smith made his case with four sentences: “Get me that horse. He has real stuff in him. I can improve him. I’m positive.”
It was a statement astounding for its audacity. Tom Smith was an obscure trainer with one year’s experience with a mainstream stable. Fitzsimmons was the undisputed leader of the nation’s training ranks. If Sunny Jim couldn’t get a horse to win, no one could. Few trainers, even the most cocksure, were fool enough to buy a horse from the master. For Smith, walking into that barn must have been akin to entering a cathedral; telling Fitzsimmons that he could improve on his work must have felt like sacrilege. And there was another reason for worry. Howard sent veterinarians to inspect the horse. They were only lukewarm about his prospects, eyeing that iffy left foreleg and pronouncing the horse only “serviceably useful.” But in this horse, Smith knew there was something lying dormant.
The bump from Seabiscuit’s head took care of Howard’s sentimental side. “I fell in love with him,” he said later, “right then and there.” Marcela was sold and urged him not to wait. But Howard’s business side was still not convinced. He contacted co-owner Ogden Mills and made an offer of $8,000, with one string attached: Seabiscuit had to perform well in his next start.2
The appointed day arrived with pouring rain, and Fitzsimmons considered scratching Seabiscuit. But no one else seemed to want to run in the mud either. All day long, trainers kept scratching horses from the race. By afternoon, only one other horse remained in the field. Fitzsimmons decided he had nothing to lose. Howard amused himself by putting a $100 bet on the horse, then settled in to watch. Smith was terrified. He had studied Seabiscuit’s past performances and knew that the horse did not run his best in mud. The trainer stood on the track apron and fretted.
Seabiscuit broke slowly and dropped farther and farther back. By mid-race, he was trailing by at least ten lengths. Smith was dismayed. But Seabiscuit began to rally. Slogging through the slop, he lumbered up to his competitor, pushing as hard as he could, and passed him. It wasn’t much of a race, but it was a win nonetheless. Howard was satisfied. The horse had grit.3
“I can’t describe the feeling he gave me,” Howard said later, “but somehow I knew he had what it takes. Tom and I realized that we had our worries and troubles ahead. We had to rebuild him, both mentally and physically, but you don’t have to rebuild the heart when it’s already there, big as all outdoors.”
Smith breathed a sigh of relief. Years later, he would shiver at the thought of how easily he could have lost the colt in the driving rain that day.
Howard let Mills know that the offer was still on the table. Mills mulled it over. Fitzsimmons had become deeply fond of the colt and entertained private doubts about parting with him. Seabiscuit might, he muttered dubiously, win another purse. He didn’t share his reservations with Mdls, an omission he would come to regret. Howard found Mdls in the Saratoga paddock.
“Deal or no deal?” he asked.
“Deal,” said Mdls. Howard wrote out a check to Mills, then gave his new horse to Marcela.
Tom Smith had found the horse who would lift him from obscurity.
On an August day in 1936, Seabiscuit was led from the Fitzsimmons barn for the last time. No one came to see him go. Fitzsimmons hadn’t been told that the sale had gone through, so he didn’t come to say his good-byes. Seabiscuit was walked down the backstretch, a long canopy of trees bowing over his head. At the Howard barn, Smith waited, flanked by a cluster of stable hands. Though the trainer hardly ever said anything, there was an air to him that day that told the grooms how special the horse was to him. One kid who had not picked up on it was a teenaged apprentice jockey named Farrell Jones, who joined the others at the barn as Seabiscuit was led up. Seeing a thin, homely animal, Jones made the understandable assumption that this was no racehorse.
“Looks like they got a new saddle horse,” he blurted out, loud enough for Smith to hear.
The grooms shushed him.
A few days later, Smith led Seabiscuit up onto a railcar, and the Howard barn pushed off for the Detroit Fair Grounds. Smith began thinking about finding a jockey.
1 It has long been part of racing lore that the use of the word “upset” to mean the surprise defeat of a favorite originates from Man o’ War’s shocking loss to the horse Upset in 1920. Though a good story, it is false. Use of the word “upset” in this sense predates that race. In fact, reporters covering the race noted how coincidental it was that Man o’ War should lose to a horse with such a name.
2 Though $8,000 sounds like a lot in Depression dodars, it was a relatively low price for a racehorse. Horse racing was one of the most lucrative sports in America at that time, and even undistinguished horses often earned two to three thousand dodars a year. In addition, the breeding industry was potentially profitable, adding considerably to the value of horses. Seabiscuit was reasonably well-bred, giving him additional value as a stallion.
3 The official Daily Racing Form record of this race states that Seabiscuit held the lead from the start, but it appears to be in error. Multiple eyewitness accounts of this race state that Seabiscuit trailed badly early, then rallied to win.
Chapter 4 THE COUGAR AND THE ICEMAN
Red Pollard was sinking downward through his life with the pendulous motion of a leaf falling through still air. In the summer of 1936 he was twenty-six and in the twelfth year of a failing career as a jockey and part-time prizefighter. He was an elegant young man, tautly muscled, with a shock of supernaturally orange hair. Whenever he got near a mirror, he wetted down a comb and slicked the hair back like Tyrone Power, but it had a way of rearing up on him again. His face had a downward-sliding quality, as if his features were just beginning to melt.
He was, statistically speaking, one of the worst riders anywhere. Lately, at least. Once, he had been one of the best, but those years were far behind him. He had no money and no home; he lived entirely on the road of the racing circuit, sleeping in empty stalls, carrying with him only a saddle, his rosary, and his books: pocket volumes of Shakespeare, Omar Khayyám’s Rubaiyat, a little copy of Robert Service’s Songs of the Sourdough, maybe some Emerson, whom he called “Old Waldo.” The books were the closest things he had to furniture, and he lived in them the way other men live in easy chairs.
On the day Seabiscuit settled in at the Detroit Fair Grounds, Pollard was in North Randall, Ohio, sweltering through August at a middling racetrack called Thistle Down Park, which was wrapping up its summer meeting. Pollard’s career had continued slipping there, as it had everywhere else. His win percentage had dropped into the single digits. The last horse he rode came to a halt right in the middle of his race. On August 16, 1936, when Thistle Down Park shuttered its doors for the season, Red Pollard appeared to be out of chances.
Back home in Edmonton, Alberta, he had been known as Johnny. Right from his boyhood, people had seen the restlessness in him. They must have known he wouldn’t stay in their town for long.
Wanderlust ran in his family. Johnny’s father and namesake, the son of an Irish emigree who had become a Union Cavalryman, had spent his young adulthood rambling across the western Canadian wilderness in search of gold. In 1898, prospecting led him to a nearly vacant trail crossing that the trappers called Edmonton, where he found that the soil was the perfect medium for making brick. The Irishman staked a claim, opened a brick factory on the banks of the North Saskatchewan River, and made a fortune on the Northwest’s turn-of-the-century construction boom. He bought up a huge portion of Edmonton and built the first real house in town, a vast home surrounded by sprawling acres of virgin countryside. With his wife, Edith, he raised seven whip-smart, buoyant children: Jim, Johnny, Bill, Edie, Betty, Norah, and a little girl whom, with characteristic Pollard whimsy, they called Bubbles. The elder Pollard’s brother Frank and his family moved in to join the business, and the Pollard home was soon teeming with sixteen family members and a host of workers who took their meals at the house.
Born in November 1909, Johnny was the liveliest member of a clever and boisterous family. In the Pollard home, books were always open, old Irish songs sung, jigs danced, long stories spun. Johnny played on the grassy fields of his family’s estate and spent his Sundays in the lap of the family Model T, competing with his siblings for a window seat. As the car swung over a high bridge that crossed the North Saskatchewan River, he could peer over the railing to see the family business at the water’s edge below.
Misfortune struck suddenly and forcefully. In 1915 the river boiled up in a flash flood, ripping over the shoreline around the factory. Johnny’s father rescued his family from the water by throwing them in a buggy and lugging them up the bank himself, but he couldn’t save the factory machinery. The business vanished, and the tax bill arrived. Pollard traveled around Canada, trying in vain to find a bank to lend him the money. The city of Edmonton foreclosed, and the Pollards lost everything but their house. Virtually overnight, Johnny’s father was bankrupt with seven children and a wife to feed. He eventually found meager income as an auto repairman. It was only by bartering gasoline for groceries that he managed to keep his family alive.
Johnny found myriad avenues of distraction from his family’s penury. One was athletic. His father took him and his brother Bill to the community boxing ring, where they were swept up in the prizefighting craze of the 1920s. Bill, a tall, powerful fighter, made it to the Golden Gloves. Johnny, smaller and leaner, became a proficient and scrappy fighter but never achieved his brother’s success. He amused himself by provoking much bigger boys into fights, calling his “Golden Glove brother” to the rescue, and laughing as they ran in terror.
His other escape was intellectual. Johnny devoured great literature. He committed long passages of prose and poetry to memory and engaged in lively recitation duels with his sister Edie as they bounced over the local roads in the Model T. Graced with an agile mind, he had the makings of a man of letters. Later, when his fate became known, his boyhood friends would wish for his sake that he had gone the way of the academy. But the classroom smothered him. He desperately wanted to explore the wider world. He was impatient with his lessons, mouthed off at teachers, got poor grades, spent his hours coining witticisms and engineering elaborate practical jokes. His emotions were liquid; his anger was a wild rage, his pleasure jubilation, his humor biting, his sorrow and empathy a bottomless abyss. He was, his son John would later remember, a person who brought an uproar with him wherever he went. Johnny Pollard was a caged bird.
As he grew, his restlessness turned into aspiration. His father had somehow managed to obtain a gift for his second son, a little horse named Forest Dawn. To help make ends meet, Johnny began hitching the horse to his toboggan and using them to make deliveries for the local grocery. In long afternoons aboard the pony’s back, Johnny discovered a gift for riding. His daughter, writer Norah Christianson, remembers that he had “the body of a dancer, lithe and wiry and thin, everything in balance,” a physique ideally suited to the pitch and yaw of a horse’s withers. Riding also suited his passion for risk. His life, from his youth onward, was a headlong rush into danger and uncertainty. Out on Edmonton’s dirt roads, his legs swinging free from Forest Dawn’s sides while the toboggan bobbed along behind, Johnny decided he wanted to be a jockey.
As he entered his teens, Johnny began haunting local stables, trading his labor for a chance to ride. He appealed to his parents to let him go out on the racing circuit and learn to be a jockey. His mother wanted to stop him. His father did not. Perhaps the aging prospector understood the futility of trying to contain a torrential boy within the confines of a small town. Perhaps he was proud of Johnny’s aspiration to make a career of sport. Surely money played a role in the decision Pollard would make; he was barely able to feed his children. But his wife was frightened. In 1925 the Pollards made a compromise. Johnny would be allowed to go to the racetrack to pursue his career, but only on the condition that he be escorted by a trusted family friend. The Pollards swallowed their fears, kissed their son good-bye, and handed him over to his new guardian.
Sometime in 1925 Johnny and his guardian pulled into the old mining town of Butte, Montana, where the local bullring racetrack linked up with a network of other tracks, carnivals, and fairs. Featuring bottom-level Thoroughbreds and quarter horses, these tracks offered the worst of low-rent racing. Most were little more than makeshift ovals cut through hayfields. Races were begun either by walking horses away from the starter, then spinning them around when the starter said go—a method called “lap and tap”—or by lining them up behind a simple webbing that was rigged to spring upward to start the race, sometimes catching riders under the chin. Purses were often smaller than the cost of shoeing a horse—about $1.40. The tracks were only a half mile around. The turns were so tight that a horse with a head of steam on him—a top quarter horse have been clocked at peak speeds of well over fifty miles per hour1—would go winging off into the hay if he didn’t ease back as he left the straightaway. It was nothing special, but it was a start.
Johnny had only just arrived when his guardian vanished. The man never returned. Pollard was completely alone and penniless in a remote town of a foreign country. He was just fifteen years old, and his boyhood was over.
If Pollard had any way to get home, he didn’t use it. Somehow, he managed to find a place to sleep and something to eat. He began wandering around the carnivals and tracks, trying to talk his way onto the backs of horses. Though he towered over other jockeys, ultimately leveling off at about five feet seven inches, he hadn’t filled out his frame yet, weighing just 101 pounds, light enough to ride. The local racetrackers grew fond of the odd, bookish boy, nicknaming him Red, and a few let him ride their horses.
It was a rough place to start a career. Racing in the bush leagues was utterly lawless. “If you could survive there,” remembered former jockey Joe “Mossy” Mosbacher, “you could ride anywhere.” With no race cameras and only two patrol judges to oversee them, jockeys could—and would—do anything to win. Jockeys on trailing horses grabbed hold of leading horses’ tails or saddlecloths so their own horses could be towed around the track, saving energy. They joined arms with other jockeys to “clothesline” riders trying to cut between horses, formed obstructive “flying wedges” to block closers, and bashed passing horses into the inside rail. They hooked their legs over other jockeys’ knees, ensuring that if their rivals moved forward, they’d be scraped off their saddles. They dangled their feet in front of passing horses to intimidate them, and when less inspired, they shoved and punched one another and grabbed one another’s reins. Because many of the tracks had no inner rail, some jockeys simply cut through the infield, dodging haystacks, to win. In some cases, riders toppled their opponents right off their horses.
Such tactics were, until the mid-1930s, seen at all levels of racing, but nowhere were they used with such ruthlessness as on the bush tracks where Pollard got his start. According to the great jockey Eddie Arcaro, who once rammed another rider over the rail in retribution for a bump (“I was trying to kill that Cuban S.O.B.,” he told the stewards, who reformed him with a year’s suspension), the desire to win wasn’t the only motivation. The bush leagues contained two kinds of riders: kids like Pollard seeking to make their names and veterans in the bitter waning days of their careers, sliding down to this last and lowest place in the sport. “To succeed in those days, you had to fight for everything you got,” Arcaro wrote in his autobiography, I Ride to Win! “You were competing with men who were aware that their own particular suns were fading, and they resented your moving into the places they would leave. They fought you, and you fought them back.”
Pollard took a few licks, held his own, and learned a lot. But months passed, and still he didn’t win a single race. In danger of starving, he used the only other skill he had, straying into carnival bullrings and cow-town clubs to moonlight as a prizefighter. He was no headliner. Mostly, he boxed in preliminary matches to warm up the crowd. At the time, a local kid nicknamed “the Nebraska Wildcat” was the hottest boxing property around. In imitation, Pollard took the ring name “Cougar.” His skills didn’t live up to the nickname. He fought a lot of matches, and lost, he said, “a lot of ’em.”
Though a misnomer, his nickname proved to be the one enduring thing about Pollard’s ring career. Racetrackers in that era had a peculiar animosity for given names. Among those haunting the track in Pollard’s day were Lying Tex, Truthful Tex, Scratchy Balls John, Cow Shit Red, Piss-Through-the-Screen Slim, and a man the trackers called Booger. Baptist John was the nickname of a tracker famed for being run over by a police car that was chasing him, breaking his leg. He left the cast on his leg until it rotted off, so that, in the words of horseman Wad Studley, “one leg went north and the other one southwest.” The given names of half the people at the track were complete mysteries. The name Cougar followed Pollard from the boxing ring to the races and stuck with him for good. He liked the name, referred to himself by it, preferred that his closest friends use it, and gave it to every dog he ever owned.
