Charles Howard knew something about making an entrance. In the predawn hours of one December morning in 1939 the Seabiscuit crew came whooping and hollering into Santa Anita in a manner only a man as spectacular as Howard could have pulled off. Their vehicle was a streamlined “palace” horse van painted in Howard crimson and white and featuring two musical horns, eight headlights, fourteen cigar lighters, and a luxurious stall with kapok-stuffed walls. The back doors dropped open, and Smith and Seabiscuit emerged. Smith took the horse straight down the shed rows, pulled him up at the Kaiser Suite, and evicted Kayak. “Have to give the better horse preference,” he grunted. The first fans arrived at daybreak. All morning long, hundreds of them streamed into Barn 38 to greet the old warrior. Among them was Woolf. Seabiscuit came to the door and rubbed his face against the jockey’s fedora.
Smith, knowing that returning the horse to racing was controversial, took the offensive with the press. With a host of newsmen congregated outside, he led Seabiscuit out and stood him in an open space between the barns. He announced that anyone who was suspicious of the horse’s soundness could step right up and have a look. He asked the photographers to take close-up shots of the horse’s left ankle. “If anybody thinks I am training a cripple,” he said, “I want these pictures definitely to prove otherwise.”1
The 1940 hundred-grander was on March 2, giving Smith about three months to prepare the horse. He got to work. He had Seabiscuit’s heavy winter coat clipped off and took him to the scales. The horse weighed in at 1,070, twenty pounds too much. Smith was worried that the load would strain the leg, so he pulled out the yellow sweating hood and gave the horse slow gallops. In the barn they strapped the horse into a muzzle each evening to stop him from eating his bedding. Seabiscuit put up a fight, but the groom managed to get it on without losing any fingers. Gradually, the weight vanished from the horse’s ribs.
On December 19 Smith felt the horse was ready to be tested. He tacked him up and took him out for his first fast workout since the injury. As the grooms watched and fretted, Smith waved the exercise rider on. Venting months of frustration, Seabiscuit burned rubber off the line and sped past the grandstand. He came back perfectly sound. The grooms sagged with relief.
The mood didn’t last long. Late that afternoon Smith went into the track secretary’s office to see the weight postings for the Santa Anita Handicap. He couldn’t believe his eyes: Though he had been idle for a year, Seabiscuit had been assigned 130 pounds; Kayak, 129. As he ran his eyes down the list, the highest number Smith saw for any other horse was 114.
Smith lit up like a firecracker. He stormed around the office and shouted about the irresponsibility of the handicapper. A gathering of horsemen gaped at him. Silent Tom’s tirade lasted a full five minutes. After giving vent to his anger, he pulled himself together and stalked off.
“So what?” he grumbled. “We’ll run one-two anyway.”2
The year 1940 rolled in with heavy black clouds. Snow brushed over the tips of every peak up in the San Gabriels, but down on the track there was only rain and slippery mud. Smith tucked Seabiscuit away in the barn and waited for a break in the weather. It didn’t come. Day after day, the rains kept falling. Over and over again, Smith postponed Seabiscuit’s workouts. He spent every minute with the horse, sleeping in the barn, watching him eat, personally wrapping his legs in stall bandages, but he wouldn’t let him out to work. Pressure began to build. Seabiscuit was entered in several races, and each time he had to be scratched. The crowds booed and the press picked at Smith and Howard. “If Seabiscuit is scratched again,” wrote a reporter, “he will be an etching.” The whole barn was in a funk. Kayak was trounced in his first race of 1940. Not a single Howard runner won.
Seabiscuit may have been trapped in the barn, but his idleness didn’t hurt his celebrity. He was the hottest name in the nation. Fans thronged into the Uptown Theater in Pasadena to see The Life of Seabiscuit, a compilation of the horse’s newsreel footage. The film relegated a much anticipated Jimmy Stewart movie to second billing. The stylish “Seabiscuit” ladies’ hat, with a fishnet veil, was all the rage in department stores on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue. The hat was the first of myriad lines of signature products: toys, commemorative wastebaskets, two varieties of oranges. All kinds of businesses from hotels to laundries to humor magazines were using the horse’s likeness in their ads. The horse even had his own parlor game, the first of at least nine.
When Pollard hung up his tack in the Santa Anita jockeys’ room, he found the riding colony in an uproar. Just before the track’s season had begun in December, Pollard’s old colleague Tommy Luther had sat down for coffee in the Santa Anita golf club with a handful of other riders. They began chatting about the alarming number of jockeys who had been wiped out by injuries, including Pollard. Luther had never gotten over the death of poor little Sandy Graham, thrown from a horse Luther was to have ridden. He had an idea: Why not ask each rider to contribute 10 cents for every ride, plus $20 a year, to a community fund that could help injured riders? The five riders liked the idea and agreed to have a second meeting at the golf club, each man bringing two riders with him.
The next morning, when Luther arrived to pick up his jockey’s license for the track’s winter meet, he was called before old Pink Whiskers, steward Christopher Fitzgerald, who asked about the meetings. Luther explained his fund idea. Pink Whiskers accused him of starting a union. Luther denied it. Pink Whiskers promptly banned him from riding for a full year for his “defiant and threatening attitude.”3 The ban was upheld everywhere in the country.
Luther refused to back down. He rallied the jockeys around him, and each week the riders streamed across the street to the golf club. Woolf was there, as were Spec Richardson and Harry Richards. But Pollard refused to go.4 No man in the riding colony needed a community fund more. He had twice narrowly escaped dying in riding accidents that had landed him in the hospital for months on end, wiped him out financially, and caused near crippling injury. Now he was forcing himself back into the saddle at the risk of his leg because he hadn’t a cent to his name to support a coming baby. Red Pollard should have been the community fund’s poster boy.
But all he could think of was Charles and Marcela Howard. With the jockeys’ efforts widely perceived as the formation of a union against stewards, owners, and trainers, Pollard feared that he might offend the Howards by crossing the street and walking into the golf club. To the exasperation of his fellow riders, Pollard stayed away.
For Pollard, it was a season of incredible strain and humiliation. Before arriving at Santa Anita, he had tried to resume his career at Tanforan. At first he found a few trainers who wanted to help him get back on his feet. The result was nearly catastrophic. He had come away hopping from two horses, in obvious pain. He had looked very weak, and everyone, including the newsmen, had noticed. And he hadn’t won a race.
He came down to Santa Anita resolving to do better. Yummy, still as fiercely loyal as he had been back in their Thistle Down days, joined up with him again and promised to get him mounts.5 Red and Agnes settled into a little rental house near the track. Pollard built his strength, hit the sack early, and rose well before dawn to head back to the track. But his declarations of readiness were received with awkward silence. Everyone knew what had happened at Tanforan. Yummy scoured the backstretch for trainers willing to put the Cougar on their horses. He didn’t find one. Every trainer on the grounds believed Pollard was finished, and no one wanted to be responsible for crippling him.
The biggest disappointment was Howard. Even when he had been at the top of his game with Seabiscuit, Pollard had never established himself with any other major stable, so Howard was his only real hope. Smith wanted Pollard on the horse for the hundred-grander. Howard wanted to grant the redhead his wish, but both he and Marcela were tormented by the thought of what it would cost him. He let Pollard ride Seabiscuit in slow gallops but kept him off the horse’s back for most of his fast workouts. At first, Howard would not allow Pollard to ride in races on any of his horses. Then, one afternoon in late January, he finally relented and assigned the jockey the race mount on a filly. But when the track came up muddy, Howard abruptly snatched Pollard off the horse and put someone else in his place, fearing that the filly might slip and jar the jockey’s leg.6 From then on, when jockeys’ names were posted for Howard’s horses, Pollard was never among them. In a sport in which men are measured by their toughness, he must have felt humiliated.
Pollard was left with nothing to do. His anguish deepened. He sat in Pops’s stall, thinking about Agnes’s pregnancy and wondering how he would find the money to support the baby. He told Howard again and again that he was fit to ride in the hundred-grander, but got nowhere.
The truth was that Pollard couldn’t even convince himself. The leg didn’t feel right in his boot. The bones felt like matchsticks. He was sure that it wouldn’t take more than a light bump to shatter them. A secret terror began to rack his mind: What if Howard let him ride and his leg snapped in midrace?7
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.
