On a soft April day in 1940, Smith led Seabiscuit out of the Kaiser Suite for the last time. There had been countless requests for appearances—the promoters of the Golden State International Exhibition, having secured the attendance of F.D.R., wanted to host “that other great American, Seabiscuit”—but Howard declined them all. It was time to let the horse rest. Howard had preceded Seabiscuit up to Ridgewood and had coaxed every reporter, newsreel man, admirer, and friend in his address book into driving up to attend the horse’s homecoming. He proudly introduced everyone to Seabiscuit’s first foal, still wobbling on new legs. The owner passed out cigars and showed off the sacks of fan mail addressed to “Daddy Seabiscuit” and “Pappa Seabiscuit.” The foal delighted Pollard in particular; he was a redhead. Howard named him First Biscuit.
Smith wasn’t going to join the celebration. He preferred to say his good-byes at the track. He slipped his fingers into Seabiscuit’s halter and led him down the shed row. A somber group of newsmen, spectators, and horsemen quietly parted to let them pass. Seabiscuit paused and looked toward the track, and Smith’s eyes clouded over. He led his horse up the ramp and disappeared into the darkness. A moment later, he emerged alone.1
The men who handled Seabiscuit quietly scattered. Woolf continued his dizzying ascent, becoming the leading rider in America. On the day in 1942 when he rode Triple Crown winner Whirlaway to break Seabiscuit’s earnings record, Pollard was up in the stands cheering him on with his usual lack of restraint, bouncing around the box, rooting himself hoarse, and drawing the stares of everyone nearby. Dismounting, Woolf was swamped by reporters asking him to confirm that “Whirly” was the best horse he had ever ridden. Woolf was as impolitic as ever. “Seabiscuit,” he said, “is the greatest horse I ever rode.”2
On a January day in 1946, Woolf rode into the Santa Anita starting gate for a weekday race. At thirty-five, he was preparing to end one of history’s greatest athletic careers. He was struggling with his diabetes, and friends had noticed that he was unusually thin that winter.3 That afternoon, Woolf wasn’t feeling well enough to ride, but a friend needed a jockey for a horse named Please Me. Woolf didn’t need to think about it. “There was one thing special you can say about George,”4 Smith would say of him. “He remembered the little fellows who were his friends when he needed them. He never forgot about his friends. Say that about George.” Please Me was an ordinary horse in an ordinary race, so Woolf used weekday tack. When he walked out to the paddock, he left his lucky kangaroo-leather saddle in his trunk.5
For George Woolf, the last sensations of life were the sight of Santa Anita’s russet soil and the curve of Please Me’s neck, the coarse feel of mane in his hands, the smell of the horse’s skin, the deep roll of his breathing. As Woolf and his mount passed the grandstand and banked into the first turn, some witnesses thought they saw Please Me stumble. But most saw Woolf sink from the saddle, unconscious, his dieting and diabetes finally taking their toll. He slid into the air.6 There was the awful dissonance of a lone horse galloping riderless. There was terrible speed and terrible, sudden stillness.
The sound of the Iceman’s head striking the track carried over the crowd.7 Woolf’s friends turned away.8
Fifteen hundred people came to say good-bye to Woolf.9 Genevieve, widowed at thirty-two, sat in a front pew. Gene Autry sang “Empty Saddles in the Old Corral,” his voice wafting out over rows and rows of faces, spilling back to the church’s opened doors, down the steps, and filling the street. Pollard was among them, sobbing for his best friend. “I wonder who has Woolf’s book?”10 he said later. “Saint Peter, or some other bird?”
Three years later a wistful bugle cry carried over the empty track at Santa Anita, and sixteen thousand people gathered by the paddock to witness the unveiling of the George Woolf memorial statue. Much of the price had been footed by Please Me’s owner, Tiny Naylor, who sold a horse at auction and donated the proceeds to the statue fund. The rest had come from the California Turf Writers Committee and countless contributions from trackers and fans the world over. Genevieve joined Charles Howard in the center of the paddock to hear a eulogy delivered by Joe Hernandez, the man who first called Woolf “Iceman.” The jockeys lined up in silent attention before Woolf’s veiled likeness, their hats over their hearts. The cloth was slid from the statue.
Woolf’s handsome face looked out across Santa Anita once again. He stood just as he always had in life, hand on hip, chin up, radiating insouciance, the kangaroo-leather saddle over his arm. His gaze fell to the east end of the paddock and rested on the life-sized bronze image of Seabiscuit that Howard had placed there.
“George Woolf is at Santa Anita, there near the paddock, facing [sculptor Tex] Wheeler’s magnificent figure of Seabiscuit,” wrote the Thoroughbred Times’s Jack Shettlesworth.11 “He’ll be there as long as Santa Anita stands. Santa Anita will be there as long as people feel anything about anything in racing.”
Howard lobbied to get Smith named champion trainer of 1940, but Smith would never have the respect he deserved. Owner and trainer continued to work together until the spring of 1943, when Smith underwent back surgery and wound up in a yearlong convalescence that forced Howard to replace him. They parted amicably, and Smith went, of all places, to the East, signing on as trainer for cosmetic queen Elizabeth Arden Graham.12
Graham was a woman of famously dubious sense, and working for her was a tall order. She demanded that her trainers apply her beauty products to her horses. Prone to premonitions, she once dreamt that her filly had climbed a tree and called her trainer in the middle of the night to see if the dream had come true. “I climbed all the way up in that tree,” replied the much abused trainer, “and if [the filly] was up there, she got back in that stall all right.” She was also famous for firing workers for absurd reasons; she once dismissed an exercise boy because his hair was “remarkably bushy and profuse.” She went through trainers like chewing gum. But once she found Smith, she was sold. She loved the way he nurtured her horses. “There’s something about Tom Smith,” she said, “that gives you confidence.” He humored her insistence that stalls be perfumed and horses be slathered in cold creams, trained just as he wanted, and won everything in sight. “I try not to hurt her feelings,” he once said, “and yet do it my way.” He soon became the leading trainer in America.
Smith was sitting in Graham’s box one afternoon when an ancient man hobbled up to him. It was Samuel Riddle, easing down in his last years of life. For years, Riddle had burned with resentment over War Admiral’s loss to Seabiscuit, turning his head away when he saw Smith, never speaking a word. But this day Riddle halted in front of Smith and directed his first words to him since the race.13 “Tom,” he said, “you and that George Woolf are the only ones who ever outdid me.”
On November 1, 1945, one of Smith’s horses, a claimer named Magnific Duel, was being prepared for a New York race when a Jockey Club official saw a groom spraying something up the horse’s nostril.14 The atomizer he took from the stall contained 2.6 percent ephedrine, a decongestant. Smith was in deep trouble. New York did not allow any medications in racing horses. Though Smith was not present when the incident occurred and there was no evidence that he knew what his groom was doing, by racing law he was responsible for anything his employee did. The Jockey Club suspended him immediately, pending a hearing. Smith was aghast. “I am absolutely innocent,” he said.
At the hearing, pharmacologists testified that the dosage in the atomizer was far too low to have any effect on the horse’s performance. The horse had tested negative for any trace of the drug. In a quarter century of training, Smith hadn’t received a single black mark on his record. It made no sense that, while training the leading barn in America, winner of half a million dollars in purses in 1945, he would have had any interest in tampering with a $1,900 claimer. From a betting standpoint, he had even less to gain; the horse was a heavy favorite, and would have paid only a few cents on the dollar. His defense convinced nearly everyone in racing and the public that he was not deserving of punishment, but it was not enough for the Racing Commission.15 In an extremely controversial decision, Smith was banned from racing for one year.
In his seventy years, Smith had never known a life apart from horses. He had nowhere to go. He came to Santa Anita, but officials wouldn’t let him in. He spent his days sitting alone out on Baldwin Avenue, just outside the track fence, watching his sport go on without him. Graham may have been the strangest of eccentrics, but she was loyal. She paid for a prominent lawyer for Smith, hired his son Jimmy to train in his place, and gave him back his job the minute he was reinstated in 1947.16 He repaid her by promptly winning the Kentucky Derby with her horse Jet Pilot.
But the damage had been done. Unquestionably one of the greatest trainers who ever lived, Smith was excluded from racing’s Hall of Fame for more than forty years after his death. His reputation was ruined; racing officials tailed him around after his reinstatement, trying to catch him in some nefarious act. Smith was bitter for the rest of his life. He toyed with the officials, pretending to hide things in the hay and sending his pursuers on wild-goose chases, hoping to be accused again so he could be exonerated and make fools of the officials. When Time asked him to speak about the Racing Commission, Smith was typically pithy. “Those bastards.”17
He descended into obscurity just as he had risen from it. He eventually parted with Graham and wound up training a single horse at Santa Anita.18 When he was seventy-eight, a stroke stilled him. His family nursed him at home until his worsening condition made home care impossible. He was sent to live his last days in the antiseptic confinement of a sanatorium, where his family sat with him through his final hours. At Forest Lawn in Glendale, California, on a cold day in 1957, they buried the man the Indians called the Lone Plainsman. Almost no one came.19
Pollard had exhausted every physical and emotional reserve to get himself back to the Santa Anita Handicap, and he emerged near collapse. Agnes was afraid for him. They finally had some money, so the two left town immediately for a long vacation. There Pollard coped with what he called his “nervous reaction” to the strain, and the two of them discussed their future. When Pollard came back, he had an announcement to make. “My pal’s quit racing,” he said. “I’m not getting any younger, and I’ve had more than my share of serious accidents. Maybe I won’t be lucky in escaping with nothing worse than broken bones next time.”
“I’ll never throw a leg over another horse,” he said, “unless it’s for a canter in the park.”20
Howard offered him a job as his stable agent. Impressed with the work Pollard had done to get Seabiscuit back to the track, Howard hoped to have the redhead succeed Smith when the old trainer finally took down his shingle. Pollard took the job.
One day in early May 1940, Pollard limped down the shed rows at Santa Anita in his best impersonation of a run. Agnes was in labor, and he was desperate to find someone with a car. He found a teenaged kid who could drive, dragged him out to his car and pressed him into service. Pollard reached the hospital a few minutes later and promptly fainted from the excitement. He was hospitalized alongside his wife, who delivered a little girl that Pollard named after his sister Norah. Pollard would have known her anywhere; her voice, even as a baby, was a deep baritone like his. In a few years, a son, John, would follow.
Eventually Pollard took out a trainer’s license and tried to do for a barnful of horses what he had done for Seabiscuit in 1939. It didn’t work out. Describing himself as “a barnacle on the wheels of progress,” he quit.21 With nothing better to do, he took out a jockey’s license, strapped his fur-lined leg brace back on, and returned to riding. This time he had a safety net. Evidently with Howard’s blessing, he had joined the newly established Jockeys’ Guild, the final realization of Tommy Luther’s community-fund insurance idea. He was voted onto its first board of directors.
The war came down on Santa Anita a few months later. The horses were shipped out and men and women and children were shipped in, Japanese-Americans interned in stalls meant for animals. The Kaiser Suite became home to an entire family, the Satos.23 When the Satos and their unfortunate brethren were moved out in 1943, the track became Camp Santa Anita, a massive ordnance storage site and open-air Army barracks for thousands of soldiers.
Seized by patriotic fervor, Pollard galloped off to join the military.24 Due to his innumerable injuries, he was deemed such a spectacularly unfit soldiering prospect that all three services rejected him. He went back, once again, to race riding.
Agnes had had enough of lugging her babies through hotels and rental places. They journeyed east and bought a little house in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. He rode with less and less success, winding up back in the bush leagues. He spent part of each year on the road, traveling alone from motel to motel, and the rest booting horses around Rhode Island’s declining Narragansett Park, soon to meet the bulldozer, where he and Pops once raced.
He continued to endure horrific injuries, falling so often that he quipped about having a “semiannual comeback.” He never received anything but the worst care. He went down one day at Narragansett and was taken to the hospital, but no one ever came to look him over, so he just got up and went home. It wasn’t until much later that he learned that he had walked out on a broken hip. After breaking his back in a spill in Maryland in 1942, he was carried to a hospital in a laundry basket.25 The injury knocked him out of the sport for a year and left him with one leg shorter than the other. A 1945 head injury incurred in a Florida race cost him a handful of teeth and nearly his life. “When I woke up, the parish priest leaned over me and whispered, ‘The Devil has no stall for you,’ so here I am,” he told reporters after awakening. “And I guess I’ll be here forever, me and Methuselah.”26
He nearly was. His brilliant red hair slowly went gray, his blind eye paled, his battered body aged, and still he rode racehorses. He rode alongside kids who hadn’t even been born when he first offered a sugar cube to Seabiscuit, but he never let the latest teenaged hotshot get the best of him. Shouting, “No room at the bar!” he would cut off the rail route and make some poor kid go around the long way.
He came home at night and Agnes tended to him. So many phone calls told her of terrible crashes that she came to fear the phone’s ring. On some mornings the back door banged open to reveal a host of muddy racetrackers, carrying a bloodied Red in from another fall. She prayed for his safety every day, but never complained to him. She understood, as would her children, that her husband would have suffocated in any other life. He was in constant and serious pain, but didn’t speak of it. He still carried a rosary and little volumes of poetry in his pocket, and still gave away most of the money he earned. His children grew up knowing to be careful around their father’s game leg, which never fattened up to anything much thicker than a broomstick. Pollard wove his books into his children’s lives but did not try to teach them about horses. He never once brought them to the track to see him ride and didn’t tell the stories of his youth. The closest his daughter, Norah, ever came to the races was to comply with his request to paint a cougar on his helmet.
By 1955, when he was forty-six, he couldn’t make it any longer. “Maybe I should have heeded the rumble of that distant drum when I was riding high,” he once said.27 “But I never did. Trouble is, you never hear it if you are a racetracker. Horses make too damned much noise.” He called David Alexander from across the country to tell him the news. “I’m hanging up my blouse for good,”28 he said. “I wanted you to be the first to know. You can’t first-past Father Time.”
“It’s about time,” said Alexander. When the writer paid tribute to him in a lengthy article in Time, Pollard called him up and sang every verse of “You Made Me What I Am Today, and I Hope You’re Satisfied,” then hung up.29
Pollard wound up sorting mail in a track post office, then working as a valet, cleaning the boots of other riders.30 His racetrack injuries worsened as he aged, and he slowly became a prisoner in his own body. He struggled as hard as he could against his alcoholism but never beat it.31
One day in the waning years of his life, Red Pollard stopped talking. Perhaps it was a physical problem. Perhaps the old raconteur just didn’t want to speak anymore. When on rare occasions a reporter turned up to ask about Seabiscuit, Agnes answered the questions while Red sat by, mute.32
In 1980 Agnes was hospitalized with cancer. Though only seventy, Pollard was suffering from so many physical problems that he could no longer get along without her. His children had no choice but to place him in a nursing home. He knew this ground. The home had been built over the ruins of Narragansett Park.33
The Cougar slipped away one day in 1981, uttering not a word in parting. Agnes was with him when he stopped breathing. His heart kept beating for several minutes, then went still. No cause of death was ever found.34 It was as if, Norah remembers, “he had just worn out his body.”35 Agnes died two weeks later.
Seabiscuit and Howard grew old together in the slow rhythms of Ridgewood. Howard’s hair thinned; Seabiscuit’s muddy bay coat darkened. Howard kept the horse with Kayak in a handsome red barn and installed a walking ring that led right up to the door of Howard’s house. He hung a sign on the pillared gates to the ranch, out on the Redwood Highway, that read: RIDGEWOOD, HOME OF SEABISCUIT. VISITORS WELCOME.36
The visitors came, fifty thousand over the years, as many as fifteen hundred at a time.37, 38 Howard erected a little grandstand by his horse’s paddock and ushered the spectators in to watch him. Kayak thrilled the crowds by galloping around his adjacent paddock in all his black splendor. Most of the time, all Seabiscuit did was stretch out on his side, drowsing in the shade of his paddock oak tree.39 Occasionally, he would raise his head and look the spectators over, then drop off to sleep again.40 Once in a while he’d get up and amble over to his admirers, licking their cameras and sticking his tongue out to be scratched.
With each spring the foals came. Howard doted on them as if they were his own children. “They are the finest foals I have ever seen,” he said when the first crop came, “and I am not prejudiced when I say this.” They all had their father’s amiable personality, and most of them had his homely little body too. Nearly all were homebreds, the products of Howard’s moderately bred mares; the ranch was more than six hundred miles from the nearest major breeding farm, and few breeders wanted to subject their mares to such a long haul. So Howard used his own mares, pampered and overfed their babies, and sent them into training fat and happy.
When the “Little Biscuits” reached racing age and went south to the tracks, the public flocked in to see them. Thousands of admirers came out to watch their workouts, and on race days full houses packed in to cheer for them and for proud old Howard. The owner issued Christmas card photos of Seabiscuit standing with his foals. The cards became hot items across the nation. One racetrack, Chicago’s Arlington Park, recreated one in a giant mural.
A few of the Seabiscuits could run. Sea Sovereign and Sea Swallow became stakes winners, as did a chip off the old block, a grandson named Sea Orbit, who ran sixty-seven times, winning twenty-two, including a long list of elite stakes races in California. One of Fair Knightess’s foals, Phantom Sea, became stakes-placed. But most of the Seabiscuits were poor racehorses, and because Howard refused to let them suffer the indignity of running at their ability level, in claiming races, few of them won anything on the track. Howard didn’t seem to notice. After an advisor talked him into selling an especially slow one, Howard quietly bought him back. “You don’t understand,” he explained. “This one used to eat sugar cubes out of my hand.”
Hollywood took the tale of Seabiscuit’s life, deleted everything interesting, and made an inexcusably bad movie, The Story of Seabiscuit, starring Shirley Temple. They cast one of Seabiscuit’s sons in the title role. When they set up to film the War Admiral match race, they deliberately chose a woefully sluggish horse to play War Admiral. Unfortunately, the Seabiscuit son was even slower. Every time they tried to shoot the race, the colt playing War Admiral beat the colt playing Seabiscuit, no matter how hard the jockeys tried to prevent it. Eventually, they gave up and substituted film of the actual race.
Seabiscuit settled well into his retirement. Knowing he needed activity, Howard taught him how to herd cattle.41 The horse loved it, nipping at the animals’ rumps and torturing them as he had once tortured War Admiral and Kayak. Every day the ranch hands rode him out with Pumpkin on a five-mile jaunt, trotting up and down the California hills, cantering alongside the lake, pausing to graze on the mountain grass. He became very fat—1,250 pounds—and blissfully happy. Every fall he would pose for family portraits, sometimes with Marcela aboard, and Howard would have the photos printed in huge numbers and mailed to everyone he knew.
When the war came, Howard looked into building a bomb shelter for the horse but eventually gave up the idea.42 He worked to help the war effort, donating an ambulance to the British Red Cross, which named it Seabiscuit.43 Howard printed patriotic messages on all the Seabiscuit Christmas cards and mailed Seabiscuit’s shoes off to bomber pilots as good-luck charms. Two bombers were named for the horse. The navy’s Seabiscuit bomber was painted with the horse’s smoke-breathing likeness.44 The air force’s Seabiscuit, which was shot down off the coast of China in 1944, had the horse’s name painted across its nose.45
As Seabiscuit aged, Howard faded. His heart began to fail him, and his life slowly contracted. Marcela, who adored him to the last, nursed him through his final years. He showered her in flowers and little love notes, written in a wavering hand. He found one last success on the track, this time with the great Noor, winner of the Santa Anita Handicap and conqueror of Triple Crown winner Citation. “Guess you’ve got another Seabiscuit on your hands,” said a reporter after Noor’s greatest win. Howard, thin and unsteady, straightened up and raised his chin. “Sir,” he said, “there will never be another Seabiscuit.”46
When his heart became too frail for him to endure the thrill of seeing his horses run, Howard came to the track anyway, sitting in the parking lot and listening to race calls on the radio in his Buick.47 In what is believed to be the last photograph ever taken of him, he was at the racetrack, standing in the winner’s circle. After leaving the track, he would go back to Ridgewood to be near the horses. On beautiful days, he would throw a saddle over Seabiscuit, and together they would walk into the hills to lose themselves in the redwoods.48
On the morning of May 17, 1947, Marcela met her husband at breakfast and told him his rough little horse was gone, dead of an apparent heart attack at the relatively youthful age of fourteen.49 The onetime bicycle repairman, whose own heart would fail him just three years later, was beside himself with grief. “I never dreamed,” he said, “the old boy would go so quickly.”50 Someone broke the news to Pollard, who was plugging away on claimers at Suffolk Downs. His mind rolled back over all those years. “It seems only yesterday,” he said.
Howard had the body carried to a secret site on the ranch. After Seabiscuit was buried, the old owner planted an oak sapling over him. Howard, a vigorously public man, made his last gesture to his horse a private one. He told only his sons the location of the grave and let the oak stand as the only marker.51 Somewhere in the high country that once was Ridgewood, the tree lives on, watching over the bones of Howard’s beloved Seabiscuit.