Seabiscuit: An American Legend

Charles Howard, Red Pollard, and Tom Smith

(KEENELAND-COOK)

For Borden

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Preface

PART I

  1.   The Day of the Horse Is Past

  2.   The Lone Plainsman

  3.   Mean, Restive, and Ragged

  4.   The Cougar and the Iceman

  5.   A Boot on One Foot, a Toe Tag on the Other

  6.   Light and Shadow

PART II

  7.   Learn Your Horse

  8.   Fifteen Strides

  9.   Gravity

10.   War Admiral

11.   No Pollard, No Seabiscuit

12.   All I Need Is Luck

13.   Hardball

14.   The Wise We Boys

15.   Fortune’s Fool

16.   I Know My Horse

17.   The Dingbustingest Contest You Ever Clapped an Eye On

18.   Deal

19.   The Second Civil War

PART III

20.   “All Four of His Legs Are Broken”

21.   A Long, Hard Pull

22.   Four Good Legs Between Us

23.   One Hundred Grand

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

A Reader’s Guide

About the Author

Excerpt from Unbroken

Copyright

“Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bullfighters.”

—ERNEST HEMINGWAY, THE SUN ALSO RISES

PREFACE

In 1938, near the end of a decade of monumental turmoil, the year’s number-one newsmaker¹ was not Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Hitler, or Mussolini. It wasn’t Pope Pius XI, nor was it Lou Gehrig, Howard Hughes, or Clark Gable. The subject of the most newspaper column inches in 1938 wasn’t even a person. It was an undersized, crooked-legged racehorse named Seabiscuit.