“Couldn’t find one,” he grumbled. “Had to get this one.”
Howard asked him how much the new hat had set him back.
“Three dollars.”2
The new raiment fit him. Tom Smith had arrived. He had taken Howard’s ill-bred yearlings, worked with them in solitude for a year, then slipped them into Barn 38 at Santa Anita and hung out his shingle. Right from the start he attracted curious glances. Someone saw him wrapping up an alarm clock in a towel and burying it in the straw of a filly’s stall, letting her get used to the ticking.3 Then, while everyone at the track was speculating about what he was up to, Smith tacked up the horse, fished out the clock, and went to the track. He loaded the filly in the gate, set off the clock alarm, and let her rip. He brought her back and did it again and again until she was primed to jackrabbit down the track when she heard a bell.
Pretty soon, people were coming around just to watch Smith. No one had ever seen a trainer work like this. The Howards motored down and watched, too, feeding sugar cubes to their horses and surely wondering what they had gotten themselves into. But then the races began and Smith’s horses started winning. Not just a little; Smith
Howard and Smith came to an understanding. Howard called his trainer Tom; Smith, without fail, called his employer Mr. Howard. The Howards came to the barn almost every morning, and Charles stayed on, sometimes for fourteen hours at a stretch. He brought in a big truck of a saddle horse named Chulo so he could ride out with Smith on the track. But he knew his place. He didn’t mess with Smith’s business. For a hands-on executive like Howard, the urge to tinker must have been strong, but he was smart enough to recognize superior understanding, no matter how bizarre the training practices looked. “Mr. Howard pays me for results,” Smith once said. “He doesn’t ask questions.” In turn, Smith put up with Howard’s love of the spotlight, the long stream of friends and reporters he brought to the barn, his need to be in the center of things. To a point. If Howard’s friends got too close to his horses, Smith would snap at them to get back. The union had its rough points, but it worked.
Howard was hungry for more winning. As the spring waned, they decided to take the show on the road. The horses would go to a little track in Michigan called the Detroit Fair Grounds. Smith was sent on alone, farther east, on a different mission. Howard wanted some mature horses to augment his fleet of juveniles. Howard had the kind of money to turn the head of any major-league owner, and he could have used it to acquire a ready-made stable of proven runners. But Howard didn’t want to take the easy route. He wanted a bargain animal whose talent had been overlooked by the old-money lords of eastern racing. He knew he had the trainer who could find him. In June 1936 Smith arrived in Massachusetts. He traveled from track to track, looking at hundreds of cheap horses, but he couldn’t find the one he sought. On the sweltering afternoon of June 29, at Boston’s Suffolk Downs, the horse found him.
The colt was practically sneering at him. Smith was standing by the track rail, weighing the angles and gestures of low-level horses as they streamed to the post, when a weedy three-year-old bay stopped short in front of him, swung his head high, and eyed him with an arch expression completely unsuited to such a rough-hewn animal. “He looked right down his nose at me,” Smith remembered later, “like he was saying, ‘Who the devil are you?’” Man and horse stood on opposite sides of the rail for a long moment, sizing each other up.4 An image materialized in Smith’s mind: the Colorado ranges, a tough little cow horse. The pony boy leading the colt to the post tugged him on his way. Smith watched the animal’s rump swing around and go. Thin, yes, but he had an engine on him.
Smith flipped to the horse’s profile in the track program. The colt was a descendant of the mighty Man o’ War through his sire, the brilliantly fast, exceptionally handsome Hard Tack, but his stunted build reflected none of the beauty and breadth of his forebears. The colt’s body, built low to the ground, had all the properties of a cinder block. Where Hard Tack had been tall, sleek, tapered, every line suggesting motion, his son was blunt, coarse, rectangular, stationary. He had a sad little tail, barely long enough to brush his hocks. His stubby legs were a study in unsound construction, with squarish, asymmetrical “baseball glove” knees that didn’t quite straighten all the way, leaving him in a permanent semicrouch. Thanks to his unfortunate assembly, his walk was an odd, straddle-legged motion that was often mistaken for lameness. Asked to run, he would drop low over the track and fall into a comical version of what horsemen call an eggbeater gait, making a spastic sideways flailing motion with his left foreleg as he swung it forward, as if he were swatting at flies. His gallop was so disorganized that he had a maddening tendency to whack himself in the front ankle with his own hind hoof. One observer compared his action to a duck waddle.5 All of this raggedness was not helped by his racing schedule. His career had been noteworthy only in its appalling rigor. Though only three years old, he had already run forty-three races, far more than most horses contest in their entire careers.
But somehow, after throwing a fit in the starting gate and being left flat-footed at the bell, the colt won his race that day. While being unsaddled, he leveled his wide-set, intelligent eyes on Smith again. Smith liked that look, and nodded at the horse. “Darned if the little rascal didn’t nod back at me,” Smith said later, “kinda like he was paying me an honor to notice me.” He was a horse whose quality, an admirer would write, “was mostly in his heart, and Tom Smith had been the first to recognize it.”6 A man for whom words were encumbrances, Smith didn’t take note of the horse’s name, but he memorized him nonetheless. He spoke to the horse as he was led away.
“I’ll see you again.”7
The horse’s name was Seabiscuit, and for a bent-backed trainer on the other side of the backstretch, the brief exchange of glances between the horse and Tom Smith was the beginning of the end of a long, pounding headache. In 1877, when James Fitzsimmons was three, the Coney Island Jockey Club annexed his family’s Brooklyn neighborhood and literally built a track around his house, leaving it standing in the infield while the racing world revolved around it.8,9 “Sunny Jim,” as admirers called him, was thus entangled in the racetrack from the beginning of his conscious life. He never escaped it. “All I ever wanted to do,” he once said, “was be with the horses.” At age ten he worked as a dishwasher in the track kitchen. He moved on to a harrowing career as an exercise boy, then became a jockey. “I was vaccinated for jockey,” he liked to say, “but it didn’t take.” He survived a rocky reinsman’s career, then hung it up to try his hand at training. He had found his niche.
Fitzsimmons soon established himself as the most successful conditioner of Thoroughbreds in the nation. That June he was sixty-one and imprisoned in a body so ravaged by arthritis that his upper spine was slowly collapsing forward, driving his head so far downward that in time he would have to learn to identify his horses solely by their feet. He coaxed a phenomenal amount of work out of his rigid body, laboring so hard over his horses through the week that he had to sleep straight through Sunday to recover. The work paid off: Fitzsimmons had cultivated the talents of myriad champions, including Gallant Fox and Omaha, two of the first three horses to sweep the Kentucky Derby, Preakness Stakes, and Belmont Stakes—the Triple Crown. His greatness was beyond question. His was a household name across America, and trainers regarded him with profound reverence. Tom Smith was no exception. Fitzsimmons was apparently the only man whom Smith ever regarded with awe.
