nonetheless.31 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.32 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.33 He didn’t share his reservations with Mills, an omission he would come to regret. Howard found Mills in the Saratoga paddock.
“Deal or no deal?” he asked.34
“Deal,” said Mills. 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.35
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.
(KEENELAND-COOK)
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 dollars, 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 dollars 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
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 Khayyam’s
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.1 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.2 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
