Seabiscuit: An American Legend

fields of his family’s estate and spent his Sundays in the lap of the family Model T, competing with his siblings for a window seat. As the car swung over a high bridge that crossed the North Saskatchewan River, he could peer over the railing to see the family business at the water’s edge below.

Misfortune struck suddenly and forcefully. In 1915 the river boiled up in a flash flood, ripping over the shoreline around the factory. Johnny’s father rescued his family from the water by throwing them in a buggy and lugging them up the bank himself, but he couldn’t save the factory machinery. The business vanished, and the tax bill arrived. Pollard traveled around Canada, trying in vain to find a bank to lend him the money. The city of Edmonton foreclosed, and the Pollards lost everything but their house. Virtually overnight, Johnny’s father was bankrupt with seven children and a wife to feed. He eventually found meager income as an auto repairman. It was only by bartering gasoline for groceries that he managed to keep his family alive.³

Johnny found myriad avenues of distraction from his family’s penury. One was athletic. His father took him and his brother Bill to the community boxing ring, where they were swept up in the prizefighting craze of the 1920s. Bill, a tall, powerful fighter, made it to the Golden Gloves. Johnny, smaller and leaner, became a proficient and scrappy fighter but never achieved his brother’s success. He amused himself by provoking much bigger boys into fights, calling his “Golden Glove brother” to the rescue, and laughing as they ran in terror.

His other escape was intellectual. Johnny devoured great literature. He committed long passages of prose and poetry to memory and engaged in lively recitation duels with his sister Edie as they bounced over the local roads in the Model T. Graced with an agile mind, he had the makings of a man of letters. Later, when his fate became known, his boyhood friends would wish for his sake that he had gone the way of the academy. But the classroom smothered him. He desperately wanted to explore the wider world. He was impatient with his lessons, mouthed off at teachers, got poor grades, spent his hours coining witticisms and engineering elaborate practical jokes. His emotions were liquid; his anger was a wild rage, his pleasure jubilation, his humor biting, his sorrow and empathy a bottomless abyss. He was, his son John would later remember, a person who brought an uproar with him wherever he went. Johnny Pollard was a caged bird.

As he grew, his restlessness turned into aspiration. His father had somehow managed to obtain a gift for his second son, a little horse named Forest Dawn. To help make ends meet, Johnny began hitching the horse to his toboggan and using them to make deliveries for the local grocery.⁴ In long afternoons aboard the pony’s back, Johnny discovered a gift for riding. His daughter, writer Norah Christianson, remembers that he had “the body of a dancer, lithe and wiry and thin, everything in balance,” a physique ideally suited to the pitch and yaw of a horse’s withers.⁵ Riding also suited his passion for risk. His life, from his youth onward, was a headlong rush into danger and uncertainty. Out on Edmonton’s dirt roads, his legs swinging free from Forest Dawn’s sides while the toboggan bobbed along behind, Johnny decided he wanted to be a jockey.

As he entered his teens, Johnny began haunting local stables, trading his labor for a chance to ride. He appealed to his parents to let him go out on the racing circuit and learn to be a jockey. His mother wanted to stop him. His father did not. Perhaps the aging prospector understood the futility of trying to contain a torrential boy within the confines of a small town. Perhaps he was proud of Johnny’s aspiration to make a career of sport. Surely money played a role in the decision Pollard would make; he was barely able to feed his children. But his wife was frightened. In 1925 the Pollards made a compromise. Johnny would be allowed to go to the racetrack to pursue his career, but only on the condition that he be escorted by a trusted family friend. The Pollards swallowed their fears, kissed their son good-bye, and handed him over to his new guardian.

Sometime in 1925 Johnny and his guardian pulled into the old mining town of Butte, Montana, where the local bullring racetrack linked up with a network of other tracks, carnivals, and fairs. Featuring bottom-level Thoroughbreds and quarter horses, these tracks offered the worst of low-rent racing. Most were little more than makeshift ovals cut through hayfields.⁶ Races were begun either by walking horses away from the starter, then spinning them around when the starter said go—a method called “lap and tap”—or by lining them up behind a simple webbing that was rigged to spring upward to start the race, sometimes catching riders under the chin. Purses were often smaller than the cost of shoeing a horse—about $1.40. The tracks were only a half mile around. The turns were so tight that a horse with a head of steam on him—elite quarter horses have been clocked at peak speeds of well over fifty miles per hour¹—would go winging off into the hay if he didn’t ease back as he left the straightaway.⁷ It was nothing special, but it was a start.

Johnny had only just arrived when his guardian vanished. The man never returned.⁸ Pollard was completely alone and penniless in a remote town of a foreign country. He was just fifteen years old, and his boyhood was over.

If Pollard had any way to get home, he didn’t use it. Somehow, he managed to find a place to sleep and something to eat. He began wandering around the carnivals and tracks, trying to talk his way onto the backs of horses. Though he towered over other jockeys, ultimately leveling off at about five feet seven inches, he hadn’t filled out his frame yet, weighing just 101 pounds, light enough to ride. The local racetrackers grew fond of the odd, bookish boy, nicknaming him Red, and a few let him ride their horses.

It was a rough place to start a career. Racing in the bush leagues was utterly lawless.⁹ “If you could survive there,” remembered former jockey Joe “Mossy” Mosbacher, “you could ride anywhere.” With no race cameras and only two patrol judges to oversee them, jockeys could—and would—do anything to win. Jockeys on trailing horses grabbed hold of leading horses’ tails or saddlecloths so their own horses could be towed around the track, saving energy. They joined arms with other jockeys to “clothesline” riders trying to cut between horses, formed obstructive “flying wedges” to block closers, and bashed passing horses into the inside rail. They hooked their legs over other jockeys’ knees, ensuring that if their rivals moved forward, they’d be scraped off their saddles. They dangled their feet in front of passing horses to intimidate them, and when less inspired, they shoved and punched one another and grabbed one another’s reins. Because many of the tracks had no inner rail, some jockeys simply cut through the infield, dodging haystacks, to win. In some cases, riders toppled their opponents right off their horses.

Such tactics were, until the mid-1930s, seen at all levels of racing, but nowhere were they used with such ruthlessness as on the bush tracks where Pollard got his start. According to the great jockey Eddie Arcaro, who once rammed another rider over the rail in retribution for a bump (“I was trying to kill that Cuban S.O.B.,” he told the stewards, who reformed him with a year’s suspension), the desire to win wasn’t the only motivation.¹⁰ The bush leagues contained two kinds of riders: kids like Pollard seeking to make their names and veterans in the bitter waning days of their careers, sliding down to this last and lowest place in the sport. “To succeed in those days, you had to fight for everything you got,” Arcaro wrote in his autobiography, I Ride to Win!¹¹ “You were competing with men who were aware that their own particular suns were fading, and they resented your moving into the places they would leave. They fought you, and you fought them back.”

Pollard took a few licks, held his own, and learned a lot. But months passed, and still he didn’t win a single race. In danger of starving, he used the only other skill he had, straying into carnival bullrings and cow-town clubs to moonlight as a prizefighter. He was no headliner. Mostly, he boxed in preliminary matches to warm up the crowd. At the time, a local kid nicknamed “the Nebraska Wildcat” was the hottest boxing property around.¹² In imitation, Pollard took the ring name “Cougar.” His skills didn’t live up to the nickname. He fought a lot of matches, and lost, he said, “a lot of ’em.”

Though a misnomer, his nickname proved to be the one enduring thing about Pollard’s ring career. Racetrackers in that era had a peculiar animosity for given names. Among those haunting the track in Pollard’s day were Lying