very much about what the world thought of him, and his place in history, but he let the horses speak for him. Horsemanship was the beginning and end of Tom Smith. So I came to understand him through his horses and what he did with them. These animals and their accomplishments were all he left behind, and I think he intended it that way.
WN: Your description of the Seabiscuit–War Admiral match race was masterfully done, filled with tension, drama, and suspense. It formed the aesthetic center of your book. And it seemed, in the time it took for the post parade and the running of the race, that everybody in America had an ear pressed to a radio, including President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who kept a passel of advisors waiting while he listened to Clem McCarthy’s call of the race. How did you pull all of this together for the narrative—from films of the race, or from contemporary accounts in print? It reads as though you enjoyed writing it more than any other part of the book.
LH: I loved writing this section of the book. I researched that race and the events leading up to it in hundreds of places. I read accounts of the race in every major newspaper and magazine of the era, plus quite a few minor ones. I listened to Clem McCarthy’s radio call, playing over and over again that unforgettable moment when George leans over the mike from Seabiscuit’s back and says, “I wish my old pal Red had been on him instead of me. See ya, Red.” I obtained films of the race, taken from multiple angles, and studied them. I scoured photo archives for shots taken during the race.
The individuals involved in the match left behind quite a bit of testimony about the race. I located candid interviews that George did, describing his walk over the track the night before the race, then the race itself, detailing every decision he made, everything he experienced, everything the horses experienced. He was a remarkably attentive and observant man; in many interviews after races he recounted the position of Seabiscuit’s ears, where the horse was looking at a stage of the race, the precise position of another jockey’s hands on the bridle. Journalist David Alexander spent a lot of time with Red before and after the match, sitting in on strategy sessions between George and Red, and he recorded everything. Kurtsinger, too, did some revealing interviews, so I was able to recount exactly what he was thinking as he rode. And reporters trailed Smith and the Howards everywhere, jotting down much of what they said and did.
There were also many living sources on this race. I placed ads in racing publications and cold-called dozens of racing organizations and officials in hopes of finding people who witnessed the race. Many people came forward to share intensely vivid memories of that day. One man mailed photographs he had taken as a boy when he snuck into the barn area to watch Seabiscuit and Pumpkin. What was most amazing was that nearly every one of the witnesses I spoke to still thought it was the greatest horse race they had ever seen. I can’t describe how moving it was to hear a hard boiled ninety-year-old horseman choke up as he relived what he saw that day. This race was the research mother lode. I had accounts from every possible vantage point, not only on the track and in the infield, grandstand, and press box, but in Red’s hospital room, Riddle’s box, Howard’s box, and the Oval Office. The wealth of information enabled me to tell the story of that race in great detail, and from any viewpoint I chose.
WN: One of the problems in doing historical non-fiction is finding people still alive who actually witnessed what you were writing about. You did find people who were around at the time, such as Alfred Vanderbilt, Jr., Seabiscuit’s exercise riders, and jockey Tommy Luther and his wife Helen. Did these voices bring fresh and special vibrancy and life to the narrative?
LH: So much of history goes unrecorded. Newspapers, magazines, and recordbooks, by virtue of lasting the longest and being most accessible, form the mainstay of the historian’s diet. They are indispensable, but because they are mainly concerned with basic facts, they are often one-dimensional. In these sources, historical figures have a certain sameness; what they said and did is dryly recorded, but their interesting edges are usually polished off.
This isn’t the way we experience history when we view it firsthand. We see all the small things that illustrate a person and an event—things that few people ever think to record, but that tell us a great deal about who the historical players are and why their actions are important. So much of what is truly interesting and illuminating in history resides only in memory, which outlives events for only a brief time. In researching Seabiscuit, I wanted to capture as many of those memories as possible before they were lost forever.
I caught many eyewitnesses to this story in the last months of their lives. These men and women put flesh on the bones of this tale. Without them, we would have known the basics of Seabiscuit’s career, but we never would have known about the girls of the Molino Rojo and the runaway manure mountain at Tijuana; Red’s secret blind eye; Frenchy Hawley’s explosive “Slim Jim” experiments, and many of the grisly details in the lives of jockeys; what Red said to George on that scandalous live national radio interview in 1938; Smith and Howard’s secret strategy for the War Admiral match race negotiations; life on the road with Ten Ton Irwin; how Tom taught Seabiscuit to outbreak War Admiral; the use of Grog as a ringer, and dozens of other things. These are the details that, for me, made my subjects and their time real and accessible. They made the story much more intimate. Memory is, of course, a fallible source, and everything had to be cross-checked, but over and over again, I was amazed at how accurately these people recalled the events. And aside from facts, these people communicated the emotions that attended the events, the feel of America in that era.
WN: You were faced with a real problem involving momentum in this book. There were two legitimate endings to it. The first, of course, was the end of the Seabiscuit–War Admiral match race, the culmination of the 1938 racing season and one of the greatest events in the history of American sport. The second was the 1940 Santa Anita Handicap, the last race of his career and the Big One that had always gotten away. You were faced with the problem of building dramatic tension right through the match race, an event that left readers breathless, and then
LH: I was concerned about the pacing through these two races, and the events in between. A year and four months passed between the match and the 1940 handicap, a space of time in which Seabiscuit tumbled from the top of the racing world to the depths of serious injury, then, slowly, climbed all the way back to the top again, alongside his crippled jockey. Part of what made this progression enthralling for those who followed it was the considerable time it took for it to happen. It was, as Pollard phrased it, “a long, hard pull,” and the slowly building tension of this time loaded his final race with emotional import for the participants and the public. But in terms of recounting it in print, so little happened in the space between the two races—compared to the dense sequence of events that had preceded that time—that I was worried that it would be hard to pace the book in a way that would impart the same exhilaration, almost hysteria, that the public felt upon witnessing the horse’s incomparable final performance.
To recapture the pacing of the story as it played out in 1939 and 1940, I delved as deeply as possible into the horse’s injury and first retirement. I worked as hard as I could to gather every detail about the day of the horse’s injury, and was able to find quite a bit. I wanted to provide the same kind of detail for the retirement period, but because the horse and the men spent it in a remote place, out of view of reporters, there was much less to be found. I was lucky in that I located people who were there, and Howard and Pollard later spoke of that time to the press and to their families. Hopefully, what I found was enough.
WN: How long did it take you to research and write
