man does when he humors a child. While other riders dragged themselves to the barn to gallop horses at 4:00 A.M. seven days a week, compelled by a biting fear that their skills would wane or trainers would forget them, Woolf slept in, rarely showing up at the track before noon.30 “He was a better rider than most of us, and he knew it,” remembered fellow jockey Mosbacher.33 “So he just kind of took the easier way.”
Woolf was an uncensored man, in word and deed. “As a jockey,” wrote Red Pollard’s friend David Alexander, a columnist for the
“Woolf,” remembered his close friend Bill Buck, “done what Woolf wanted to do.” Throughout his career, if he felt like taking a day off, he’d just pack up and go, leaving his exasperated agent and jilted trainers hunting for him. On one occasion, after he failed to appear for several potentially lucrative races, his agent found him starring in a bull-riding exhibition. He once vanished without a trace a few days before the Preakness Stakes, throwing the entire Maryland racing community, including an owner who wanted him to ride one of the race favorites, into an uproar. He glided back to civilization three days later, tanned and happy. While driving through Pennsylvania he had simply happened upon a beautiful lake, pulled over, and taken an impromptu fishing vacation in perfect serenity. When he disappeared on another afternoon, horsemen eventually found him in a crowd watching a visiting Montana rodeo.36 A trick rider had claimed that he could jump a car while riding two horses simultaneously, “Roman” style—a foot in one stirrup of each. Woolf called his bluff and volunteered his gleaming new Cord roadster for the job. The horses nicked the car up pretty good but made it over. Woolf felt the spectacle was worth the price of new paint and a furious agent.
Only his contract trainer, Whitey, was unfazed by his jockey’s behavior. This needled Woolf. To raise Whitey’s blood pressure a bit, Woolf started delaying his horses’ rallies until the last possible second.37 He would send a friend to sit nearby and watch the color drain from Whitey’s face as Woolf waited, and waited, and waited before driving for the lead just when it seemed too late. Whitey surely whitened a little more with every closing kick, but the Iceman knew what he was doing. Incredibly, Woolf’s timing was so good that he rode for more than a decade before he was beaten in a photo finish of a stakes race.38
Woolf was fanatical about clean riding. He never initiated any rough riding tactics, and took justice into his own hands when anyone fouled him. He was known to haul off and crack offending riders right in the mouth with his whip, then frankly tell the stewards exactly what he’d done when a lie could have gotten him out of trouble. He rode claiming races with as much zeal as he rode the Santa Anita Handicap. He was also not above a little playful heckling; a few choice words from the Iceman could spook his rivals into blowing their game plans.
George Woolf, from the very beginning, stood a rung above Red Pollard. While Pollard bedded down in a horse stall at night and grazed out of the track kitchen, Woolf lived in the comfort of Whitey’s house, eating home-cooked meals. Pollard would never escape Woolf’s shadow, but he was not a jealous man. “I know George,” he would laugh. “Big head, little ass, and roars like a lion.”39 Pollard, famously, tried to take credit for giving Woolf the nickname Iceman, explaining it thus: “In all the smoking-car stories I have ever heard, icemen and traveling salesmen were very immoral characters. George does not have a pleasing enough personality to be a traveling salesman.”40
Woolf replied in the same vein. “You don’t have to be an athlete to be a jockey,” he told a reporter. “Why, Red Pollard is one of the smartest jockeys in the country today, and he doesn’t have the strength to blow out a candle.”41
In those early days, Pollard and Woolf found common ground in their quick minds, cerebral riding styles, and keen senses of humor. On the backstretch of Vancouver Race Course in the summer of 1927, a friendship was forged in the crucible of the racetrack and adolescence. It would endure long into manhood and bind them together in history.
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1 In 1991, George Pratt, Ph.D., of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used high speed cameras, race films, and computer analysis to gauge the speed of high-class quarter horses at Los Alamitos Racecourse, recording a top speed of 52? miles per hour for one horse. According to Pratt’s analysis, quarter mile world record setter Truckle Feature had a peak speed of just under 80 feet per second, or 54 mph. Note that this reflects top speed, not average speed over a distance, which would be slower.
A BOOT ON ONE FOOT, A TOE TAG ON THE OTHER
On a Saturday afternoon in July 1938, a half-starved teenager wandered into a bus station in Columbus, Ohio, appearing confused and disoriented. A policeman approached and tried to speak with him, but the boy seemed not to know his own name. In his pockets the officer found $112, a bus ticket for Petersburg, Illinois, and documents that identified him as Thomas Dowell, an obscure local jockey.1 Seeing that Dowell was in profound distress, the officer took him to the police station, where a police surgeon sat with him and tried to find out what was wrong. Dowell remained mute but appeared deeply shaken. Concerned that the boy might get hurt if released, the doctor sat him down in a holding cell and left to telephone his mother.
While the officer was gone, Dowell slipped his belt off, coiled it around his neck, and hanged himself.
When word of the suicide made its way to the backstretch, no one seemed surprised. In his brief career Dowell had learned what Red Pollard, George Woolf, and countless other riders had long since known. A jockey’s life was nothing short of appalling. No athletes suffered more for their sport. The jockey lived hard and lean and tended to die young, trampled under the hooves of horses or imploding from the pressures of his vocation.
For three years Dowell had known the singular strain of the jockey’s job, torturing his body to keep it at an inhumanly low weight, groveling for mounts in the mornings and enduring punishing violence in the afternoons, waiting in vain for the “big horse” that would bear him from poverty and peril. Dowell was no anomaly, and everyone on the backstretch knew it. His was a life no different from that of almost every other jockey. Under its terrific weight, Dowell had come undone.
