own. It began with a simple morning workout on a horse whose name has long since been forgotten. As Pollard rode the horse down the track that morning, another horse passed close by. Something—maybe a rock or a clump of dirt—flew up from under the animal’s hooves and struck Pollard in the head.
In the glimmer of an instant, for the price of a 50-cent galloping fee he was probably never paid, Pollard lost the sight in his right eye forever.20
Had they known of Pollard’s blindness, the stewards would rightly have banned him from racing. With virtually no depth perception and no ability to see horses to his outside, he was far more vulnerable to positioning errors. He could unwittingly charge straight into a wreck. It was an injury that should have ended his career.
But Pollard, like Woolf, was not willing to hang it up. If anything, he was bolder than ever in the saddle, either to conceal his blindness or simply because he couldn’t see just how close he was cutting it. “Red is not one of our great riders, but the only word he knows is yes,” wrote a columnist who didn’t know of Pollard’s blindness.21 “He’ll try to thread a needle with a horse as the flying field turns down the last bend for home, and you must salute him for his courage, if not his judgment.” Pollard took an awesome risk. He kept his blindness secret and kept on riding.
Just after Pollard rode Gallant Sir to win the 1934 Agua Caliente Handicap, Mexico banned gambling.22 The colorful racing world that had spun itself around Tijuana withered and blew off into the sagebrush deserts. Pollard and Woolf returned to the United States, where racing had been relegalized, and their careers began to diverge.
On Christmas Day 1934 Santa Anita Park opened for the first time. Woolf turned the place upside down, riding an out-of-the-clouds long shot named Azucar, a former steeplechaser, to a smashing victory in the first Santa Anita Handicap. It was one of the greatest rides anyone had ever seen. After Woolf dismounted, Azucar butted him out of the way, ran over a spectator, slashed the NBC Radio wire—cutting off the national broadcast—and dragged his terrified groom down the track like a toboggan. The Iceman watched him go from the winner’s circle, a floral wreath wrapped around his shoulders, smiling his cool Gary Cooper smile as a mob of admirers cheered for him. The Iceman had arrived.
As Woolf ascended, Pollard began to fail. Perhaps his partial blindness was the reason. After Gallant Sir, he didn’t ride another stakes winner for years. Then even his modest weekday mounts began losing. He moved around North America, through Chicago, New York, Canada, riding the tough horses, the sour ones, and the nervous ones, but his statistics continued to slip.
Somewhere along the way, Pollard crossed paths with a jockey agent named Yummy, a round, toad-eyed, linty man, built low.23 Yummy had a pronounced harelip that slurred his speech badly. He raised his voice to a pounding level to compensate, but this only made people cringe. He kept his cash in his shoe and lived year- round in the Turkish baths of whatever city he happened through. Like Pollard, he seemed to have lost the need to belong to any place in particular. The best Yummy could do for Pollard was chase his hopelessly beaten mounts down the grandstand rail, hollering and frightening spectators. But he was fanatically loyal, and he had a car. The two began kicking around the country together.
In August 1936 they turned up at Ohio’s Thistle Down Park. Any hopes Pollard had of redeeming himself there were quickly silenced. His win percentage dropped to a lamentable 6 percent.24 He rode, on average, fewer than two winners a month. Around the track, people whispered that he was finished. He was drifting into the great slipstream in which many promising jockeys are lost, their talents never tried for lack of the skilled trainer, the wise owner, the “big horse.”
On August 16 Pollard and Yummy climbed into Yummy’s car, pulled out of the track, and hit the highway. Somewhere along the way, they smacked the car into something. Whatever it was they hit, it didn’t have a lot of give to it; the car was showered all over the road.25 They bailed out into blistering heat. There beside the hulk of the ruined car, countless miles from anywhere, Pollard was standing in a metaphor for his own life. At twenty-six, he was frightened and empty. The car was totaled, the money was gone, and there were no prospects ahead of him. He and Yummy picked through the wreckage for their most essential belongings, 27 cents and a half pint of a foul brandy they called “bow-wow wine.”26 Pollard probably salvaged his books and his rosary. There was a sugar cube kicking around in his pocket. They abandoned the car and hung their thumbs in the northbound lane.
It was late afternoon when they rolled up Woodward Avenue in Detroit. The city was stacked up in a hot, close grid, and the summer lay heavy over it. The ruinous decade had scarred the city, as it had every other: poor boxes on the street, people living on railcars. Near the intersection of Woodward and Eight Mile Road there was a cemetery. Pollard and Yummy called for the driver to stop. On the other side of the avenue stood the gate to a racetrack, the Detroit Fair Grounds. Pollard and Yummy hopped down, turned their backs to the gravestones, and walked in.
Across the track, Tom Smith was leaning against the easternmost barn, turning a straw in his teeth. In the stall behind him was Seabiscuit. Smith had been sitting by the horse for two days, thinking on him, watching him, trying to inhabit him. Something rattled in the horse’s mind that made him edgy and angry. He had been enjoying a reign of terror since they brought him to Detroit, trying to take big chunks out of the grooms, and no one wanted to go within a pitchfork’s length of him. No man had ever understood him, and the horse now turned against anyone who tried. Smith was thinking that he needed a strong and intuitive jockey for this one.
Up the backstretch, Yummy was zigging and zagging his way through barns with his big paw out, booming his pitch—“Name’s Yummy, not Dummy”—and coming out empty-handed. No one wanted Pollard. He and Pollard were dirty and tired and shaky from the wreck. Evening was falling, and it was time to start thinking about where to get their next meal and bed down for the night. The bottle of bow-wow wine was probably long dry.
A groom pointed to a gray man sitting in front of the barn where the Howard horses were kept. Agent and jockey turned east and walked toward Smith.
Yummy reloaded and made a run at him. Smith waved him off, eyeing the redhead and retrieving a name from years back: Cougar. He recalled the grave lines of the jockey’s profile from the days when they had crossed paths somewhere out West. He looked at the brooding face and the boxer’s physique and thought:
He gestured toward the stall behind him. Pollard leaned over Seabiscuit’s half door. The horse had his back to him, a dark mass shifting in the straw. Pollard pushed his hand into his pocket and pulled it out again with his fingers closed. He extended his arm and opened his hand: the cube of sugar. From the back of the stall, there came a tentative sound of nostrils drawing the air, weighing the scent. A black muzzle materialized, licked up the sugar, and touched the jockey’s shoulder.27
The scattered lives of Red Pollard, Tom Smith, and Charles Howard had come to an intersection. Their crowded hour had begun.
PART II
