(USC LIBRARY, DEPARTMENT OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS)
LEARN YOUR HORSE
The grooms were walking around with their faces fixed in permanent winces. Every time they passed Seabiscuit’s stall, the horse lunged at them, mouth wide open, ears flat back, eyes in a sinister pinch, and he meant business. Heaven help the poor kid who had to go in there, muck the floor, and curry the horse. Everyone was wondering what Smith possibly could have been thinking. The horse was a train wreck. He paced in his stall incessantly. He broke into a lather at the sight of a saddle. He was two hundred pounds underweight and chronically tired. He was so thin, said one observer, that his hips could have made a passable hat rack, but he refused to eat.1 And that left foreleg didn’t look good.
As he did with every new horse, Smith pored over Seabiscuit when he was with him and mulled him over when he was not.2 The first thing he had to try to do, the trainer decided, was defuse the horse. Ignoring the snapping jaws and pinned ears, he showered him with affection and carrots. He then tried one of the oldest remedies for unhappy horses: animal companionship. Motley collections of stray animals have always populated racetracks, and being the social creatures they are, horses usually befriend them. All sorts of animals, from German shepherds to chickens, have become the stable companions of racehorses. A three-legged cat lived with Fitzsimmons’s horses; the trainer dismantled a piece of harness and crafted a tiny wooden leg for him, then watched as the cat learned to snare mice with one paw and “blackjack” them with the other.3 At a track in Arizona a monkey was a popular mascot until he began turning on all the shed-row faucets and tearing the shingles off the roof.
Smith took the goat route.4 He dug up a nanny named Whiskers and parked her in Seabiscuit’s stall. Shortly after dinnertime, the grooms found Seabiscuit walking in circles, clutching the distraught goat in his teeth and shaking her back and forth. He heaved her over his half door and plopped her down in the barn aisle. The grooms ran to her rescue.
Smith opted for a companion who could take a little more punishment. Down the shed row he kept a lead horse he called Pumpkin. As broad as a Sherman tank and yellow as a daisy, Pumpkin—or “Punkins,” as the hands called him—had once been a Montana cow pony. Out on the range, the horse had experienced everything, including a bull goring that had left a gouge in his rump. He was a veteran, meeting every calamity with a cheerful steadiness. He was, in the parlance of horsemen, “bombproof.” Smith recognized the value of a horse like this and brought him along with his racing string to work as a lead pony, Smith’s track mount, and general stable calmer-downer. Pumpkin was amiable to every horse he met and became a surrogate parent to the flighty ones. He worked a sedative effect on the whole barn. After Seabiscuit evicted the goat, Smith hauled in Pumpkin. A brief mutual nose- sniffing produced no ill-will, so Smith decided to make Seabiscuit Pumpkin’s new assignment. He housed Pumpkin in one stall, Seabiscuit in the next, and tore down the wall between. The horses conversed and developed a fast friendship. They would live and work together for the rest of their lives.
The experiment with Pumpkin worked so well that Smith began collecting other stable companions for Seabiscuit. Somewhere along the way, a little spotted stray dog fell in with the Howard barn and began to travel with it. Named Pocatell, the dog had curiously upright ears that were round as platters and roughly three times normal size. Pocatell took a liking to Seabiscuit and began sleeping in his stall at night. Jo Jo, a small spider monkey of undetermined origin, had the same preference for Seabiscuit’s company.5 Sleeping with Pumpkin a few feet away, Jo Jo in the crook of his neck, and Pocatell on his belly, Seabiscuit began to relax.
The next hurdle was the horse’s sore and underweight body. Smith mixed up a homemade liniment and painted it on Seabiscuit’s legs. To keep the mixture from rubbing off when the horse lay in his straw and to protect his dinged-up legs from additional bumps and bruises, the trainer instituted a routine of keeping the horse in knee-high, inches-thick cotton bandages, once compared to World War I puttees. Smith also paid very close attention to Seabiscuit’s fuel. He fed the colt a high-quality strain of timothy hay, cultivated in Northern California, which he had come across during his first days as a trainer. For oats, he ladled out carefully measured portions of a fine white variety grown in the Sacramento Valley. After reading an article describing the nutritional intake of the University of Washington crew team, Smith made sure the horse received feed with a high calcium content.6 For bedding, he spread out a thick mattress of dust-free rice straw.
Once Seabiscuit was settled in at Detroit, Smith took the colt to the track to stretch his legs. It was a disaster. Seabiscuit didn’t run, he rampaged. When the rider asked him for speed, the horse slowed down. When he tried to rein him in, the horse bolted, thrashing around like a hooked marlin. Asked to go left, he’d dodge right; tugged right, he’d dart left. The beleaguered rider could do no better than cling to the horse’s neck for dear life. Smith watched, his eyes following the colt as he careened across the track, running as a moth flies.
Smith knew what he was seeing. Seabiscuit’s competitive instincts had been turned backward. Instead of directing his efforts against his opponents, he was directing them against the handlers who tried to force him to run. He habitually met every command with resistance. He was feeding off the fight, gaining satisfaction from the distress and rage of the man on his back. Smith knew how to stop it. He had to take coercion out of the equation and let the horse discover the pleasure of speed. He called out to the rider:
The rider did as told, and Seabiscuit took off with him, trying once to hurdle the infield fence but meeting with no resistance from the reins. He made a complete circuit at top speed, but Smith issued no orders to stop him, so around he went again, dipping and swerving.
After galloping all-out for two miles, weaving all over the track, Seabiscuit was exhausted. He stopped himself and stood on the track, panting. The rider simply sat there, letting him choose what to do. There was nowhere to go but home. Seabiscuit turned and walked back to the barn of his own volition. Smith greeted him with a carrot. Neither Smith nor his exercise rider had raised a hand to him, but the colt had learned the lesson that would transform him from a rogue to a pliant, happy horse: He would never again be forced to do what he didn’t want to do. He never again fought a rider.
After that wild ride, Smith put Pollard up on Seabiscuit for the first time to see how he would handle the horse. Pollard rode the horse around, studying him. Seabiscuit wouldn’t try much for him. Pollard turned him and brought him back to the barn. Trainer and jockey conferred. Pollard told Smith that the whip, used so liberally by Fitzsimmons, had to be put away. It should be used, he said, only in times of great urgency. Pollard saw that if this horse was pushed around, all he would do was push back. Smith knew he had found the right jockey.
Smith and Pollard made a point of allowing Seabiscuit to do as he pleased.9 Smith issued orders that the horse never be disturbed while sleeping, for any reason. Riders and grooms would sometimes stand around for hours, waiting for the horse to wake up before they could get to work. Seabiscuit milked it for all it was worth. “He wakes up in the morning like a sly old codger,” said Pollard. “Y’know, the Biscuit is like an old gentleman, and he hates to get up with the rising sun. When you go to his stall, he lays over like a limp, old rag and peeks out at you with one eye to see whether you get what he’s trying to drive over—that he’s sick as a dog. He’d get away with it if he could, but wise old Tom Smith knows him like a book.”
