Pollard and the other exercise riders were given instructions to simply lean on his neck, sitting still and leaving the reins loose, so that the horse could choose his own pace. By making sure that all workouts ended at the finish line, Smith taught Seabiscuit that he needed to be ahead of other horses by the time he crossed the wire. Racetracks are ringed with poles that tell riders what fraction of a mile remains before the finish wire. Pollard found that with every pole he passed, the horse would run harder. Pollard didn’t need to hold him back, or “rate” him, in the early part of workouts; the horse knew that the homestretch was where the real running was done. “Why rate him?” Pollard would later say.8 “He knows the poles better than I do.”
Over the next weeks, Pollard and Smith discovered that obstreperousness was only one of Seabiscuit’s bad traits. He amused himself by propping in mid-workout, decelerating rapidly and vaulting his jockey up onto his neck. He also harbored a peculiar ardor for the inner rail. He refused to run at all unless he was practically on top of it, a consequence, Smith believed, of Fitzsimmons’s practice of invariably working the horse along the inside. When he was guided away from the rail, Seabiscuit would slow down and do just about anything to get back over to it, including abruptly ducking inside. This created two problems. First, the area by the inner rail was the lowest part of the slightly banked oval, so it tended to hold the most water, making it the slowest, most tiring part of the track during and after rainstorms. Second, he was most likely to get caught in traffic jams on the rail. Any horse who refused to swing wide could get into serious trouble.
Hoping to focus the horse’s mind on his job and reduce the distractions of the rail, Smith fitted Seabiscuit with a set of blinkers that restricted his vision to the track straight ahead of him. He took the horse out to gallop on a morning when track officials, trying to protect the overused inside of the course, had put out “dogs,” sawhorses lining the rail path to keep exercising horses to the outside. By galloping the horse to the outside of the dogs, Smith hoped to wean him from the rail. Seabiscuit thwarted his efforts, ducking into the rail in the gaps between dogs, swerving out to avoid them, then cutting in again.10 Smith kept at it, eventually making progress. Unable to eliminate the rail obsession completely, the trainer made use of it. As Seabiscuit was apt to fight any direct attempts to rate him, Smith told his riders to adjust the horse’s speed with steering.11 When a rider wanted Seabiscuit to speed up, he would swing him toward the rail; when he wanted him to ease off, he’d nudge him to the outside.
The most difficult quirk was Seabiscuit’s behavior in the starting gate.12 Within its metal confines he raised holy hell, throwing himself around, exhausting the assistant starters, and reminding everyone of Hard Tack. To stop the colt’s gate rages, Smith used a daring method. He led him out to the gate each morning, walked him inside it, and asked him to halt. Risking life and limb, Smith positioned himself directly in front of the horse, facing him. When Seabiscuit began banging around to get out, Smith held his ground, raised his hand, and tapped the horse firmly on the chest and shoulders until he stood still. When the horse stopped, so did Smith. When the horse moved, Smith tapped him again. Morning after morning, he was out at the gate with the horse, repeating the lesson. “You got to go at a horse slowly teaching him most anything,” Smith explained later.13 “Easy, firm repetition does it.” The effect was mesmerizing. The horse began to relax in the gate. “He caught on quick enough,” said Smith. “He’s wise as an old owl.” Eventually, Smith was able to leave Seabiscuit standing in there for as long as ten minutes without the horse turning a hair.
Smith also made a point of giving Seabiscuit a structured life. The horse got breakfast when he woke up, usually at four-thirty, followed by stall mucking and grooming at five, and a lengthy gallop with Pumpkin at eight. For horses, “downshifting” from strenuous exercise is risky. If they are brought to idleness too soon after running all- out—in old cowboy parlance, being “rid hard and put away wet”—their major muscle groups can seize up in an agonizing spasm called “tying up.” In addition, they can develop colic, a potentially fatal digestive crisis. Because of this, horses must be brought down from exercise gradually, slowly decelerating over about a half mile after a race and then undergoing a long walk. For Seabiscuit, this meant that after each workout he was covered in a blanket and hotwalked for about half an hour, until he was cool and dry. Then he was given a warm bath, dried, and led back into his stall, where his legs were painted in liniment and wrapped in protective bandages. He had lunch at eleven, hay snacks all afternoon, dinner at five. After that, the horse went to sleep, with his groom, Ollie, on a pallet in the stall with him. Seabiscuit fell into the schedule completely. Rain or shine, Smith was there to check on him at about eight every night before turning in.
Smith gave Seabiscuit time to learn to trust him and Pollard. Seabiscuit learned.14 When he heard Pollard’s deep voice coming down the shed row, he would poke his head over the half door to greet him. When Pollard, who called the horse Pops, sat outside the stall, reading the paper while Seabiscuit was cooled out, the horse would tug his hot walker off course to snuffle his jockey’s hands. When Smith led him out of the stall, he didn’t even need a lead rope; the horse would follow his trainer wherever he went, nuzzling his pockets. Smith spoke to the horse in nearly inaudible tones, calling him Son and touching him lightly when he needed him to turn. Seabiscuit understood him and always did as asked. In moments of uncertainty, the horse would pause and look for Smith. When he found his trainer, the horse would relax. Smith taught him that he could trust his trainer and rider, and this became the foundation for the trials the three would share over the next five years. “[Smith] let horses get confidence in him,” remembered Keith Stucki, one of the horse’s exercise riders. “He was the best horseman I’ve ever seen.”15
With long, careful schooling, Seabiscuit began to figure things out. Once he was no longer being coerced, his instincts bubbled back to the surface. His innate love of running returned. Pollard used the whip not as an implement of force, but as a signal: one glancing swat on the rump at the eighth pole, another a few feet from home, a cue that it was time to hustle. Seabiscuit began to wait for it and respond with lightning quickness. “So long as you treat him like a gentleman,” said Pollard, “he’ll run his heart out for you.” Though the horse was still goofing off and pulling tricks in his workouts, his speed was excellent.
After two weeks, Smith was ready to send him to the races. Howard agreed.
In late August they tried him in a good stakes race in Detroit. He had the bad luck of drawing into an event that featured the best filly in the country, Myrtlewood.16 Green to the core, Seabiscuit was all over the track, streaking out with the early leaders as they tried to keep up with Myrtlewood. On the backstretch, he was going along smoothly when, without warning, he threw his forelegs forward and propped, decelerating rapidly and dropping back through the field. Ahead of him, Myrtlewood drove to an insurmountable lead, with local star Professor Paul rallying in vain to catch her.
Seabiscuit’s temperamental outburst had left him hopelessly beaten, but as Pollard angled him into the stretch and asked him to get his mind back on running, Smith witnessed something he would never forget. Seabiscuit began to rip over the track, cutting into Myrtlewood’s lead even as she flew through fractions faster than any ever run at the Detroit Fair Grounds. He was much too late to overtake the filly or Professor Paul, but his rally carried him to fourth place, just four lengths behind Myrtlewood, who had broken the track record. Even more encouraging, in the homestretch, Seabiscuit’s ears were up, a signal that the horse was running within himself. “He showed me two great qualifications that day,” Smith remembered later. “He showed me speed, and he showed me courage. He was in trouble, and the way he pricked his ears, I knew if I could get the true speed out of him, I would have a champion.”
Pollard knew it too. Leaping off of Seabiscuit’s back, he ran over to Howard.
“Mr. Howard,” he sang out, “that horse can win the Santa Anita!”17
Howard laughed.
In his next start, on September 2 in the Roamer Handicap, Seabiscuit had nothing but bad luck. He took the
