with incredulity. A prominent eastern handicapper called him “the most overrated horse in California.”7 The phrase “who did he beat?” appeared over and over in the press. “It is difficult to give him a rating above a $5,000 plater,” wrote one journalist, using the synonym for claimer. Seabiscuit was a horse who had to be seen to be believed.
Trouble dogged him from the moment he was vanned into Santa Anita. Smith had initially planned on running him Christmas Day, but the trainer thought the horse seemed slightly weary and decided to back off for a while. He found a replacement race in the New Year’s Stakes, but the track came up muddy. Smith didn’t want to risk Seabiscuit’s soundness by running on a slippery track, so he scratched him and moved his scheduled Santa Anita debut to January 16, 1937. On the appointed day, an ominous hive of an inch or so square popped up on the colt’s coat. Smith withdrew him again.
One hive became two, then three, then an army of angry lumps. Driven mad by itching, Seabiscuit began to lose his newfound calm. Unable to train, he began pacing in the stall again. Smith tried every remedy he knew, but the rash kept marching onward.8 Finally, after more than a week, the rash began to retreat. “Don’t tell me about bad breaks,” Howard grumbled.9 “Seabiscuit certainly gets them.”
The long layoff from racing, culminating in a week stuck itching in the barn, took its toll. Seabiscuit, already inclined toward portliness, was turning into one thousand pounds of flab. Smith looked the horse over and frowned. “Butterball,” he called him. Idleness wasn’t the only reason for the added weight. Seabiscuit’s groom, Ollie, had been feeding the horse enough rations to fatten up an elephant.10 Smith had asked him to limit the horse to dry mash, but Ollie had begun sneaking in warm oat-mash snacks when he thought Smith wasn’t looking. Smith considered firing Ollie, but the horse was so enamored of the groom that Smith decided otherwise. It was the beginning of a chronic problem for Seabiscuit, who loved eating so much that he often followed up his regular meals by consuming his own bedding.
Burning the flab off was going to be difficult. Smith was concerned that he’d have to work the horse to death to get the weight off. To get as much weight off as he could with each workout, he took a cue from the jockeys’ room and began zipping the horse into rubber-lined sweating hoods during the gallops, then wrapping him in hot blankets afterward. He strapped him into a muzzle to stop his snacking. But the biggest problem was Ollie. The groom simply wouldn’t do as asked.
Smith appealed to the highest court: Marcela Howard. She was the kind of woman who had a certain unspoken authority. She never had to raise her voice; she had a certain expression that communicated things well enough. Smith had seen it himself. She had once come into his barn and discovered jockey Farrell Jones lying on a cot in the cold, drafty tack room, desperately ill with an infection. Smith, who never missed a pimple on a horse but tended to be oblivious to the plight of his fellow man, hadn’t taken the slightest notice of the boy and whatever ominous hacking noises must have been coming from the tack room. Marcela was appalled. She fired that look around, Farrell got his medicine and blankets, and everyone felt ashamed of themselves. No one ever forgot it.
Smith asked Marcela to see what she could do about Seabiscuit’s clandestine munching. Marcela called on Ollie, and they had a talk. The gift snacks disappeared. Smith started conditioning his horse all over again.
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By the time Smith was able to get Seabiscuit in racing shape, two months had passed since the World’s Fair Handicap. It was already the second week of February, the Santa Anita Handicap was a little more than two weeks away, and Seabiscuit was far behind in his preparation. If Smith could get the horse into a race on the weekend of February 9, he would have time enough to run him once more before the hundred-grander. The only suitable race that weekend was the seven-furlong Huntington Beach Handicap, in which Rosemont was set to run. Smith had avoided Rosemont earlier in the season not because he feared Seabiscuit would lose, but because he feared his horse would win, prompting the racing secretary to assign him heavy weight for the hundred-grander. That problem no longer existed; weights had finally been posted. Seabiscuit would carry 114 pounds, probably not as few as Smith had hoped for, but no backbreaker either. On February 9, Smith sent his horse out for the Huntington.
Without any urging from Pollard, Seabiscuit shot from the gate as he had in the World’s Fair, but this time there was a horse to go with him, Cloud D’Or. Pollard clucked once in Seabiscuit’s ear, and his colt hooked up with his rival on a dizzying pace, with Seabiscuit down on the deep, slow rail and Cloud D’Or on the outside. After half a mile, they were two and two-fifths seconds below the track record. At three quarters of a mile, they were just one second off the world record. They left the field far behind them, never to catch up.
In the homestretch, with a sixteenth of a mile to go, Seabiscuit had had enough fooling around and abruptly burst away from Cloud D’Or. Once safely in the lead, Pollard slowed him down, and Seabiscuit galloped in ahead by four and a half lengths. Rosemont labored in far behind. After they passed the wire, Pollard let Seabiscuit keep running to get more of a workout from the race. The horse galloped until he had completed a mile in 1:36, more than a second faster than any horse would run that distance at Santa Anita in the entire year. Again, Seabiscuit wasn’t even breathing hard in the winner’s circle.
“Heck, I’ve never let Seabiscuit out yet,” Pollard boasted after the race. “You’ll really see Seabiscuit do some running when I cut him loose in the big race.”
Smith knew he had the best horse in America.11
Horsemen in the East didn’t know it yet. In the eastern race books, the horse was still a long shot for the hundred-grander. Seabiscuit’s final prep race, the San Antonio Handicap, seemed to confirm the easterners’ wisdom. Hung out in post position eleven—eleven positions out from the rail—Seabiscuit was bumped at the break, dropped back to fourteenth, then drifted extremely wide down the backstretch as Rosemont cruised ahead of him. Seabiscuit ran up on the heels of a group of horses and was forced to check sharply, then ran hopelessly wide again on the final turn. Finally loose in the stretch, Seabiscuit cut Rosemont’s eight-length lead in half but couldn’t catch him, finishing fifth. Rosemont won.
Quiet trepidation settled over the Howard barn in the week before the Santa Anita Handicap. Late in the week, a long, soaking shower doused the racing oval. When the rain stopped, asphalt-baking machines droned over the course, licking flames over the surface to dry the soil. Rosemont emerged from the barn three days before the race and scorched the track in his final workout. Reporters waited for Smith to give his horse a similar workout, but they never saw Seabiscuit doing anything more than stretching his legs. Rumors swirled around the track that Seabiscuit was lame. Rosemont’s stock rose; Seabiscuit’s dropped.
Smith had fooled them. At three o’clock one morning shortly before the race, he led Seabiscuit out to the track and gave him one last workout in peace and isolation. The horse ran beautifully.
On February 27, 1937, Charles and Marcela Howard arrived at Santa Anita to watch their pride and joy go for the hundred-grander. They were giddy with anticipation. “If Seabiscuit loses,” mused a friend, “Mrs. Howard is going to be so heartbroken that I’ll have to carry her out.12 If he wins, Charley’ll be so excited that I’ll have to carry him.” Howard couldn’t keep still. He trotted up to the press box and made the wildly popular announcement that if his horse won, he’d send up a barrel of champagne for the reporters. He went down to the betting area, and seeing that the line was too long to wait, he grabbed a bettor and jammed five $1,000 bills into his hand.13 “Put it all on Seabiscuit’s nose, please,” he told the bewildered wagerer before trotting off again.
