Seabiscuit: An American Legend

picture, just a wink ahead of Seabiscuit’s. “Dame Fortune,” wrote announcer Joe Hernandez, “made a mistake and kissed the wrong horse—Rosemont—in the glorious end of the Santa Anita Handicap.”¹⁸

Charles and Marcela collected themselves. The length of Rosemont’s nose had cost them $70,700. They continued passing out the champagne, brave smiles on their faces.

Pollard didn’t need to look at the tote board. He knew he had lost from the instant the noses hit the line. Wrung to exhaustion and deathly pale, he slid from Seabiscuit’s back. He walked over to Richards, who was being smothered in kisses by his tearful wife. Pollard’s face was blank, his voice barely above a whisper. All around him, people regarded him with expressions of cool accusation.

“Congratulations, Harry, you rode a swell race,” Pollard said.

“Thanks,” said Richards, his face covered in lipstick and his voice breaking; he had shouted it away urging Rosemont on. “But it was very close.”

“Close, yes,” said Pollard almost inaudibly, “but you won.”¹⁹

Pollard saw Howard hovering nearby, waiting for him. The jockey went to him.

“What happened?” Howard asked gently. Ashen and spent, Pollard said that the rail had been slow, and that he had been unable to get outside without fouling Rosemont. If he and Rosemont had switched positions, he was sure Seabiscuit would have won.

It was a thin excuse. Pollard must have known that to save his professional standing, he would have to offer more than that, say something that would explain how he had allowed Rosemont to come to him without fighting back until the last moment. Already, harsh words were being hung on him: arrogant, inept, overconfident. He could not have mistaken the reproach on the faces of those around him. His reputation was tumbling. But Pollard gave the public nothing to make them reconsider.

Perhaps he couldn’t. He had a secret to keep, a gamble he had made years earlier and remade with each race. But he could no longer think that its risks affected only himself.

Perhaps Pollard didn’t see Rosemont coming because of the blindness of his right eye.

It is unlikely that he could have heard Rosemont over the din from the crowd. Rosemont’s surge, unexpected and sudden, may have eluded Pollard until very late in the race. Pollard did not begin urging Seabiscuit in earnest until Rosemont was alongside him, just forward enough for Pollard to see him with his left eye, upon turning his head. One good eye offers little depth perception, so he may not have been able to judge whether Rosemont was far enough to his right to allow Seabiscuit to move outward.

If this explanation is correct, then Pollard was trapped. He was publicly accused of inexcusable failure in the most important race of his career, but he could not defend himself. Had he let on that he was blind in one eye, his career would have been over. Like most jockeys in the 1930s, he had nowhere else to go, nothing else to live on, nothing else he loved. For Red Pollard, there was no road back to Edmonton. If his blindness was the cause of the loss, his frustration and guilt must have been consuming.

Howard accepted Pollard’s explanation without criticism. Neither he nor Smith blamed him.²⁰

Almost everyone else did.

———

(AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS)

1 This thought, like all others recorded in this book, is expressed exactly as the subject later described it.

2 An age-old, widely-followed formula holds that one-fifth of a second equals one length. But this formula is obviously flawed; a sprinter travels many more feet per second than a distance runner. The above figure and all others in this book are calculated separately for each race, using the horses’ actual feet-per-second speed. In this case, it took the track record holder 1:38 (98 seconds) to travel 5,280 feet, one mile. That’s 53.87 feet per second. He was two seconds slower than Seabiscuit, which translates into 107.75 feet. The average Thoroughbred is 8.5 feet long. 107.75 divided by 8.5 is 12.67 lengths.

Chapter 9

GRAVITY

For six months Tom Smith had been holding Seabiscuit in his closed fist. He had inched him up through back alleys and smaller races, bypassing the nationally spotlighted races in favor of slow cultivation and parochial seclusion. It wasn’t until the Santa Anita Handicap, with the whole world watching, that Smith had opened his hand.

The world had been waiting for him. In the winter of 1937, America was in the seventh year of the most catastrophic decade in its history. The economy had come crashing down, and millions upon millions of people had been torn loose from their jobs, their savings, their homes. A nation that drew its audacity from the quintessentially American belief that success is open to anyone willing to work for it was disillusioned by seemingly intractable poverty. The most brash of peoples was seized by despair, fatalism, and fear.

The sweeping devastation was giving rise to powerful new social forces. The first was a burgeoning industry of escapism. America was desperate to lose itself in anything that offered affirmation. The nation’s corner theaters hosted 85 million people a week for 25-cent viewings of an endless array of cheery musicals and screwball comedies.¹ On the radio, the idealized world of One Man’s Family and the just and reassuring tales of The Lone Ranger were runaway hits. Downtrodden Americans gravitated strongly toward the Horatio Alger protagonist, the lowly bred Everyman who rises from anonymity and hopelessness. They looked for him in spectator sports, which were enjoying explosive growth. With the relegalization of wagering, no sport was growing faster than Thoroughbred racing.

Necessity spurred technological innovations that offered the public unprecedented access to its heroes. People accustomed to reading comparatively dry rehashes of events were now enthralled by vivid scenes rolling across the new Movietone newsreels. A public that had grown up with news illustrations and hazy photo layouts was now treated to breathtaking action shots facilitated by vastly improved photographic equipment. These images were