Seabiscuit: An American Legend

now rapidly available thanks to wirephoto services, which had debuted in Life in the month that Pollard, Howard, and Smith formed their partnership.

But it was radio that had the greatest impact.² In the 1920s the cost of a radio had been prohibitive—$120 or more—and all that bought was a box of unassembled parts. In unelectrified rural areas, radios ran on pricey, short-lived batteries. But with the 1930s came the advent of factory-built console, tabletop, and automobile radio sets, available for as little as $5. Thanks to President Roosevelt’s Rural Electrification Administration, begun in 1936, electricity came to the quarter of the population that lived on farmlands.³ Rural families typically made the radio their second electric purchase, after the clothes iron. By 1935, when Seabiscuit began racing, two thirds of the nation’s homes had radio. At the pinnacle of his career, that figure had jumped to 90 percent, plus eight million sets in cars. Enabling virtually all citizens to experience noteworthy events simultaneously and in entertaining form, radio created a vast common culture in America, arguably the first true mass culture the world had ever seen. Racing, a sport whose sustained dramatic action was ideally suited to narration, became a staple of the airwave. The Santa Anita Handicap, with its giant purse and world-class athletes, competing in what was rapidly becoming the nation’s most heavily attended sport, became one of the premier radio events of the year.

In February 1937, all of these new social and technological forces were converging. The modern age of celebrity was dawning. The new machine of fame stood waiting. All it needed was the subject himself.

At that singular hour, Seabiscuit, the Cinderella horse, flew over the line in the Santa Anita Handicap. Something clicked: Here he was.

Immediately, the reporters infested everything. Smith swatted at them. They staked out the barn, constantly asking Smith to pull the horse out of his stall for photo sessions and even to let them sit on his back, as if he were a carnival pony. They stood by the rail in noisy clumps during morning workouts, snapping pictures and buzzing in Smith’s ear. They photographed the Howards everywhere they went, at the betting windows, at dinner, getting in and out of their Buick. One paper ran a large shot of Marcela in the act of blowing her nose. Smith, Pollard, and the Howards were soon intimately familiar with the strange gravity of celebrity. The earth seemed to dip under Seabiscuit’s hoof-falls, pulling the world in toward him and everyone around him.

The paradox of all this attention was that many of the turf writers who covered Seabiscuit knew next to nothing about horses and racing. Pari-mutuel racing was spanking new in California and many other places, so there were few established racing writers. Much of the coverage was left to complete novices on loan from other beats. Because Seabiscuit’s popularity was so broad-based, reporters from publications that had nothing whatsoever to do with sports covered him. Many newsmen were completely ignorant of standard training practices. Some were in so far over their heads that they resorted to invention, fabricating preposterous stories or quotations out of thin air. One columnist wrote that Tom Smith fed Seabiscuit two quarts of Golden Rod beer before each race; if the horse doesn’t get his beer, he wrote, he “whinnies and stomps to indicate displeasure.”⁴ Worse, there were more than a few conspiracy theorists in the bunch. Racing had recently emerged from an era of corruption, and though incidents of foul play were now extremely rare, reporters tended to be overly suspicious of horsemen, accepted rumors of wrongdoing with credulity, and adopted a studied cynicism.

Pair an intrusive, usually ignorant, and often suspicious press corps with an intensely private trainer, and you have a volatile mix. Smith viewed the press as parasitic. To foil it, he elevated obstruction to an art form. His first line of defense was frowning terseness.⁵ Once, when asked to describe Seabiscuit at length, he replied, “He’s a horse,” and walked away.⁶ It was typical of Smith to stroll off in silence while reporters were in mid-question. At other times he would respond to a question by staring straight at a reporter with a blank expression for as long as three minutes, saying nothing. “Tom Smith,” lamented a reporter, “is by no means a long distance conversationalist.⁷ Ten words in a row for him would constitute a course record.” Talking to Smith, remembered one racetracker, “was like talking to a post.” His stable agent, Sonny Greenberg, compared him to a mummy. The smart ones learned to keep quiet and let Smith initiate a conversation, which he did every once in a while. The dumb ones pecked at him and got nothing but ulcers.

Smith also went to great lengths to keep Seabiscuit’s training private. To mollify reporters, he would take Seabiscuit out onto the track during the heavily attended morning hours, but only for slow workouts or jogs. In the afternoons, when the reporters were watching the races, he would sneak the horse out for his real workouts on the training track or another track altogether.⁸ If anyone happened to be standing around, he’d do his best to keep them from learning anything interesting. Once, when a man wandered up to the rail of the otherwise deserted track and pulled out a stopwatch to time the horse’s workout, Smith asked to borrow the watch, held it while the horse galloped, reset it, and handed it back.

“How did it go?” asked the man.

“Looked all right to me—it seems to be a nice watch,” said Smith.

“Not the watch,” said the man, “Seabiscuit’s work. How fast did he go?”

“Damned if I know.”⁹

The secret workouts had three purposes. First, they concealed the horse’s superb form from track racing secretaries, who assigned imposts. Second, through an ingenious method devised by Smith, they helped the horse stay in racing trim. Seabiscuit was more prone to weight gain than any horse Smith had ever handled. Because he believed that the quickest way to ruin a horse was to overwork him, Smith resorted to creative solutions to overcome Seabiscuit’s weight problem. On mornings when an afternoon workout was planned, he would set the horse’s bridle and saddle out where he could see them, withhold breakfast, skip his normal morning workout, and do everything else that was typical of a race day.¹⁰ Seeing the tack and thinking he was racing that day, Seabiscuit would become keyed up, lose interest in eating, and fret weight off. Smith would then take him out to work in the afternoon, just as if he were racing. The method worked, and Seabiscuit kept his weight down.

The final benefit of the secret workouts was sadistic pleasure. Smith took immense satisfaction in making reporters and clockers miserable. The old man had an offbeat sense of humor. He once electrified a park bench with wires and tacks, ran a trigger wire down the shed row, hid himself in a stall, and spent the day shocking the hell out of every weary hot-walker who tried to sit down and rest.¹¹ Once he became a major subject for the press, nothing was more amusing to him than creating situations that left his pursuers confused and frustrated. They gave him limitless opportunity; Seabiscuit was one of the biggest stories in the country, so they just kept coming back for more punishment. For people trying to make a living covering him, Smith was thoroughly maddening. “Turf writers and clockers swear by Tom Smith,” moaned a reporter, “and very often they just swear.”¹²

The secret workouts worked for Seabiscuit, but because Smith refused to explain himself to the press, they created a serious misapprehension. The rarity of Seabiscuit’s public appearances fueled rumors that the horse was unsound, rumors that were reinforced by the horse’s choppy gait. Smith did little to correct them. “That horse of yours can’t walk,” said one spectator as Seabiscuit bumped past. “Runs, though,” Smith replied.¹³ Though the horse was dollar sound at this stage of his career, reporters given to hyperbole began regularly referring to him as a “cripple.” The stories were accepted as fact, and soon the word attached to Seabiscuit for good. It was a misconception that would create serious headaches for Smith later.