San Francisco was overjoyed to see Seabiscuit again. Responding to banner headlines that read, SEABISCUIT GOES TODAY!, the largest crowd in the history of Northern California racing packed into Tanforan to witness the Marchbank Handicap, Seabiscuit’s rematch with Indian Broom and Special Agent. Pollard was again spectacular. Instructed by Smith to wait behind Special Agent’s lead, he quickly saw that the pacesetter was blocked and was not going to be able to get to the front. Pollard dove for it himself, took control of the race, then eased Seabiscuit back. Hauling a load of 124 pounds, Seabiscuit clipped past the quarter-mile mark in 22? seconds, six furlongs in a breathtaking 1:10 ?, then a mile in 1:36, each fraction well below the track record for those distances. Then he slowed down dramatically. The crowd gasped. When the field caught him, Seabiscuit bounced away again, winning by three lengths under a stranglehold. As the newsmen wondered aloud if Man o’ War himself could have beaten Seabiscuit, Howard clattered in. Everyone looked up.
“Say!” Howard panted, winded from bounding up the stairs. “Who finished second and third?”
Trouble surfaced at Bay Meadows a few weeks later. Seabiscuit was entered in the prestigious Bay Meadows Handicap, but the track handicapper delivered bad news: Seabiscuit received a 127-pound impost. Smith dug his heels in.29 Knowing that they would soon be off to the East, he didn’t want to demonstrate to handicappers that his horse was a terrific weight carrier.30 But Howard insisted, and prevailed.
Race day dawned with gale force winds. With the gusts swirling around him, Pollard arrived at the track. He was in shocking condition. He had been reducing drastically to make weight for another horse, and was barely able to stand. Once in the jockeys’ room, he collapsed.31 He was unconscious through most of the afternoon. When he was still out cold half an hour before the race, the stewards debated whether or not to call Howard in and get him to choose another rider. A few minutes before post time, Pollard finally rose. He insisted, adamantly, that he was strong enough to ride. The stewards reluctantly let him go.
Seabiscuit seemed to sense Pollard’s weakness. At the starting gate he broke through over and over again, delaying the start for three minutes. He raced tentatively, and with the winds buffeting him through the homestretch, won by a modest margin over his stablemate Exhibit. In the final sixteenth of a mile Pollard seemed as if he was about to pass out again, but he hung on for the win.
Pollard rode back to the winner’s circle and somehow managed to complete the ceremonies. Since the Santa Anita Handicap, his riding on Seabiscuit had been impeccable. But he had not gotten past the loss in the hundred- grander. The public condemnation was corrosive. The press would not let go of it.
At Bay Meadows his anger boiled over. While walking on the track, Pollard saw Oscar Otis making his way across the parking lot. Otis had praised Pollard in print since his initial condemnation of his ride in the Santa Anita Handicap, even suggesting that he may have been wrong in attributing the loss to the jockey. But Pollard’s animosity still burned. He turned off the track and into the parking lot, where he stopped Otis and confronted him. They traded angry words.
Pollard, surely overwrought from the reducing, lost control. He picked up a newspaper, folded it into a rigid baton, and clubbed Otis once across the face.32 Otis, a much larger man, dropped to the ground under the tremendous force of Pollard’s arm. His face injured, he lay on the pavement, stunned. Pollard turned and walked away.
Seabiscuit may have been a public and media darling in the West, but in the prestigious eastern racing circles he still wasn’t taken seriously. Smith was itching to go east and teach the old guard a thing or two. Howard conceded that now was the time. There wasn’t anything left to beat in California anyway. Pollard, too, needed a change of scenery and a chance to redeem himself. A week after the Bay Meadows Handicap, Seabiscuit and Pumpkin walked up the ramp of the Pullman car and settled into the straw to sleep. Smith stocked a rear car with all the oats, hay, and straw Seabiscuit would need—he didn’t trust eastern feed—then climbed in with his horse, unfolding a cot at Seabiscuit’s feet.
There were giants to slay in the East that summer. Rosemont was there, waiting to meet Seabiscuit in the venerable Brooklyn Handicap. So was Aneroid, rawhide-tough king of the eastern handicap ranks. And there was someone else, a horse greater than the others.
His name was War Admiral.
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WAR ADMIRAL
Samuel Riddle bore a startling resemblance to the illustrated figure on a Monopoly board. He had all the appurtenances—the black hat, the white moustache, heaps of old eastern money. Everything but the smile. Riddle was a dyspeptic man. In the summer of 1937 he was seventy-five years old, and his unsmiling face was arguably the most famous in racing. Riddle
In 1918 he had plunked down $5,000 at an auction and walked away with the most extraordinary creature the sport had ever seen, Man o’ War. The horse proceeded to run the legs off everything that came near him. To some observers, the only sour note in Man o’ War’s career was Riddle himself. In their view, the man had campaigned his horse too conservatively. When racing officials offered a fantastic pot of $50,000 for Riddle to pit his colt against Exterminator, the only horse who might have made Man o’ War work for his winnings, Riddle declined. He held his horse out of the Kentucky Derby, in part because of a disdain for “western” tracks and in part because he felt that early May was too soon to send a horse over a grueling mile-and-a-quarter. In 1920, Riddle retired the colt at only three years of age. Man o’ War had run just twenty-one races—winning twenty—and faced only forty-eight opponents. Riddle did not want to subject the horse to the extremely high imposts he was slated to carry.
Man o’ War had made Riddle world famous, but the owner disliked the press as much as Charles Howard loved it. Some of the newsroom boys returned Riddle’s animosity, but the fact that he owned some of the fastest and most noteworthy horses on earth led to a certain uneasy detente. The owner didn’t help things when he stood up before a throng of people, reporters included, and told them that when it came to horses, the press knew just two things: “One end bites and the other end kicks.”1
Man o’ War became a franchise of sorts for his owner, producing a long string of gifted runners whose winner’s circle visits made Riddle one of the most photographed men in sport. But while many of Man o’ War’s get were the best of their generations, none compared to their sire.2 Then, in the spring of 1934, horsemen started gathering by a fence at Riddle’s breeding farm, gazing into a paddock and making the kind of awed noises that people make when a flaming meteor plunges out of the heavens and plows into someone’s backyard. A regally bred mare named Brushup had foaled a near-black colt, a son of Man o’ War, and they couldn’t take their eyes off of him. It was just the
