Two days later, Seabiscuit ran in the Riggs Handicap, over the same distance as the Pimlico Special. Members of the Riddle barn came out to the track to watch him. They were treated to quite a spectacle. Seabiscuit annihilated the field, breaking the track record while carrying 130 pounds, two more than War Admiral had lugged in the Pimlico Special. With the victory, Seabiscuit took back the lead in the earnings race, amassing about $9,000 more than War Admiral.
Vanderbilt worked on Riddle for a few days to get the owner to rescind his boycott of Pimlico and bring his colt back to meet Seabiscuit. Howard kept his horses in town in case something came of it.20 For a few days, Vanderbilt thought Riddle would reconsider and run War Admiral in the Bowie Handicap. He talked Howard into committing to the race, even though it was at the marathon distance of one-and-five-eighths miles, farther than Smith wanted to send Seabiscuit. But by race day, it was clear that War Admiral wasn’t coming.22 Trainloads of fans were pouring in for the race, and Howard didn’t want to disappoint them, so he agreed to send Seabiscuit out anyway. Carrying 130 pounds, Seabiscuit endured a rough trip and lost by a nose to the brilliant race mare Esposa, who carried fifteen fewer pounds and set a track record. With that, the Pimlico season ended.
In mid-November Smith loaded Seabiscuit and the rest of his stable, blanketed in red and white stable colors, into three cars of a train bound for California. The train rolled up the East Coast. It paused at Belmont Park in New York while Howard completed a transaction. Bing Crosby had long been deeply impressed with Howard’s racing success—he once suggested to his wife that they name their son Seabiscuit—but every attempt to emulate his friend ended in spectacular failure. In 1937 Bing joined forces with Howard’s polo-playing son Lin to form the Binglin Stock Farm, hoping that Lin’s considerable horsemanship could turn his luck around. That fall, while in Argentina for a polo tournament, Lin had stumbled upon some promising racehorses. He had purchased several, shipping them by sea to New York. Charles Howard had agreed to pick them up and bring them to California with his own horses. Lin and Bing told the elder Howard that he could pick out one that he liked and buy him.
Howard and Smith came down to the docks to see the horses. Two stood out from the rest. One was Kajak, later renamed Kayak II. Big, black, and gorgeous, he was barely halter broken and fought every attempt to handle him. The other was a mature horse, Ligaroti, Argentina’s champion miler. Smith was particularly enamored of Ligaroti. Howard liked both horses. He chose to buy Kayak.
After tacking on additional railcars to bear the Binglin horses west, the Seabiscuit train rolled out of the East, across the plains and over the Rockies, desolate and white and still in their early, deep winter. When the train paused at little towns along the route, fans gathered in the cold to peer in the windows and catch a glimpse of Seabiscuit.
Ahead, a celebration awaited the travelers. Howard had telephoned Oscar Otis to tell him that Seabiscuit was coming back, and Otis had printed the news.21 Five hundred enthusiastic fans were preparing to rise early and come to the track to give the hometown hero a noisy welcome.23 City and state dignitaries would be there to pair their images with the hottest celebrity in the nation. Even the jaded horsemen would take a respite from their labors to see him, eating their breakfasts outdoors on the benches near the siding. To joyful applause and popping flashbulbs, the horse would draw up in his railcar. He would step from his three-foot-deep bed of straw, give Smith an affectionate bump with his nose, and leave the train bucking. The men around him would be triumphant and relieved. Even Smith would be in an optimistic, relatively chatty mood, stringing several hundred words together in what the papers would call “a great moral victory for the reporters present.”
But there were long, cold miles to go before they were home. The train rolled through country where the temperature was fourteen degrees below zero. Storm after storm buffeted the train and buried the landscape in snow. The going was treacherous and frightening.
When the train’s water pipes froze, Howard left Marcela in the sleeper car to join Seabiscuit. It was a habit he had learned, looking to the horse to steady himself. He found Seabiscuit warm and drowsy under a double layer of blankets, swaying on his feet as the cars snaked over the mountains. In the icy, rocking train, Howard sat with his horse over the journey home.
It was going to be a long, cold winter.
(USC LIBRARY, DEPARTMENT OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS)
NO POLLARD, NO SEABISCUIT
It was December 7, 1937, and Red Pollard was winging around the far turn at Tanforan. He was riding Howard’s colt Exhibit, circling the field in a weekday sprint race.1 He was ticking past horses one by one, watching them waver and fail as his colt powered by. At the juncture between turn and homestretch, he collared the last of the front-runners, Half Time, who was laboring along the rail. Ripping down the center of the track, Pollard saw a wide-open lane in front of him. He knew he had more than enough horse under him to last to the wire.
Suddenly, Exhibit bolted inward, shying from something to his right. Pollard’s weight sank hard into his right stirrup, and he pushed off against it, trying to avoid falling over Exhibit’s shoulder and down into the dirt. Exhibit veered toward Half Time. As he careened left, Pollard must have heard the hard irregular pounding of Half Time’s forehooves as his jockey, standing bolt upright in panic, sawed on the reins, trying to back his horse out of the way before Exhibit crashed into him. Half Time’s head came up, and he dropped out of the pocket an instant before Exhibit’s broad rump bulled into it. Pollard got his weight back under him, straightened the horse’s course, and galloped him under the wire first.
Half Time’s jockey was off his horse and up to the stewards in seconds. Exhibit was promptly disqualified, and the stewards scheduled a meeting to determine if Pollard would have to serve a suspension for the incident. Pollard must have expected to be taken off his weekday mounts for a few days. Though the jockey was probably not at fault for Exhibit’s change of course, it was common for stewards to briefly suspend riders caught in his situation to guard against foul play.
But no one expected the Tanforan stewards to do what they did. Perhaps they were erring on the side of overpunishment out of concern for the sport’s image. Or maybe they wanted to take a strike against Pollard, who delighted in sassing them. He had nicknamed a particularly tyrannical, humorless, and rosy steward “Pink Whiskers,” a sobriquet that was soon used by all the jockeys. Whatever their motivation, the stewards buried him. Handing out the toughest sentence of the season, they not only suspended Pollard from riding for the rest of the Tanforan meeting, they asked the state racing board, which usually followed their recommendations, to suspend him from riding at
