Seabiscuit: An American Legend

scheduled a later meeting to consider taking this privilege away from him as well.

The news stunned the Howard barn. Seabiscuit was set to meet War Admiral in the Santa Anita Handicap on March 5, and his preparations were just getting into high gear. His first prep race was the San Francisco Handicap, to be run on December 15, during Pollard’s suspension. Howard was livid. For the Howards, the jockey had long ago ceased being a mere employee. He was more like a son. For Charles, Pollard may have become a surrogate for little Frankie, the boy he had lost. Both Charles and Marcela fretted like nervous parents over the jockey’s welfare. Marcela called the jockey by his childhood name, Johnny; though Pollard was approaching thirty, Charles hadn’t been able to break his habit of referring to him as a boy. Any insult to Pollard was received by the Howards as a slight to themselves.

Howard’s anger over the suspension went beyond loyalty. Riding Seabiscuit was a nuanced task. No other jockey had ever ridden him successfully, and Howard believed no one else could. More important, he knew that Pollard was the jockey best able to protect his horse’s idiosyncratic body from injury. “If Pollard rides Seabiscuit,” he explained to the press, “I know he will bring the horse back intact, and that is my chief concern.”

“Nobody,” he said, “fits my horse better than that boy.”

When Pollard returned from his meeting with the stewards that night, there was more bad news. The Turf and Sport Digest sportswriter poll had named War Admiral Horse of the Year, outballoting Seabiscuit 621 to 602.²Horse and Horseman magazine, which polled horsemen, not sportswriters, had named Seabiscuit Horse of the Year, but the Turf and Sport vote was regarded as the deciding one. There were consolation prizes—Turf and Sport was going to present Seabiscuit with a special plaque commending his performances, and by unanimous vote, they had named him Handicap Champion—but these weren’t the honors the Howard barn craved. And Smith had been right about War Admiral: Riddle’s camp announced that the horse would not be coming to the Santa Anita Handicap after all. He was off to Florida’s Hialeah Racetrack, where he was greeted with near hysteria, generating a bigger stir than any Florida visitor save President Roosevelt. Instead of meeting Seabiscuit, War Admiral would face a soft field in Hialeah’s Widener Handicap.

The next morning, Howard issued his response to Pollard’s suspension.

“No Pollard, no Seabiscuit.”

The stewards did not like being threatened. After leaning toward allowing Pollard to ride in his stakes engagements, they changed their minds. He was suspended from all mounts. Howard struck back. As the state racing board prepared to decide whether or not Pollard’s suspension would be extended to year’s end, Howard scratched Seabiscuit and Fair Knightess from the San Francisco Handicap. Seabiscuit’s next scheduled start was in the Christmas Day Handicap, but Howard made it clear that he would pull Seabiscuit from that race, and any other, if Pollard’s suspension were extended. The crisis was escalating rapidly, and Pollard was getting alarmed. He didn’t want the horse to miss any races on his account. He approached Howard with a compromise: Get George Woolf to ride Seabiscuit. Howard wouldn’t consider it. He trusted no other rider on his horse. He was going to take the state officials to the mat.

On December 22 the chairman of the California Horse Racing Commission gathered reporters together and issued the board’s decree: Red Pollard was banned from riding all horses, including stakes mounts, until January 1, 1938. Five minutes later Charles Howard stormed into the racing secretary’s office at Santa Anita and announced that Seabiscuit would not run on Christmas.

Seabiscuit idled. He was entered in the New Year’s Handicap, held on the day Pollard’s suspension would end, but that was more than a week away. Smith had to keep him fit through workouts. Every reporter and clocker on the West Coast wanted to sit in on them, and Smith was determined to keep them away. His war with the press resumed.

The enemy, Smith discovered, was getting smarter. Knowing that Smith had a history of giving his horse moonlight workouts, the newsmen first tried showing up at ungodly hours of the morning. When he led Seabiscuit and Fair Knightess out for what was supposed to be a secret predawn workout veiled in thick fog, Smith discovered a thicket of clockers and reporters waiting for him.³ Because visibility was so low, they had formed a human chain stretching all the way around the track, each man clocking a portion of Seabiscuit’s workout. In spite of the pea-soup fog, they caught the Biscuit spinning six furlongs in 1:14, a solid workout.

Smith tried plan b: working Seabiscuit in the afternoons on Mondays, when Santa Anita was closed to racing and the clockers and reporters had gone home. His adversaries guessed his tactic and hung around Santa Anita hour after hour on the following Monday.⁴ Seabiscuit didn’t show. One by one, the reporters bailed out. As dusk fell, the last one drove away. Seconds later Smith and Seabiscuit trotted out onto the track. The horse worked in solitude. The next day the clockers and press got word that they had been duped.

The Howards blew time any way they could. They showed up at the barn every morning at seven sharp, Howard with sugar cubes, Marcela with Wee Biscuit, a toy Scottish terrier given to her during a visit to Bing Crosby’s house. The reporters were almost always in tow, and Howard usually created some amusement for them to write up or photograph, including talking Smith into dipping Seabiscuit’s hoof in ink and stamping their Christmas cards.⁵ In the afternoons, the Howards would walk up to their box for the races. Howard made sport of cornering journalists who had criticized Seabiscuit. Summoning them to the box, he and his whole family would rise together and ask in unison, “Tell us what you have against Seabiscuit.” On one of those afternoons, Marcela brought Alfred Vanderbilt up to join them. She introduced him to her cousin, a gorgeous young woman named Manuela Hudson. Vanderbilt was dazzled. A romance began, and Alfred and Manuela were soon engaged. Vanderbilt owed the Howards a favor.

Everyone was waiting for the impost announcement for the New Year’s Handicap. They had reason to worry. Howard’s insistence that his horse would not run under more than 130 pounds had put track handicappers in a bind. California racing rules mandated that no horse carry fewer than 100 pounds, and Seabiscuit was clearly more than 30 pounds better than most horses on the West Coast.⁶ But Seabiscuit was a fail-safe moneymaker, drawing record crowds and wagering virtually everywhere he showed his face. If tracks wanted the attendance, revenue, and exposure that a superstar like Seabiscuit brought, they had to obey Howard’s wishes. But if they gave him 130 or fewer pounds, they risked the ire of rival horsemen and the excoriation of journalists.

All week before the weights for the New Year’s Handicap were announced, Howard made warning noises about his 130-pound limit. On the Tuesday before the race, the weights were released. Smith and Howard groaned. Seabiscuit was weighted at 132 pounds. Seabiscuit was getting heavy and stall-crazy and desperately needed a race. That night, while playing in his stall, he reared up and smacked his head against the stall door. He came down with a nasty gash a millimeter above his right eye. Smith stitched him up, installed a safety door, and damned the racing secretary. Unable to stomach running with 132 pounds, he scratched the horse. Next among race possibilities was the San Pasqual Handicap, but again, the secretary assigned him 132 pounds. Howard and Smith again scratched him. Howard started referring to the racing secretary as “public enemy number one.” Only two races remained on Seabiscuit’s schedule before the Santa Anita Handicap, the San Carlos on February 19 and the San Antonio on February 26. Seabiscuit was very, very late in his preparation.