mass.
From the far outside, Woolf felt something coming. He turned in the saddle and looked back. It was a lone horse, shaking loose from the pack and driving toward Seabiscuit as Rosemont had done a year before. Woolf studied the horse’s head, then straightened out. He knew that face: a long aristocratic nose, mahogany deepening to black at the muzzle. But the silks on the rider didn’t match. He had to be wrong. He swung his head back and looked again. There was no mistake.
It was Stagehand.
The realization shivered through Woolf: The caps of Stagehand and Sceneshifter had been switched.11 All the way around the track, the horse Woolf thought he had been chasing had in fact been behind him, stalking him. Woolf had spent Seabiscuit’s rally much too early, in pursuit of the wrong horse.
Up in the grandstand, Stagehand’s trainer, Earl Sande, realized what was happening. “We’ve got the race!” he shouted.14 Nick Wall, aboard Stagehand, thought he had it too. He had sat behind Seabiscuit, watched him dash off on the backstretch, and thought that Woolf had lost his head. He was sure that Seabiscuit was finished. Wall was sitting on a fresh, perfectly conditioned horse, under a feather impost, just dropping down into his run. He thought:
Streaking down the homestretch, Woolf was a crimson blur on Seabiscuit’s back, lifting him, holding him together, begging him for more, dropping flat to lie under the wind. Wall wound Stagehand up to top speed, his eyes fixed on Woolf’s back. He couldn’t understand it: His horse was tearing over the track, but he was barely gaining. Gradually, he snipped away at the distance between them. They drew even. Seabiscuit disappeared, his compact body eclipsed from the crowd’s view by Stagehand’s long, dark form. It seemed that Stagehand would surely rush right by and that Seabiscuit would reappear in his wake. Up in the stands, Pollard thought it was over.15
But Seabiscuit did not appear. For as long as they lived, spectators would regard what they saw next as the most extraordinary feat they ever witnessed in sport.16 They recognized it all at once: Seabiscuit, under a tremendous load, having already run at world-record speed for most of the race,
The crowd was in a frenzy. McCarthy, one of the few commentators who had not mistaken Stagehand for Sceneshifter, was screaming himself hoarse.10 “It’s Seabiscuit and Stagehand. They’re coming away. It’s all between them … They’re almost here! Stagehand is running stronger.
It was too much for Pollard. He twisted in his chair and gasped for air, terrified, overjoyed. He was choking on it. His heart was thumping so hard in his chest that for a moment he wondered if it would fail, if he would die right there in the announcer’s booth, the race still playing out beneath him. Marcela went white and shrieked.13 Someone behind her, remembering the microphone, clapped a hand over her mouth.17 Below them, Howard stood absolutely still. His binoculars had fallen from his hands.
The rest of the field dropped into the distance. Stagehand and Seabiscuit drove side by side, blazing through a final quarter in 24? seconds, astounding for a distance race. Wall was hammering Stagehand at Seabiscuit, but Seabiscuit was hanging up against him and giving it right back, ferocious, head down, ears pinned. Woolf was strung flat over Seabiscuit’s back, driving for all his worth. As the wire neared, the horses’ heads bobbed out of time, so that the lead was traded every few feet. They hit the line together.
Again, no one was sure who had won. There was the long wait, the murmuring crowd, the timer blinking a new track record, and again, the soft whir of the finish photo slipping down to the stewards. The photo was murky, indistinct. The stewards made their ruling.
The winner was Stagehand.
Atop the grandstand, Marcela and Red huddled together and wept. The jockey pulled himself up and smiled. “He tried with every ounce, with every muscle in his body,” he later said. “I am proud of my horse.”
Howard and Smith sat cold and still in their box. By two noses in two runnings of the race he and his wife most wanted to win, Howard had lost $182,150, and Seabiscuit had been denied the title of history’s greatest money winner. Howard pushed out a faint laugh. “Hell,” he said. “We can’t win all the time.”
The press box wilted. Seabiscuit had delivered what many of them thought was the greatest performance in racing history, and had lost simply because of a fluke in the weight system, and a foul from another horse. “The best horse,” wrote turf scribe Salvator, “was unjustly beaten.”
Stagehand cantered back to the winner’s circle. “That’s the greatest racehorse in the world,” Nick Wall would say of Seabiscuit.18 “He had enough trouble to stop a locomotive.… At equal weights, there’s nothing that wears racing plates that’s a mortal to beat him.”
Seabiscuit returned to the grandstand, where Smith and the Howards awaited him. Woolf was rigid with rage. He slid down and dragged his kangaroo-leather saddle off of Seabiscuit, so angry over the foul from Count Atlas that he could barely speak. It was the first time in his ten-year career that he had been beaten in a photo finish of a stakes race.
Howard looked at Seabiscuit. The horse’s head was high, and light played in his eyes. He didn’t know he had lost. Howard felt confidence swell in himself once more.
“We’ll try again,” he said.19 “Next time we’ll win it.”
(© BETTMANN/CORBIS)
HARDBALL
A few minutes after Seabiscuit lost, the Howards reeled out of Santa Anita, changed into formal attire, raised their chins once again, and walked into the Santa Anita Turf Club Ball, held in honor of Stagehand’s victory. There was a buzz in the room. Hours before, beneath the swaying palms of Florida’s Hialeah Park, War Admiral had logged his tenth consecutive victory, winning the Widener Handicap with ease. The Triple Crown winner had become so unruly
