Seabiscuit: An American Legend

A distant train whistle sounded. War Admiral spooked at it, jerking his head up. For one brief instant he stood still, ears pricked, head high, body stretched out in all its geometric magnificence. He was listening to the train. No one was foolish enough to try to pull off the ugly halter and nose chain to perfect the shot. The attendant on the end of the lead rope braced himself, Kurtsinger turned his head and grinned stiffly, and all the photographers snapped their shots.

Kurtsinger bailed out and War Admiral whirled off. Seabiscuit came out after him, sauntering in, wrote a reporter, “like he owned the place.” Pollard strode out with him, buttoned into Howard’s red and white silks.

The contrast between the two horses could not have been more glaring. Though a little lower at the withers and nearly half a foot shorter, nose to tail, Seabiscuit seemed a cumbersome giant in comparison. At 1,040 pounds, he outweighed War Admiral by 80 pounds, with six feet of girth and a markedly wider chest. But the big body was perched on legs a full two inches shorter. His neck was thick, his head heavy, his tail stubby, his boxing-glove knees crouched. Whitey had done his best to clean Seabiscuit up, braiding his mane, forelock, and tail, but the mane plaits didn’t lie right and stuck out like quills. The horse stood straddle-legged, as if perpetually bracing himself against a strong wind.

But to the weary photographers, Seabiscuit was a relief. He stood perfectly still as he was being saddled, and Pollard hopped on his back. The photographers lifted their cameras, and Seabiscuit pricked his ears and struck his horizon-gazing pose. He held the position, without quivering a muscle, for nearly five minutes as the photographers scurried around him, cameras grinding, shooting him from every angle. They brought the noisy newsreels right up to his nose, but he never moved.

From the day of his arrival in New York, Smith was Smith; the New York press corps couldn’t get a grunt out of him. “Tom Smith,” wrote a reporter, “says almost nothing, constantly.” The New York Herald Tribune found one reporter’s valiant attempt to get more than a monosyllabic answer out of him so amusing that it published a transcript of the entire nonconversation. Smith was cooperative in only one respect. Probably at Howard’s insistence, he let the press come into the barn to see the horse, albeit without narration from the trainer. This was a step better than George Conway. A similarly mute man described by one reporter as “lean, tall and indifferent,” Conway wouldn’t let photographers near the barn in the understandable fear that the jittery War Admiral would spook at the flashbulbs and whack his head. When Smith proved more welcoming, the reporters virtually moved into Barn 43, forcing the trainer to wade through them to get to his horse. When the horse left the barn, they tramped along en masse behind him, joining large throngs of spectators on the apron of the track. They hung around day and night, asking Smith if he really thought his horse could win.

By May 14, the honeymoon was over. “You won’t be seeing this horse much anymore,” Smith growled. He shooed the press out of the barn, slung a rope across the entrance, posted a guard, and retreated to his track cottage, sitting by an oil stove in a cramped room. Even Pollard, who had been jabbering gaily with reporters since his arrival, stopped talking. “Some suspect,” wrote Jolly Roger, “that Tom may have removed his tongue.” Team Seabiscuit effectively vanished. No one was allowed to see the horse. Pleas for information brought a vintage reply: “No.”

The reporters assumed that Smith was just being curmudgeonly, but there was likely more to it than that. In a workout three days earlier, Seabiscuit had needed 1:48 to negotiate a mile. Though the track was somewhat soggy that day, Seabiscuit had been capable of ticking off miles in 1:36 throughout his career with Smith. It had been an unusually rainy spring in New York, and the track was difficult to handle even when dry. But the surface alone couldn’t account for so sluggish a workout. The horse seemed off, yet Smith could find no problem. There was still plenty of time before the race, but the trainer was increasingly concerned. He knew that any sign that Seabiscuit was not himself would only make the press more intrusive. He parked himself in the cottage and kept his mouth shut. More than ever before, he sought to hide the horse’s training, taking him out at 4:00 A.M. He got away with it until one morning when he was a little late leading the horse off the track. A group of clockers arriving for work at four-thirty saw Smith leading a winded Seabiscuit back to the barn. Smith moved the work times to 8:00 P.M. For the time being, no one caught him, but the press now knew he was fooling them.

The absence of news about the year’s biggest story drove the reporters to distraction. At first they wrote whatever came to mind. One dreamed up an “interview” with Seabiscuit, in which the horse disowned his year- younger half-uncle, War Admiral. Life magazine ran a full-page photo layout of Seabiscuit’s facial expressions. One bored clocker resorted to timing Smith as he walked down the track, catching him at a clip of thirty-five minutes for the half mile. Veteran turf writer John Lardner printed the information, “but this,” he admitted, “had little or no bearing on the race.”

The New York press corps went into a huddle. They dubbed their conflict with Smith “the Battle of Long Island.” If Smith was going to be silent, so would they; they opted not to write another word about Seabiscuit. It was a bold move, but a bad one. An angry public outcry followed, and the plan was quickly scrapped. So they formed a conspiracy. They banded together to create the “Wise We Boys,” a network of reporters and clockers operating in concert to catch Seabiscuit training.⁷ Someone followed Smith every hour of the day, and each reporter received assignments on where and when to be posted. Clockers were stationed at the track twenty-four hours a day, greeting one another with the phrase “What do you know?” Sentries were deployed in concentric circles around Barn 43, even, reportedly, perching in trees. Meetings were held to share information. It was, remembered one reporter, “an epic of espionage.”

The Wise We Boys’ most inspired decision was to send scouts to pick the brains of anyone who had witnessed Smith’s secret training methods in the past. They pooled their findings and made a critical discovery. During his sojourn in the East in 1937, Smith had been caught working Seabiscuit at night four times. While this information wouldn’t normally have been very useful, the reporters were able to pin down the exact times at which the workouts had been held. In every case, the horse had worked precisely at 8:00. Further investigation unearthed evidence that Smith had secretly worked Seabiscuit twice at Bay Meadows. Again, the time was 8:00 P.M. They had found Smith’s witching hour.

A fearless clocker volunteered to verify the finding. On the night of May 17 he scaled the grandstand and slid out onto the roof. Shinnying out onto a perilous but hidden spot, he gripped the roof with one hand and his stopwatch with the other. He waited. The track was flooded in moonlight. He could see every pole along the course, glowing in lunar blue.

At exactly 8:00, Smith emerged. He walked the length of the grandstand, checking for spies. Seeing no one, he pointed his flashlight at the barns and flicked it on and off twice. Seabiscuit emerged under a rider and cantered up to the far turn. As he dropped into a run, the clocker punched his watch. Seabiscuit rolled around the track, then slowed to a walk and returned to the barn. The clocker stopped his watch and crawled back down.

The next morning, papers across the nation ran the workout time, which was slow, and attributed it to Seabiscuit. Not one paper mentioned the circumstances, reporting the work exactly as if the horse had gone out in the standard manner. Smith said nothing.