Seabiscuit: An American Legend

The following afternoon Smith emerged from the barn to swing Pollard up on a horse for a race. As he stood in the paddock, a reporter’s voice sang out from the crowd.

“Is it true, Mr. Smith, you consider eight P.M. to be your lucky hour?”

“Tom answered,” wrote a delighted Jolly Roger, “with a grunt of something akin to rage.”

There was rejoicing among the Wise We Boys. “Score: Newsmen 1, Tom Smith 0,” trumpeted Jolly Roger in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Smith executed a flanking maneuver. A few days later, reporters and clockers were startled to see him leading Seabiscuit out in broad daylight. He was heading toward the training track, which abutted the main track’s clubhouse turn. Had Jean Harlow been dancing stark naked around the sixteenth pole, the press box could not have cleared out any faster. Thinking that Smith was surrendering and victory was at hand, the Wise We Boys grabbed their stopwatches and bolted from the booth, ran down through the bowels of the immense building and into the parking lot, piled into their cars, sped over to the training track, bailed out, and sprinted to the side of the course. There they sat, panting and congratulating one another, watching the gap in the track and waiting for Smith to lead Seabiscuit in and lay down his arms, like Lee at Appomattox.

Time passed. A breeze whistled over the empty track. Seabiscuit didn’t come. The laughter gradually died out.

By the time the boys at the training track realized that they had been had, it was all over. Seeing that he had emptied out the clockers’ stand and reporters’ booths, Smith had simply turned Seabiscuit around and worked him over on the main track. He had fooled every single clocker and newsman on the grounds.

Knowing he wouldn’t be able to pull that off twice, Smith tried his most ingenious move: hiding in plain sight. Since his pursuers were focused on discovering him working Seabiscuit late at night, before dawn, and on the training track, Smith scheduled a workout on the main track in the daytime, just after the last race. He knew that the clockers and reporters would never believe that he would do something so obvious, and would pay no attention to him.

Because Belmont rules stated that any workout in daylight after the last race had to be approved, Smith had to consult the stewards. He knew better than to walk over to the stewards’ stand—a reporter stood by to tail him wherever he went—so he called the office instead.

When the phone rang, the stewards were tied up in meetings. By fantastic coincidence, a reporter named Eddie Farrell happened to have just taken a seat by the phone while he waited to speak with the stewards. Hearing the ringing, a steward yelled into the office, asking Farrell if he would pick up the phone. Farrell answered with a simple hello.

“This is trainer Tom Smith speaking,” came the voice over the line. “I would like permission to work a horse after the last race.”

Farrell couldn’t believe his ears. He turned in his chair and called to the stewards. “Tom Smith would like permission to work a horse after the last race.”

“Tell him all right,” came the reply.

Farrell banged down the phone, dashed to the press box, rounded up the clockers, and delivered the news.

One half hour after the last race was run that evening, twenty-two giggling newsmen and clockers tiptoed to the top of the grandstand. They crammed into the press box and hid themselves, keeping the lights out and spying through peepholes. Grinning and giddy, they watched as Smith’s charge worked over a mile and an eighth. The following morning the papers were full of stories on Seabiscuit’s workout, but again, the reporters made no mention of the circumstances. “Score, newsmen 2, Tom Smith 0,” wrote Jolly Roger.

But there was something out of place about the incident. Some of the clockers, training their field glasses on Tom Smith’s face as he led the horse back to the barn, noticed a glaring incongruity. Tom Smith looked happy.

“I’m wondering,” Jolly Roger wrote later, “if that really was Seabiscuit the boys were looking at.” It occurred to him for the first time that Grog, who was supposed to be in California, hadn’t made an appearance out there in a good long time.

The question was still eating at him later as he sat at his spy post outside Smith’s cottage. Curious, he trained his field glasses on Smith through the cottage window. There sat the trainer, pushed up against the oil stove. Smith, Roger noted with despair, “had a slight, knowing smile.”

Had Smith known he was speaking to a reporter when he called the stewards’ office that afternoon? “I was just wondering which would be the winner in a contest such as this—an Indian fighter’s intuition or that wily old boy, coincidence,” Roger wrote later. “Personally, I’m coupling Seabiscuit and Intuition.”

At the murky press of daybreak on May 20, Pollard took Seabiscuit to the track, jogged him around to warm up, then walked him to the training track and into the starting gate. It was immediately clear that Seabiscuit wasn’t right. He started banging around the gate like Chanceview and refused to settle down. When the bell rang, he left it like a shot. Pollard flattened down for a hard mile workout. The first few furlongs went well, but gradually, Seabiscuit began to slow down. After a third quarter in 25?, Pollard reached back and delivered a crack with the whip. There was no response. The horse kept decelerating. After a final quarter in 27 ?, Pollard pulled him up.

The stopwatch told the tale. It had taken Seabiscuit 1:42 to negotiate eight furlongs on the training track, and that was under strong urging. Worst of all, it was by far the fastest mile the horse had worked since coming to Belmont. The reporters, for once, had caught the workout. “Somebody ought to tell him that he’s going to fight War Admiral,” one of them mused after watching Seabiscuit slog by. “If he goes into the ring that way against the Admiral, he’ll be batted out in a helluva hurry.”

The rumors that had been filtering down the backstretch, whispered in confidence between clockers and horsemen, suddenly became noisy public accusations: Something is wrong with Seabiscuit. The newsmen peppered the nation’s papers with stories about the slow workouts. People were hollering suspicious questions at Smith everywhere he went. The atmosphere was growing hostile. Smith needed a little Howard image control, but he was on his own. The Howards were on a cruise around Bermuda. They had visited briefly in early May, just before embarking on the ship. Howard, chattering gaily about how he had been mobbed on the train by Seabiscuit fans who were coming to New York for the race, swung by the barn for a quick once-over of his horse.

“He never looked better,” said Howard.⁸