“Yes, he looks all right,” replied a groom.
“But he hasn’t been working very well, has he?”
“No, he hasn’t.”
In midafternoon, the cottage door opened. Smith emerged, went to Seabiscuit’s stall, and began preparing to send the horse out. Howard went to the stewards’ stand, to which he called C. V. Whitney, Joseph Widener, and Herbert Bayard Swope. At the track, crowds began to gather to see the workout.
Smith led Seabiscuit toward the course. Howard disappeared into the administrative offices to explain the problem to Swope and Whitney and get their opinion. A few minutes later, he walked out. A crush of reporters pushed up to him. His voice wavered as he began to speak.
It was three-thirty. Back on the track, Smith boosted Pollard up on Seabiscuit, swung his leg over Pumpkin’s back, and began moving down the course. The track announcer’s voice cut over the grandstand.
The race was off.12
The crowd sagged. Smith led Seabiscuit past the stunned fans and back into the barn.
At the stewards’ office, Howard gave his profound apologies to everyone, then took Marcela back to their lodgings at the Garden City Hotel. She wanted to cry in private.
Howard was mortified over the disaster he had created. And he was worried about his horse. “I don’t know if he’ll ever come out of his soreness,” he said.13 “We won’t patch him up and send him out there to break his heart trying to win.” The idea of retiring him and taking him home to Ridgewood began playing in his mind. Smith shook his head. The horse was not through yet. Smith could work through the lameness. Howard came to believe him. They began laying plans.
Howard was in a fix. His efforts to arrange a match at Belmont had not only fallen through, they had greatly diminished his chances of ever securing a meeting between the two horses. Riddle, who had never been more than lukewarm about it, could now say that he had tried to get the match race but that Howard had backed out. War Admiral could go into his scheduled retirement at season’s end without anyone accusing him of dodging the best competition. Belmont officials were snakebit. Howard did his best to warm them to the idea of rescheduling the match, even setting aside his heretofore paramount goal of breaking Sun Beau’s earnings mark. Forget the $100,000 purse, he said. Once Seabiscuit recovered, he would welcome a race at Belmont held merely on a sporting basis.14 Belmont officials grudgingly agreed to consider it, and there was talk of rescheduling the race for the fall meeting.
Riddle put an end to that. Belmont officials, trying to come up with some way to salvage the weekend, telephoned Riddle and offered War Admiral a berth in the Suburban Handicap, which had been moved to Saturday, May 28, to accommodate the match. Though War Admiral had been assigned 132 pounds, Riddle accepted. The day appeared to have been saved. Twenty-five thousand fans, many of whom had crossed the country expecting to see the race of the century, mobbed Belmont on race day. The papers were singing of Riddle’s sportsmanship in starting War Admiral in the race. The crowd, which had greeted Howard’s announcement with sympathy and understanding, was eager to see its consolation prize.
At the very last second, without any warning, Riddle and Conway refused to start War Admiral. They offered no explanation. Officials insisted that they give one, so they cited poor track condition. As the track was, by all accounts, perfect—the Suburban was run in record time—no one believed them.
War Admiral’s scratch appeared on the jockey board in the infield.15 Most of the reporters, and much of the crowd, believed that Riddle had simply balked at the 132-pound impost and didn’t care enough about the consequences of scratching to do the sportsmanlike thing. The crowd had run out of patience. A cacophony of boos and catcalls rolled down the grandstand for a full two minutes. Riddle, wrote one spectator, “was accused of everything under the sun save the shooting of Lincoln and the current recession.”
C. V. Whitney listened to the din and was livid. Asked if he would agree to a War Admiral–Seabiscuit rescheduling, he snapped.
“Not if I could buy them for a dime a dozen. I’ll never again consent to such a thing.”16
After seeing what Belmont had gone through, no other track managers were likely to agree to a race either. There was a rumor that Seabiscuit’s lameness was a ruse designed to avoid a loss to War Admiral, and an awful lot of people believed it. Howard had, it seemed, only one chance left. If no one was willing to arrange a match, he was going to have to follow War Admiral to his next scheduled contest, to pit Seabiscuit against him in a full-field race.
The next suitable venue was the Massachusetts Handicap on June 29. War Admiral was slated to run in it, and though Suffolk Downs’s officials made no effort to invite defending champion Seabiscuit, Howard had already entered him. Seabiscuit would have a full month to recover, ample time, said Smith, for him to work the soreness out of those knees.
Perhaps Riddle felt the sting of his public excoriation. On June 6, he ran his colt in Aqueduct’s Queen’s County Handicap despite a 132-pound impost. Many of the fans, eager to let Riddle know how they felt about the scratching of a week before, attempted to drown out any cheering with lusty howls.17 In spite of the mixed reception, War Admiral won. Then he loaded up and headed north to Suffolk Downs to prepare for the Massachusetts Handicap. On June 14, Smith and the Howards followed him. Pollard and his agent, Yummy, came with them. Woolf stayed behind. With Pollard in perfect condition, he thought they didn’t need him.
(© BETTMANN/CORBIS)
FORTUNE’S FOOL
It was the early morning of June 23, 1938, workout hours. At Boston’s Suffolk Downs, horses skittered and blew over the track, slower ones making lazy loops around the oval, faster ones humming down the rail. In the clockers’ stand, men clicked stopwatches and jotted down numbers.
There was a pause, and all eyes refocused up the track. Around the turn came a long man on a low horse. The man was Red Pollard; the horse was Seabiscuit. The great rolling wheel of Red’s life had swung upward again, and
