he could not suppress his high spirits. He was riding in fine form, everything clicking, the broken bones mended, his timing right. Beneath him that morning was Seabiscuit, and Pollard could feel from the tension in the reins and the rhythm under him that Smith had worked his magic. The horse was, as they said, “sound as a Roosevelt dollar” and jumping out of his skin to run. He clicked past the track poles at a staccato pace. Pollard tipped back in the irons and Seabiscuit tugged on his hands, picking off six furlongs in 1:12?, marvelous time. The horse finished the mile sparkling and galloped out an eighth of a mile farther, still burning Pollard’s arms in his eagerness to continue.
A smile shimmered over Smith’s face. Six days to go until the Massachusetts Handicap. Bring on War Admiral.
Back at the barn, Pollard jumped off and handed the reins to a groom. He sat down in front of a shed row to rest and chat with friends. While sitting there, he caught sight of an old friend from his Tijuana days, owner Bert Blume, and the two began talking. Blume was in trouble. A rider had promised to gallop a green two-year-old named Modern Youth for him but hadn’t shown up. There were no other riders available. The workout was critical; the colt was scheduled to race and needed a blowout. The race in question was a forgettable weekday event for a trifling purse, but Blume was strapped for money. Pollard, Blume remembered later, “had been broke often enough to know what it was like.” And he had not forgotten a good turn Blume had done him back in his bush-league days.
“I’ll work the bum,” Pollard said. He hopped aboard the horse and trotted off. Had the rider given Blume a moment to consider the risk Pollard was taking in riding an immature colt just before a major race, Blume would not have let him go. But Pollard, as Blume noted, was impulsive with his generosity. He and Modern Youth were gone in an instant. All Blume could do was watch.
Flying past the three-eighths pole at breakneck speed, Modern Youth suddenly spooked, bolting to the right, and headed straight for the outer rail. Pollard couldn’t stop him. The colt plunged through the rail, somehow got his hooves back under him again, and fled for the barns. Pollard clung to his back, unable to regain control. The horse was running in a blind terror, streaking down the shed rows. He was probably doing thirty or so when he tried to cut between two barns. He was moving too fast to make it. He skidded sideways and slammed into the corner of a barn, then fell in a heap.
A sickening noise ran down the long line of barns. It was Pollard. He was screaming.
His right leg was nearly sheared off below the knee.1
All along the backstretch, men dropped what they were doing and ran toward the sound. They found Pollard lying on the ground, writhing spastically. The flesh of his leg had been ripped away, exposing the bone. Pollard’s face was a rictus of agony, his lips peeled back over his teeth, and gusts of pain were rolling through his body and escaping through his mouth in deep guttural roars.
Someone ran for an ambulance, but the one that sat at the track during the day’s races had not yet arrived. Someone else called Smith, who rang for an ambulance and then sped toward the barns. The stable hands, despairing of getting help to the track fast enough, fetched the only transportation on hand, a little runabout truck that the track starter used to motor around the course. The truck had no passenger seat, and the back was cluttered with gate equipment. So while Pollard lay on the ground, his cries distilling down to long strings of barked obscenities, the panicked stable hands heaved the gear out of the runabout. They sprinted down the shed rows, gathering pommel pads, horse blankets, and rub rags, and threw them on the truck bed to serve as a makeshift gurney mattress. They hoisted the screaming rider up from the foot of the barn wall and gently laid him on the horse paraphernalia. The starter jumped into the driver’s seat while a host of stable hands climbed in around Pollard, who was swearing out every oath in his tremendous vocabulary. The little runabout chugged off onto the road.
Back at the barn, Blume was in tears. He sobbed uncontrollably for an hour and sank into a weeklong guilt- inspired bender. He never forgave himself.
Though Winthrop Hospital was only five minutes from the track, none of the stable hands knew where it was. The runabout driver steered the truck blindly through the streets, slowed by heavy traffic, trying to find someone to help Pollard. The jockey never stopped screaming. An excruciating forty-five minutes passed. Pollard was growing more and more frantic. Then, across lanes of traffic ahead, someone spotted a physician’s bungalow. The runabout puttered toward it.
Just then an ambulance screamed up behind the starter’s truck and pulled to a halt. Smith sprang out. After commandeering the ambulance at the track, he had been combing the streets for nearly an hour in search of the runabout. He found Pollard mad with pain, “hotter than a smoking .45,” went one account, “and not holding back.” They transferred their wailing patient into the ambulance. Smith climbed in beside him, and the driver hit the siren and slammed the pedal to the floor, darting in and out of lanes and swerving around cars. Along a road running perpendicular to a river, the traffic thickened, bogging the ambulance down. Pollard became wild, screeching and howling in the back.
“Tom!” he shouted. “Stop this wagon! I can’t stand it any longer. Stop it, I tell you!” His voice was so loud that passersby across the river turned to see what the commotion was. Smith, shaken by Pollard’s insistence, told the driver to stop.
Pollard sat up and began searching the lines of buildings. His eyes hit on one.
“STOP!” he bellowed. “That’s the place.” He pointed to a liquor store. “Tom, I tell you I cannot get to that hospital alive if you don’t get on over there and buy me a bottle of beer.”
Smith, a lifelong teetotaler who strongly disapproved of Pollard’s drinking, probably waved off the jockey’s plaintive wails for alcohol that morning. But his agent, Yummy, came through. Speeding to the hospital, he snuck a crock of bow-wow wine in to Pollard. He found the stricken rider distracting himself from his pain by firing off aphorisms from Ralph Waldo Emerson—“Old Waldo”—at the nurses.
Yummy saw Pollard’s leg and was horrified. Both bones of his lower leg were splintered. Yummy knew what the injuries meant. He reeled over by the telephones and wept. He spent the morning calling Pollard’s friends, crying into the phone as he broke the news. “The Cougar just got throwed off a horse he was working and busted his leg,” he sobbed to David Alexander. Yummy stayed by Pollard all day, despondent, greeting the worried friends who came to see him. He would still be there long after nightfall.
Someone contacted San Francisco and told the Howards what had happened. Howard got on the telephone and pulled every string he had. Almost immediately he had a team of the nation’s best orthopedic specialists on planes, flying in to Boston at his expense.2 They examined Pollard’s leg. Somehow, they saved it from amputation, but it was a hollow victory.
Pollard, they announced, would probably never walk again. His career was declared over.
Smith wired the news to Woolf in New York, asking that he come up immediately. Woolf sped north.
Pollard stabilized. Woolf arrived to take his place on Seabiscuit. On the backstretch, there was only one
