reminder of the accident. At 6:00 one morning shortly after Pollard went down, a fully equipped ambulance rolled onto the racecourse, pulled over to the side, and parked. Suffolk Downs made sure that it would be there every morning from that day forward. No fallen rider, at least at Suffolk Downs, would have to go to the hospital in a starter’s runabout again.
At the Howard barn, life had to go on. Smith prepared Kayak, the horse Lin Howard had bought in Argentina and sold to his father, for a purse race at Suffolk. As soon as the colt had disembarked in California, Smith had sent him to the Burlingame Polo Grounds near the Howards’ house. He had put the best man he knew, his own son Jimmy, in charge of his breaking and early training. The son had clearly inherited his father’s instincts. Returned to the elder Smith once he matured, Kayak showed promise. A very difficult horse upon his arrival, he was now as tame as a kitten. In his first start, at New York’s Aqueduct Racecourse under Pollard on June 10, he had led into the stretch and lost narrowly, finishing second. Smith was starting to think that Kayak was going to be awfully good.
Seabiscuit took well to Woolf’s guidance. His workouts for the Massachusetts Handicap were brilliant. All traces of knee soreness were gone, and his action was smoother than ever. Smith sent him out one morning for a three- furlong workout. He lined Seabiscuit up at the three-eighths pole, positioned a sprinting stablemate fifty yards ahead and set them off at the same time. Seabiscuit mowed his stablemate down with incredible speed, running the first eighth in 11 seconds, a quarter in 23, and three eighths in 36. “If that isn’t running,” Smith later said, “I don’t know anything about horses.”3
War Admiral, meanwhile, was his usual combative self. Guarded by Spot, a surly Dalmatian who took hunks of flesh out of reporters who got too close, he stormed around the barn and fretted, pouted and balked in his workouts.4 At times he refused to run without a workmate. One day he backed himself up against a fence and froze there, Hard Tack–style, simply refusing to budge. His handlers scurried around, trying to coax him into moving. In the end the only way Conway was able to get him to move at all was to turn him the wrong way around the track.
On June 26 Smith was set to give Seabiscuit his last prerace workout. Outside was a driving rain. Charles and Marcela were due in that afternoon, so Smith delayed the workout. The rain fell all day. At four-thirty the Howards arrived. The track was a quagmire. Howard and Smith stepped out into the muck and worried. In normal conditions, they wouldn’t have worked the horse, but Seabiscuit couldn’t afford to miss another workout before meeting War Admiral. Smith led the horse out. Seabiscuit flew through the slop to clock six furlongs in 1:12?. Howard beamed.
On June 28, the day before the race, heavy rain was still raking the course. Entries were due by 10:30 A.M. At 9:30, War Admiral’s entry was made. Conway was confident. “He can beat anything on four feet,” he had told reporters upon arriving at Suffolk with the bucking, rearing War Admiral in hand, “and if anything beats him, we will know the miracle of the ages has happened.”5 Seabiscuit, he said, was “just one more horse to beat.”
Still Howard and Smith waited. The rain never let up. Smith went down to the track office with his entry but just stood there without entering the horse, watching the rain. Finally, just fourteen minutes before entries closed, he made the entry. The decision was not final; they could still scratch him at any point up to forty-five minutes before post time. “We’re still on the fence,” said Howard.6 If the track stayed loose and wet, the horse was in; if the rain stopped and the track turned into the kind of thick surface that would pull on Seabiscuit’s legs, he was out. Smith went back to the barn and readied Kayak for his purse race. The horse was superb, skipping over the mud to win. His time was excellent.
That night David Alexander and a host of radio technicians arrived at Pollard’s hospital room. NBC had asked Alexander to host a nationally aired, live interview with Woolf and Pollard, conducted from Pollard’s hospital room. Woolf would be on a hookup from a Boston broadcasting studio. Alexander found Pollard lying supine with his leg up in traction, his misery greatly assuaged by a leggy private nurse named Agnes. The technicians set up a makeshift radio studio around his bed. Concerned that Pollard’s famously mischievous ad-libs might get them kicked off the air, Alexander had come prepared. He presented Pollard with a complete script for the interview, leaving nothing to the jockey’s rich imagination or questionable vocabulary. At the studio, Woolf was given the same script.
At first the interview went as planned. Woolf read his lines, and Pollard read his responses. When they reached the section devoted to race tactics, Woolf dutifully recited his line asking Pollard how he should ride the race. Just then, Pollard’s script spilled to the floor. The pages fluttered everywhere. Alexander hurriedly tried to gather them up. He looked up, a mess of papers in hand, just as Pollard opened his mouth. In the jockey’s eyes, Alexander saw “an evil gleam.”
“Why, Georgie boy,” said Pollard to the eager ears of the entire nation, “get on the horse—face to the front— put one leg on each side of him, get someone to lead you into the gate, and then
For a moment the only sound reaching the NBC radio audience was a brief
NBC didn’t think it was so funny. The quip was a national scandal. The network, horrified at Pollard, wrote up a sanitized transcript of the interview.
The harrows worked the track all night. Howard kept the reporters up late. He was careful not to raise expectations. “My horse is sharper than a fishwife’s tongue, and I’m as anxious as the next man to see him race against War Admiral.8 But a ‘holding track’ definitely is against him, and if we have to miss Mr. Riddle’s horse today, we’ll catch up with him yet.”
In the morning the rain stopped. Seabiscuit was taken to the track for a final blowout. He ran beautifully. Smith took him back to the stall, inspected his legs, found them clean and cool, and bound them up in bandages for the rest of the morning. As midday rolled past, seventy thousand fans spilled out of the hotels and special trains and poured into the track. It was the second-largest crowd ever to attend a horse race in North America.9 Among the fans was Samuel Riddle. It had taken a special effort to get him to the track that afternoon. He was in poor health and had to come with the assistance of his physician, who sat with him.
Howard and Smith went out to make their final decision. They walked down the track from the finish line to the far turn. Their feet sank to the ankles, but the mud was loose. They looked for the “cupping” that told of a sticky track, but they didn’t find it. One hour before post time, fifteen minutes before the deadline for scratches, they decided to go. Seabiscuit’s number blinked up on the board. The race was on. Smith had never been more confident in his horse. Not normally a betting man, he cleaned out his pockets and put it all on Seabiscuit’s nose.
Forty minutes before post time, Smith walked into Seabiscuit’s stall. The bandages were unraveled from the horse’s legs. Smith slid his hands over the horse’s joints and tendons, feeling for the uniform cool firmness of a healthy leg. Halfway down one foreleg, his fingers tracing the bones and soft tissues of the lower leg, Smith paused. Seabiscuit was flinching. Smith looked hard at the spot. There was no break in the skin, and the hair lay flat. He touched it again. He felt a slender vein of heat, running from the ankle to the knee. The leg was injured. Smith
