Seabiscuit by moonlight in 1937, racing officials had been growing increasingly frustrated. It had finally boiled over.
Standing in the barn next to his perfectly sound horse, Smith was dumbfounded. “Nobody is going to inspect this horse if I know anything about it,” he snapped. “He won’t go postward if I don’t think he’s in good shape. We wouldn’t have shipped Seabiscuit clear across the country if we didn’t believe he was in good shape. And now that he’s here, no clockers, newspapermen, or veterinarians are going to step in and tell me how to train my horse.”
His words fell flat. The veterinarian arrived at the stall, ready to examine the horse whether or not Smith gave him permission. Smith blocked his way.
“Nobody is going to examine Seabiscuit but me,” he snarled. He slammed the stall doors in the veterinarian’s face. The vet gave up and left.
After trying and failing to reach Howard to get him to talk Smith into the exam, the stewards asked Smith to work the horse in their presence, and cleared a slot for him between the third and fourth races on the afternoon of July 14. An assembly of clockers lined up to see the work. They sat there and aged a little, seeing nothing but an empty track. Hollywood Park general manager Jack Mackenzie tried to make an end run around Smith, running up to Howard’s box in hopes of winning his word that Seabiscuit was sound and would start. But Howard, like Smith and Seabiscuit, never showed up. Mackenzie camped out at the box all afternoon, then gave up and went to a telephone and tried to track Howard down. For once in his life, Howard was inaccessible.
That evening Smith finally emerged from the barn with Seabiscuit. Track representatives dropped in behind him, trailing him all over the track. After watching Seabiscuit work, they followed him around while he cooled out, searching for lameness that wasn’t there.
The conflict turned bizarre on the day before the race. Smith sent his stable agent, Sonny Greenberg, to the racing secretary’s office with an entry form. Mackenzie took one look at it and hit the roof. Smith had scrawled two words across it: “Doubtful starter.”
Mackenzie booted Greenberg back out the door with a demand to see Smith in person. Greenberg ran back to Smith.6 The trainer scrawled another note and sent Greenberg back to the track offices. The stewards read his message: “I have a previous engagement.”
That did it. Mackenzie was seething. Someone suggested that mercenaries be sent over to the Howard barn to forcibly haul Smith into the office. Setting that popular idea aside, the stewards fired the leg-weary Greenberg back to the barn again, bearing yet another message. “Seabiscuit will either be a positive starter tomorrow, or we will refuse his entry entirely.”
A few minutes later, Greenberg dragged himself back to the offices with Smith’s counterdemand: No one was to show up at his barn asking to examine the horse. The stewards complied, and Greenberg stumbled back to the Howard barn.
In late morning, the administrative office door swung open. The officials looked up, expecting to see Greenberg. It was Smith. The stewards sat blinking at him. “All right,” Smith said. “Take the ‘doubtful starter’ off the blank. Seabiscuit will run all right.”
Back at the barn, resting his sore legs, Greenberg saw Smith laughing. “The madder they got, the better he liked it,” Greenberg remembered. “He just done that for bein’ onery.”
On July 16 a record sixty thousand people pressed into Hollywood Park to see Seabiscuit try for the Gold Cup, while millions more crowded around radio sets to hear NBC’s national broadcast. The radio announcer spent fourteen of the fifteen minutes before the race talking about Seabiscuit. One question hummed through the crowd: Was Seabiscuit the same horse he was when he left California in April?
The fans cheered when Seabiscuit stepped out onto the track, then gave him two more ovations as he paraded to the post and loaded into the gate. Once in, Seabiscuit stood quietly. In stall number one, the quick-footed Specify began acting up, backing, ducking back and forth, and kicking at his handlers. He had been assigned just 109 pounds, and his jockey, Wayne Wright, had reduced himself half to death to make weight.7 Wright felt weak and woozy, and was having trouble holding the horse. A lot was riding on his being able to hold himself together: Specify’s owner, Bert Baroni, was so confident that Seabiscuit was lame that he had placed a $5,000 wager on his horse.
Standing under his 133 pounds in the hot sun, Seabiscuit waited. After several minutes and the efforts of three assistant starters, Specify finally stood still. Starter Eddie Thomas reached for the bell. An instant before he rang it, Specify lunged forward. Wright couldn’t hold him. Thomas hit the bell a millisecond later. Specify had lunged himself into a false start, but the race was on. Wright was under Baroni’s orders to restrain the horse, but he simply couldn’t. In a few strides, Specify was six lengths ahead of the field and running away with Wright.
Seabiscuit broke sluggishly and sank back through the field. Going into the first turn with only one horse behind him, Woolf asked Seabiscuit to move up. There was no response. From his post on the homestretch, Smith watched Seabiscuit’s action and gritted his teeth. As he had foreseen, the track was crumbling like sand under the horse’s hooves. In the saddle, Woolf could feel his mount fighting the surface. Seeing that he could not make up ground at this stage, the jockey changed his game plan, eased up, and settled in to wait. The fans grew concerned. Seabiscuit was dropping farther and farther out of the race. After half a mile, he was more than twelve lengths back and still sinking. Woolf was not moving at all, his chin in Seabiscuit’s mane, his eyes on the horses ahead, his hands still. In the grandstand, the crowd pleaded for Woolf to do something.
The Iceman wasn’t worried. “Let ’em run themselves out,” someone heard him saying into Seabiscuit’s ear.8 “It’s a long way to go.” Smith had given him orders to stay with Ligaroti, who was now galloping near him. Woolf knew that to put Seabiscuit into a drive to catch Specify would leave him vulnerable to a late rally by Ligaroti. He would not repeat the mistake he had made against Stagehand, moving too soon. He nudged his mount down onto the rail, where the going was smoother, and waited.
With eight horses ahead of him, Woolf couldn’t see what was happening out front. Seabiscuit was built low to the ground, so Woolf’s view was constantly obstructed by bigger horses. Somewhere in the backstretch, he lost sight of Ligaroti. He knew that there was a horse far out in front, but because the runner immediately ahead, Whichcee, was blocking his view, he couldn’t tell if it was Specify or Ligaroti. It was critical to know. If it was Ligaroti, a horse with a sustained stretch drive, he would have to move now and hope Seabiscuit could hold his rally. If it was the shorter-winded Specify, whom he expected to collapse in the homestretch, he could afford to wait.
Late in the backstretch, Woolf shifted Seabiscuit to the outside and craned around Whichcee. He caught sight of the horse out in front, but he still didn’t know who it was. He looked at the horse’s jockey. He was leading with his left hand. Woolf knew that among the local riders, only Wayne Wright was left-handed. So it had to be Specify. He studied Wright’s hands. He was holding the reins loosely, and they were flapping on Specify’s neck. It was all Woolf needed to see. Specify was at the top of his speed, with nothing in reserve. Woolf was sure that he would soon burn out. He began to edge Seabiscuit closer but didn’t ask him for his best, thinking that Ligaroti was tracking him.
