Seabiscuit: An American Legend

In New York, where he had been lobbying Riddle in person, Vanderbilt had the proposal with Riddle’s demands typed up as a formal contract and sent to Howard. Howard moaned about the walk-up. He called Smith, who mulled it over. The trainer told him to demand that the start be made with a bell, not simply the traditional walk-up flag, and without assistant starters. The jockeys, he said, would have to be able to handle their horses without aid. Howard passed this on to Vanderbilt, who agreed. The contract came back. Howard had signed it and enclosed his $5,000 forfeit fee.

With one man down and one to go, Vanderbilt went to seal the deal. He showed up at Riddle’s New York hotel room, contract in hand. Riddle was gone. The owner had already departed for the train station, bound for Philadelphia. Vanderbilt jumped into a cab, sped across town, and dashed into Penn Station, where he caught up with Riddle just as he was about to board the train. Riddle was still wavering. Vanderbilt stood his ground and refused to let Riddle board the train until he had signed the paper. Riddle gave in, and Vanderbilt returned to Maryland to cheers from horsemen. The November 1 Pimlico Special, universally hailed as the race of the century, was on. Nothing, this time, was going to stop it from being run.

When news of the deal broke to an ecstatic public on October 5, horsemen were amazed that Howard had accepted the walk-up. One horseman, wrote The New Yorker’s Audax Minor, “wonders if Riddle forgot to ask for permission to bring his own judges, too.” Yet during the negotiations, Vanderbilt had noticed something strange. Howard, who had been loudly and publicly lamenting Riddle’s demand for the walk-up, seemed in private to be delighted. “Howard loved it,” Vanderbilt remembered. “He loved it.”

The reason was Tom Smith. Once again the old cowboy had something up his sleeve. All along, he had been secretly hoping that Riddle would demand the walk-up.¹¹ By some accounts, he had actually instructed Howard to make a few protests before ultimately agreeing to it so that no one would suspect his game plan. The best anyone thought Smith could hope for was for Seabiscuit to somehow stay reasonably close to War Admiral in the early stages of the race. Smith was far more ambitious. Sitting on a tack trunk with his friend Bill Buck during the match negotiations, he made an amazing statement. “I’m going to give them birds the biggest surprise they ever had in their lives.¹²

“I’m going to send Seabiscuit right out on the lead.”

Pollard was lying on his hospital bed, chatting with David Alexander, when the phone rang. It was Woolf, and he wanted to get Pollard’s opinion on the match.¹³ The Iceman, like virtually everyone else, disagreed with Smith. He thought War Admiral simply had more God-given speed than Seabiscuit, and that the Triple Crown winner would surely beat him off of the line. How, he asked Pollard, should he ride this race?

Pollard surprised him. If Woolf put the throttle to the floor right from the bell, he promised him, Seabiscuit would beat War Admiral to the first turn. He told Woolf to gun to the lead but to keep him in check on the backstretch. When jockey Kurtsinger launched War Admiral in his final drive for the wire, Pollard said, do something completely unexpected and probably unprecedented: Let him catch up.

It was a startling plan. “Maybe you would call it a kind of horse psychology,” Pollard explained to Alexander. “Once a horse gives Seabiscuit the old look-in-the-eye, he begins to run to parts unknown. He might loaf sometimes when he’s in front and thinks he’s got a race in the bag. But he gets gamer and gamer the tougher it gets.” Pollard was sure that if Woolf let War Admiral challenge him, Seabiscuit would run faster and try harder than if Woolf tried to hold the lead alone. “Seabiscuit is the gamer horse. I know that.” From there on in, the instructions were simple. Once War Admiral hooked Seabiscuit, “race him into the ground.”

Everything hinged on two assumptions to which virtually no one outside the Seabiscuit camp would have ever agreed: that Seabiscuit had the speed to beat War Admiral off the line, and that he had enough gameness to fight back and win when his jockey sacrificed his lead. On the first point, Woolf was quickly convinced. The second was more difficult. Pollard knew that what he was asking his friend to do went against every tenet of reinsmanship.

“Most jockeys would have thought me nuts,” he told Alexander after hanging up. “When a horse drives on you at a time like that, it just seems logical to drive as hard as you can to stay in front. It’s instinct. I tell you that what I told Woolf to do was tough to do.” If Pollard was wrong about Seabiscuit, then his strategy would hand the victory to War Admiral. But Woolf recognized that his friend understood the horse better than he did. He came to view the race as Pollard did, as a test of toughness, and had never seen a horse as tenacious as Seabiscuit. “Seabiscuit’s like a hunk of steel—Solid.¹⁴ Strong,” he once said. “Admiral has speed, good speed … speed when unopposed. But he’s not game.” Of Seabiscuit he said, “you could kill him before he’d quit.”¹⁵

Woolf agreed to do exactly what Pollard told him to do. He and Smith brought Seabiscuit to Pimlico and went to work.

On the day after the match race deal was finalized, Smith walked up the Pimlico track to the starter’s stand. Climbing up to the bell, he rang it several times, studying the sound. It made a clang much like an alarm clock. He hopped down and went back to the barn, where he gathered up some redwood planks, a phone, and an alarm clock. Dismantling the clock and the phone, he rigged up a starting bell with the clock alarm and the telephone’s five-inch batteries, then cut the redwood into a box to hold the works and wired a trigger button to the outside. When the box was complete, Smith tacked up Seabiscuit and Pumpkin, pushed Woolf up onto the former, swung himself onto the latter, and took them toward the track, carrying the box with him.

On most mornings, War Admiral preceded Seabiscuit onto the course. Invariably, hundreds of people fanned out around the track apron to watch the Triple Crown winner, who had come to Pimlico after crushing the field in the Jockey Club Gold Cup. Trainer Conway stood on the sideline and watched his horse from afar as he circled around the course, legging up for the stout mile-and-three-sixteenths distance of the match. War Admiral was, as always, fretting and fussing and glorious.

As War Admiral was led back to Man o’ War’s old barn, Conway stepped back to watch Smith and Pumpkin trotting onto the track alongside Seabiscuit and Woolf. Smith took the horses up to the race’s starting point at the top of the homestretch. The crowd, which had been thinly dispersed around the track to see War Admiral’s distance workouts, migrated up to the turn after Seabiscuit and stood in a thick mass by the rail.

Spectators murmured among themselves at Smith’s homemade bell.¹⁶ They watched quizzically as Smith lined up his horse, stepped behind him, and hit the bell, sending Seabiscuit into a rocket start. Woolf hustled him deftly; having begun his career booting horses through walk-up match races in Indian country, he knew how to hit the gas on a horse. Most of the time, Woolf would only let the horse fly through a short sprint before pulling him up and circling back for another go. Day after day, Woolf and Smith repeated the drill, sometimes pairing him with Chanceview. The homemade bell worked perfectly, and the horse began blowing off the line with explosive power.

When the walk-ups were over, Smith would take the horse back to the barn. Just as always, in the afternoons most of the Eastern Seaboard streamed into the barn to stare at Seabiscuit. Smith didn’t seem to mind. “Can’t hurt a horse looking at him,” he said. Smith probably did think you could hurt Seabiscuit by looking at him. Which is why he made sure that the horse they were all gawking at was Grog.¹⁷