Seabiscuit would turn six, relatively old for a racehorse and an age at which most stallions were already at stud. The newsmen wanted to know if Howard was ready to retire his horse. Howard shook his head. Beating War Admiral had always been a secondary ambition. Charles and Marcela’s greatest wish was for Seabiscuit to win the Santa Anita Handicap. The horse would stay in training.
When Howard finally let them go, the reporters went home and filled out their ballots for championship honors. Seabiscuit was, at last, Horse of the Year.
Smith arrived at the barn at four the next morning.37 The reporters, drowsing in the barn aisles, jumped up when they saw him. For once in his life, Smith couldn’t stop smiling. “That War Admiral is a better horse than I thought he was,” he quipped as he walked into the shed row. “I had been sure we’d beat him by ten lengths, and it was only four. It’s funny that nobody’d believe me when I said this horse could run.”
As he approached Seabiscuit’s stall, he fell silent, walking tiptoe. He gently opened the door and peered inside. Seabiscuit was a dark lump half buried in the straw, dead to the world. Smith stepped back and quietly closed the door.
“He’s earned his rest, all right,” he breathed.
Up in Massachusetts, Pollard greeted reporters with a rhyme:
David Alexander came in with congratulations.
“Well, what did you think of it?” Alexander asked.
“He did just what I’d thought he’d do.”
“What was that?”
“He made a Rear Admiral out of War Admiral.”
An envelope from Woolf arrived. Inside was $1,500, half the jockey’s purse.38
PART III
(© BETTMANN/CORBIS)
“ALL FOUR OF HIS LEGS ARE BROKEN”
In mid-November, after five months in bed, Pollard emerged from Winthrop Hospital, stabbing at the ground with his crutches and swinging his legs along. He returned to the world a changed man. His body was still wasted. His face was withered and old. His career was dead. He was homeless. And because he had no insurance, he hadn’t a cent left to his name.
The Howards asked him to come live with them at Ridgewood. Pollard accepted. His doctor drove him to the airport, and Agnes rode along with them. Pollard promised her that once he was established, he would send for her and they would marry. Agnes watched him bump up to the plane and wondered if he would live to see her again.
When Pollard arrived in California, he went to Tanforan to see the racetrackers again. His appearance stunned everyone. On the backstretch, his old contract trainer, Russ McGirr, saw the young man whom he had once purchased as a bug boy for a bridle, a saddle, and a few sacks of oats. McGirr burst into tears as they embraced.
Pollard settled in at Ridgewood. He was determined to heal and get back to riding, so he tossed away his crutches and tried to walk. It was a mistake. On one of the Ridgewood hills, he set his foot down wrong in a ditch hidden in the grass. The leg came down at an oblique angle and snapped.1
The Howards rushed Pollard to the hospital Charles had built in memory of his lost son and called Doc Babcock, the same country physician who had tried in vain to save Frankie. In examining Pollard’s leg, Babcock discovered that the Massachusetts doctors hadn’t managed the setting and rehabilitation of Pollard’s leg properly. The leg would have to be rebroken, but this time, he felt, it would heal. Pollard knew what suffering lay in store for him but didn’t hesitate. He underwent the procedure.2
Soon afterward, Woolf drove from Maryland back to California, where he arrived at Tanforan to general applause. Someone told him that Pollard had again been hospitalized, and Woolf was crestfallen. He got back in his car and headed north to Willits, where he spent several days visiting with Pollard.
November rolled through Maryland, bringing with it sheets of ice.3 The track at Pimlico became a virtual skating rink, and Smith limited Seabiscuit’s outings to walks around the shed rows. The ice didn’t melt, and the horse began gaining weight.
On December 1 Smith walked out of the barn and stooped over the dirt racecourse. The track was glazed in ice. He stood there a while, quietly humming, “I Hear You Calling, Caroline.” Behind him, Seabiscuit fidgeted in his stall, fat and impatient, having not felt a saddle on his back for ten days. It was time to go. Smith went back inside and consulted with Howard. The next night, the trainer loaded the entire Howard barn onto train cars for a trip south, to Columbia, South Carolina. There they could train in warm weather and on safe tracks.
The choice of South Carolina was a strategic one. Seabiscuit was nominated for the Santa Anita Handicap, to be run in March, but Howard had also named him for the Widener Challenge Cup at Florida’s Hialeah Race Track. The races were to be run on the same afternoon. It is highly unlikely that he was considering passing up the hundred-grander for the Widener, but he thought the pretense might help in the touchy matter of weights. Santa Anita, undoubtedly because of Seabiscuit, had eliminated the 130-pound weight maximum for the handicap. The weights would be announced that winter, and given the results of the match race, the track racing secretary would obviously be inclined to assign Seabiscuit the biggest impost of his career. So Howard parked his horses between the two tracks and began playing one against the other, hoping to pressure Santa Anita out of giving Seabiscuit an excessive impost. Whenever he could, he made good use of his omnipresent entourage of newsmen. Sitting within earshot of a group of reporters at the Giants–Green Bay football game at the Polo Grounds in New York, Howard wondered aloud which race he would choose.
