The reporter, flustered, stammered out something about the rarity of successful comebacks.
Smith stood up. “The Biscuit will come back,” he said in a voice more emotional than he meant it to be.7 “He’ll come back and fool the whole turf world.”
Smith seemed uncomfortable. He drew himself together and smiled at the reporter.
Kayak continued to gaze out the door.
Pollard had learned a thing or two about training from Smith, and he managed Seabiscuit’s rehabilitation carefully. By early summer, walking turned to a gentle canter, first a mile, then two, then three. Seabiscuit kept pulling, but Pollard never gave in; the turns on the little track were too tight, the leg too delicate. Howard walked out to the barn every morning with a quiver in his gut, afraid that they might make a mistake and reinjure Seabiscuit. But the horse kept getting stronger and sounder. An idea was working around in the heads of everyone at Ridgewood. Howard and Smith might be right. Seabiscuit might make it back to the races. Outside the ranch, it was considered an absurd idea. Inside, it seemed somehow possible.
Everyone went to work. Bradshaw began strapping Seabiscuit into a fur-lined muzzle to get the extra pounds off him, and they weighed the horse every week. When a groom was caught sneaking carrots to Seabiscuit, Pollard ran him off with a pitchfork and the groom was summarily fired. Seabiscuit took to stomping and bellowing for food day and night. His moans rang off the barn walls and worked on everyone’s nerves, but no one gave in. “The whole ranch became centered on the job,” Howard said.8 “Even the pigs quit grunting at him and the chickens kept out of his way.”
By summer’s end, Seabiscuit had made surprising progress. He was now soundly negotiating five miles a day. Beneath Pollard, there was something different. Seabiscuit was developing a new stride.9 No longer did he stab out with a foreleg as he ran, producing the curiously choppy duck-waddle gait that so many observers had mistaken for lameness. He now folded his legs up neatly under him when airborne, directing all of his motion forward and back, not side to side. It was a beautiful, smooth gait, and probably a sounder one. Seabiscuit was in fighting trim and hard as rock, and Pollard, though still a wreck, was at least strong enough to handle him.
“Our wheels went wrong together, but we were good for each other,” he said.10 “Out there among the hooting owls, we both got sound again.”
On her trips to the barn, Marcela also noticed something new. Seabiscuit was pacing around his stall, as he had done in his days with Fitzsimmons. When he paused, he directed his gaze at the horizon, distracted. Howard saw that look and knew what it meant. “You knew he wanted to race again,” he said, “more than anything else in the world.”11
In the fall Howard called Smith in. The trainer motored up to the ranch and silently watched as Seabiscuit, looking blocky in his winter coat, was galloped in front of him. Smith scrutinized the horse from head to toe. He was deeply impressed with the work Pollard had done with him.
They were all thinking the same thing. Seabiscuit was ready to take another run at the Santa Anita Handicap.
The idea was outlandish. The comeback, if successful, would be unprecedented.
No elite horse had ever returned to top form after such a serious injury and lengthy layoff.12 Few great horses have competed beyond age five or through more than forty races; in a couple of months Seabiscuit would be a bewhiskered seven years old, more than twice the age of many of the horses he would be facing, and he had already raced eighty-five times. When word got out, the Howard team would be widely ridiculed. But Smith, Howard, and Pollard believed he could do it.
Pollard wanted to go with him. He had never lost his belief that he could ride in races again, though no one who looked at him as he leaned on his cane, his leg grotesquely thin and discolored, his body weak and emaciated, would have agreed with him.
His desire became urgency. Agnes began experiencing unusual symptoms and paid a visit to her doctor. He told her that she was pregnant. She thought he had to be wrong. She was certain that Red was too weak to be capable of fathering a child.13 But the doctor’s verdict was unequivocal: Agnes was going to have a baby.
For Pollard, the news was at once wonderful and terrifying. He was still living on the Howards’ good graces. He had no money, no home, no career. He had only Seabiscuit. He told Howard he wanted to go back to the track with the horse. Howard was frightened for him. Doc Babcock had said that Pollard was never to go near a horse again. One bump, one twist, and he could lose his ability to walk forever. All Howard would agree to was to let him come along. On a cool day in the late fall of 1939, Pollard and Seabiscuit set out for Santa Anita to chase the one dream that had eluded them.
(USC LIBRARY, DEPARTMENT OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS)
FOUR GOOD LEGS BETWEEN US
Charles Howard knew something about making an entrance. In the predawn hours of one December morning in 1939 the Seabiscuit crew came whooping and hollering into Santa Anita in a manner only a man as spectacular as Howard could have pulled off. Their vehicle was a streamlined “palace” horse van painted in Howard crimson and white and featuring two musical horns, eight headlights, fourteen cigar lighters, and a luxurious stall with kapok- stuffed walls. The back doors dropped open, and Smith and Seabiscuit emerged. Smith took the horse straight down the shed rows, pulled him up at the Kaiser Suite, and evicted Kayak. “Have to give the better horse preference,” he grunted. The first fans arrived at daybreak. All morning long, hundreds of them streamed into Barn 38 to greet the old warrior. Among them was Woolf. Seabiscuit came to the door and rubbed his face against the jockey’s fedora.
Smith, knowing that returning the horse to racing was controversial, took the offensive with the press. With a host of newsmen congregated outside, he led Seabiscuit out and stood him in an open space between the barns. He announced that anyone who was suspicious of the horse’s soundness could step right up and have a look. He asked the photographers to take close-up shots of the horse’s left ankle. “If anybody thinks I am training a cripple,” he said, “I want these pictures definitely to prove otherwise.”1
The 1940 hundred-grander was on March 2, giving Smith about three months to prepare the horse. He got to work. He had Seabiscuit’s heavy winter coat clipped off and took him to the scales. The horse weighed in at 1,070, twenty pounds too much. Smith was worried that the load would strain the leg, so he pulled out the yellow sweating hood and gave the horse slow gallops. In the barn they strapped the horse into a muzzle each evening to
