ride.8 Pollard called his naysayers “my left-handed rooting section.”9
Pollard watched Woolf canter off on Pops. Despair rushed up under him like a riptide. “And none so poor,” he muttered to a reporter, echoing
Pollard began to crumble under the pressure. He had become a binge drinker. He made a point of temperance during working hours—“Never let it be said,” he once told his friend Bill Buck, “that Pollard was drinking when he was riding”—but during off-hours he sometimes drank heavily.11 “Tonight’s the night,” he once shouted as he ran into Buck’s apartment near the end of a race season, “the Cougar howls!” When he drank, he endured monstrous hangovers and appeared to suffer from delirium tremens. “I got to wear glued shoes when I’m hung,” he said, “because I shake the nails out of the other kind.”12
Yummy was frightened for him.13 If Pollard began drinking too heavily, he would lose any chance he had to ride Seabiscuit. Yummy did everything he could to keep the jockey from going on benders. He asked Pollard to come stay with him at the Turkish baths. Pollard refused. So Yummy shadowed him everywhere. He made a point of knowing exactly where his client was twenty-four hours a day. He asked David Alexander to stay around Pollard as much as possible to keep him from overimbibing. In an apparent bargain to keep him dry until the race, Yummy made a deal with the rider. If Pollard won the hundred-grander, Yummy promised to sneak him a swig of bow-wow wine in the winner’s circle.
Pollard wasn’t the only one feeling the strain. Smith was racked with anxiety. “His whole life,” recalled Sonny Greenberg, “was gathered around Seabiscuit.” Howard, too, was at the breaking point. Over a five-year partnership, these two radically different men with often conflicting priorities had forged a surprisingly harmonious relationship, but decisions about Seabiscuit’s racing and training schedule had repeatedly caused tension between them. When under pressure, each man had a tendency to become more controlling, and never was the pressure higher than in the winter of 1940.
One morning at Santa Anita, Howard pushed Smith hard to take a course with Seabiscuit that Smith was not prepared to take, apparently to rush his very conservative training regimen. In front of a barnful of horsemen, Smith laid down the law. Let me train my horse as I see fit, he snapped, or find a new trainer.14 Everyone within earshot froze, listening for Howard’s response.
Howard said nothing and walked away.
January waned, and still Seabiscuit had not raced. Whichcee, Heelfly, all his rivals were preparing well. The rains didn’t relent. Smith couldn’t wait any longer. He took Seabiscuit and Kayak out for a hard workout on the training track. For once, Pollard was allowed to ride Seabiscuit for speed. In a driving rainstorm that sent everyone running, Seabiscuit and Kayak blistered six furlongs in 1:13 with Pollard leaning all the way back against the reins, his feet “on the dashboard.” Horse and jockey returned intact. A few days later Smith sent Seabiscuit back out again, and again his time was superb, 1:12? for six furlongs. Pollard said the horse had never been sounder.
After the workout, Smith entered Seabiscuit in the San Felipe Handicap, scheduled for January 30. Pollard awaited a decision on whether or not he would be in the irons. Smith announced that Pollard would ride. But Howard added an escape clause: Pollard would ride only if he was fit to do so. If he wasn’t, Howard said, Woolf had the mount. He said nothing about the hundred-grander, now just a month away.
Woolf and Pollard fell into the first crisis of their friendship. To Pollard, the mount on Seabiscuit could not have been more important. The horse meant financial rescue, the ability to meet his responsibilities as father and husband, professional redemption, and the end of a long, public humiliation. But Woolf must have burned with the frustration of the nose loss in 1938, and the guilt for having possibly exacerbated the horse’s injury in 1939. In announcing publicly that it was Woolf or Pollard, Howard had inadvertently set the two against each other.
Somewhere along the backstretch, Woolf and Pollard had a bitter argument over Seabiscuit, nearly coming to blows.15 When they walked away, their friendship was broken.
January 29 dawned sunny and clear. Howard started the long walk to the track offices to enter his horse in the next day’s San Felipe. As he ambled around the course, the barometer in the track secretary’s office leaned toward rain. He entered the horse. Seeing that Seabiscuit was in, NBC Radio began setting up at Santa Anita to broadcast the race nationally. The barometer continued to sink. Overhead, the clouds furrowed. The next morning, just as Seabiscuit stepped on the track for his final blowout, it began to rain. Then it cleared again, and Howard went to the track and crossed his fingers.
After the third race, David Alexander interrupted Howard in the Turf Club.
“It’s raining, Charley.”16
“No!” Howard shouted, a little too loud. “Three times in a row! This just can’t happen.”
He stared out at the rain. “It might stop,” he said weakly.
It rained harder and harder. A half hour before the race, Howard and Smith got into a station wagon and toured the track. The rain pinged off the roof. The horse needed the work badly, but the track was just too muddy to risk it. When the scratch appeared on the board, the crowd booed. The sun promptly came back out.
The scratchings were becoming a joke. “For hire: One Rain-Maker Racehorse,” wrote David Alexander.17 “Answers to the name of Seabiscuit. Guaranteed to cause rainstorms wherever he goes. Capable of solving all irrigation problems of dust bowl farmers. Can vastly simplify Federal reclamation projects in all drought areas. All businesses now operating under Federal Bankruptcy Law 7-B can become liquid at once by employing services of this miraculous animal.… Clockers have given up timing Seabiscuit with a stopwatch. They’re using a barometer instead.”
The rain kept falling. A week later Seabiscuit had to be scratched again.
Howard was driven to distraction and needed something to keep himself busy. Overhearing a valet lamenting the lack of funds to create an all-jockey baseball team, he jumped in.18
“Let me take care of it,” he said. “What will it cost?” The valets came up with an estimate of $23.80 per jockey.
“Go to it,” said Howard. “Go first-class.”
Arriving to watch them play, Howard was delighted to see that the jockeys had memorialized his generosity by ordering their uniforms in Howard red and white, with the Howard signature triangle on them. Instead of their own names, the jockeys had stenciled the names of Howard’s horses on the back. Howard attended every game, playfully rooting for the opposition.
Days slipped by. The Santa Anita Handicap was just weeks away. Seabiscuit had not raced once. His fans were so eager to see him that when Smith decided to treat the fans by sending the horse out for a public workout
