between races one afternoon, a massive crowd of forty thousand people flocked to Santa Anita to see it. The exercise was not doing the trick. “He’s gaining weight,” moaned Smith, “and we aren’t feeding him enough to satisfy a full-grown canary bird.” Seabiscuit was far behind in his preparation. The chances of his making the hundred-grander were dimming every day. Woolf couldn’t wait any longer. Pressured by trainers who wanted his services in the race, he gave up and signed on to ride Heelfly.
The sky finally cleared for Seabiscuit on February 9, and Smith sent him out for his first race, the La Jolla Handicap. Pollard begged Howard for the mount, and the owner relented. It was Pollard and Seabiscuit’s first race together since 1937. It was not a happy reunion. Seabiscuit broke in a tangle. Pollard tried to rush him into contention, only to be pocketed in. As Pollard waited for a gap to run through, a horse blew past. It was Heelfly, with Woolf in the stirrups. Pollard swung Seabiscuit out of the pack and asked him to chase Heelfly. There was no response. Seabiscuit finished third. Up in the press box, a
Pollard slid slowly to the ground in front of the grandstand. He was crying.20
Smith came out to meet him. He looked over Seabiscuit’s legs. The horse was perfectly sound. Smith wasn’t worried about the loss. “I’m satisfied. He was a short horse,” he said, using the horseman’s term for an animal who is not fully fit. “He ran like one.”
Pollard pulled himself together. Over the weekend, Yummy took him down to his old haunt, Caliente.21 The visit gave the rider confidence. “Can we do it? I say we can,” he told Alexander. “It’s me and the Biscuit, for the big money.” Pollard handed Yummy a stack of dollars and sent him to a future book operator to place a bet on the Santa Anita Handicap. “Seabiscuit,” he told him. “To win.”
A week later, Kayak and Seabiscuit paraded out for the San Carlos Handicap, the same race in which Pollard and Fair Knightess had fallen two years before. The 1940 running turned out better, but not by much. Given clear sailing, neither horse could even get into contention. At the half-mile pole, Seabiscuit abruptly propped.22 Pollard managed to hang on, but when he asked him to run, again the horse didn’t respond. Pollard crouched over his neck, urging him on and getting nothing, watching helplessly as horses flew past. A heartbreaking thought crossed his mind:
This time, Smith was rattled. He couldn’t understand what had happened. He wondered if his talents had failed him, if he had, in trying to compensate for months of undertraining, thrown too much work at his horse at once. He had two weeks to fix the problem and he wasn’t sure if he could.
Pollard left the track in despair. Around Santa Anita, people were blaming him for Seabiscuit’s losses, and he must have heard them. But as the days passed, something about the race kept pulling at him. At the half-mile pole, Seabiscuit had propped. He hadn’t done that since back in 1936, in the first race against Myrtlewood in Detroit. The horse hadn’t seemed tired before he did it, so it was strange that he tired abruptly afterward. Pollard began to wonder if the Biscuit had just been fooling around. Perhaps, he thought, he’d done it because he was feeling good and a little mischievous. Howard and the stable hands clung to the propping incident as a good omen.24 It was all they had.
Smith was adamant that Pollard was the man for the job. Howard couldn’t commit to it. Shortly before Seabiscuit’s final prep race, the San Antonio, Pollard learned that Howard had sent a $500 retainer check to jockey Buddy Haas, asking him to come west.25 Howard then made Seabiscuit’s entry for the Santa Anita Handicap.
He left the jockey space blank.
Later that week there was a rap at the door of David Alexander’s rental house in the Hollywood hills. It was Pollard. Alexander had never seen him in such a state. He was falling apart. He was, Alexander wrote, “nervous and worried and distraught.”
Alexander ushered Pollard into his den.26 He tried to make small talk, telling the jockey that Bing Crosby’s hit “Pennies from Heaven” was written in that den by earlier tenants.
“That’s what I need,” Pollard muttered. “Pennies from heaven. And I’ve got just one more ride to get ’em.”
“How’s Pops?” Alexander asked.
“Pops’s leg is no worse than usual, but how’s the Cougar?” Pollard replied. Alexander watched as Pollard pulled his trouser leg up. The jockey’s leg was purple. A broad welt ran the entire length of it. It looked, Alexander wrote, “like a charred, knobby broomstick.”
“One little tap,” Pollard said. “Just one. But it’s got to last for one more ride.”
He shrugged. “Old Pops and I have got four good legs between us,” he said. “Maybe that’s enough.”
They talked about Pollard’s fears. The leg was only part of it. Buddy Haas’s impending arrival had him overwrought.
“I’ve got to ride that horse.” Pollard’s voice had a deadly urgency to it.
Alexander promised Pollard that he would talk to Howard. The following day he tracked the owner down and asked him point-blank if he was going to take the mount away from Pollard.
“What would you and the other newspaper boys do if I rode Haas?” Howard asked.
Alexander said he couldn’t speak for the whole press corps, but “I said I would crucify him and use a whole keg full of nails for the job.”
“If Red breaks that leg again,” Howard said soberly, “it will cripple him for life.”
Alexander told him that maybe it was better to break a man’s leg than his heart.
February 23 was the day before the San Antonio. Howard was pacing around Santa Anita, a rabbit’s foot working overtime in his pocket.27 With only a week remaining before the Santa Anita Handicap, Seabiscuit had to run well or his attempted comeback would have to be deemed a failure. Kayak, too, had his reputation on the line. The whole barn was failing. Howard had never doubted his chances so much, and Smith had said nothing that reassured him.
