carried to a hospital in a laundry basket.25 The injury knocked him out of the sport for a year and left him with one leg shorter than the other. A 1945 head injury incurred in a Florida race cost him a handful of teeth and nearly his life. “When I woke up, the parish priest leaned over me and whispered, ‘The Devil has no stall for you,’ so here I am,” he told reporters after awakening. “And I guess I’ll be here forever, me and Methuselah.”26
He nearly was. His brilliant red hair slowly went gray, his blind eye paled, his battered body aged, and still he rode racehorses. He rode alongside kids who hadn’t even been born when he first offered a sugar cube to Seabiscuit, but he never let the latest teenaged hotshot get the best of him. Shouting, “No room at the bar!” he would cut off the rail route and make some poor kid go around the long way.
He came home at night and Agnes tended to him. So many phone calls told her of terrible crashes that she came to fear the phone’s ring. On some mornings the back door banged open to reveal a host of muddy racetrackers, carrying a bloodied Red in from another fall. She prayed for his safety every day, but never complained to him. She understood, as would her children, that her husband would have suffocated in any other life. He was in constant and serious pain, but didn’t speak of it. He still carried a rosary and little volumes of poetry in his pocket, and still gave away most of the money he earned. His children grew up knowing to be careful around their father’s game leg, which never fattened up to anything much thicker than a broomstick. Pollard wove his books into his children’s lives but did not try to teach them about horses. He never once brought them to the track to see him ride and didn’t tell the stories of his youth. The closest his daughter, Norah, ever came to the races was to comply with his request to paint a cougar on his helmet.
By 1955, when he was forty-six, he couldn’t make it any longer. “Maybe I should have heeded the rumble of that distant drum when I was riding high,” he once said.27 “But I never did. Trouble is, you never hear it if you are a racetracker. Horses make too damned much noise.” He called David Alexander from across the country to tell him the news. “I’m hanging up my blouse for good,”28 he said. “I wanted you to be the first to know. You can’t first-past Father Time.”
“It’s about time,” said Alexander. When the writer paid tribute to him in a lengthy article in
Pollard wound up sorting mail in a track post office, then working as a valet, cleaning the boots of other riders.30 His racetrack injuries worsened as he aged, and he slowly became a prisoner in his own body. He struggled as hard as he could against his alcoholism but never beat it.31
One day in the waning years of his life, Red Pollard stopped talking. Perhaps it was a physical problem. Perhaps the old raconteur just didn’t want to speak anymore. When on rare occasions a reporter turned up to ask about Seabiscuit, Agnes answered the questions while Red sat by, mute.32
In 1980 Agnes was hospitalized with cancer. Though only seventy, Pollard was suffering from so many physical problems that he could no longer get along without her. His children had no choice but to place him in a nursing home. He knew this ground. The home had been built over the ruins of Narragansett Park.33
The Cougar slipped away one day in 1981, uttering not a word in parting. Agnes was with him when he stopped breathing. His heart kept beating for several minutes, then went still. No cause of death was ever found.34 It was as if, Norah remembers, “he had just worn out his body.”35 Agnes died two weeks later.
Seabiscuit and Howard grew old together in the slow rhythms of Ridgewood. Howard’s hair thinned; Seabiscuit’s muddy bay coat darkened. Howard kept the horse with Kayak in a handsome red barn and installed a walking ring that led right up to the door of Howard’s house. He hung a sign on the pillared gates to the ranch, out on the Redwood Highway, that read: RIDGEWOOD, HOME OF SEABISCUIT. VISITORS WELCOME.36
The visitors came, fifty thousand over the years, as many as fifteen hundred at a time.37,38 Howard erected a little grandstand by his horse’s paddock and ushered the spectators in to watch him. Kayak thrilled the crowds by galloping around his adjacent paddock in all his black splendor. Most of the time, all Seabiscuit did was stretch out on his side, drowsing in the shade of his paddock oak tree.39 Occasionally, he would raise his head and look the spectators over, then drop off to sleep again.40 Once in a while he’d get up and amble over to his admirers, licking their cameras and sticking his tongue out to be scratched.
With each spring the foals came. Howard doted on them as if they were his own children. “They are the finest foals I have ever seen,” he said when the first crop came, “and I am not prejudiced when I say this.” They all had their father’s amiable personality, and most of them had his homely little body too. Nearly all were homebreds, the products of Howard’s moderately bred mares; the ranch was more than six hundred miles from the nearest major breeding farm, and few breeders wanted to subject their mares to such a long haul. So Howard used his own mares, pampered and overfed their babies, and sent them into training fat and happy.
When the “Little Biscuits” reached racing age and went south to the tracks, the public flocked in to see them. Thousands of admirers came out to watch their workouts, and on race days full houses packed in to cheer for them and for proud old Howard. The owner issued Christmas card photos of Seabiscuit standing with his foals. The cards became hot items across the nation. One racetrack, Chicago’s Arlington Park, recreated one in a giant mural.
A few of the Seabiscuits could run. Sea Sovereign and Sea Swallow became stakes winners, as did a chip off the old block, a grandson named Sea Orbit, who ran sixty-seven times, winning twenty-two, including a long list of elite stakes races in California. One of Fair Knightess’s foals, Phantom Sea, became stakes-placed. But most of the Seabiscuits were poor racehorses, and because Howard refused to let them suffer the indignity of running at their ability level, in claiming races, few of them won anything on the track. Howard didn’t seem to notice. After an advisor talked him into selling an especially slow one, Howard quietly bought him back. “You don’t understand,” he explained. “This one used to eat sugar cubes out of my hand.”
Hollywood took the tale of Seabiscuit’s life, deleted everything interesting, and made an inexcusably bad movie,
Seabiscuit settled well into his retirement. Knowing he needed activity, Howard taught him how to herd cattle.41 The horse loved it, nipping at the animals’ rumps and torturing them as he had once tortured War Admiral and Kayak. Every day the ranch hands rode him out with Pumpkin on a five-mile jaunt, trotting up and down the California hills, cantering alongside the lake, pausing to graze on the mountain grass. He became very fat—1,250 pounds—and blissfully happy. Every fall he would pose for family portraits, sometimes with Marcela aboard, and Howard would have the photos printed in huge numbers and mailed to everyone he knew.
When the war came, Howard looked into building a bomb shelter for the horse but eventually gave up the idea.42 He worked to help the war effort, donating an ambulance to the British Red Cross, which
