Seabiscuit: an American legend

474 Pages·2012·5.18 MB·English

by  Laura Hillenbrand

A Ballantine Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 2001 by Laura Hillenbrand
Reader’s Guide copyright © 2001 by Laura Hillenbrand and The Random House Publishing
Group, a division of Random House, Inc. Excerpts from Daily Racing Form copyright © 2002 by
Daily Racing Form, Inc. Reprinted by permission.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing
Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random
House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Ballantine is a registered trademark and the Ballantine colophon is a trademark of Random
House, Inc. Random House Reader’s Circle and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
www.ballantinebooks.com
Library of Congress Control Number: 2002090323
eISBN: 978-0-345-46739-3
Title page photo by AP/Wide World Photos
v3.0

Charles Howard, Red Pollard, and Tom Smith
(KEENELAND-COOK)
For Borden
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Preface
PART I
1. The Day of the Horse Is Past
2. The Lone Plainsman
3. Mean, Restive, and Ragged
4. The Cougar and the Iceman
5. A Boot on One Foot, a Toe Tag on the Other
6. Light and Shadow
PART II
7. Learn Your Horse
8. Fifteen Strides
9. Gravity
10. War Admiral
11. No Pollard, No Seabiscuit
12. All I Need Is Luck
13. Hardball
14. The Wise We Boys
15. Fortune’s Fool
16. I Know My Horse
17. The Dingbustingest Contest You Ever Clapped an Eye On
18. Deal
19. The Second Civil War
PART III
20. “All Four of His Legs Are Broken”
21. A Long, Hard Pull
22. Four Good Legs Between Us
23. One Hundred Grand
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
A Reader’s Guide
About the Author
Excerpt from Unbroken
Copyright
“Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bullfighters.”
—
ERNEST HEMINGWAY, THE SUN ALSO RISES
PREFACE
n 1938, near the end of a decade of monumental turmoil, the year’s
I
number-one newsmaker1 was not Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Hitler, or
Mussolini. It wasn’t Pope Pius XI, nor was it Lou Gehrig, Howard
Hughes, or Clark Gable. The subject of the most newspaper column
inches in 1938 wasn’t even a person. It was an undersized, crooked-
legged racehorse named Seabiscuit.
In the latter half of the Depression, Seabiscuit was nothing short of a
cultural icon in America, enjoying adulation so intense and broad-based
that it transcended sport. When he raced, his fans choked local roads,
poured out of special cross-country “Seabiscuit Limited” trains, packed
the hotels, and cleaned out the restaurants. They tucked their Roosevelt
dollars into Seabiscuit wallets, bought Seabiscuit hats on Fifth Avenue,
played at least nine parlor games bearing his image. Tuning in to radio
broadcasts of his races was a weekend ritual across the country, drawing
as many as forty million listeners.2 His appearances smashed attendance
records at nearly every major track and drew two of the three largest
throngs ever to see a horse race in the United States. In an era when the
United States’ population was less than half its current size,4 seventy-
eight thousand people witnessed his last race,3 a crowd comparable to
those at today’s Super Bowls.5 As many as forty thousand fans6 mobbed
tracks just to watch his workouts, while thousands of others braved ice
storms and murderous heat to catch a glimpse of his private eighty-foot
Pullman railcar. He galloped over Manhattan on massive billboards and
was featured week after week, year after year, in Time, Life, Newsweek,
Look, Pic, and The New Yorker. His trainer, jockey, and owner became
heroes in their own right. Their every move was painted by the glare of
the flashbulb.
They had come from nowhere. The horse, a smallish, mud-colored
animal with forelegs that didn’t straighten all the way, spent nearly two
seasons floundering in the lowest ranks of racing, misunderstood and
mishandled. His jockey, Red Pollard, was a tragic-faced young man who
had been abandoned as a boy at a makeshift racetrack cut through a
Montana hay field. He came to his partnership with Seabiscuit after
years as a part-time prizefighter and failing jockey, lugging his saddle
through myriad places, getting punched bloody in cow-town boxing
rings, sleeping on stall floors. Seabiscuit’s trainer, a mysterious, virtually
mute mustang breaker named Tom Smith, was a refugee from the
vanishing frontier, bearing with him generations of lost wisdom about
the secrets of horses. Seabiscuit’s owner, a broad, beaming former
cavalryman named Charles Howard, had begun his career as a bicycle
mechanic before parlaying 21 cents into an automotive empire.
In 1936, on a sultry August Sunday in Detroit, Pollard, Smith, and
Howard formed an unlikely alliance. Recognizing the talent dormant in
the horse and in one another, they began a rehabilitation of Seabiscuit
that would lift him, and them, from obscurity.
For the Seabiscuit crew and for America, it was the beginning of five
uproarious years of anguish and exultation. From 1936 to 1940,
Seabiscuit endured a remarkable run of bad fortune, conspiracy, and
injury to establish himself as one of history’s most extraordinary
athletes. Graced with blistering speed, tactical versatility, and
indomitable will, he shipped more than fifty thousand exhausting
railroad miles,7 carried staggering weight to victory against the best
horses in the country, and shattered more than a dozen track records.
His controversial rivalry with Triple Crown winner War Admiral
culminated in a spectacular match race that is still widely regarded as
the greatest horse race ever run. His epic, trouble-plagued four-year
quest to conquer the world’s richest race became one of the most
celebrated and widely followed struggles in sports. And in 1940 after
suffering severe injuries that were thought to have ended their careers,
the aging horse and his jockey returned to the track together in an
attempt to claim the one prize that had escaped them.
Along the way, the little horse and the men who rehabilitated him
captured the American imagination. It wasn’t just greatness that drew
the people to them. It was their story.
It began with a young man on a train, pushing west.