Seabiscuit: An American Legend

by Laura Hillenbrand

  Pollard, a more adventurous soul, probably lived a little closer to the pulse of Tijuana. A romantic, he appears to have passed up the offers from the Tijuana prostitutes. He drank a little with the boys, got into a few fistfights, and lived at the top of his game. It was the happiest time of his life. “How can I keep away from this place?” he would say on a visit ten years later.12 “Isn’t it my first love?”

  ———

  The halcyon days at the Tijuana track came to a spectacular end. On the backstretch early each morning men guided teams of horses on circuits of the barns, shoveling the mucked-out manure into wagons and driving the teams up the hill behind the backstretch, where they would dump it. The pile had been accumulating since 1917, and because the city received little rain to wash it down, it was enormous. “Oh my gosh,” remembered trainer Jimmy Jones. “It was as big as the grandstand.” Inside its percolating depths, the manure fermented, generating scalding heat.

  To the locals, the mountain of manure was a steaming eyesore. To the jockeys, it was prime sauna country. Every day riders dug holes in the surface and burrowed in, Pollard and Woolf probably included. A few took the precaution of zipping into rubber suits before wiggling in, but most just wore street clothes. It was almost too hot to take, but Mother Nature’s hotbox proved unbeatable for sweating off weight.

  The mountain was not long for this world. Sometime in the late 1920s, after extraordinarily heavy rains, swollen streams running off the nearby mountains backed up into a ravine, then exploded over the banks. Howling through Tijuana, the wall of water crashed into the racetrack, hurling houses, barns, and bridges along with it. Grooms ran down the backstretch before the onrushing water, throwing open stall doors and chasing out the horses, who scattered in all directions.

  Behind them, the irresistible force of the flood met the immovable object of the manure pile. The water won. The mound, a marvel of solidity for a decade, was uprooted whole and began to shudder along in one murderous mass. It rolled over the San Diego and Arizona railroad tracks that fed the racetrack, tearing them out. Moving as if animated with destructive desire, it gurgled down the backstretch, banked around the far turn, bore out in the homestretch, and mowed down the entire grandstand. It made a beeline for the Monte Carlo Casino, crashing straight through its walls and cracking it wide open. Then, like a mighty shit Godzilla, it slid out to sea and vanished.13

  For two days the track was underwater, stranding a cluster of grooms and loose horses atop a spit of land. People scurried in and out of what was left of the casino, pushing wheelbarrows brimming with silver dollars scooped up from the opened vaults. As the water subsided, grooms combed the town for the freed horses. Most had vanished in the hills, never to be reclaimed. But one man’s loss was another man’s gain. Impoverished mountain-dwelling Mexicans, who usually got around on wormy little burros, were soon cantering through town in high style, straddling blue-blooded Thoroughbreds worth a lifetime of their income. The Tijuana horsemen, long accustomed to calamity, wrote off the horses, picked up, and went on. They were racing again in a couple of days.

  Soon afterward, a new $3 million racetrack called Agua Caliente was built just down the road. The old Tijuana track was reduced to a squatter’s haven, and Pollard and Woolf set up shop across town.

  Woolf immediately ruled the roost at Agua Caliente. Riding the best horse at the track, Gallant Sir, he won the 1933 Agua Caliente Handicap, one of the world’s most prestigious races. In 1934 Woolf and Gallant Sir were set to defend their title.14 On the morning of the race, Woolf was scheduled to give the horse a light gallop. But at the appointed hour the rider was nowhere to be found. Trainer Woody Fitzgerald jumped in his car and drove to Woolf’s house. He found the Iceman sprawled across his bed, too absorbed in a cowboy magazine to bother going to his job. Fitzgerald fired him on the spot. Woolf went back to reading.

  Fitzgerald sped back to the track and began a frantic hunt for a last-minute replacement. Pollard didn’t have a mount in the race, so Fitzgerald let him ride. Pollard rode flawlessly and won. Gallant Sir had won more than $23,000 that day, and Pollard’s cut was the biggest payday of his life. It was only the third stakes win of Pollard’s career, and in a backward kind of way, he owed it to Woolf. It would be four years before he was in a position to repay him.

  The days of large life and uncomplicated success were fleeting. For Woolf, the longest shadow on his life surfaced a few years into his career. Its most evident manifestation seemed innocuous enough: Woolf was prone to nodding off.15 He would spend his days off stretched out in bed, snoozing. At parties, he was known to fall asleep in mid-conversation. His wife, Genevieve, and his friend Bill Buck were so concerned about his sudden attacks of sleep that they chauffeured him everywhere. Between races, Woolf climbed atop the jockeys’ lockers and curled up in the arms of Morpheus. He took napping so seriously that he eventually staked out a secret nest on the track roof, tucked in behind a chimney. Roused as the jocks’ room custodian shouted the traditional prerace call of “Jockeys! Jockeys!” Woolf would slip downstairs, wake himself with a tall Coca-Cola spiked with a couple of drops of ammonia, blot his lips, mutter, “Let’s go get this money and go home,” and stride into battle.

  To almost everyone in the jockeys’ room, Woolf’s perpetual sleepiness was just another of his many eccentricities. To Woolf, Genevieve, and a few close friends, it meant something entirely different: insulin-dependent, Type I diabetes.16

  His disease apparently surfaced in 1931, shortly after Caliente opened. Diabetes has never been easy to live with. In the 1930s it was hellish. Insulin had only been discovered about a decade before Woolf’s diagnosis. Glucose levels were monitored by testing urine, which could only measure glucose present in the blood eight hours earlier. Trial and error was the only method physicians had to figure dosage, additives had not been developed to improve the absorption of the hormone, and the proper diet for diabetes management was not yet fully understood. As a result, patients like Woolf could never truly control their illness. Giving himself repeated daily shots of canine insulin in the abdomen, arm, or leg, Woolf almost certainly spent his days boomeranging between insulin gluts and deficits. The result was frequent sickness—nausea, vomiting, extreme thirst, and hunger—occasional irritability, and exhaustion.

  It also created a perilous dilemma. Woolf was in a career in which staying light was of paramount importance. He was not a natural lightweight; fellow jockeys dubbed him “Old Lead Pad.” This was a problem facing nearly every jockey, but with the onset of his diabetes, Woolf’s problems were compounded. In most patients, Type I diabetes spurs the appetite, sometimes to extremes. Insulin injections encouraged Woolf to gain weight, and to manage his diabetes he needed to consume regular, high-protein, low-carbohydrate meals—meats were recommended—which also added pounds. Between 1931 and 1932 Woolf’s weight jumped by almost 10 percent, to 115, too high to ride most horses.

  He faced a wrenching conflict. To perform in the sport he was born for, he had to be very thin, but to survive his disease, he had to maintain habits that made thinness virtually impossible. He tried to find a happy medium, taking his insulin regularly, eating thick steaks, and reducing the extra weight off. Genevieve worried about the reducing and tried to stop him, but he appears to have found ways to do it anyway. He was an avid follower of Frenchy Hawley’s methods. Though Frenchy’s concepts of reducing were in some cases medieval, they were generally safer than those the jockeys dreamed up on their own, so Woolf probably benefited as a result. But his reducing, combined with the blunt-instrument character of diabetes treatment in the 1930s, made controlling his blood sugar extremely difficult. At times he seemed to hover on the edge of passing out. Trainer George Mohr remembered that Woolf sometimes rode while appearing strangely ashen, while Woolf’s friend Sonny Greenberg recalled incidents in which he found the rider slumped in the jockeys’ room, too ill to speak.

  So Woolf made another concession to his disease. He began to restrict his riding to t
op horses assigned high imposts. Occasionally, as a favor to an old gyp trainer friend, he would agree to ride a cheap horse. Woolf weighed a lot more than the imposts assigned to most of these horses, but somehow he was able to circumvent the rule requiring riders to be within five pounds of the assignment. His skills negated the handicap; he once won on a horse carrying fifteen pounds more than his impost.

  But these sojourns on cheap horses were rarities. Usually he rode only about four times a week, nearly all classy horses, rarely more than one a day. Over the course of a year, he rode one hundred and fifty to two hundred mounts, compared with as many as one thousand for other top riders. Incredibly, in spite of his small number of total mounts, his soaring win percentage invariably placed him near the top of the national jockey rankings for purse money won. In one season Eddie Arcaro nosed him out for the money-winning title, but only by riding three times as many horses.17 Woolf took to calling Arcaro “the Desperate Dude.”18

  Woolf’s habit of minimal riding for maximum purses allowed him to survive as a jockey, but he knew he was walking a very fine line. In his era, even simple lacerations often left diabetics with savage infections that necessitated limb and digit amputations, a consequence of the disease’s ravaging effect on circulation and immunity. To minimize the risk of being cut in a spill, he tried to avoid very young, inexperienced horses. On the rare occasions when he rode a green horse, he used a custom-made, reinforced saddle and slip-proof girth.19 But Woolf knew that infection and amputation were the least of his worries. If he played the balance of diabetes management and reducing wrong, he could faint in the saddle while moving at forty miles per hour. It was probably the only thing that ever really scared him.

  At roughly the same time that Woolf started his potentially deadly gamble, Pollard engaged in a gamble of his own. It began with a simple morning workout on a horse whose name has long since been forgotten. As Pollard rode the horse down the track that morning, another horse passed close by. Something—maybe a rock or a clump of dirt—flew up from under the animal’s hooves and struck Pollard in the head.

  In the glimmer of an instant, for the price of a 50-cent galloping fee he was probably never paid, Pollard lost the sight in his right eye forever.20

  Had they known of Pollard’s blindness, the stewards would rightly have banned him from racing. With virtually no depth perception and no ability to see horses to his outside, he was far more vulnerable to positioning errors. He could unwittingly charge straight into a wreck. It was an injury that should have ended his career.

  But Pollard, like Woolf, was not willing to hang it up. If anything, he was bolder than ever in the saddle, either to conceal his blindness or simply because he couldn’t see just how close he was cutting it. “Red is not one of our great riders, but the only word he knows is yes,” wrote a columnist who didn’t know of Pollard’s blindness.21 “He’ll try to thread a needle with a horse as the flying field turns down the last bend for home, and you must salute him for his courage, if not his judgment.” Pollard took an awesome risk. He kept his blindness secret and kept on riding.

  Just after Pollard rode Gallant Sir to win the 1934 Agua Caliente Handicap, Mexico banned gambling.22 The colorful racing world that had spun itself around Tijuana withered and blew off into the sagebrush deserts. Pollard and Woolf returned to the United States, where racing had been relegalized, and their careers began to diverge.

  On Christmas Day 1934 Santa Anita Park opened for the first time. Woolf turned the place upside down, riding an out-of-the-clouds long shot named Azucar, a former steeplechaser, to a smashing victory in the first Santa Anita Handicap. It was one of the greatest rides anyone had ever seen. After Woolf dismounted, Azucar butted him out of the way, ran over a spectator, slashed the NBC Radio wire—cutting off the national broadcast—and dragged his terrified groom down the track like a toboggan. The Iceman watched him go from the winner’s circle, a floral wreath wrapped around his shoulders, smiling his cool Gary Cooper smile as a mob of admirers cheered for him. The Iceman had arrived.

  As Woolf ascended, Pollard began to fail. Perhaps his partial blindness was the reason. After Gallant Sir, he didn’t ride another stakes winner for years. Then even his modest weekday mounts began losing. He moved around North America, through Chicago, New York, Canada, riding the tough horses, the sour ones, and the nervous ones, but his statistics continued to slip.

  Somewhere along the way, Pollard crossed paths with a jockey agent named Yummy, a round, toad-eyed, linty man, built low.23 Yummy had a pronounced harelip that slurred his speech badly. He raised his voice to a pounding level to compensate, but this only made people cringe. He kept his cash in his shoe and lived year-round in the Turkish baths of whatever city he happened through. Like Pollard, he seemed to have lost the need to belong to any place in particular. The best Yummy could do for Pollard was chase his hopelessly beaten mounts down the grandstand rail, hollering and frightening spectators. But he was fanatically loyal, and he had a car. The two began kicking around the country together.

  In August 1936 they turned up at Ohio’s Thistle Down Park. Any hopes Pollard had of redeeming himself there were quickly silenced. His win percentage dropped to a lamentable 6 percent.24 He rode, on average, fewer than two winners a month. Around the track, people whispered that he was finished. He was drifting into the great slipstream in which many promising jockeys are lost, their talents never tried for lack of the skilled trainer, the wise owner, the “big horse.”

  On August 16 Pollard and Yummy climbed into Yummy’s car, pulled out of the track, and hit the highway. Somewhere along the way, they smacked the car into something. Whatever it was they hit, it didn’t have a lot of give to it; the car was showered all over the road.25 They bailed out into blistering heat. There beside the hulk of the ruined car, countless miles from anywhere, Pollard was standing in a metaphor for his own life. At twenty-six, he was frightened and empty. The car was totaled, the money was gone, and there were no prospects ahead of him. He and Yummy picked through the wreckage for their most essential belongings, 27 cents and a half pint of a foul brandy they called “bow-wow wine.”26 Pollard probably salvaged his books and his rosary. There was a sugar cube kicking around in his pocket. They abandoned the car and hung their thumbs in the northbound lane.

  It was late afternoon when they rolled up Woodward Avenue in Detroit. The city was stacked up in a hot, close grid, and the summer lay heavy over it. The ruinous decade had scarred the city, as it had every other: poor boxes on the street, people living on railcars. Near the intersection of Woodward and Eight Mile Road there was a cemetery. Pollard and Yummy called for the driver to stop. On the other side of the avenue stood the gate to a racetrack, the Detroit Fair Grounds. Pollard and Yummy hopped down, turned their backs to the gravestones, and walked in.

  Across the track, Tom Smith was leaning against the easternmost barn, turning a straw in his teeth. In the stall behind him was Seabiscuit. Smith had been sitting by the horse for two days, thinking on him, watching him, trying to inhabit him. Something rattled in the horse’s mind that made him edgy and angry. He had been enjoying a reign of terror since they brought him to Detroit, trying to take big chunks out of the grooms, and no one wanted to go within a pitchfork’s length of him. No man had ever understood him, and the horse now turned against anyone who tried. Smith was thinking that he needed a strong and intuitive jockey for this one.

  Up the backstretch, Yummy was zigging and zagging his way through barns with his big paw out, booming his pitch—“Name’s Yummy, not Dummy”—and coming out empty-handed. No one wanted Pollard. He and Pollard were dirty and tired and shaky from the wreck. Evening was falling, and it was time to start thinking about where to get their next meal and bed down for the night. The bottle of bow-wow wine was probably long dry.

  A groom pointed to a gray man sitting in front of the barn where the Howard horses were kept. Agent and jockey turned east and walked toward Smith.

  Yummy reloaded and made a run at hi
m. Smith waved him off, eyeing the redhead and retrieving a name from years back: Cougar. He recalled the grave lines of the jockey’s profile from the days when they had crossed paths somewhere out West. He looked at the brooding face and the boxer’s physique and thought: Maybe. He offered his hand. Pollard took it. Smith smiled.

  He gestured toward the stall behind him. Pollard leaned over Seabiscuit’s half door. The horse had his back to him, a dark mass shifting in the straw. Pollard pushed his hand into his pocket and pulled it out again with his fingers closed. He extended his arm and opened his hand: the cube of sugar. From the back of the stall, there came a tentative sound of nostrils drawing the air, weighing the scent. A black muzzle materialized, licked up the sugar, and touched the jockey’s shoulder.27

  The scattered lives of Red Pollard, Tom Smith, and Charles Howard had come to an intersection. Their crowded hour had begun.

  PART II

  Tom Smith and Seabiscuit

  (USC LIBRARY, DEPARTMENT OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS)

  Chapter 7

  LEARN YOUR HORSE

  The grooms were walking around with their faces fixed in permanent winces. Every time they passed Seabiscuit’s stall, the horse lunged at them, mouth wide open, ears flat back, eyes in a sinister pinch, and he meant business. Heaven help the poor kid who had to go in there, muck the floor, and curry the horse. Everyone was wondering what Smith possibly could have been thinking. The horse was a train wreck. He paced in his stall incessantly. He broke into a lather at the sight of a saddle. He was two hundred pounds underweight and chronically tired. He was so thin, said one observer, that his hips could have made a passable hat rack, but he refused to eat.1 And that left foreleg didn’t look good.