Читать книгу Seabiscuit: The True Story of Three Men and a Racehorse - Laura Hillenbrand - Страница 15

Prosperity, in the form of a fat salary from Howard, had found Tom Smith. He had invested a little in the outer man. Gone were the overalls, the big plaid work shirts, the muddied boots, the chaps, the cap. He began showing up at the barn in neat gray suits, dark vests, whipcord trousers, wing tips, and on race days a restrained Republican tie. He had even purchased a camel-hair coat. Topping off the ensemble was, of course, the utterly unremarkable gray felt fedora. Head and hat were inseparable. Given that Smith was not a man of particularly noteworthy appearance, it was probably the hat, not his face, that people recognized. A couple of years later, during a stable trip to New York, Smith decided that he had just about worn the hat to death and left the barn in search of a replacement. He stomped back in, brushing past Howard, four hours later. On his head was an exact replica of the old hat. Obviously in sour spirits, he muttered that he had spent the entire morning scouring the town trying to find a hat for $2.50.

“Couldn’t find one,” he grumbled. “Had to get this one.”

Howard asked him how much the new hat had set him back.

“Three dollars.”

The new raiment fit him. Tom Smith had arrived. He had taken Howard’s ill-bred yearlings, worked with them in solitude for a year, then slipped them into Barn 38 at Santa Anita and hung out his shingle. Right from the start he attracted curious glances. Someone saw him wrapping up an alarm clock in a towel and burying it in the straw of a filly’s stall, letting her get used to the ticking. Then, while everyone at the track was speculating about what he was up to, Smith tacked up the horse, fished out the clock, and went to the track. He loaded the filly in the gate, set off the clock alarm, and let her rip. He brought her back and did it again and again until she was primed to jackrabbit down the track when she heard a bell.

Pretty soon, people were coming around just to watch Smith. No one had ever seen a trainer work like this. The Howards motored down and watched, too, feeding sugar cubes to their horses and surely wondering what they had gotten themselves into. But then the races began and Smith’s horses started winning. Not just a little; Smith owned the place. The horses were almost all long shots, because no one trusted what Smith was doing, but that just made the payoffs for Howard’s bets all the greater. The filly trained with the alarm clock, a 70-1 long shot, smoked a giant field right out of the gate to win the biggest juvenile race of the season, paying $143.60 for every $2 bet, a meet record. Smith won so much that he started to make the papers almost daily. The racetrackers were soon calling the winner’s circle “Howard’s Half Acre,” and Barn 38 was the track’s runaway leader in wins.

Howard and Smith came to an understanding. Howard called his trainer Tom; Smith, without fail, called his employer Mr. Howard. The Howards came to the barn almost every morning, and Charles stayed on, sometimes for fourteen hours at a stretch. He brought in a big truck of a saddle horse named Chulo so he could ride out with Smith on the track. But he knew his place. He didn’t mess with Smith’s business. For a hands-on executive like Howard, the urge to tinker must have been strong, but he was smart enough to recognize superior understanding, no matter how bizarre the training practices looked. “Mr. Howard pays me for results,” Smith once said. “He doesn’t ask questions.” In turn, Smith put up with Howard’s love of the spotlight, the long stream of friends and reporters he brought to the barn, his need to be in the center of things. To a point. If Howard’s friends got too close to his horses, Smith would snap at them to get back. The union had its rough points, but it worked.

Howard was hungry for more winning. As the spring waned, they decided to take the show on the road. The horses would go to a little track in Michigan called the Detroit Fair Grounds. Smith was sent on alone, farther east, on a different mission. Howard wanted some mature horses to augment his fleet of juveniles. Howard had the kind of money to turn the head of any major-league owner, and he could have used it to acquire a ready-made stable of proven runners. But Howard didn’t want to take the easy route. He wanted a bargain animal whose talent had been overlooked by the old-money lords of eastern racing. He knew he had the trainer who could find him. In June 1936 Smith arrived in Massachusetts. He traveled from track to track, looking at hundreds of cheap horses, but he couldn’t find the one he sought. On the sweltering afternoon of June 29, at Boston’s Suffolk Downs, the horse found him.

The colt was practically sneering at him. Smith was standing by the track rail, weighing the angles and gestures of low-level horses as they streamed to the post, when a weedy three-year-old bay stopped short in front of him, swung his head high, and eyed him with an arch expression completely unsuited to such a rough-hewn animal. “He looked right down his nose at me,” Smith remembered later, “like he was saying, ‘Who the devil are you?’ ” Man and horse stood on opposite sides of the rail for a long moment, sizing each other up. An image materialized in Smith’s mind: the Colorado ranges, a tough little cow horse. The pony boy leading the colt to the post tugged him on his way. Smith watched the animal’s rump swing around and go. Thin, yes, but he had an engine on him.

Smith flipped to the horse’s profile in the track program. The colt was a descendant of the mighty Man o’ War through his sire, the brilliantly fast, exceptionally handsome Hard Tack, but his stunted build reflected none of the beauty and breadth of his forebears. The colt’s body, built low to the ground, had all the properties of a cinder block. Where Hard Tack had been tall, sleek, tapered, every line suggesting motion, his son was blunt, coarse, rectangular, stationary. He had a sad little tail, barely long enough to brush his hocks. His stubby legs were a study in unsound construction, with squarish, asymmetrical “baseball glove” knees that didn’t quite straighten all the way, leaving him in a permanent semicrouch. Thanks to his unfortunate assembly, his walk was an odd, straddle-legged motion that was often mistaken for lameness. Asked to run, he would drop low over the track and fall into a comical version of what horsemen call an eggbeater gait, making a spastic sideways flailing motion with his left foreleg as he swung it forward, as if he were swatting at flies. His gallop was so disorganized that he had a maddening tendency to whack himself in the front ankle with his own hind hoof. One observer compared his action to a duck waddle. All of this raggedness was not helped by his racing schedule. His career had been noteworthy only in its appalling rigor. Though only three years old, he had already run forty-three races, far more than most horses contest in their entire careers.

But somehow, after throwing a fit in the starting gate and being left flat-footed at the bell, the colt won his race that day. While being unsaddled, he leveled his wide-set, intelligent eyes on Smith again. Smith liked that look, and nodded at the horse. “Darned if the little rascal didn’t nod back at me,” Smith said later, “kinda like he was paying me an honor to notice me.” He was a horse whose quality, an admirer would write, “was mostly in his heart, and Tom Smith had been the first to recognize it.” A man for whom words were encumbrances, Smith didn’t take note of the horse’s name, but he memorized him nonetheless. He spoke to the horse as he was led away.

“I’ll see you again.”

The horse’s name was Seabiscuit, and for a bent-backed trainer on the other side of the backstretch, the brief exchange of glances between the horse and Tom Smith was the beginning of the end of a long, pounding headache. In 1877, when James Fitzsimmons was three, the Coney Island Jockey Club annexed his family’s Brooklyn neighborhood and literally built a track around his house, leaving it standing in the infield while the racing world revolved around it. “Sunny Jim,” as admirers called him, was thus entangled in the racetrack from the beginning of his conscious life. He never escaped it. “All I ever wanted to do,” he once said, “was be with the horses.” At age ten he worked as a dishwasher in the track kitchen. He moved on to a harrowing career as an exercise boy, then became a jockey. “I was vaccinated for jockey,” he liked to say, “but it didn’t take.” He survived a rocky reinsman’s career, then hung it up to try his hand at training. He had found his niche.

Fitzsimmons soon established himself as the most successful conditioner of Thoroughbreds in the nation. That June he was sixty-one and imprisoned in a body so ravaged by arthritis that his upper spine was slowly collapsing forward, driving his head so far downward that in time he would have to learn to identify his horses solely by their feet. He coaxed a phenomenal amount of work out of his rigid body, laboring so hard over his horses through the week that he had to sleep straight through Sunday to recover. The work paid off: Fitzsimmons had cultivated the talents of myriad champions, including Gallant Fox and Omaha, two of the first three horses to sweep the Kentucky Derby, Preakness Stakes, and Belmont Stakes—the Triple Crown. His greatness was beyond question. His was a household name across America, and trainers regarded him with profound reverence. Tom Smith was no exception. Fitzsimmons was apparently the only man whom Smith ever regarded with awe.

The events that brought the two trainers together had begun in 1928, when Fitzsimmons was entrusted with the two-year-old Hard Tack, sire of the colt Smith would see at Suffolk Downs. Owned by Gladys Phipps and her brother Ogden Mills, operators of the East’s legendary Wheatley Stable, Hard Tack was a copper-colored paragon of symmetry, grace, and blinding speed. Everything about him was superlative, including his single flaw: He was uncontrollable. The characteristic had surfaced, to a greater or lesser degree, in nearly every horse to descend from his great-grandsire, Hastings, a thousand-pound misanthrope for the ages. On the track, where he won races as prestigious as the 1896 Belmont Stakes, Hastings deliberately rammed and attempted to maul his competitors. Off the track, he ripped groom after groom to ribbons. “He went to his death unreconstructed and unloved,” wrote Peter Chew in American Heritage magazine, “having left his mark literally and figuratively on many a stablehand.” Hastings passed both speed and malevolence down to his son Fair Play, who in turn bequeathed it to his incomparable son, Man o’ War. Racing in 1919 and 1920, this immense red animal so devastated his competition that he won by as many as one hundred lengths and set numerous speed records. Man o’ War lost only once in his career—to a colt coincidentally named Upset—a defeat that still ranks among the most shocking in sports history.¹ Arguably the greatest runner who ever lived, Man o’ War became a prolific sire, populating the racing world with beautiful man-eaters.

A typical example was War Relic. While a youngster, he acquainted the world with his jolly personality by stomping a groom to death. His trainer, Culton Utz, tracked down leading jockey Tommy Luther, famed for his fearlessness and ability to stay aboard even the most unrideable beasts, and brought him to the training farm to work with the horse. Luther was appalled at just how bad the colt was. “The horse,” remembered Luther, “would do everything wrong.” Luther and Utz put War Relic through endless hours of patient schooling until they felt he was ready to go to the track without killing anyone. At Rhode Island’s Narragansett Park they entered him in a race. War Relic displayed cherubic behavior, grabbed the lead out of the gate, and never relinquished it, winning with consummate ease. “Next time he runs,” Luther told his wife, Helen, “bet a hundred dollars. It will be like taking candy from a baby.”

Helen did as her husband asked, then sat in the stands on race day, terrified and praying. War Relic rocketed to the lead, held it around the track, and flew into the homestretch all alone. Luther thought his $100 bet was going to cash in. But War Relic had been an angel for exactly one and three quarter races, and he was pushing his limits. As the crowd cheered him on from the grandstand, he abruptly bolted to the inside, hit the rail, and stopped dead, vaulting Luther into a spiraling dive directly toward the toothy track harrows parked in the infield. Luther was on the verge of being skewered. Throwing out his hands, he caught the rail, swooped around it like a gymnast, and made a clean dismount onto the track. Steward Tom Thorpe walked across the course and stared at Luther’s uninjured body, incredulous.

“Tommy,” he said, “you must have had somebody praying for you.”

Praying was usually the best you could do when confronted with a son of Man o’ War. Hard Tack, also a Man o’ War son, inherited the fabled Hastings temper distilled to crystal purity. The colt spent three years plunging around the track in devil-possessed rages and nurturing a vendetta against the hapless assistant starters assigned to hold his head in the doorless starting gate. He terrorized them without mercy; they feared and loathed him without reserve. Hard Tack became a notorious rogue, inspiring turf writer John Hervey to dub him “the archexponent of recalcitrance.” Fitzsimmons had gentled plenty of miscreants, but he had no answers for Hard Tack. By some miracle, on three occasions, he was able to coax the horse into playing the racing game. Running with an unusual gait in which one foreleg jabbed out as he swung it forward, Hard Tack channeled savagery into velocity, whipping top horses in stakes races—the highest level of racing—and breaking speed records. But these were only skirmishes. Hard Tack won the war. At the starting gate before a race in 1931, he issued his declaration of independence. When the starter banged the bell, Hard Tack rooted his hooves in the ground and stayed right where he was. Fitzsimmons packed him up and shipped him back to owner Phipps.

By the time Hard Tack entered stud in 1932, his name burned in infamy. No one was foolish enough to pay a stud fee to breed a mare to him. Poor Gladys Phipps offered him to Maryland breeders for free, but she couldn’t find a single taker. She then asked Kentucky’s famed Claiborne Farm, which boarded her mares, to stand him at stud. They declined. Eager to see some return on her investment, she had him vanned far down a lonely Kentucky lane, onto a farm called Blue Grass Heights, and parked him in a paddock deep in a grove of mulberry trees. She sent some of her own mares over from Claiborne to be bred to him. One of them was a mealy, melon-kneed horse named Swing On. She, too, had once been in Fitzsimmons’s care, but though she had shown a quick turn of foot occasionally, she hadn’t trained well enough for Fitzsimmons to think she was going to be much of a racehorse. He had retired her without ever racing her. She was nicely bred, so Phipps decided to send her to Hard Tack’s court, along with three other mares. Swing On and her fellow mares came back to Claiborne pregnant. Phipps crossed her fingers, hoping that these matings would re-create the perfect forms of the forebears without the tyrannical disposition.

They didn’t. At New York’s Aqueduct Racecourse late in 1934, Hard Tack’s first two yearlings stepped off a railcar into Fitzsimmons’s care. Swing On’s son Seabiscuit (a synonym for his sire’s name) and the other colt, Grog, could not have looked less like their sire. Noah, the foaling groom at Claiborne, had summed it up about as well as anyone when he pulled Seabiscuit into the world: “Runty little thing.” Claiborne handlers had been so dismayed with the colt that they had hidden him in a back barn when Phipps came to look over her new crop of horses. A year of maturing hadn’t helped much. “Seabiscuit was so small,” said Fitzsimmons, “that you might mistake him for a lead pony.” Curiously, Hard Tack appeared to be stamping his foals in a mold that was the polar opposite of his own. The only similarity, evident in Seabiscuit, was that swatting foreleg. Not only were these colts strange-looking, shaggy, and awkward, but aside from the slight difference in their mutually diminutive heights—Grog was a hair shorter—they were identical. Without the assistance of a halter nameplate, virtually no one could tell them apart. The colts must have liked the mirror image; they had become inseparable in the Claiborne paddocks.

Fortunately, Hard Tack’s raging temper had also come out in the genetic wash. Seabiscuit floated along in a state of contented, bovine torpor. Sleeping was his favorite pastime. Horses usually sleep in numerous brief sessions scattered throughout the day and night; about 20 percent of their daytime is spent snoozing. Because of the size and configuration of their bodies, they suffer impeded breathing and circulation when recumbent, and as prey animals who have trouble getting to their feet quickly, they are instinctively disinclined to stay down. As a result, the vast majority of horses’ sleeping is done standing, which they can do thanks to ligaments that lock their leg joints in the extended position. The average stabled horse spends just five minutes at a time lying down to sleep, almost always at night.

Seabiscuit was the exception. He could keel over and snooze for hours on end. His inability to straighten his knees all the way may have been the culprit, preventing him from locking his forelegs in the upright position. Fortunately, he suffered no negative consequences. While every other horse at the track raised hed demanding breakfast, he slept long and late, stretching out over the floor of his stall in such deep sedation that the grooms had to use every means in their power just to get him to stand up. He was so quiet that Fitzsimmons’s assistant trainers once forgot all about him and left him in a van for an entire afternoon in brutal heat while they went for a beer. They found him there hours later, pitched over on his side, blissfully asleep. No one had ever seen a horse so relaxed. Fitzsimmons would remember him as “a big dog,” the most easygoing horse he ever trained. The only thing Seabiscuit took seriously, aside from his beauty rest, was eating, which he did constantly, with great vigor.

He may have been an amiable little horse, but his career prospects looked dim. He was as slow as growing grass. He barely kept up with his training partners, lagging along behind with happy ineptitude. Worked over and over again, he showed no improvement whatsoever. “The boys who took care of him could do anything with him,” Fitzsimmons said. “Anything, that is, except to get him to run in the mornings.… I thought he simply couldn’t run.”

But in time, something in Seabiscuit’s demeanor—perhaps a conspicuous lack of sweating in the workouts, perhaps a gleam in the horse’s eye that hinted at devious intelligence—made Fitzsimmons question his assumptions. “He was as wise as a little owl,” Fitzsimmons remembered later. “He was almost too quiet, too docile.” Fitzsimmons began to wonder if this horse might be just as obstreperous as his sire, only much more cunning in his methods. His father had raged; Seabiscuit seemed … amused. “He struck me,” Fitzsimmons said, “as a bird that could sing but wouldn’t unless we made him.”

Fitzsimmons made him. “I decided to fool the Biscuit,” he explained, “to prove to him he wasn’t fooling me.” One morning, when working all the yearlings over two furlongs—a quarter of a mile—in sets of two, he paired Seabiscuit with Faust, the fastest yearling in the barn and a future major stakes winner. He told Seabiscuit’s exercise rider to find a stick to use as a whip. This was a radical departure from Fitzsimmons’s regular training practices, which mandated that exercise riders never use whips on their horses. The trainer believed that racehorses were instinctively hard-trying, competitive creatures who did not need to be forced to exert themselves. During one race in his jockey days, he heard another rider cursing after dropping his whip on what he thought was an otherwise sure winner. Fitzsimmons handed the jockey his whip, then rode his own horse right past him to win, urging him with nothing but hands and voice. But Seabiscuit could not be coaxed into showing any speed at all, and to find out if the horse was hoodwinking him, Fitzsimmons opted to make an exception to his no-whip rule. To ensure that the stick would not hurt Seabiscuit, Fitzsimmons had the rider select one that was flat, so it would merely slap his flank.

“Keep this colt right up with Faust as close as you can,” he later recalled telling the jockey. “Just see how many times you can hit him going a quarter of a mile.” Fitzsimmons expected that, at best, Seabiscuit would be able to cling to Faust for a little while.

Faust never had a chance. Slapped over and over again with the stick, Seabiscuit blew Faust’s doors off, covering a quarter mile in an impossible 22₢ seconds. It may have been the fastest quarter ever run by a yearling. Today, on tracks that are several seconds faster than they were in the 1930s, such a workout time is considered exceptionally swift, even for a mature horse. The bird could sing.

“I found out why he wasn’t running,” said Fitzsimmons. “It wasn’t that he couldn’t. It was that he wouldn’t.” Fitzsimmons realized that he was confronted with a behavioral problem at least as maddening as Hard Tack’s murderousness: pathological indolence. “He was lazy,” marveled Fitzsimmons. “Dead lazy.”

The colt had proven that Hard Tack’s speed lived on in his homely little body. But the revelation didn’t make him any more eager to work. Though he later denied it, Fitzsimmons evidently suspended his no-whip rule indefinitely with Seabiscuit. “We used a whip on him every time we sent him to the track, and we used it freely, too,” he once conceded. “When we didn’t, he loafed along.” The horse performed better, but he still wasn’t working hard enough to get himself fit. Fitzsimmons came to the conclusion that the only way to tap into the potential he had glimpsed was to race him hard. Very hard. His logic: Since the horse rested himself so much more than other horses, he could stand up to an unusually heavy racing schedule. And since the horse was uncommonly intelligent, he would know to back off if he became overworked.

Entrusted to assistant trainer James Fitzsimmons, Jr., while Sunny Jim manned the helm on the more precocious horses, Seabiscuit began a regimen of incredibly rigorous campaigning. Thoroughbreds are placed in age classes according to the year in which they are born, rather than their birth month. On January 1 all horses graduate to the next age class even if their birthdays fall months later. Seabiscuit had been a very late foal, born at the end of May 1933, but in January 1935, half a year short of his actual birthday, he was deemed a two-year-old, officially eligible to race. On January 19, he began his career at Florida’s Hialeah Race Track. He finished fourth. It wasn’t good enough for the Wheatley Stable, which was overflowing with top prospects. Three days later, Seabiscuit was put up for sale, placed in a rock-bottom claiming race for a tag of just $2,500. No one wanted him even at that price, and he lost again. James junior then put the colt on the road, touring through thirteen tracks up and down the East Coast to run in low-rent races spaced as little as two days apart. Sixteen times Seabiscuit ran; sixteen times he lost. From Florida to Rhode Island and practically everywhere in between, he was offered in the cheapest claiming races. No one took him.

Once in a while the Hard Tack speed reappeared. In the colt’s eighteenth start, for no explicable reason, he finally won, clocking a sterling time. Rolled back into another claiming race just four days later, he broke a track record, an unheard-of feat for a claimer. But the brilliant form fell apart immediately, leaving him back among the dregs of racing. He plodded along for another few months, then rebounded with three moderate wins in the fall of 1935 before sinking back into failure.

By season’s end, Seabiscuit had been shipped over six thousand miles and raced a staggering thirty-five times, at least triple the typical workload. Grog had fared even worse, racing thirty-seven times before being claimed for a paltry $1,500. Sooner or later, it appeared, Seabiscuit would meet the same fate.

At least the problem of how to get Seabiscuit in shape had been solved. Raced constantly, he surely no longer lacked for fitness. But his problems were predominantly mental. By the time his two-year-old season drew to a close, he was showing signs of burnout. He became edgy. He stopped sleeping, spending his nights pacing around and around his stall. On the track, he fought savagely in the starting gate and sulked his way through races, sometimes trailing the field from start to finish. A young jockey named George Woolf, aboard for one of these woeful performances, summed up the colt’s mental state in four words: “mean, restive, and ragged.”

Years later Fitzsimmons would argue that the intense campaign through which he and his assistants put Seabiscuit gave the horse the seasoning that enabled him to race for so long as an older horse. There may be some merit to this, as recent research suggests that steady, hard training and racing in sound horses, especially in young ones, may give bones and soft tissue the loading they need for optimal durability, and give horses the wind foundation to tackle harder racing later. But such a thing can be overdone. Thoroughbreds run because they love to, but when overraced they can become stale and uninterested, especially when repeatedly trounced and bullied by their riders, as Seabiscuit was. By the spring of 1936 he was clearly miserable, and it is hard to avoid the conclusion that his exhausting schedule was the cause. Given that he wasn’t winning, or even running passably well, it’s very difficult to defend it.

Seabiscuit had the misfortune of living in a stable whose managers simply didn’t have the time to give his mind the painstaking attention it needed. Fitzsimmons’s barn, consisting of horses owned by the Wheatley and Belair Stables, was teeming with precocious youngsters and proven, high-class older horses. As Seabiscuit ground through his first season, Fitzsimmons was touring the nation amid a storm of publicity as Seabiscuit’s stablemate, Omaha, made a successful assault on the Triple Crown. The following season Fitzsimmons turned his attention to the promising Granville, readying him for a shot at the ’36 Kentucky Derby. It was often said that Fitzsimmons nearly ruined Seabiscuit by using him as a workmate for Granville, pulling him up during hot contests to bolster Granville’s confidence. This is highly unlikely. Since Seabiscuit refused to exert himself in workouts, it would have made little sense to pair him with the brilliantly fast Granville, especially as Granville already had a designated workmate who traveled with him. Further, as Fitzsimmons often explained, Granville was owned by Belair Stable, Seabiscuit by Wheatley, and one of horse training’s cardinal rules is that the horse of one owner is never sacrificed to benefit the horse of another. Fitzsimmons would certainly have avoided this conflict of interest.

But Granville’s presence probably did work against Seabiscuit, simply by virtue of the demands that a Kentucky Derby contender makes on his trainer. Granville was a temperamental animal who needed coddling, and little time was left over for the Seabiscuits and Grogs of the stable. The Fitzsimmons barn was one in which a horse who did not display spectacular talent could slip through the cracks. That is what happened to Seabiscuit, and Fitzsimmons knew it. “He had something when he wanted to show it,” the trainer later admitted. “It was like he was saving himself for something. Trouble was, I didn’t have time right then to find out for what.”

In the spring of ’36 Fitzsimmons set off for the Triple Crown prep races with Granville, leaving Seabiscuit in the hands of assistant trainer George Tappen. The horse’s campaign became a road show of athletic futility. Seabiscuit shipped ad over the Northeast, never stayed more than two or three weeks in one place, averaged one race every five days, and racked up losses to inferior horses practically every time out. But just as in his freshman season, he showed glimmers of promise. There was a decent effort at New York’s Jamaica Race Track, then a modest allowance win at Narragansett Park. The decent performances were mixed with laughably bad outings—two ten-length thumpings, one of which saw him lag in twelfth from start to finish—but Fitzsimmons was becoming more and more convinced that the colt could be improved. He never stopped trying to encourage Seabiscuit to work harder in the mornings, including offering a $1 incentive—twice the standard fee—to any exercise rider who could get him to run a half mile in anything under a sleepy fifty seconds. “None of them,” Fitzsimmons lamented, “ever won the dollar.”

The puzzle of the horse weighed on Fitzsimmons’s mind. One morning at Aqueduct, while standing by the track to watch Granville complete his preparations for the Kentucky Derby, reporters were surprised to hear Sunny Jim ruminating not on his stable star but on the unknown Seabiscuit. The colt was, said the trainer, “a pretty nice hoss, the kind that might take some time to get going, but would take a lot of beating when he did.”

As Fitzsimmons was warming up to Seabiscuit, Wheatley was cooling off. Gladys Phipps was convinced that even if Fitzsimmons could make a silk purse out of this sow’s ear, the horse was still much too small to make it in the more lucrative “handicap” division, in which he would have to carry heavier weights. The new crop of horses coming into the barn was a big one, and the stable string had to be culled. Seabiscuit topped the list of disposable horses, and Phipps was eager to find a buyer. Unable to do so, she tried to pawn the colt off as a polo pony. The prospective buyer took one look at the colt’s crooked legs and passed. Early that spring, before she left for a tour of Europe, Phipps set a $5,000 price on Seabiscuit, hoping he would be sold before she came back.

Fitzsimmons had bigger things to worry about. In early May, a few days before Seabiscuit earned $25 for finishing fourth in a race at Jamaica Race Track, Fitzsimmons and Granville shipped off to Churchill Downs to go for the $37,725 winner’s share of the purse in the Kentucky Derby. Coming into the race with an excellent shot at winning, Granville fumed, stormed, and lathered through the post parade and bounced and shimmied in the starting gate. When the bell rang, he was sideswiped by a horse named He Did and nearly went down. He dumped jockey Jimmy Stout and took off for a glorious solo gallop around the track. In Baltimore’s Preakness Stakes, Stout stuck to his stirrups but finished second to Derby winner Bold Venture, foiled by the brilliant reinsmanship of Seabiscuit’s onetime jockey, George Woolf. In early June, as Seabiscuit was being humiliated in a cheap stakes race in New Hampshire, Granville finally lived up to expectations by winning New York’s Belmont Stakes, the final jewel in the Triple Crown. He would be named Horse of the Year for 1936. With a competitor like Granville in his barn, Fitzsimmons now had no reason to be fretting over a colt like Seabiscuit.

In June, after being whipped by a total of more than twenty-five lengths in his previous three starts, Seabiscuit appeared at Massachusetts’s Suffolk Downs to compete against a lowly field vying for a $700 winner’s purse. There Tom Smith bent over the track rail and exchanged looks with him for the first time. Countless horsemen had run their eyes over that plain bay body. None of them had seen what Smith saw.

In a private box above Saratoga Race Course on August 3, 1936, Marcela and Charles Howard surveyed a field of generic $6,000 claimers. In town to bid on the yearling sales on behalf of Bing Crosby, they had stopped by the track to take in a few races. Charles pointed to an especially homely colt and asked his wife what she thought of him. She offered a wager of a cool drink that the horse would lose. He accepted the bet, and they watched as the colt led wire to wire. Marcela bought her husband a lemonade. Sitting together in the clubhouse that afternoon, husband and wife felt a pull of intuition. Howard contacted Smith and told him he had a horse he wanted him to look at, stabled in the Fitzsimmons barn. Smith was probably skeptical. That spring he had been shown nearly two dozen prospects and had frowned over every one of them.

Smith walked over to the Wheatley barn and presented himself to Fitzsimmons, asking to see the horse of whom Howard had spoken. Fitzsimmons walked the colt in question out of his stall. Smith recognized him immediately; it was Seabiscuit. Smith saw the bucked knees, the insistent pressure of ribs under skin, the weariness of the body. But he saw something else, too. He tracked down Howard.

“Better come and see him for yourself,” he said.

Led out of his stall with the two men standing by, Seabiscuit head-butted Howard. Smith made his case with four sentences: “Get me that horse. He has real stuff in him. I can improve him. I’m positive.”

It was a statement astounding for its audacity. Tom Smith was an obscure trainer with one year’s experience with a mainstream stable. Fitzsimmons was the undisputed leader of the nation’s training ranks. If Sunny Jim couldn’t get a horse to win, no one could. Few trainers, even the most cocksure, were fool enough to buy a horse from the master. For Smith, walking into that barn must have been akin to entering a cathedral; telling Fitzsimmons that he could improve on his work must have felt like sacrilege. And there was another reason for worry. Howard sent veterinarians to inspect the horse. They were only lukewarm about his prospects, eyeing that iffy left foreleg and pronouncing the horse only “serviceably useful.” But in this horse, Smith knew there was something lying dormant.

The bump from Seabiscuit’s head took care of Howard’s sentimental side. “I fell in love with him,” he said later, “right then and there.” Marcela was sold and urged him not to wait. But Howard’s business side was still not convinced. He contacted co-owner Ogden Mills and made an offer of $8,000, with one string attached: Seabiscuit had to perform well in his next start.²

The appointed day arrived with pouring rain, and Fitzsimmons considered scratching Seabiscuit. But no one else seemed to want to run in the mud either. All day long, trainers kept scratching horses from the race. By afternoon, only one other horse remained in the field. Fitzsimmons decided he had nothing to lose. Howard amused himself by putting a $100 bet on the horse, then settled in to watch. Smith was terrified. He had studied Seabiscuit’s past performances and knew that the horse did not run his best in mud. The trainer stood on the track apron and fretted.

Seabiscuit broke slowly and dropped farther and farther back. By mid-race, he was trailing by at least ten lengths. Smith was dismayed. But Seabiscuit began to rally. Slogging through the slop, he lumbered up to his competitor, pushing as hard as he could, and passed him. It wasn’t much of a race, but it was a win nonetheless. Howard was satisfied. The horse had grit.³

“I can’t describe the feeling he gave me,” Howard said later, “but somehow I knew he had what it takes. Tom and I realized that we had our worries and troubles ahead. We had to rebuild him, both mentally and physically, but you don’t have to rebuild the heart when it’s already there, big as all outdoors.”

Smith breathed a sigh of relief. Years later, he would shiver at the thought of how easily he could have lost the colt in the driving rain that day.

Howard let Mills know that the offer was still on the table. Mills mulled it over. Fitzsimmons had become deeply fond of the colt and entertained private doubts about parting with him. Seabiscuit might, he muttered dubiously, win another purse. He didn’t share his reservations with Mdls, an omission he would come to regret. Howard found Mdls in the Saratoga paddock.

“Deal or no deal?” he asked.

“Deal,” said Mdls. Howard wrote out a check to Mills, then gave his new horse to Marcela.

Tom Smith had found the horse who would lift him from obscurity.

On an August day in 1936, Seabiscuit was led from the Fitzsimmons barn for the last time. No one came to see him go. Fitzsimmons hadn’t been told that the sale had gone through, so he didn’t come to say his good-byes. Seabiscuit was walked down the backstretch, a long canopy of trees bowing over his head. At the Howard barn, Smith waited, flanked by a cluster of stable hands. Though the trainer hardly ever said anything, there was an air to him that day that told the grooms how special the horse was to him. One kid who had not picked up on it was a teenaged apprentice jockey named Farrell Jones, who joined the others at the barn as Seabiscuit was led up. Seeing a thin, homely animal, Jones made the understandable assumption that this was no racehorse.

“Looks like they got a new saddle horse,” he blurted out, loud enough for Smith to hear.

The grooms shushed him.

A few days later, Smith led Seabiscuit up onto a railcar, and the Howard barn pushed off for the Detroit Fair Grounds. Smith began thinking about finding a jockey.

1 It has long been part of racing lore that the use of the word “upset” to mean the surprise defeat of a favorite originates from Man o’ War’s shocking loss to the horse Upset in 1920. Though a good story, it is false. Use of the word “upset” in this sense predates that race. In fact, reporters covering the race noted how coincidental it was that Man o’ War should lose to a horse with such a name.

2 Though $8,000 sounds like a lot in Depression dodars, it was a relatively low price for a racehorse. Horse racing was one of the most lucrative sports in America at that time, and even undistinguished horses often earned two to three thousand dodars a year. In addition, the breeding industry was potentially profitable, adding considerably to the value of horses. Seabiscuit was reasonably well-bred, giving him additional value as a stallion.

3 The official Daily Racing Form record of this race states that Seabiscuit held the lead from the start, but it appears to be in error. Multiple eyewitness accounts of this race state that Seabiscuit trailed badly early, then rallied to win.