Seabiscuit understood him and always did as asked. In moments of uncertainty, the horse would pause and look for Smith. When he found his trainer, the horse would relax. Smith taught him that he could trust his trainer and rider, and this became the foundation for the trials the three would share over the next five years. " let horses get confidence in him," remembered Keith Stucki, one of the horse's exercise riders. "He was the best horseman I've ever seen." With long, careful schooling, Seabiscuit began to figure things out. Once he was no longer being coerced, his instincts bubbled back to the surface. His innate love of running returned. Pollard used the whip not as an implement of force, but as a signal: one glancing swat on the rump at the eighth pole, another a few feet from home, a cue that it was time to hustle.
After two weeks, Smith was ready to send him to the races. Howard agreed. In late August they tried him in a good stakes race in Detroit. He had the bad luck of drawing into an event that featured the best filly in the country, Myrtlewood. Green to the core, Seabiscuit was all over the track, streaking out with the early leaders as they tried to keep up with Myrtlewood. On the backstretch, he was going along smoothly when, without warning, he threw his forelegs forward and propped, decelerating rapidly and dropping back through the field. Ahead of him, Myrtlewood drove to an insurmountable lead, with local star Professor Paul rallying in vain to catch her.
Seabiscuit's temperamental outburst had left him hopelessly beaten, but as Pollard angled him into the stretch and asked him to get his mind back on running, Smith witnessed something he would never forget. Seabiscuit began to rip over the track, cutting into Myrtlewood's lead even as she flew through fractions faster than any ever run at the Detroit Fair Grounds. He was much too late to overtake the filly or Professor Paul, but his rally carried him to fourth place, just four lengths behind Myrtlewood, who had broken the track record. Even more encouraging, in the home stretch, Seabiscuit's ears were up, a signal that the horse was running within himself. "He showed me two great qualifications that day," Smith remembered later. "He showed me speed, and he showed me courage. He was in trouble, and the way he pricked his ears, I knew if I could get the true speed out of him, I would have a champion." Pollard knew it too. Leaping off of Seabiscuit's back, he ran over to Howard. [Charles Howard, Seabiscuit's owner, was a one-time bicycle repairman who introduced the automobile to the American Wild West.]
"Mr. Howard," he sang out, "that horse can win the Santa Anita!" Howard laughed.
In his next start, on September 2 in the Roamer Handicap, Seabiscuit had nothing but bad luck. He took the early lead, then swung very wide on the far turn, falling behind into fourth. Pollard tried to rally him, but he was blocked by traffic until deep in the stretch, when he shook loose and flew up, almost catching Professor Paul for the win. Smith was pleased. The horse, he thought, was ready for sterner stuff.
On September 7th, Smith led Seabiscuit out for the Governor's Handicap. The race had no national importance, but in Detroit it was the big event of the racing season. Seabiscuit was sent off at long odds, for good reason: Also entered in the race were Professor Paul and Azucar, George Woolf's Santa Anita Handicap winner, under a new rider and not quite his old self.
Twenty-eight thousand fans, the biggest throng in Michigan racing history, showed up to see it, among them Charles and Marcela Howard.
They were treated to a spellbinder. Just after the start, Pollard tucked Seabiscuit in behind early leader Biography, who cut a brisk pace. Around the first turn and down the long backstretch, Pollard held Seabiscuit just behind Biography. Leaning into the far turn, Pollard saw a hole along the rail. He threaded Seabiscuit through, and in a few strides he had seized the lead. As Biography accelerated to stay with him, Professor Paul swept up on the grandstand side. In the center of the track, Azucar began to uncurl his long legs and accelerate, grinding away at the lead. In that position, the four horses bent around the turn and hit the homestretch.
Pollard, in the lingo of jockeys, asked Seabiscuit the question.
Seabiscuit, for the first time in his life, answered. Pollard dropped his belly down in the saddle and rode as hard as he could. The quartet of horses blazed down the stretch at a terrific clip, with Seabiscuit a half length in front.
Biography was the first to crack. Professor Paul, carrying just ninety-nine pounds, ten fewer than Seabiscuit, was skipping along under the light load, inching in on the lead, while Azucar, on the far outside, was driving at them. In midstretch, Professor Paul's blinkered head was at Pollard's hip with Azucar just behind them. A few feet later, Professor Paul was past Pollard's elbow and still gaining. Then Azucar gave way. It was down to Seabiscuit and Professor Paul. The latter was cutting the lead down with every lunge.
With the crowd on its feet, Pollard spread himself flat over Seabiscuit's withers, reins clutched in his left hand, right hand pressed flat to Seabiscuit's neck, head turned and eyes fixed on Professor Paul's broad blaze. A few feet from the wire, Professor Paul reached Seabiscuit's throat. He was too late. Seabiscuit had won.
Red Pollard had won just his fourth stakes race in eleven long years in the saddle. He was radiant. He galloped Seabiscuit out to the cheers from the crowd, then turned him back toward the grandstand. Beneath him, Seabiscuit bounced along with his tail fanned out high in the air. He played with the bit and wagged an ear at the photographers who stood by the rail, snapping his picture for the morning papers. Pollard steered him back to the winner's stand, leapt off, and ran to Howard, who beamed like a schoolboy.
It was only a good stakes race at a minor-league track, but it might as well have been the hundred-grander.
In the fiftieth start of his life, Seabiscuit finally understood the game.
Smith and Pollard had unearthed in him, in Smith's words, "more natural inclination to run than any horse I have ever seen". Behind his frown, Smith was pleased.
The colt was transformed. In the barn he became a disarmingly affectionate glutton, "as gentlemanly a horse," marveled Smith, "as I ever handled". On the track, once the forum for rebellion, he displayed blistering speed and bulldog tenacity. Smith wasn't ready to put the screws to him just yet.
He was beginning to think that Pollard was right about the horse's chances in the Santa Anita Handicap. Because track handicappers assign higher imposts to faster and more accomplished horses, Smith wanted to keep his horse a secret for as long as he could. Smith kept the horse in the small pond of Detroit, where Seabiscuit followed the Governor's Handicap win with an impressive score in the Hendrie Handicap. Smith then shipped him down to Cincinnati's River Downs, where the horse narrowly missed winning two more minor stakes.
It was at Cincinnati that Seabiscuit's handlers first realized how fanatically competitive the horse was. Those unfamiliar with horses might scoff at the notion of equine pride as a silly anthropomorphism, but the behavior is unmistakable. Those who make their lives among horses see it every day. Horses who lose their riders during races almost always try to win anyway, charging to the lead and sometimes bucking with pleasure as they pass the last opponent. Weanling herds stampede around their paddocks several times a day, running all-out to beat one another. Even old stallions, decades away from the track, still duel with one another up and down the fences of breeding farms. As George Woolf noted, losers show clear signs of dejection and frustration, even shame; winners prick their ears and swagger. "You don't have to tell good horses when they win or lose," he said. "They know. I guess they come by it kinda natural." Humans aren't the only creatures to seek mastery and rebel at being mastered. The fire that had kept Seabiscuit frustrated and unruly now fuelled a bounding will to win.
It first surfaced in the midst of a scorching workout alongside Howard's excellent sprinter, Exhibit. Seabiscuit had him beaten, but instead of pulling away, he eased himself up and galloped alongside, going just fast enough to keep Exhibit a notch behind. Exhibit tried his hardest, but Seabiscuit kept adjusting his speed to maintain the short advantage. He appeared to be taunting Exhibit. The two kept it up for a few furlongs before Exhibit abruptly pulled himself up. From that day forward, he refused to work with Seabiscuit.
The scene would be reenacted countless times on the racetrack in the next few years, and it would become Seabiscuit's trademark. The horse seemed to take sadistic pleasure in harassing and humiliating his rivals, slowing down to mock them as he passed, snorting in their faces, and pulling up when in front so other horses could draw alongside, then dashing their hopes with a killing burst of speed. Where other horses relied solely on speed to win, Seabiscuit used intimidation.
After the performance against Exhibit, Smith thought Seabiscuit was ready to move up a notch. The upstart West had the new Santa Anita Handicap, but the East, seat of racing's elite governing bodies and home to all of America's venerable old races and stables, had prestige. In October 1936 Seabiscuit climbed down from a railcar and stepped onto Empire City Racetrack in New York.
He was not yet good enough to shoot for the East's great races, so Smith entered him in the Scarsdale Handicap, a mid-level stakes race. Few spectators cared that Seabiscuit, the second-longest shot on the board, was in the field.
The horse needed just a minute and forty-four seconds to change their minds.
Fighting his way through one of the wildest contests of the season, Pollard swung Seabiscuit clear of a set of chain-reaction collisions on the far turn, circled the field, and sent his mount running in a frantic effort to catch the leaders. In a hub-scraping finish, Seabiscuit dropped his head and won by inches. The finish photo captured the scene: a dense cluster of horses stretched out for the wire, ears flat and lips peeled back in extreme effort. Ahead of them all, ears tipped forward with a jaunty expression, was Seabiscuit's heavy, homely head. Easy.
One week later, Howard met with Smith. "Lets head for California," he said. "A little wind off San Francisco Bay would do us good." Smith agreed, thinking Seabiscuit could use a rest.
The trick was getting the horse there. In the 1930s, long-distance horse-shipping could only be done via railcar. A cross-country journey was a harrowing ordeal, five days of clanging, rocking, and bumping in a confined space. Train travel was so exhausting and upsetting to most thoroughbreds that few could be taken outside their region. With Seabiscuit, Smith had reason to worry. Back at Saratoga, when he caught sight of the train to Detroit, the colt had panicked so badly that sweat streamed from his belly.
While the other Howard horses filed onto standard horse-class cars, Seabiscuit had earned himself a luxury berth: a full end of an 80-foot Pullman car. Halfl to the car was knee-deep in straw, half was left unbedded so he could stretch his legs. Smith watched to see how Seabiscuit would behave. The horse stepped in and lay down. He would sleep during most of the journey. Smith climbed into the caboose, coming forward at each whistle-stop to check on his horse.
They were retracing Charles Howards's youthful journey, 30 years later.
"We're coming back," the old bicycle man told his friends. "And when we do, hang on to your hats."