Seabiscuit: Chapter 20–Epilogue

Someone told him that Pollard had again been hospitalized, and Woolf was crestfallen.

Whenever he could, he made good use of his omnipresent entourage of newsmen.

Even in the bucolic surroundings of Columbia, Seabiscuit could not escape the carnival atmosphere.

While he attended the races at Tanforan with Bing Crosby, the crooner found himself abandoned as fans and autograph-seekers smothered Howard.

Reporters and distraught fans phoned his house all night long.

“The affection that this inarticulate brown horse had aroused,’’ journalist Ed Sullivan would write, “was a most amazing thing.”

Smith’s protectiveness had given way to confident magnanimity.

While Howard gathered up the old shoes to have them cast into silver ashtrays to give to reporters, Smith got a farrier to design special new turn-gripping shoes.

He swallowed his trepidation and opted to run.

Woolf met him in the paddock, and Smith gave him a leg up.

If he jumped off now, Seabiscuit, obedient to equine instinct to flee pain, would probably tear over the track, exacerbating his injury.

Restive, he stalked the fences on his lame leg.

After a period of convalescence, the horse returned to racing, only to be injured again.

Smith scrutinized the horse from head to toe.

The idea was outlandish. The comeback, if successful, would be unprecedented.

He had never lost his belief that he could ride in races again, though no one who looked at him as he leaned on his cane, his leg grotesquely thin and discolored, his body weak and emaciated, would have agreed with him.

But the doctor’s verdict was unequivocal: Agnes was going to have a baby.

Silent Tom’s tirade lasted a full five minutes. After giving vent to his anger, he pulled himself together and stalked off.

The film relegated a much anticipated Jimmy Stewart movie to second billing.

One morning at Santa Anita, Howard pushed Smith hard to take a course with Seabiscuit that Smith was not prepared to take, apparently to rush his very conservative training regimen.

In announcing publicly that it was Woolf or Pollard, Howard had inadvertently set the two against each other.

Answers to the name of Seabiscuit. Guaranteed to cause rainstorms wherever he goes. Capable of solving all irrigation problems of dust bowl farmers. Can vastly simplify Federal reclamation projects in all drought areas. All businesses now operating under Federal Bankruptcy Law 7-B can become liquid at once by employing services of this miraculous animal. . . .

Smith was adamant that Pollard was the man for the job.

As Pollard and his horse moved past the grandstand, hundreds of men spontaneously rose together and doffed their hats to him, their eyes shining.

Now he prattled on at Pollard, giving him every needless detail of how to ride the race.

Up in the press box, Jolly Roger and all the other Wise We Boys had dropped their objectivity.

The place was vintage Woolf, decorated floor to ceiling in flamboyant cowboy memorabilia.

There was the awful dissonance of a lone horse galloping riderless.

Genevieve joined Charles Howard in the center of the paddock to hear a eulogy delivered by Joe Hernandez, the man who first called Woolf “Iceman.”

Prone to premonitions, she once dreamt that her filly had climbed a tree and called her trainer in the middle of the night to see if the dream had come true.

His reputation was ruined; racing officials tailed him around after his reinstatement, trying to catch him in some nefarious act.

He toyed with the officials, pretending to hide things in the hay and sending his pursuers on wild-goose chases, hoping to be accused again so he could be exonerated and make fools of the officials.

When Time asked him to speak about the Racing Commission, Smith was typically pithy.

When the Satos and their unfortunate brethren were moved out in 1943, the track became Camp Santa Anita, a massive ordnance storage site and open-air Army barracks for thousands of soldiers.

Seized by patriotic fervor, Pollard galloped off to join the military.

He continued to endure horrific injuries, falling so often that he quipped about having a “semiannual comeback.”

Perhaps the old raconteur just didn’t want to speak anymore.

Howard doted on them as if they were his own children.

So Howard used his own mares, pampered and overfed their babies, and sent them into training fat and happy.

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.