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The Return of Seabiscuit A cast-off thoroughbred who became one of America's most-beloved heroes is finally ready for his close-upBy William Nack
The colts, two of the finest 3-year-olds ever to appear in the same year, were set to battle at old Washington Park, Chicago's South Side course, in what was being whooped along as the greatest match race on the planet since Seabiscuit and War Admiral ran at Pimlico on Nov. 1, 1938, the epochal clash of regions, lifestyles and social classes. But that had been 17 years, a Great Depression and one long world war ago. A few weeks before the match, as I hung on the outside fence near the 1/16 pole at Washington Park, suddenly there he stood, Swaps, all 1,000 gleaming pounds of him, with a face as finely chiseled as a cameo, gliding out of the grandstand shadows and into the afternoon sun. He had been brought out between races to parade for the folks. His rider, Bill Shoemaker, guided him to the outside rail. "Be gentle with him," said Shoemaker. "He won't bite you." Swaps dropped his nose over the fence. As hands reached up and stroked his soft muzzle, he pricked his ears. His eyes, brown and gentle as a doe's, flicked over the faces looking up at him. And then, slowly, he backed up, turned and walked away. It was only a moment, but there began the setting of the hook that has kept me tethered to the sport for nearly 50 years.
My memories of that surreal afternoon resurfaced like old flotsam at a recent screening of Seabiscuit, directed by Gary Ross and based on the best-selling book by Laura Hillenbrand, and not just for the eerily similar themes that the Seabiscuit-War Admiral match race engendered but also for the even more haunting similarities in the two great matches. That Pimlico match in '38 is the emotional center of the picture, the most artful racing movie Hollywood has ever done. If Ross occasionally plays loose with the facts, he remains true to the core of the story, and many of the racetrack scenes evoke more sharply than ever before on film a sense of the surpassing grace and power of the running horse, the sound of rolling thunder of the hooves and a sense of the precarious, perilous nature of the jockeys' existence as they bound along hell-fired at 40 miles an hour, monkeys on a stick, wind-sheared and often screaming at each other in the din. For them, it is a world that can turn suddenly violent with the exploding crack of a cannon bone or under a runaway rogue. Never has this been captured more graphically than in the extraordinary sequence in which Seabiscuit's jockey, Red Pollard (Tobey Maguire), is thrown off a bolting horse and dragged through the stable area, one foot caught in a stirrup, his broken body bouncing off posts and barns. Hillenbrand's book, Seabiscuit: An American Legend, was No. 1 in hardcover last year, and today it is back atop The New York Times best-seller list, giving it 69 weeks on the list, making it one of the most successful books on sports ever written. While it is well-organized and beautifully paced, with touches of lyrical writing throughout, surely the source of its appeal is that it is a wonderful story that also happens to be true, as warm and fuzzy as nonfiction can get without suggesting a collaboration of Horatio Alger and Sylvester Stallone. Wisely, Ross organized his movie as Hillenbrand did her book, introducing the three main human characters early and then weaving them in and out of the story's narrative. Owner Charles Howard (Jeff Bridges) goes from being a bicycle repairman in New York City at the turn of the century to an automobile dealer in California, rising to claim vast riches as the car replaces the horse. He decides to start a racing stable. Trainer Silent Tom Smith (Chris Cooper), an old mustang breaker and horse whisperer, rides alone off the vanishing plains on a horse, builds a crackling fire and awaits his destiny. Howard finds him there among the tumbleweed and hires him as his trainer. Smith finds Seabiscuit, an underachiever himself, and sees something he likes, so Howard buys him. All they need now is a jockey. Pollard, tossed in poverty, comes out of the rough-and-tumble tracks of the Great Northwest, where jockeys fought hand-to-hand on horseback, rode cheap horses in the afternoon and made whiskey money by getting their brains scrambled in saloon fights. A raconteur, he quotes Shakespeare and Emerson in the jock's room. Down but not out, blind in one eye, he one day runs into Smith. And Seabiscuit. They formed as unlikely a foursome as racing has known -- Howard the carny-barking huckster, Smith the enigmatic loner, Pollard the injury-prone journeyman who saw Seabiscuit as his final chance and the unprepossessing horse himself -- the knob-kneed, crooked-legged Biscuit. Under Smith's divining eye, with Pollard in the irons, The Biscuit grew into the runningest machine in America, a rolling road show from coast to coast, ultimately a national hero as popular as FDR, a blue-collar bay with a working-stiff jockey and this weird trainer who talked to horses with his hands. And, finally, there was George Woolf, one of the greatest riders in the history of the American turf, mounting The Biscuit to save the day when Pollard got hurt before the race with War Admiral. Like Dempsey-Tunney before and Swaps-Nashua after, that match had magical themes. War Admiral was owned by Sam Riddle, perceived as yet another rich and crusty stanchion of the Eastern establishment, the man who owned War Admiral's sire, the immortal Man o' War. The Admiral won the Triple Crown and was feted as his sire's greatest son. So it was East versus West. Old money versus new. Blazing saddles against blasŽ sophisticates. The Admiral's vaunted speed against The Biscuit's storied grit. Belmont Park against Hollywood Park. String ties versus bow ties. Old America versus new. Behind it all, the Seabiscuit phenomenon had no less than the Great Depression as its backdrop. No wonder the horse and his handlers had such enormous appeal. Down one day, they had risen to survive and prevail the next. The Seabiscuit story squeezed a national nerve. The release of the movie and the concomitant spike expected in book sales will undoubtedly spur interest in the sport that has not been seen since the '70s, the decade that produced seven of the greatest racehorses in history -- Secretariat, Forego, Ruffian, Seattle Slew, Affirmed, Alydar and Spectacular Bid -- with crowds tuning into races or descending on tracks everywhere to watch them run. This year, not only did a huge crowd stand in bone-chilling rain to witness Funny Cide's run for the Triple Crown in the Belmont, but TV ratings for the event also soared to heights not seen in racing in almost 15 years. The gelding's rags-to-riches quest, with his gaggle of owners arriving at the gates of Churchill Downs and Pimlico in a rented school bus, tapped into the same warm sentiment that turned Seabiscuit into a hero. The book has been viewed by some as a chance to inspire a renaissance in a sport that was once among the most popular in America, but no book or movie is going to bring back the crowds that filled the tracks back when the grandstand aprons were seas of fedoras in Movietone black-and-white and racing was the one game in town suited for adults only. Still, the Funny Cide phenomenon -- unfolding as though inspired by Seabiscuit's ghost -- vividly demonstrated the power that the sport still has to draw large crowds. The young gelding dropped out of nowhere to win the Derby, at odds of almost 13-1, and two weeks later -- when he sailed to a 93Ú4 length victory in the Preakness Stakes -- he became the newest "people's horse," bearing upon his ample back every dreamer who ever saw himself as owning a Triple Crown winner. From Alsab to Stymie, from John Henry to Real Quiet to Cigar, the hard-knocking horses of the plain folk have always spun their magic. None did this more seductively than Seabiscuit. The movie vividly captures The Biscuit's appeal, and the visceral appeal of racing. With two actual jockeys riding the horses in the movie's big race -- recently retired Chris McCarron is on The Admiral as Charles Kurtsinger, Gary Stevens on The Biscuit as Woolf -- the scenes ring evocatively true, to art as well as to history. There is Woolf driving Seabiscuit hard from the barrier, his horse outgunning the supposedly faster War Admiral to the first turn, and then Woolf allowing The Admiral to join him down the backside, eyeball-to-eyeball. The horses hurtle as one around the last turn and into the stretch, with Woolf finally asking The Biscuit for all he has left and then turning to yell at Kurtsinger as he pulls away, "So long, Charley!" The crowd roared Seabiscuit home, embraced him in cheers at the Pimlico winner's circle and made of him a chapter in turf lore. America was on the back of that horse, and instinct tells us that our affection for the animal traces deep along the taproots of our history and culture. Whether it is Swaps dropping his head over the rail at old Washington Park, his muscles shifting supplely beneath his golden coat; or Seabiscuit and War Admiral straining neck and neck around the turn for home; or Secretariat winning the Belmont Stakes by 31 lengths; or the seal-coated Ruffian racing on the lead, right to her grave -- they all cast a curious spell. At the heart of the movie and its match race, if you peel all the human layers away, what is left to behold are these two majestic-looking beasts -- quite simple and so generous with their manifest gifts, oblivious to celebrity and adulation. Alone, running in tandem, they cast this movie's spell.
Issue date: August 4, 2003
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