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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Surprise! The book everyone is reading and loving stars a stocky, funny-looking hero with four legs -- the champion racehorse Seabiscuit.
Mar 14, 2001 | Ideally, you wouldn't just find Laura Hillenbrand's "Seabiscuit: An American Legend" in bookstores. It would be next to Frank Sinatra or Nat King Cole or Lee Wiley CDs as well -- anywhere you'd go to look for love songs.
The music that arises from the pages of "Seabiscuit" may be from the past, but it's no less sweet or clear. "Seabiscuit" not only records the love song of three men -- owner, trainer and jockey -- for an oddly shaped horse who possessed potential visible only to them. The book itself is also Hillenbrand's love song for those men and for the magnificent creature himself, who became something like the familiar of his human companions, a protective spirit in the face of ridiculous odds and cruel luck.
Charles Howard, the first to enter the picture in "Seabiscuit," thrived on bad odds. The bicycle repair shop he opened in 1903 San Francisco bloomed into a Buick dealership after Howard began servicing the few autos that existed in the city. He made his fortune in the aftermath of the city's catastrophic 1906 earthquake, when automobiles ceased being novelties and became the only possible means of transporting the dead and injured. The combination of the money he accumulated and the need to find an escape after the death of a beloved son led Howard to thoroughbred racing, and eventually to Tom Smith.
Smith, the genuine version of the sort of character Cormac McCarthy fakes, was a man who bridged two epochs, having gone from being a young plainsman in the frontier days of the American West to training horses for the British cavalry in the Boer War to training horses for rodeos and races. Taciturn to the point of utter silence, Smith did his talking to horses, whom he believed could be communicated with if you just bothered to observe them. He became known as a healer as much as a trainer, mending hurt horses with his homemade liniments and, seemingly, the empathy of his touch.
Hired by Howard to be his trainer in 1934, and with the tycoon's money at his disposal, Smith nevertheless preferred taking on horses that were considered bargains -- not as a way to save money, but because those animals' talents were overlooked. He found what he was looking for when he encountered Seabiscuit in 1936 at Suffolk Downs racetrack outside Boston.
Seabiscuit was descended from the legendary Man o' War and possessed the temperamental imperiousness of all that great horse's offspring. But he also looked like everything a racehorse shouldn't be: square, squat, inclined to portliness, low to the ground with short legs and knees that didn't straighten, and a racing gait so strange that his hind hoof often whacked his front ankle while he was running. Something in Smith told him he had a find; maybe he'd picked up on the hauteur he later claimed radiated from the animal.
Even more necessary than the understanding between trainer and horse is the symbiosis between horse and rider. And it was Smith who brought in Red Pollard, a down-on-his-luck jockey whom he'd run across earlier. Smith decided that Pollard was the man to ride Seabiscuit.
