Seabiscuit: An American Legend, by Laura Hillenbrand

Even non-racing fans will recognize some names from thoroughbred racing.  Man o’ War.  Secretariat.  Northern Dancer.  And Seabiscuit.

Seabiscuit was short.  His front legs wouldn’t straighten out all the way.  He slept a lot.  He was lazy in races.  He was passed up for sale at rock bottom prices.  A descendant of Man o’ War, he luckily failed to inherit the line’s infamous temper.  He did inherit the ability to run fast, but only if he felt like it.  The trick was in getting it out of him.  Hillenbrand does a great job of describing the colourful times and people, and the owner, the jockeys and the trainer who turned Seabiscuit from a poor performer into a racing phenomenon.

The owner was a bicycle repairman who made his fortune in early 20th century auto sales.  He became interested in horse racing, attending the Tijuana race track in the 1920’s.  Tijuana was the hot spot for indulging your vices.  A ban on gambling, alcohol and cavorting with women made it the place to go for southern Californians seeking some serious sinning.  Charles Howard would go for the racing.

The trainer was a pale man who rarely spoke.  Known as “Silent Tom” or “The Lone Plainsman,” he was more at ease with horses than with people.  The jockeys, Pollard and Woolf, were talented, intuitive riders.  Pollard raced while blind in one eye, was maimed in riding accidents, and wound up an alcoholic.  Woolf was a diabetic, and must have suffered terribly from thirst.

Conditions for jockeys were brutal.  They were underpaid, their contracts could be bought and sold among trainers, and they raced with concealed injuries so they could keep riding, keep their jobs.  They starved themselves and suffer extreme dehydration to keep their weight down.  Some would dig a hole in the huge pile of hot, fermenting manure at the Tijuana racetrack, and climb in to sweat off the pounds.  This ended dramatically when the manure pile was swept away by flooding:  “Moving as if animated with destructive desire, it gurgled down the backstretch, banked around the far turn, bore out in the homestretch, and mowed down the entire grandstand.  It made a beeline for the Monte Carlo Casino, crashing straight through its walls and cracking it wide open.  Then, like a mighty shit Godzilla, it slid out to sea and vanished.”

Tom Smith trained Seabiscuit at night to keep his speed a secret.  After his abilities were revealed in races, Seabiscuit was assigned heavy weights to slow him down, but could still outrun his competitors.  He became the underdog darling of his fans, getting more newspaper column inches in 1938 than FDR, Hitler or Mussolini.  Seabiscuit’s match race against War Admiral was probably the biggest story of the year.  Fans turned out in droves just to see him at rail stops; they would go just to watch him train.  When Charles Howard was at races with Bing Crosby, people lined up for autographs – from Howard, not Bing.  There were Seabiscuit hats, toys, wastebaskets, oranges, and parlour games.  When Seabiscuit retired, fans flocked to the farm by the thousands.  The story of his life was made into a movie starring Shirley Temple.  His offspring, the “Little Biscuits”, were popular, but generally poor racers.  He died in 1947.

Northern Dancer: The Legendary Horse That Inspired a Nation, by Kevin Chong

In his time, Northern Dancer was the most famous animal in the world.  It may be hard for us to appreciate today just how important thoroughbred racing was, but it was more popular than hockey or football, and people would follow closely the training and progress of race horses.

Northern Dancer was short, he had cracked heels and a cracked hoof that had to be repaired with epoxy; he failed to sell at his first auction, and he was hard on his handlers.  But he was fast.  From the relative backwater of Canadian racing came a horse that could outrun the best in North America.  He became as famous as Muhammad Ali and beat out Gordie Howe for Canada’s Athlete of the Year.

Chong tells us of the owner, E.P Taylor, a wealthy industrialist with investments in beer brewing, paper products, mining and grocery stores, broadcasting and pop.  Taylor founded Argus, the holding company eventually controlled by Conrad Black, which now owns the Hollinger media company.  Taylor was lucky in his entry into racing – every horse he bought in his first year was a winner.  He almost didn’t make it to continue in racing, as he narrowly survived having his ship torpedoed from under him during the war.

Northern Dancer was trained by Horatio Luro, an elegant Argentinian who was always careful to be photographed only while wearing his tie.  Luro trained Nearctic, Northern Dancer’s father, in the late 1950’s, and his methods worked with Northern Dancer, too.  In his brief racing career, Northern Dancer won the Kentucky Derby, Preakness, and had a shot at the Triple Crown by racing in the Belmont Stakes.  Although he raced for less than a year, he won fourteen out of eighteen races, never finished behind third place, and won over half a million dollars.

Then he went to stud, where he also turned in a top-notch performance.  His stud fee eventually reached a million dollars. Some 75% of thoroughbreds alive today are descendants of Northern Dancer.