Seabiscuit

This first chapter introduces the owner of Seabiscuit, Charles Howard, by explaining how he made his fortune as a young man. Howard is large in both stature and personality, someone who “had the feel of a gigantic onrushing machine” (3). In 1903, at age 26, he left New York for San Francisco, promising his wife he’d send for her soon. There he opened a small shop to repair bicycles, soon expanding his work to include automobiles. The automobile was new to the market and, at this stage, creating more problems than benefits. They were expensive, dirty, noisy, and prone to breaking down. 

As the industry was in its infancy, things like gas stations and repair shops were few and far between. Howard taught himself how to repair cars and, since his shop was close to wealthy neighborhoods, he began to do a brisk business. He was so convinced of a future in the automobile that he traveled to Detroit and finagled a meeting with Will Durant, then the head of Buick. Howard impressed Durant enough to be awarded the Buick franchise for all of San Francisco by 1905. His wife and two sons now joined him there, but he sold none of the three cars he had shipped to the city. 

When the San Francisco Earthquake hit in April 1906, the city was devastated and terrible fires broke out. In the desperate need for transportation, horse-drawn carts proved unreliable, due to the exhaustion of the horses. Howard turned his three cars into ambulances, dashing about the city. At one point, in an effort to halt the fires, firefighters blew up the buildings along a wide avenue, including Howard’s dealership. He lost everything except for his three cars, though he collected insurance money for his loss. Another man might have walked away and chosen another career path, but Howard was still convinced that automobiles were the future. 

To promote his Buicks, Howard adopted a daredevil-like persona and engaged in risky races that he often won. Always ready with a clever quote, he became a darling of the press, soon becoming a local legend. To spur sales, he accepted horses as trade-ins and offered free driving lessons to purchasers. By 1908, he had sold 85 cars for $1,000 each and Durant expanded his role to include overseeing the distribution of cars for the entire western US. As Hillenbrand writes, Howard became “the world’s largest distributor in the fastest-growing industry in history” (9). Soon after, he bailed Durant out of bankruptcy and was repaid with General Motors stock and a percentage of sales for the rest of his life, making him fabulously wealthy. 

Howard became a philanthropist and bought a large ranch north of San Francisco. It was at this ranch that his 15-year-old son Frankie died in 1926 when he lost control of the truck he was driving. Howard and his wife were away at the time, and there was no hospital close by. A local doctor tried to save Frankie but could not. This profoundly affected Howard for the rest of his life, and one thing he did in response to it was to found a hospital in the area. 

Hillenbrand then spends a fair amount of time contrasting San Diego with Tijuana, the Mexican city just over the border. At the time, California, like the rest of the country, was under Prohibition; it had also recently outlawed gambling and cabaret dancing. On the other hand, Tijuana was the place to go to indulge in any number of vices. One main draw was its racetrack, where visitors could bet on the horses. Howard began attending the races, and it was there that he met Marcela, his daughter-in-law’s sister. Despite a 27-year age difference, they fell in love, and Howard divorced his wife to marry Marcela in 1932. Not long afterward, they became interested in investing in racehorses. The Great Depression led many states to seek out more sources of revenue, and California had legalized racing again. A new racetrack at Santa Anita offered a huge purse of $100,000 for its annual race, and Howard set out to win it. 

Next, Hillenbrand turns her attention to Tom Smith, who would come to be Seabiscuit’s trainer. Smith was a man with a mysterious nature and background. He grew up around horses in the West, and early on began taming wild mustangs for the British cavalry to use in the Boer War. When that ended, he worked for a cattle ranch in Colorado for 20 years. After the ranch was sold, Smith was out of a job before picking up work caring for broken-down horses that were used in relay races at rodeos. It was there that he caught the attention of Charlie Irwin, the owner of a traveling Wild West show. Irwin hired him to train and take care of the horses, and a hard life on the road ensued. 

The Great Depression took a toll on Irwin’s business, as people no longer had money to spend on his shows. Irwin was unable to pay his employees for long stretches at a time. During one such period, Irwin acquired an old racehorse named Knighthood that suffered an injury during a race. Smith cared for it and noticed its potential. He convinced Irwin to give him Knighthood in place of the wages that were due him. Smith nursed the horse back into racing form and showed up at a race in Tijuana months later. At 10 years old, Knighthood beat the pack of younger horses. Now Irwin and Smith begin focusing on training horses for races, and Smith was a great success. 

In 1934, Irwin died in a car accident, and his horses were all sold. Smith ended up working a few small jobs, during which he acquired a lame horse and, as with Knighthood, revived it to enter some races. He approached each horse individually, studying it intensely and “listening” to it: “For Smith, training was a long, quiet conversation” (27). At one racetrack, he shared a stall with the trainer for a good friend of Charles Howard, and word reached Howard of Smith’s brilliance with horses. When they met, Howard recognized Smith’s talent and hired him as his trainer.

This chapter describes Tom Smith’s search for a winning horse and the background of the one he found: Seabiscuit. Smith and Howard were a study in opposites but formed a workable relationship: Howard spent a lot of time at the track and drew considerable press coverage, but he mostly stayed out of Smith’s way and let his trainer work his magic. Smith’s unusual methods caught the attention of the other trainers, who watched him do things like repeatedly set off an alarm clock for one horse to get it used to bolting at the sound of the bell. Soon Howard sent Smith around the country to look for a horse to put everything behind. He had the money to buy the top Thoroughbreds from famous stables but was looking for more of a bargain with an unsung horse. In the summer of 1936, Smith found such a horse at a racetrack in Boston.

There he happened upon Seabiscuit, the offspring of Hard Tack and a descendant of the legendary Man o’ War. Though it was a brief chance meeting, something about Seabiscuit stuck with Smith. Hillenbrand describes the horse as physically unexceptional: short and blocky, with a scraggly tail and an odd gait. His trainer at the time was James Fitzsimmons, whose success commanded such respect that he “was apparently the only man whom Smith ever regarded with awe” (35). He was hired by the famed Wheatley Stable in 1928 to train Hard Tack, a brilliant but uncontrollable horse. This temperament was a common trait in the horse’s lineage. While he clearly had what it took to win, Hard Tack was also unpredictably stubborn, once refusing to run when entered in a race, and was retired to stud in 1932.

Due to Hard Tack’s temperament, no one would pay the fee to breed their mares with him, so his owner used mares of her own. Seabiscuit was one of Hard Tack’s first two offspring and had none of his sire’s physical stature—but neither did he inherit Hard Tack’s fierce temper. Seabiscuit was small and shaggy looking but also laid back, with a penchant for sleeping. He didn’t seem especially gifted in racing, showing little promise early on. But Fitzsimmons came to wonder if Seabiscuit wasn’t just holding back. Maybe he was as stubborn as Hard Tack, just more subtle about it. He decided to test his theory by using a whip. Normally, Fitzsimmons did not use a whip on his horses, figuring it was in their constitution to run hard. But he had a jockey use one (flat, so it wouldn’t hurt) in a workout, and the results showed why he had always been a poor racer. “It wasn’t that he couldn’t. It was that he wouldn’t,” according to Fitzsimmons (39).

From then on, a whip was used to prod Seabiscuit on. To get him into better shape, Fitzsimmons put him on a grueling regimen. But his results still were not good enough, and the Wheatley Stable decided to sell him. He was entered in cheap claiming races—events in which horses could be bought for a set price beforehand—but nobody bought him. Though his speed sometimes shone through, he lost sixteen races in a row. He was clearly overworked and showed signs of burnout. Fitzsimmons didn’t have the proper time to nurture him since he worked for the best barns that were teeming with talent. Then Seabiscuit caught Howard’s eye at a race in Saratoga, and Howard asked Smith to go check him out; there he recognized the horse he had seen in Boston and argued strongly for buying him. Soon Howard was Seabiscuit’s new owner.