Seabiscuit: The True Story of Three Men and a Racehorse. Laura Hillenbrand

       Chapter 4 THE COUGAR AND THE ICEMAN

      Red Pollard was sinking downward through his life with the pendulous motion of a leaf falling through still air. In the summer of 1936 he was twenty-six and in the twelfth year of a failing career as a jockey and part-time prizefighter. He was an elegant young man, tautly muscled, with a shock of supernaturally orange hair. Whenever he got near a mirror, he wetted down a comb and slicked the hair back like Tyrone Power, but it had a way of rearing up on him again. His face had a downward-sliding quality, as if his features were just beginning to melt.

      He was, statistically speaking, one of the worst riders anywhere. Lately, at least. Once, he had been one of the best, but those years were far behind him. He had no money and no home; he lived entirely on the road of the racing circuit, sleeping in empty stalls, carrying with him only a saddle, his rosary, and his books: pocket volumes of Shakespeare, Omar Khayyám’s Rubaiyat, a little copy of Robert Service’s Songs of the Sourdough, maybe some Emerson, whom he called “Old Waldo.” The books were the closest things he had to furniture, and he lived in them the way other men live in easy chairs.

      On the day Seabiscuit settled in at the Detroit Fair Grounds, Pollard was in North Randall, Ohio, sweltering through August at a middling racetrack called Thistle Down Park, which was wrapping up its summer meeting. Pollard’s career had continued slipping there, as it had everywhere else. His win percentage had dropped into the single digits. The last horse he rode came to a halt right in the middle of his race. On August 16, 1936, when Thistle Down Park shuttered its doors for the season, Red Pollard appeared to be out of chances.

      Back home in Edmonton, Alberta, he had been known as Johnny. Right from his boyhood, people had seen the restlessness in him. They must have known he wouldn’t stay in their town for long.

      Wanderlust ran in his family. Johnny’s father and namesake, the son of an Irish emigree who had become a Union Cavalryman, had spent his young adulthood rambling across the western Canadian wilderness in search of gold. In 1898, prospecting led him to a nearly vacant trail crossing that the trappers called Edmonton, where he found that the soil was the perfect medium for making brick. The Irishman staked a claim, opened a brick factory on the banks of the North Saskatchewan River, and made a fortune on the Northwest’s turn-of-the-century construction boom. He bought up a huge portion of Edmonton and built the first real house in town, a vast home surrounded by sprawling acres of virgin countryside. With his wife, Edith, he raised seven whip-smart, buoyant children: Jim, Johnny, Bill, Edie, Betty, Norah, and a little girl whom, with characteristic Pollard whimsy, they called Bubbles. The elder Pollard’s brother Frank and his family moved in to join the business, and the Pollard home was soon teeming with sixteen family members and a host of workers who took their meals at the house.

      Born in November 1909, Johnny was the liveliest member of a clever and boisterous family. In the Pollard home, books were always open, old Irish songs sung, jigs danced, long stories spun. Johnny played on the grassy fields of his family’s estate and spent his Sundays in the lap of the family Model T, competing with his siblings for a window seat. As the car swung over a high bridge that crossed the North Saskatchewan River, he could peer over the railing to see the family business at the water’s edge below.

      Misfortune struck suddenly and forcefully. In 1915 the river boiled up in a flash flood, ripping over the shoreline around the factory. Johnny’s father rescued his family from the water by throwing them in a buggy and lugging them up the bank himself, but he couldn’t save the factory machinery. The business vanished, and the tax bill arrived. Pollard traveled around Canada, trying in vain to find a bank to lend him the money. The city of Edmonton foreclosed, and the Pollards lost everything but their house. Virtually overnight, Johnny’s father was bankrupt with seven children and a wife to feed. He eventually found meager income as an auto repairman. It was only by bartering gasoline for groceries that he managed to keep his family alive.

      Johnny found myriad avenues of distraction from his family’s penury. One was athletic. His father took him and his brother Bill to the community boxing ring, where they were swept up in the prizefighting craze of the 1920s. Bill, a tall, powerful fighter, made it to the Golden Gloves. Johnny, smaller and leaner, became a proficient and scrappy fighter but never achieved his brother’s success. He amused himself by provoking much bigger boys into fights, calling his “Golden Glove brother” to the rescue, and laughing as they ran in terror.

      His other escape was intellectual. Johnny devoured great literature. He committed long passages of prose and poetry to memory and engaged in lively recitation duels with his sister Edie as they bounced over the local roads in the Model T. Graced with an agile mind, he had the makings of a man of letters. Later, when his fate became known, his boyhood friends would wish for his sake that he had gone the way of the academy. But the classroom smothered him. He desperately wanted to explore the wider world. He was impatient with his lessons, mouthed off at teachers, got poor grades, spent his hours coining witticisms and engineering elaborate practical jokes. His emotions were liquid; his anger was a wild rage, his pleasure jubilation, his humor biting, his sorrow and empathy a bottomless abyss. He was, his son John would later remember, a person who brought an uproar with him wherever he went. Johnny Pollard was a caged bird.

      As he grew, his restlessness turned into aspiration. His father had somehow managed to obtain a gift for his second son, a little horse named Forest Dawn. To help make ends meet, Johnny began hitching the horse to his toboggan and using them to make deliveries for the local grocery. In long afternoons aboard the pony’s back, Johnny discovered a gift for riding. His daughter, writer Norah Christianson, remembers that he had “the body of a dancer, lithe and wiry and thin, everything in balance,” a physique ideally suited to the pitch and yaw of a horse’s withers. Riding also suited his passion for risk. His life, from his youth onward, was a headlong rush into danger and uncertainty. Out on Edmonton’s dirt roads, his legs swinging free from Forest Dawn’s sides while the toboggan bobbed along behind, Johnny