In the sultry summer of 1936, Charles Howard, a former bicycle repairman who made a fortune by introducing the automobile to the American West, bought a horse named Seabiscuit. He was a rough-hewn, undersized horse with a sad little tail and knees that wouldn't straighten all the way. For two years, he fought his trainers and floundered at the lowest level of racing, misunderstood and mishandled, before Howard discovered his dormant talent and entrusted him to two men.
One was Red Pollard, a failing jockey who had been living in a horse stall since his family lost its fortune in the crash. The other was Tom Smith, "The Lone Plainsman," a virtually mute mustang breaker who had come from the vanishing frontier, bearing generations of lost wisdom about the secrets of horses.
Using frontier training methods that raised eyebrows on the backstretch, they discovered that beneath the hostility and fear was a gentlemanly horse with keen intelligence, frightening speed, and ferocious competitive will. It was the beginning of four years of extraordinary drama, in which Seabiscuit overcame a phenomenal run of bad fortune to become one of the most spectacular performers in sports history.
Competing in the cruelest years of the Depression, the rags-to-riches horse emerged as an American cultural icon, drawing an immense and fanatical following, inspiring an avalanche of merchandising, and establishing himself as the single biggest newsmaker of 1938 -- receiving more coverage than FDR, Hitler, or any other public figure.
Cypress Entertainment Group, LP ©2004
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