Seabiscuit Is Still the Stuff of Dreams

July 18, 2003 -- When Laura Hillenbrand was a child, she dreamed that she died and went to heaven, where she was presented with a barn and a racetrack.

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"The barn was full of horses," she remembered, "and there was a saddle sitting over a fence. And a man walked up and handed me the saddle and said, 'Go to it.' And I looked in the first stall and Seabiscuit was in it."

Seabiscuit — a racehorse who earned his place among the immortals long before Hillenbrand was born — has exercised extraordinary power in her life. He captivated her and inspired her and ran for her, not just in her dreams, but in her effort to capture a moment in America that created a nation of dreamers through an incredible sports story.

Hillenbrand's book, Seabiscuit: An American Legend, was published to great acclaim in 2001, and has sold more than 2.5 million copies, according to Random House. The racehorse is in the news again because Seabiscuit, an $87 million movie inspired by the book, will open July 25. The movie rights to the book were sold before the bidders knew it would become a publishing phenomenon. It is an epic story that needed no embellishment, even by Hollywood standards.

The Story of Two Underdogs

Seabiscuit was one of the most famous figures of Depression-era America — an underdog racehorse who few people believed in at first but who wound up electrifying the entire nation.

"He was actually the No. 1 newsmaker of 1938," Hillenbrand said. "Roosevelt was second and Hitler was third. This is by newspaper column inches. He was everywhere. And by virtue of that, Seabiscuit went from being merely a sports hero to being a national icon."

One of the central figures in the story was a down-and-out jockey and part-time prizefighter named Red Pollard, who is played in the movie by actor Tobey Maguire.

"His career was basically nowhere," Maguire said of Pollard. "He was really on the skids in terms of horseracing, and wandering the country in a lot of pain and despair."

But in his late 20s, Pollard got a chance to jockey a horse that didn't seem to amount to much, either.

"Seabiscuit and Red Pollard shared something in common," Hillenbrand said. "Both of them had been kicking around the bottom of the sport for quite a while.

"He was a very ugly little horse. The thing that Seabiscuit needed was to rediscover his own natural love of running. In the hands of his first trainer he had been whipped a great deal in his races and he was a very obstreperous animal.

"And in Red's hands, he learned he wasn't going to be forced to do anything he didn't want to do. As a result he just blossomed and he started having a really good time out there. And if a racehorse is having a really good time, he's going to be a winner."

A Trash Talker

Seabuiscuit's owner, Charles Howard, was a businessman who had helped introduce the auto to the American West — but when his son was killed in a car accident, he returned to his love of horses and invested in Thoroughbreds. Tom Smith, Seabiscuit's trainer, was a loner whose one-time trade as a cowboy was becoming obsolete.

And Red Pollard completed the picture of three men and a horse, all slightly out of synch with their time.

In six seasons, Seabiscuit won more than one out of every three races he ran. He was so fast that track officials made him carry heavier and heavier weights, to slow him down so other horses would have a chance against him. Nevertheless, he broke the record for earnings by an American Thoroughbred; and he did it with an infectious and audacious personality.

"To apply a modern term to Seabiscuit," said Hillenbrand, "he was a trash talker.

"He didn't want to just win, he wanted to kind of rub his opponent's nose in it. So he would get up along side another horse and deliberately slow down. And he would snort in the other horse's face. He would let the other horse get a little bit ahead until just before the finish wire, and then he'd sneak up and pass him right at the wire."

It was an aggressive, turbulent, colorful world that Hillenbrand wrote about — and that Maguire discovered as an actor who had to learn what drove the characters at the center of it.

"I have such great admiration for jockeys," Maguire said. "They're like adrenaline junkies. They're working-class athletes. It's an interesting kind of addiction."

Author Struggled With Debilitating Illness

The story itself was so addictive that Hillenbrand continued to write it by struggling against overwhelming odds that had nothing to do with the lives she described — but with the devastation she experienced in her own life.

After growing up athletic and competitive, Hillenbrand was struck by a crippling condition known as chronic fatigue syndrome. As she wrote her book, she was often bedridden and sometimes unable to feed or bathe herself — fighting swollen lymph nodes, night sweats, fevers, nausea and vertigo.

There is no cure for chronic fatigue syndrome; the cause is unknown. And although many doctors once dismissed it as psychologically based, it is now recognized medically as a disabling physical condition.

"My experience for the last 16 years has really been the inside of my bedroom," said Hillenbrand. "I would surround my chair with books in a horseshoe shape, so I could reach them and not have to get up. I had a refrigerator right next to my desk so I wouldn't have to go down the stairs to get meals. And even with doing all of that, the illness would overwhelm me at times.

"I would become very, very dizzy. If I became too dizzy to write, I'd have to go lie down in bed and just write on a pad with my eyes closed."

She consulted hundreds of sources — people, and photographs, and articles — by phone, fax, Internet and e-mail, to bring to life within the confines of her small apartment one of the greatest racing stories ever told.

She spent four years writing the book, and was acclaimed by critics for her ability to capture in words the excitement and drama of a visceral sport.

Seabiscuit vs. War Admiral

One example involved her description of one of the greatest races ever run — a match race between Seabiscuit and the horse that then was considered the king of the Thoroughbreds, War Admiral. On Nov. 1, 1938, the one-on-one race drew an enormous radio audience. The amount of interest was comparable to viewer interest in the Super Bowl today. Hillenbrand willed Seabiscuit's victory back to life from her mountains of research.

The horses stretched out over the track. Their strides, each 21 feet in length, fell in perfect synch. They rubbed shoulders and hips, heads snapping up and reaching out together, legs gathering up and unfolding in unison. The poles clipped by, blurring in the riders' peripheral vision.

War Admiral tried to answer, clinging to Seabiscuit for a few strides, but it was no use. He slid from Seabiscuit's side as if gravity were pulling him backward.

"When I was able to sit down and begin to research this story and to put it to paper … I felt like I was redefining myself completely," Hillenbrand said. "I was no longer Laura the invalid. I was Laura the author, Laura the storyteller."

She also consulted on the movie from her apartment, sometimes taking calls while scenes were being filmed. After all, Seabiscuit and Red Pollard, too, had mind-boggling comeback stories. Because of a devastating injury to his leg, Pollard wasn't able to ride Seabiscuit in his great race against War Admiral. And then Seabiscuit ruptured a suspensory ligament, and wound up going out to pasture at owner Howard's farm with his old friend Pollard.

"I think that year was very special for both of them," said Hillenbrand. "They were both washed up. And no horse in history had ever come back to his top form after so serious an injury and at his age. He was 7. Which is, I don't know, early 40s or so in people years. And Red Pollard was 86 pounds, with a severely broken leg that wouldn't heal. And they walked the hills together alone."

"They're just basically alone together, on the big ranch," Maguire said. "They nurture each other, and they are on the mend together."

And then, together, they came back for a climactic race — the big one that Seabiscuit had never been able to win. It was also the richest race in the country at the time — the $100,000 Santa Anita handicap in March 1940.

History, and now Hollywood, will tell you how Pollard and Seabiscuit went out in a blaze of glory — how hundreds of spectators wept after what Pollard described as the "greatest ride I ever got from the greatest horse that ever lived." It was a triumph captured also in Laura Hillenbrand's words.

In the midst of all the whirling noise of that supreme moment, Pollard felt peaceful. Seabiscuit reached and pushed and Pollard folded and unfolded over his shoulders and they breathed together. A thought pressed into Pollard's mind: We are alone.

When asked if she had ever experienced that same sense of communion in writing the book, Hillenbrand said: "I think I consistently have that feeling. I felt wedded to this story in a very peculiar way. I felt personally involved with all the people in it.

"This horse, I think, outlined the realm of the possible for America in its worst decade. And I think he carries a lesson forward to today of that kind of possibility. As a little girl I once dreamed of riding Seabiscuit, and in a way I guess I have now."