didn’t. At New York’s Aqueduct Racecourse late in 1934, Hard Tack’s first two yearlings stepped off a railcar into Fitzsimmons’s care. Swing On’s son Seabiscuit (a synonym for his sire’s name) and the other colt, Grog, could not have looked less like their sire. Noah, the foaling groom at Claiborne, had summed it up about as well as anyone when he pulled Seabiscuit into the world: “Runty little thing.” Claiborne handlers had been so dismayed with the colt that they had hidden him in a back barn when Phipps came to look over her new crop of horses. A year of maturing hadn’t helped much. “Seabiscuit was so small,” said Fitzsimmons, “that you might mistake him for a lead pony.” Curiously, Hard Tack appeared to be stamping his foals in a mold that was the polar opposite of his own. The only similarity, evident in Seabiscuit, was that swatting foreleg. Not only were these colts strange-looking, shaggy, and awkward, but aside from the slight difference in their mutually diminutive heights—Grog was a hair shorter—they were identical. Without the assistance of a halter nameplate, virtually no one could tell them apart. The colts must have liked the mirror image; they had become inseparable in the Claiborne paddocks.
Fortunately, Hard Tack’s raging temper had also come out in the genetic wash. Seabiscuit floated along in a state of contented, bovine torpor. Sleeping was his favorite pastime. Horses usually sleep in numerous brief sessions scattered throughout the day and night; about 20 percent of their daytime is spent snoozing. Because of the size and configuration of their bodies, they suffer impeded breathing and circulation when recumbent, and as prey animals who have trouble getting to their feet quickly, they are instinctively disinclined to stay down. As a result, the vast majority of horses’ sleeping is done standing, which they can do thanks to ligaments that lock their leg joints in the extended position. The average stabled horse spends just five minutes at a time lying down to sleep, almost always at night.
Seabiscuit was the exception. He could keel over and snooze for hours on end. His inability to straighten his knees all the way may have been the culprit, preventing him from locking his forelegs in the upright position. Fortunately, he suffered no negative consequences. While every other horse at the track raised hed demanding breakfast, he slept long and late, stretching out over the floor of his stall in such deep sedation that the grooms had to use every means in their power just to get him to stand up. He was so quiet that Fitzsimmons’s assistant trainers once forgot all about him and left him in a van for an entire afternoon in brutal heat while they went for a beer. They found him there hours later, pitched over on his side, blissfully asleep. No one had ever seen a horse so relaxed. Fitzsimmons would remember him as “a big dog,” the most easygoing horse he ever trained. The only thing Seabiscuit took seriously, aside from his beauty rest, was eating, which he did constantly, with great vigor.
He may have been an amiable little horse, but his career prospects looked dim. He was as slow as growing grass. He barely kept up with his training partners, lagging along behind with happy ineptitude. Worked over and over again, he showed no improvement whatsoever. “The boys who took care of him could do anything with him,” Fitzsimmons said. “Anything, that is, except to get him to run in the mornings.… I thought he simply couldn’t run.”
But in time, something in Seabiscuit’s demeanor—perhaps a conspicuous lack of sweating in the workouts, perhaps a gleam in the horse’s eye that hinted at devious intelligence—made Fitzsimmons question his assumptions. “He was as wise as a little owl,” Fitzsimmons remembered later. “He was almost too quiet, too docile.” Fitzsimmons began to wonder if this horse might be just as obstreperous as his sire, only much more cunning in his methods. His father had raged; Seabiscuit seemed … amused. “He struck me,” Fitzsimmons said, “as a bird that could sing but wouldn’t unless we made him.”
Fitzsimmons made him. “I decided to fool the Biscuit,” he explained, “to prove to him he wasn’t fooling me.” One morning, when working all the yearlings over two furlongs—a quarter of a mile—in sets of two, he paired Seabiscuit with Faust, the fastest yearling in the barn and a future major stakes winner. He told Seabiscuit’s exercise rider to find a stick to use as a whip. This was a radical departure from Fitzsimmons’s regular training practices, which mandated that exercise riders never use whips on their horses. The trainer believed that racehorses were instinctively hard-trying, competitive creatures who did not need to be forced to exert themselves. During one race in his jockey days, he heard another rider cursing after dropping his whip on what he thought was an otherwise sure winner. Fitzsimmons handed the jockey his whip, then rode his own horse right past him to win, urging him with nothing but hands and voice. But Seabiscuit could not be coaxed into showing any speed at all, and to find out if the horse was hoodwinking him, Fitzsimmons opted to make an exception to his no-whip rule. To ensure that the stick would not hurt Seabiscuit, Fitzsimmons had the rider select one that was flat, so it would merely slap his flank.
“Keep this colt right up with Faust as close as you can,” he later recalled telling the jockey. “Just see how many times you can hit him going a quarter of a mile.” Fitzsimmons expected that, at best, Seabiscuit would be able to cling to Faust for a little while.
Faust never had a chance. Slapped over and over again with the stick, Seabiscuit blew Faust’s doors off, covering a quarter mile in an impossible 22₢ seconds. It may have been the fastest quarter ever run by a yearling. Today, on tracks that are several seconds faster than they were in the 1930s, such a workout time is considered exceptionally swift, even for a mature horse. The bird could sing.
“I found out why he wasn’t running,” said Fitzsimmons. “It wasn’t that he couldn’t. It was that he wouldn’t.” Fitzsimmons realized that he was confronted with a behavioral problem at least as maddening as Hard Tack’s murderousness: pathological indolence. “He was lazy,” marveled Fitzsimmons. “Dead lazy.”
The colt had proven that Hard Tack’s speed lived on in his homely little body. But the revelation didn’t make him any more eager to work. Though he later denied it, Fitzsimmons evidently suspended his no-whip rule indefinitely with Seabiscuit. “We used a whip on him every time we sent him to the track, and we used it freely, too,” he once conceded. “When we didn’t, he loafed along.” The horse performed better, but he still wasn’t working hard enough to get himself fit. Fitzsimmons came to the conclusion that the only way to tap into the potential he had glimpsed was to race him hard. Very hard. His logic: Since the horse rested himself so much more than other horses, he could stand up to an unusually heavy racing schedule. And since the horse was uncommonly intelligent, he would know to back off if he became overworked.
Entrusted to assistant trainer James Fitzsimmons, Jr., while Sunny Jim manned the helm on the more precocious horses, Seabiscuit began a regimen of incredibly rigorous campaigning. Thoroughbreds are placed in age classes according to the year in which they are born, rather than their birth month. On January 1 all horses graduate to the next age class even if their birthdays fall months later. Seabiscuit had been a very late foal, born at the end of May 1933, but in January 1935, half a year short of his actual birthday, he was deemed a two-year-old, officially eligible to race. On January 19, he began his career at Florida’s Hialeah Race Track. He finished fourth. It wasn’t good enough for the Wheatley Stable, which was overflowing with top prospects. Three days later, Seabiscuit was put up for sale, placed in a rock-bottom claiming race for a tag of just $2,500. No one wanted him even at that price, and he lost again. James junior then put the colt on the road, touring through thirteen tracks up and down the East Coast to run in low-rent races spaced as little as two days apart. Sixteen times Seabiscuit ran; sixteen times he lost. From Florida to Rhode Island and practically everywhere in between, he was offered in the cheapest claiming races. No one took him.
Once in a while the Hard Tack speed reappeared. In the colt’s eighteenth start, for no explicable reason, he finally won, clocking a sterling time. Rolled back into another claiming race just four days later, he broke
