![]() He was eastern born and bred, but he had a westerner’s restlessness. Years in the saddles of military-school horses had taught him to carry his six-foot-one-inch frame straight up. Back then he had a lot more hair than anyone who knew him later would have guessed. He was twenty-six, handsome, gentle-manly, with a bounding imagination. He sat in the swaying belly of a transcontinental train, snaking west from New York. On an afternoon in 1903, long before the big cars and the ranch and all the money, Howard began his adulthood with only that air of destiny and 21 cents in his pocket. There was a certain inevitability to Charles Howard, an urgency radiating from him that made people believe that the world was always going to bend to his wishes. What drew people to him was something intangible, an air about him. Nor was it that he spoke loud or long the surprise of the man was his understatement, the quiet and kindly intimacy of his acquaintance. He lived on a California ranch so huge that a man could take a wrong turn on it and be lost forever, but it wasn’t his circumstances either. But it wasn’t his physical bearing that did it. Fifty-eight years old in 1935, Howard was a tall, glowing man in a big suit and a very big Buick. ![]() He would sweep into a room, working a cigarette in his fingers, and people would trail him like pilot fish. THE DAY OF THE HORSE IS PAST Charles Howard had the feel of a gigantic onrushing machine: You had to either climb on or leap out of the way. JUST AS COMPELLING TODAY AS IT WAS IN 1938.” - The Washington Post shows an extraordinary talent for describing a horse race so vividly that the reader feels like the rider.” - Sports Illustrated “REMARKABLE. More than just a horse’s tale, because the humans who owned, trained, and rode Seabiscuit are equally fascinating. ![]() A first-rate piece of storytelling, leaving us not only with a vivid portrait of a horse but a fascinating slice of American history as well.” - The New York Times “Engrossing. Over four years, these unlikely partners survived a phenomenal run of bad fortune, conspiracy, and severe injury to transform Seabiscuit from a neurotic, pathologically indolent also-ran into an American sports icon. Smith urged Howard to buy Seabiscuit for a bargain-basement price, then hired as his jockey Red Pollard, a failed boxer who was blind in one eye, half-crippled, and prone to quoting passages from Ralph Waldo Emerson. When he needed a trainer for his new racehorses, he hired Tom Smith, a mysterious mustang breaker from the Colorado plains. Three men changed Seabiscuit’s fortunes: Charles Howard was a onetime bicycle repairman who introduced the automobile to the western United States and became an overnight millionaire. But his success was a surprise to the racing establishment, which had written off the crooked-legged racehorse with the sad tail. Seabiscuit was one of the most electrifying and popular attractions in sports history and the single biggest newsmaker in the world in 1938, receiving more coverage than FDR, Hitler, or Mussolini.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |