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Seabiscuit was an unlikely champion. He was a rough-hewn, undersized horse with a sad little tail and knees that wouldn't straighten all the way. At a gallop, he jabbed one foreleg sideways, as if he were swatting flies. For two years, he fought his trainers and floundered at the lowest level of racing, misunderstood and mishandled, before his dormant talent was discovered by three men.
One was Red Pollard, a failed prizefighter and failing jockey who had been living in a horse stall since being abandoned at a makeshift racetrack as a boy. One 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. The third was a cavalry veteran named Charles Howard, a former bicycle repairman who made a fortune by introducing the automobile to the American West.
In the sultry summer of 1936, Howard bought Seabiscuit for a bargain-basement price and entrusted him to Smith and Pollard. 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 competetive 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.
Laura Hillenbrand beautifully renders this breathtaking saga of a horse's journey from also-ran to national legend. Seabiscuit is an inspiring tale of unlikely heroes, a classic story of three embattled individuals overcoming the odds in the Great Depression.
(from SeabiscuitOnline.com)