Did John Red Pollard Injure His Leg and Then Right Again
Seabiscuit | Article
Red Pollard
John Pollard was born in 1909 and raised in Edmonton, Alberta, in the western reaches of the Canadian wilderness. The second of seven children born to a broke Irish brick manufacturer, Johnny — as he was known to his family — grew up in a boisterous home. He was passionate about athletics — especially boxing — and and so fond of literature and poetry that he was known to challenge his sister Edie over who was better at memorizing literary passages. Merely his greatest pleasance by far came from his equus caballus, Forest Dawn. To help his family make ends come across, Johnny took to delivering groceries with his toboggan hitched to the picayune horse. By the fourth dimension he was in his early on teens, he had decided that he wanted to be a jockey.
Wandering
When he was fifteen, Pollard left home in the care of a guardian and went off to pursue his dream. Inside a yr, the guardian had abandoned him at a makeshift racecourse in Butte, Montana, and the male child was on his ain. He spent the next couple of years wandering around the country's lowliest racetracks, trying to talk his way into a saddle. He was tall for a jockey — about five feet seven inches in his stocking feet — and though he managed to ride often enough, he never won a single race. Somewhen, he began moonlighting as a boxer, using the ring name "Cougar." Merely most people knew him as "Red," a nickname he earned for his stupor of flame-colored hair.
Books as Companions
Equus caballus racing is a seasonal sport, and Pollard was always on the motility, traveling to Canada in the summertime, California in the fall and spring, so to Tijuana in the winter. His only abiding companions were his books — well-worn leather pocket volumes of Shakespeare, Robert Service'southwardSongs of the Sourdough, and a Ralph Waldo Emerson collection. He barely earned coin enough to eat, and spent most nights sleeping in horse stalls, but according to his sister Edie, Pollard was "happy as heck."
Troubled Horses
In 1927, Pollard was sold — young jockeys were considered property — to a horseman named Freddie Johnson, who handed him over to his trainer, Russ McGirr. Although Red was still losing far more often than he won, McGirr discovered a rare talent in the boy that would assist carry him into racing history. Afterwards years of riding the worst mounts on the worst tracks in the racing circuit, Pollard had come up to sympathize troubled horses. He was kind to them, fugitive the whip, and his mounts often responded to his gentleness by running hard.
Partially Blind
Despite that gift, however, Red continued to have merely a middling career. Some of his failures were doubtless the result of an blow he had had one-time early in his career. While exercising a horse around a crowded track i morning, he had been hit in the head by something kicked up by some other horse'due south hooves. The blow damaged the part of his encephalon that controlled vision, permanently blinding him in the correct middle. "Without bifocal vision," explains author Laura Hillenbrand, "y'all don't accept depth perception. Then he couldn't tell how far ahead of him horses were. He couldn't tell how close he was cut it. But he knew no fearfulness. He rode right into the pack with one center." For the rest of his life, Pollard kept his blindness a secret, knowing that if track officials found out, they would never let him ride.
Lucky Day
Past the summer of 1936, twelve years of bad luck and failure had begun to take their toll. Similar many Depression-era unfortunates, Pollard was bankrupt and homeless. That August, he was heading north with his agent — a squat, hare-lipped human named Yummy — when a freak car blow left them stranded outside of Detroit, with nothing but xx cents and a one-half-pint of a cheap Whisky they called "bow-wow wine." The two men hitchhiked to the Detroit Off-white Grounds, where Pollard bumped into Tom Smith, Seabiscuit's trainer. As it happened, Smith was looking for a jockey. When introduced to the temperamental, frequently unruly horse, Pollard offered a carbohydrate cube. Seabiscuit touched the jockey's shoulder in a rare gesture of affection. Equally Smith saw information technology, Seabiscuit had chosen his jockey. It might have been the luckiest twenty-four hour period of Pollard's life.
Plagued by Injuries
For a time, Pollard and Seabiscuit lit up the racing circuit, capturing win after win in races across the country. But the injuries that plagued Red throughout his career unseated him from the celebrated thoroughbred more than once. In February 1938, he was almost crushed to death in a horse pile-up at the San Carlos Handicap. It took months to recover. No sooner was he dorsum in the saddle than an inexperienced horse spooked during a workout and crashed into a barn, well-nigh shearing off Pollard's leg below the knee joint. The broken leg wouldn't heal properly and would keep him from riding Seabiscuit in the famous one-on-one lucifer-upward confronting War Admiral on November one, 1938.
Hopelessly in Honey
While Pollard recuperated at Boston'south Winthrop Hospital, wondering if he would ever race once more, he fell in love with his private nurse, a refined Boston native named Agnes Conlon. The restless jockey and the prim, well-heeled nurse were an undeniably odd match, merely they were also hopelessly in love. When Pollard asked Agnes to ally him, she defied her family unit's wishes and said "yes." They would accept two children and live together for over xl years.
The Greatest Ride
The highlight of Pollard'southward racing career came in 1940, when he rode Seabiscuit to victory in the race that had twice eluded the horse, the Santa Anita Handicap. "I got a great ride," Pollard said afterwards. "The greatest ride I ever got from the greatest horse that always lived." Seabiscuit was retired almost immediately later on the race, and Pollard presently did the same. Simply he couldn't stay away from the jockey's life for long. He soon returned to the racing circuit, and was twice hospitalized subsequently terrible accidents — he broke a hip in one spill and his dorsum in another. After Seabiscuit, the jockey never had much success, falling back to the bush leagues of racing from which he had emerged.
Retirement
Finally, in 1955, at the age of 46, Pollard hung up his silks and retired for adept. For a fourth dimension, he worked sorting postal service at the track post function, and then equally a valet, cleaning boots for another generation of riders. He died in 1981, only what exactly killed him was unclear. According to his daughter Norah, "he had merely worn out his body." Agnes, sick with cancer, died ii weeks later.
Source: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/seabiscuit-biography-red-pollard/
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