Seabiscuit: An American Legend Hits Home

It was love at first sight for Laura Hillenbrand, author of the best-seller "Seabiscuit: An American Legend."

"When I was 5, my father took me to Charles Town Race Track in West Virginia one night and I fell in love with racing," she told me, "and with the first horse I saw."

A quarter-century later, she fell in love with Seabiscuit and decided to write a book about the unlikely champion the color of mud with crooked legs. 

"I did my research everywhere," said Hillenbrand, who has produced magazine articles about the sport since 1988. "I did, at least, 150 interviews. I looked at hundreds of record books, newspapers from the 1930s, poured over memorabilia. The research process took four years."

It was worth it. Hillenbrand's Seabiscuit captures an era when racing was truly the Sport of Kings.

She cleverly uses flashbacks on the main characters, human and equine, in a storyline that covers more than a half-century. She knows her horseflesh. "My father had a farm when I was growing up and he took in abused horses and unwanted horses. I used to ride them on the weekends and in the summers."

Her favorite track: "Arlington Park outside Chicago. I found Arlington extraordinarily beautiful. I first visited in 1989; Clever Trevor competed against Easy Goer."

Her next favorite horse: "Who would that be? That's a hard question. Perhaps, Alysheba, who was a horse with similar charisma."

But her focus is Seabiscuit. On Sept. 7, 1936, jockey Red Pollard was aboard Seabiscuit when he won the Governor's Handicap, the big event of the Detroit Fair Grounds season.

"Red Pollard had won his fourth stakes race in eleven long years in the saddle," Hillenbrand writes. "He was radiant. He galloped Seabiscuit out to the cheers of the crowd, then turned him back toward the grandstand. He was a new horse. In the fiftieth start of his life, Seabiscuit finally understood the game." 

Hillenbrand was born before Seabiscuit passed away. But she was so enthralled with the thoroughbred that she decided to write a book about him. It became a best seller.