Thoroughbred › Jockeys
It could be said with-out argument that John(Red) Pollard's riding career was on a one-way street to oblivion until the August afternoon in1936 when he arrived penniless at a race track in Detroit and was introduced to trainer "Silent" Tom Smith, an enigmatic ex-frontier mustang breaker, and a crooked-legged horse that would become "an American legend" - Seabiscuit.
Pollard had been riding at Thistle Down Park in Ohio, winning two or three races a month, and had gone two years without a stakes victory. But his career was about to bloom with Seabiscuit. Pollard rode this undersized horse 30 times (winning18 of them) between August, 1936, and his final start in March,1940, when Seabiscuit ended his fairy tale career as the world's leading money-winning Thoroughbred by capturing the rich $100,000 Santa Anita Handicap.
Born in Edmonton, Alta., in 1909, Pollard's riding career started out west riding quarter horses. He grew up in a home where books where prized possessions. Later he traveled with pocket volumes of Shakespeare, Omar Khayyam's, Rubaiyat and Robert Service's, Songs Of The Sourdough. At age 15 he convinced his parents to let him pursue a career as a jockey and was allowed to leave home with a guardian. He ended up at a track in Butte, Montana. Pollard's apprenticeship would take him from tracks and fairs across Western Canada, Montana, Nebraska and California. His first win came in 1926.
Not a lucrative occupation at the time, he supplemented his income with earnings by fighting in preliminary boxing matches under the nom de ring "Cougar." He had some early success riding at Tijuana in Mexico in the early 1930s. In one of his infrequent visits to Toronto and Woodbine Park he won the King Edward Gold Cup in 1933. In 1937 Pollard won the San Juan Capistrano, March bank and Bay Meadows Handicaps in California and the Brooklyn, Butler, Yonkers and Massachusetts Handicaps in the east.
In 1938 Pollard was in hospital after suffering a badly smashed leg during a training session on another horse and was unable to ride Seabiscuit in the colt's most memorable race of his career - the match race against War Admiral in the Pimlico Special. Plagued by injuries throughout his career (he was blind in his right eye), he injured the leg just before the race and was forced to give up the ride to his friend, George Woolf. Pollard returned to Howard's farm in California to recover from his injuries, which horsemen believed would end his career. Soon afterwards he was joined by Seabiscuit at the farm in 1939, who was convalescing from a ruptured suspensory ligament that many thought would also end his career. But Pollard and Seabiscuit returned to the track a year later and climaxed their careers in the $100,000 Santa Anita Handicap in March, 1940.
A report in the Thoroughbred Record after the race said:"Jockey John Pollard deserves more than a word of praise. This boy was himself broken down as badly or worse than Seabiscuit. A broken leg suffered in New England before the War Admiral race had refused to knit; when at last he was able to ride last fall, he rode with a steel brace strapped along that bone to keep it from buckling. When Seabiscuit was beaten in his first two starts it was freely stated that whatever chance Seabiscuit had coming back was off-set by having an old, broken-down Pollard in the saddle.
Following Seabiscuit's retirement in 1940, World War II caused a short interruption in Pollard's racing career. Rejected by all the branches of the armed services, he volunteered to work in a defense plant. In 1945 he suffered another injury in a serious spill and was bed-ridden for some time. During his recuperation he tried to train for a while but gave that up and went back to riding until 1955when he retired for good at age 46.Pollard died March 7, 1981, in East Boston, Mass., at the age of 71.
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