Era of Seabiscuit gallops into history

No one can conjure up the era better than Laura Hillenbrand herself: “In 1938, near the end of a decade of monumental turmoil, the year’s number-one newsmaker was not Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Hitler, or Mussolini. It wasn’t Pope Pius XI, nor was it Lou Gehrig, Howard Hughes, or Clark Gable. The subject of the most newspaper column inches in 1938 wasn’t even a person. It was an undersized, crooked-legged racehorse named Seabiscuit.”

So goes the opening paragraph of “Seabiscuit: An American Legend,” the celebrated book that director Gary Ross adapted into a movie, released yesterday in area theaters, starring Tobey Maguire, Jeff Bridges and Oscar-winner Chris Cooper.

Probably no one under 75 can truly appreciate Seabiscuit’s astronomic popularity, not least because the sport of horse racing has become a fossilized husk of itself. Sure, we still have the annual Kentucky Derby-Preakness-Belmont Stakes series, a tripartite rite of aristocratic spring, but the mass appeal doesn’t endure long past June.

A thoroughbred horse as popular hero? This year’s Kentucky Derby and Preakness winner Funny Cide, an equine Cinderella story, doesn’t even come close to Seabiscuit’s celebrity.

Who, beyond die-hard horsemen, will remember Funny Cide when he turns 4? Seabiscuit didn’t even run in the Triple Crown series, which is open only to 3-year-old colts, and his popularity only intensified after a spotty juvenile record.

Who will make a movie about Funny Cide 60 years from now?

The “undersized, crooked-legged” Seabiscuit earned a spot in the history books alongside such icons as Gehrig and Gable in part because horse racing was a different beast back then: It was a social magnet for wealth, style and glamour.

The racetrack then was a place to be seen; the West Coast tracks where the Seabiscuit legend was born were regular hubs for such movie stars as Jimmy Stewart and Spencer Tracy — sort of like the Super Bowl or a Lakers playoff game are today.

Seabiscuit was a national hero, too. When the colt hit his stride, his owner, the late Charles Howard, shipped him across the country to both rural and urban racecourses where he ran before big, cheering, riveted crowds — including numerous times in the District metropolitan area, at tracks such as Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore and one in Havre de Grace, Md., a facility now being used by the Maryland Army National Guard.

In fact, one of the biggest races of Seabiscuit’s storied career — the legendary 1938 match race in which he handily beat the previous year’s Triple Crown winner, War Admiral — was at Pimlico, the ailing home of the annual Preakness Stakes.

Pimlico, the original building of which was commissioned by a consummate racing fan and Maryland governor by the name of Oden Bowie in 1870, was once a swanky affair, with a Victorian clubhouse and violet-painted stands. Its modern successor, built between 1954 and 1966, is a derelict structure in a dodgy neighborhood.

Laurel Park, about 20 miles northeast of the District, is in the increasingly exurbanized Maryland countryside, and it, too, has seen better days.

No one is more acutely aware of this than Tim Capps, executive vice president of the Maryland Jockey Club, which operates Laurel, Pimlico and a horse-training facility where the old Bowie racetrack once stood.

Mr. Capps is an amateur historian of horse racing, and he appreciates as well as anyone what the sport used to be like in its glory days: when racetracks routinely drew scores of thousands of spectators, when Seabiscuit was as popular as any New York Yankee.

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