What was the major accomplishment of Red Pollard in horse racing?
Lucky Day By the summer of 1936, twelve years of bad luck and failure had begun to take their toll. Like many Depression-era unfortunates, Pollard was broke and homeless. That August, he was heading north with his agent — a squat, hare-lipped man named Yummy — when a freak car accident left them stranded outside of Detroit, with nothing but twenty cents and a half-pint of a cheap whisky they called “bow-wow wine.” The two men hitchhiked to the Detroit Fair Grounds, where Pollard bumped into Tom Smith, Seabiscuit’s trainer. As it happened, Smith was looking for a jockey. When introduced to the tempermental, often unruly horse, Pollard offered a sugar cube. Seabiscuit touched the jockey’s shoulder in a rare gesture of affection. As Smith saw it, Seabiscuit had chosen his jockey. It might have been the luckiest day 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 tha
Red Pollard From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia John “Red” M. Pollard (October 27, 1909 – March 7, 1981) was a Canadian thoroughbred horse racing jockey. A founding member of the Jockeys’ Guild in 1940, Pollard rode at racetracks in the United States and is best known for riding Seabiscuit. Biography Red Pollard stood 5 feet 7 inches, which is considered tall for a jockey (Eddie Arcaro, for example, stood 5 feet 3 inches). He had also been blinded in his right eye early in his career, by a stray rock kicked up by another horse during a training ride on a crowded track; it hit his skull and damaged the vision center of his brain. At that time, few jockeys actually wore helmets to prevent just such accidents. In 1933, he rode in Ontario at Woodbine and Fort Erie Racetracks. Down and out in Detroit in 1936 he would be hired by Tom Smith for Charles S. Howard to ride Seabiscuit. The teams first stakes win came in the Governor’s Handicap. They traveled west while winning races along the w
With physical problems of partial vision and walking issues, Red Pollard still was able to reach into Seabiscuit’s mentality to calm him down and become a winning horse. Sources: Information came from the Star Ledger and Examiner.com.
