Earning Extra Credits

John Pollard attended the premiere of the movie “Seabiscuit” in Westwood on Tuesday night. Not John “Red” Pollard, the jockey who rode Seabiscuit to his epic victory in the 1940 Santa Anita Handicap. He died in 1981. This John Pollard, the one at the premiere, is Red Pollard’s nephew.

“The movie was all right, I guess,” said Pollard, who lives in San Diego, just a few miles from the Del Mar racetrack. “But I didn’t recognize my uncle [played by Tobey Maguire]. My uncle was quick-witted. That wasn’t him up there on the screen.”

Everybody’s a critic. I met John Pollard by accident, on one of the December days director Gary Ross was shooting Seabiscuit’s last and defining race at Santa Anita. The movie opens nationally today.

My wife, Pat, Pollard and I had signed up as unpaid extras, and in December they called about 3,500 of us to the track in Arcadia, where we were outfitted in period fedoras and made to look like the crowd of 68,000 that saw the Santa Anita Handicap. The moviemakers filled in the empty seats in the grandstand with what I call the “balloon people.” There were thousands of them, inflated figures with painted-on faces and clothes, and they wore fedoras too.

Pollard, who works for the American Red Cross, had done some earlier, paid extra work on the film, during the days when Ross made Fairplex Park in Pomona look like the historic Agua Caliente track in Tijuana. Pollard didn’t throw his name around to get that gig. He answered a newspaper ad and he said they hired him and paid $15 a day.

A publicist from the film found out about Pollard and asked him if he had any mementos from Seabiscuit and his uncle. Pollard said that Maguire wanted to go away from the movie with some keepsakes.

According to Pollard, the publicist said: “We wouldn’t pay you for any of these things. But you would be able to get your picture taken with Tobey.”

In telling the story, Pollard also said:

“All I’ve really got is a lot of scrapbooks. I had one of Seabiscuit’s whips, but not anymore.”

Seabiscuit’s whip?

“Yeah,” Pollard said. “My uncle left one of his whips at our house.”

Alice Pollard was married to Bill Pollard, Red Pollard’s brother. Alice Pollard was a rigid taskmaster with her children. She brooked no shenanigans.

“She’d whack us with that whip when we got out of line,” John Pollard said. “We got to hate that whip. It always stood in a corner of the house. Tuesdays were trash days, so one Tuesday we just took that whip and tossed it in the trash. My mother didn’t know. That was the end of that whip.”

Red Pollard was blind in his right eye -- according to Laura Hillenbrand’s 2001 bestseller, from which the movie came, he was struck in the face by a rock or clump of dirt from another horse as he exercised his horse. Pollard kept this from racing officials, who might have banned him from riding, and from rival jockeys, who, had they known, could have turned his partial blindness into a tactical advantage.

“The family didn’t know about the eye, either,” John Pollard said. “We didn’t know until we read it in the book. We could tell that there was something wrong with Uncle John’s eye, but we didn’t know he couldn’t see out of it. We thought he just had what was called a ‘lazy eye’ in those days.”

The filming at Santa Anita that Saturday was long and monotonous. Seabiscuit was supposed to win the Santa Anita Handicap by half a length over his stablemate, Kayak II, but the stunt horses weren’t cooperating for Ross’ crew. The Seabiscuit standins had trouble finishing first, and in one take the main horse bolted to the outside fence. There were lengthy delays to rest the horses before another half-mile take could be filmed. Jockey Ricky Frazier was the double for Maguire’s Red Pollard, and David Nuesch rode in place of Gary Stevens, the active Hall of Fame jockey who plays George Woolf in his first acting role. Actually, Woolf had little to do with the 1940 Santa Anita Handicap. His horse, Heelfly, was a longshot who never threatened and finished 10th. Buddy Haas rode Kayak II, who had won the Santa Anita Handicap the year before.

Besides John Pollard, we met Monta Flock from Temecula, who was also an extra. Flock’s father, Fred Johnston, was a Canadian, like Red Pollard and Woolf. Johnston bred and raced many horses, some of them stakes winners, and he held Woolf’s first riding contract. It was not uncommon in that era for a jockey to be locked in with a single stable. At one time, Johnston also held the contracts of Pollard and Johnny Longden, who came to Canada from England when he was 5. Johnston bought Pollard’s contract, Hillenbrand wrote, for a couple of saddles, some other tack and two sacks of oats.

After Ross and his crew finally were able to catch Seabiscuit reaching the Santa Anita wire first, as he was supposed to, they put a patient Maguire on a model of a horse that was mounted to a low-slung flatbed truck. This vehicle was used to shoot Maguire in the tight scenes during races. The track reached the same speed as real horses, 35 mph or so, and sped down the stretch as we, on cue, cheered wildly and gestured. After a few of these takes, the notion of cheering a truck grew more and more ludicrous. But hey, somebody had to do it.

Nightfall approached, and we were profusely thanked and put on school buses that returned us to parking lots. We extras joked about looking for one another when “Seabiscuit” was released.

Predictably, you could freeze-frame the entire movie and not find me. The “balloon people” got more exposure than I did. You have to look close, but they are there.

But John Pollard said they left him in one of the scenes that was shot in Pomona.

“You can see my foot,” he said. “I was wearing brown shoes. I know that was my foot.”