DEL MAR’S 50TH SEASON : Seabiscuit-Ligaroti: Two for the Money

Horse racing lives on pari-mutuel tickets, but the most memorable race ever run at the Del Mar Thoroughbred Club was one in which no betting was allowed.

The place where the surf meets the turf was just a year old in 1938 when its president, actor-crooner Bing Crosby, conspired with a few cronies to hatch a plan that turned into a bonanza.

Until then, racing was little more than a side attraction at Del Mar. To a great number of the race-goers--and attendance rarely exceeded 5,000--it was far more important to see the Hollywood celebrities who gathered in the clubhouse.

Radio ads plugging the Del Mar meeting never mentioned San Diego. They instead noted that Del Mar was only 100 miles south of Los Angeles.

But Crosby’s brainstorm, a match race between Seabiscuit and Ligaroti, changed all that. It was for the then-princely sum of $25,000, winner take all, and it stirred so much interest that it put Del Mar on the horse racing map.

Seabiscuit, grandson of legendary Man o’ War, was the 5-year-old king of the handicap circuit in the United States. Ligaroti was a 6-year-old import from Argentina with an impressive record in South America.

Seabiscuit won by a head in a race that was close all the way, but that’s only a small part of the story.

To begin with, the race had overtones of a family feud, albeit a good-natured one.

Seabiscuit was owned by Charlie Howard, a director of the track, who bought him after a mediocre 3-year-old season for a mere $8,000. Ligaroti was owned by Crosby and Howard’s son, Lin, who called their partnership the Binglin Stable.

Crosby used to laugh about the Binglin name, saying, “It sounds like we’re running a Chinese laundry.”

Crosby was a clever promoter. Jack McDonald, a retired San Francisco sportswriter who now lives in Pacific Beach, covered the race for his paper, the San Francisco Call-Bulletin, as well as the Los Angeles Herald-Express and International News Service.

“Bing was aware of the feeling in Los Angeles about Del Mar,” McDonald said. “The population in San Diego then was only about 200,000, and he knew that L.A. people thought of Del Mar as just a county fair deal. He had to do something to give Del Mar the recognition it needed to succeed.”

Most turf experts felt that Ligaroti didn’t belong on the same track with Seabiscuit, but Crosby and Lin Howard were thinking big. When Ligaroti won four of his first eight races on U.S. tracks, his co-owners decided it was time to make a challenge.

One night, Crosby and the Howards, father and son, got together for dinner. Lin Howard stated boldly that Ligaroti could beat Seabiscuit if given a reasonable advantage in weight.

The senior Howard at first thought that Lin had had too much champagne, but eventually he went along with the idea. Why not? The race might catch on with the public, so nobody had anything to lose.

Well, almost nobody. The Howards agreed on a side bet, with Charlie giving his son 3-1 odds, $15,000 to $5,000.

Bill Quigley, the track’s general manager, had some doubts about the wisdom of a purse as big as $25,000 but finally agreed. The scheduled prize money for the entire 25-day Del Mar meeting was only $160,000.

So the stage was set--father against son, director of the track against the president, the United States against Argentina. Seabiscuit would carry 130 pounds, as he usually did for handicap races, and Ligaroti would tote 115. The 15-pound edge was just what Bing and Lin wanted.

The date would be Aug. 12, the distance a mile and an eighth, the event the fifth race on the program.

There was more than enough potential drama here to arouse the public’s curiosity, and not just on a local scale. The enterprising Crosby promoted a national radio broadcast on NBC, then volunteered to do the announcing along with fellow actor Pat O’Brien, who also owned a piece of the track. They described the race while standing on the roof of the grandstand.

But as intriguing as all these matchups were, the one that stole the show was the duel between the jockeys. Actually, duel was not a strong enough word. War would be more like it.

George “The Iceman” Woolf rode Seabiscuit, and Noel “Spec” Richardson rode Ligaroti. The wonder of it all was that neither fell off his horse down the stretch.

Oscar Otis, the track announcer, recalled the hostilities in the Del Mar Thoroughbred Club’s recently published booklet, “Del Mar: Its Life & Good Times,” written by San Diegan William Murray of New Yorker magazine and edited by Dan Smith, Del Mar’s director of marketing and media.

“That was as rough a race as I’ve ever seen in my whole life,” Otis said. “They were hitting each other over the head with their whips, and Richardson had Woolf in a leg-lock. I’ve never seen so much trouble in one race, and there was a hell of a stink about it.”

After Seabiscuit hung on to win in 1 minute 49 seconds, chopping a full 4 seconds off the track record, Richardson filed a protest. The stewards upheld Seabiscuit’s victory, but only because they felt that Richardson was as guilty as Woolf. They released the following report:

“Jockey Richardson reached out and grabbed Seabiscuit’s saddle cloth and held onto it until he got practically to the 70-yard pole. At this point he let go of the saddle cloth and tried to grab jockey Woolf’s wrist.

“Woolf fought to get his arm loose and about 20 yards from the finish, reached out and grabbed Ligaroti’s bridle rein and held on to it from there to the finish.”

The stewards suspended both jockeys for the remainder of the year, but were forced to rescind the penalties because the race had been a no-betting exhibition. Woolf and Richardson were restored to good standing at the end of the Del Mar meeting on Sept. 5.

Woolf, one of the leading jockeys of that era, died in 1946 at age 36 after being thrown from a horse named Please Me at Santa Anita. Richardson died early this year at 74.

As for the race itself, no one in the crowd of 20,000, which included a Ligaroti cheering section organized by Lin Howard, could have asked for anything more.

“It was a real corker,” McDonald recalled. “The horses were never more than a head apart.”

Ligaroti went to the post carrying 116 pounds, the extra pound a result of Richardson’s inability to sweat off enough weight. A bigger disadvantage for the Argentine horse was the outcome of a coin flip, which put Seabiscuit on the pole.

Richardson said at the time of the race’s 50th anniversary last August, “My horse was notorious for lugging in, which is why if we drew the inside, we would have won for sure.”

After the horses reached the gate, it took starter Fred Cantrell three minutes to settle them down. The delay only added to the suspense.

Finally, Cantrell sprung the latch on the gate, and O’Brien, at the NBC microphone, said, “History is about to be made.”

Eddie Read, Del Mar’s public relations director from 1938 until his death in 1973, gave this account:

“Breaking from the inside, Woolf gunned Seabiscuit for the lead and had the track by about a head going into the first turn. Richardson kept pace with the Argentine and, turning into the long backstretch, had inched his mount forward, on the outside, and was a head in front.

“They stayed that way, a roaring, driving team, to the quarter pole. At this point, the ‘Biscuit got his head in front again. From there to the finish line, it was sheer drama as horses and riders dug in with everything they had. The desperate head-and-head battle from flagfall to finish had the crowd limp with emotion.

“But the drama wasn’t over yet. Seconds after the horses flashed by under their perch, the stewards posted the ‘inquiry’ sign on the totalizator board.”

Inevitably, there were many versions of what happened at the finish.

Some sportswriters went so far as to suspect a fix. One even quoted Woolf as saying he had been instructed “to make a race of it.” This so incensed Charlie Howard that he issued the following statement:

“Any fool writing racing ought to know that a race run in 1:49 couldn’t be fixed in that manner . . . Once on the backstretch, Woolf was told to take back slightly and get on the outside, letting Ligaroti go up on the rail. Seabiscuit always runs well from behind. He was told to make his move on the outside at the far turn, but Seabiscuit wasn’t able to get more than a neck in front and had to stay on the rail.”

Film footage taken from the roof didn’t shed any light on the matter. Neither did the quotes of the riders, who predictably were in total disagreement on what had happened.

Said Richardson: “Woolf grabbed Ligaroti’s bridle in the stretch.”

Said Woolf: “Richardson grabbed my whip hand and then claimed foul to save his own skin.”

A year ago, Richardson embellished his story by saying, “Woolf reached over and whipped my horse across the nose four or five times. He grabbed my bridle rein and turned my horse sideways. Otherwise, I would have beaten him.”

As it turned out, the Del Mar race led to the biggest victory of Seabiscuit’s career. Taking a cue from Del Mar, Pimlico put on a match race between Seabiscuit and the great War Admiral later that year--this one with wagering--and Seabiscuit won.

An injury forced Seabiscuit to miss the 1939 season, but he came back in 1940 at age 7 and won the $100,000 Santa Anita Handicap, the nation’s richest race, after finishing second by a nose in both 1937 and 1938. He retired soon afterward with record earnings of $437,730, having topped the total of Sun Beau.

Ligaroti also had some success after the match race. Later in the Del Mar meeting, he won the Del Mar Handicap. Still, Ligaroti was never really in the class of Seabiscuit, and Richardson admitted this when he said, “Ligaroti almost beat him, but we needed 15 pounds to come close.”

In the final reckoning, Ligaroti’s weight advantage--actually 14 pounds--was a key to Del Mar’s rise to prominence. Who would have been excited if Seabiscuit had won going away?

Thanks to that one big event, Del Mar became major league in every respect--talent, purses, attendance and mutuel handle.

“Pretty soon they started calling it the Saratoga of the West,” McDonald said.