THE SHOE: REFLECTIONS ON A LEGEND : One More Ride For Soft Hands : Bill Shoemaker: Jockey’s style, attitude made him the best. At 58, records and body intact, he’s ready to retire.

As a jockey, what made Bill Shoemaker tick?

He never seemed to have the competitive fire of an Eddie Arcaro.

A physical contest between a Laffit Pincay and Shoemaker would have been a mismatch.

Shoemaker didn’t possess the calculated recklessness of an Angel Cordero.

Shoemaker couldn’t whip horses like a Ted Atkinson.

Shoemaker wouldn’t break horses out of the gate like Pat Valenzuela.

Yet these are the numbers, going into Saturday at Santa Anita, where Shoemaker will ride for the last time in a $100,000, one-mile grass race called the Legend’s Last Ride Handicap:

--8,833 wins.

--1,009 wins in stakes races.

--257 wins in stakes worth $100,000 or more.

--Purses of $123,398,882.

Shoemaker was so good that he was elected into the Racing Hall of Fame in 1958, only nine years after his career started and well before he began piling up wholesale victories in Triple Crown races and other stakes around the country. Nine of Shoemaker’s 11 Triple Crown victories came after his induction into the Hall of Fame at Saratoga Springs, N.Y.

Shoemaker was so good that, at 54, he won a Kentucky Derby--with Ferdinand--and, having turned 56, rode the same colt to victory in the $3-million Breeders’ Cup Classic.

Shoemaker has fun answering questions. He used to say, unequivocably, that Spectacular Bid was the best horse he ever rode. Later, like the trainer- politician he must become when his next career begins on Sunday, he spread the superlatives around, saying that Spectacular Bid AND Swaps were the best horses he ever rode.

Shoemaker also said in 1986 that Ferdinand’s Derby was his most satisfying achievement. But he was probably closer to the truth when he said more recently: “Aside from the records and all the winning, something that pleased me more was that at 58 I was still able to ride pretty good. I couldn’t do it as often, but with rest in between, I could still do it. I couldn’t ride like I was 25, but I could still ride as well as lot of guys who are only 25.”

Shoemaker is getting out, he says, “because I want to leave in one piece. My only enemy has been Father Time.”

So again, the question persists: What made Shoemaker tick?

Arcaro, who held a lot of the records Shoemaker broke--and who still holds the record for Triple Crown wins with 17 in the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness and the Belmont--seems like a representative ex-jockey to ask.

“Shoe had the finest hands in the game,” Arcaro said. “And when a jock has good hands, they can be more effective than a whip.

“Shoe’s had great rapport with horses. He had great balance. Horses would run for him, and I’ve always wanted to know why. I always thought that you had to MAKE horses run. But not Shoemaker. He got them to run without pushing them.”

Johnny Longden, who did what Shoemaker would like to do in the coming years, going from riding Kentucky Derby winners to training one, has a different theory.

“I’ve always admired Shoe’s attitude,” Longden said. “His attitude is that whatever happens, happens. He would never have done what he’s done without that attitude. When I was riding and things weren’t going right, I’d get mad at myself. You never saw Shoe doing that. I could have won a lot more races (he won 6,032, a record before Shoemaker broke it) if I could have approached the game the way he did.”

In 1959, Shoemaker left the winner’s circle at Arlington Park after capturing his 3,500th race, walked into the jockeys’ room and threw his whip down. “I hope the next 3,500 come as easy,” he said.

Riders around Shoemaker laughed. Not only did Shoemaker win the next 3,500, he won more than a 1,000 races on top of that.

Arcaro says that Shoemaker could have won even more. That que sera sera that Longden envied might have worked both ways.

“Shoemaker lost more races than anybody I know just because he refused to jam some other rider up,” Arcaro said. “That cost him a lot of wins early in his career, but later on it served him well, when he got older. But he deserves all his success. He was the fairest rider I ever knew.”

Because of the few times he’s ridden this year, Shoemaker’s career will have spanned six decades, having begun in the last year of the 1940s. When Shoemaker started riding, Harry Truman was president, Joe DiMaggio was in center field for the Yankees, Joe Louis was the heavyweight champion and Ben Hogan was the best golfer around. Sandy Hawley, who has won almost 6,000 races, was BORN in 1949.

Shoemaker was born little--one pound, 13 ounces--and stayed that way. At 4-11, he seldom has weighed more than 100 pounds. The only time anyone can remember him not making weight for a race was a day at Hollywood Park in 1967, when he was a pound over for a horse assigned 107 pounds.

Shoemaker stayed young by growing up over and over with a flotilla of new generations. Whether he was beating a longtime riding crony, Don Pierce, in a jockeys’ room gin game, or introducing an apprentice to the nuances of a game called race-horse rummy, Shoemaker was good for a laugh. Every so often, he might sneak into the steam room, while other jockeys were trying to reduce, with an ice-cream cone in his hand.

Not being tortured, as Laffit Pincay has been through the years, by a weight problem, was one advantage for Shoemaker. And while he didn’t possess much raw strength, he was a versatile athlete, as at home on a golf course or a tennis court as he was on the back of a 1,200-pound horse.

The injuries were serious, but few. There were only two major accidents--in 1968 at Santa Anita and in 1969 at Hollywood Park. They took the better part of two years out of his career, and after the second accident he thought about retirement. But in both comebacks, he resumed winning so quickly that it seemed as though he was playing out some farfetched Hollywood script. Had a screenwriter submitted the storyline to a studio, it would have been rejected posthaste.

Twice divorced, Shoemaker not only found a revitalizing third wife--Cindy, who is 19 years younger--but she made the jockey a father for the first time. Amanda Shoemaker, who is going on 10, has also contributed to keeping her father young.

Agents are underrated by some jockeys, overrated by themselves, but regardless of the degree of importance, Shoemaker and Harry Silbert were perfect for each other. Silbert, who booked mounts most of Shoemaker’s career, was a father figure, too, someone Shoemaker could discuss his marital problems with. After leaving Brooklyn, Silbert called California “the land of milk and honey,” and after he and his rider reached the top, Silbert made sure there would be no paradise lost.

In 1955, Silbert and Shoemaker both thought Swaps would be their first Kentucky Derby winner. The colt was to run once in Kentucky before the Derby, but in late April, Shoemaker was injured in a spill at Golden Gate Fields. A horse stumbled leaving the gate, threw Shoemaker forward and then ran over him.

Kicked in the knee--an injury that would bother him repeatedly-- Shoemaker stayed overnight in a Bay Area hospital. There was still another week before Swaps’ prep race in Kentucky.

At the hospital, Silbert asked about Shoemaker and a doctor said: “I don’t think he’ll be able to ride for a month.”

Late that evening, Silbert went back to the hospital unannounced and smuggled Shoemaker out the door. They took a plane--a 10-hour trip, with layovers--to Kentucky the next day.

“My knee was three times as swollen as it had been,” Shoemaker said. “Harry had to practically carry me off the plane.”

Shoemaker wound up going to a trainer for the University of Louisville, where he met a young quarterback named Johnny Unitas. The swelling went down, and then everything was swell: Swaps won the prep by 8 1/2 lengths. A week later they also won the Derby.

Swaps put Shoemaker on the national map, but nowadays he still has more to say about Spectacular Bid. He got him because his handlers thought young Ronnie Franklin’s ride had cost them the Triple Crown in the Belmont.

Under Shoemaker, Spectacular Bid lost only one race. “He was good before I rode him, and he got even better,” Shoemaker said. “He was a champ at two and three, and then was much better as a 4-year-old. He did things other horses couldn’t do. He ran on all kinds of different tracks, under all kinds of conditions, and kept winning.

“He went from coast to coast and got the job done. He was so versatile that you could move with him any time you wanted to, and then move again if you had to. He did everything a great horse should.”

Other excellent horses that came Shoemaker’s way were Gallant Man, Round Table, Ack Ack, Damascus, Sword Dancer, Ferdinand. And he rode those three durable geldings--Kelso, Forego and John Henry--who combined for 10 national championships.

Shoemaker never put John Henry in a category with Spectacular Bid and Swaps, calling him “a professional race horse.” John Henry still had a lot of dances to dance when Shoemaker quit riding him in 1983, thinking an injury might prematurely end the horse’s career.

In the American Handicap at Hollywood Park, with John Henry’s trainer, Ron McAnally, promising that the veteran campaigner was back, Shoemaker still chose to ride The Wonder for owner Allen Paulson. Paulson was new to the game, and in the back of his mind, Shoemaker felt that The Wonder would be an entree to some of the expensive young horses the owner was buying.

John Henry won the American and a year later, with Chris McCarron now riding him, won a second horse-of-the-year title.

Shoemaker won the Marlboro Cup with Forego in 1976, a remarkable performance for two reasons: The horse came from so far back and he carried 137 pounds, about 40 of it called dead weight, because lead had to be put in the saddle bags to go with Shoemaker’s 95 or so pounds. Visitors to the Hall of Fame in Saratoga Springs look at the rerun of that Marlboro over and over on a recessed console in one of the museum’s walls, every time thinking that Forego isn’t going to hit the wire in time.

“That race was also on a sloppy track,” Shoemaker said, “and Forego didn’t run very well in that stuff. He had bad wheels, and you thought he might fall down every time you rode him.”

In the Marlboro, they beat Honest Pleasure, who was carrying only 119 pounds. As Forego exploded through the stretch, he began drifting toward the center of the track, but Shoemaker didn’t discourage him, and hardly touched him with the whip, just letting him charge to the wire under his own power.

It was the kind of race that epitomized Shoemaker’s entire career. It was the kind of race that showed what made Bill Shoemaker tick as a jockey.