Shoe’s Ending Isn’t Hollywood : Horse Racing: Patchy Groundfog takes the lead briefly in stretch, but falls to fourth place in the Legend’s Last Ride.

Someone once figured that it was 80 steps from the race track at Santa Anita back to the jockeys’ room.

For Bill Shoemaker, though, with his size-1 1/2 boot and mincing walk, it’s about 100 steps.

Shoemaker, 58, made that trip for the last time Saturday, minutes after riding Patchy Groundfog to a fourth-place finish in the $107,850 Legend’s Last Ride Handicap, a farewell that brought 64,573 fans to Santa Anita.

They cheered Shoemaker all the way back to a postrace interview tent, an 8-year-old boy from Alhambra asking for and getting one of the two pair of goggles that he wore in his 40,350th and final race.

By contrast, Eddie Delahoussaye, who won the mile grass race aboard Exemplary Leader, heard catcalls normally reserved for a jockey who stiffs an odds-on favorite. Then, in the jockeys’ room, the riders were waiting for Delahoussaye with barrages of shaving cream, a trick that Shoemaker himself used to engage in after an apprentice had ridden his first winner.

Bruce Dern once said that he had trouble getting parts after a character he played killed John Wayne in a film. Delahoussaye will be remembered as the jockey who spoiled Shoemaker’s curtain call.

Nine years ago, in thoroughbred racing’s first million-dollar race, Shoemaker shoved John Henry’s nose to the wire, beating The Bart and Delahoussaye at Arlington Park in Chicago.

“I always ride to win, no matter what the race,” Delahoussaye said when asked if there were sentimental considerations coming down the stretch. “Today wasn’t any exception. It’s just too bad this wasn’t a million-dollar race, so I could have gotten even with Shoe for what happened in Chicago.”

Patchy Groundfog, a 7-year-old chestnut, looked for an instant like he might send Shoemaker out a winner. After staying close to the leader, Splendor Catch, all the way around, Patchy Groundfog took a brief lead with about an eighth of a mile to run.

But late speed surrounded Shoemaker on all sides, and his 8,834th win and his 1,010th stake victory were not to be.

Delahoussaye, deftly riding Exemplary Leader through two pockets of trouble in the stretch, got the 4-year-old colt to the wire a half-length ahead of Happy Toss. It was another half-length back to Oraibi in third place, with Patchy Groundfog missing the show spot by a head in the 11-horse field.

Instead of crying after the race, which he said he wouldn’t do, Shoemaker’s eyes welled up and his voice cracked an hour earlier in a winner’s-circle ceremony that brought out every jockey on the grounds.

“At the half-mile pole, I thought I was in great shape,” Shoemaker said of his last ride. “The horse gave it all he had, and I did, too. I rode as good as I could, and I got what I could get.

“This isn’t bitter and it isn’t sweet. It’s not either one. I didn’t feel any pressure. I’ve ridden almost 41,000 races. If I couldn’t be relaxed after all that, then I’ll never be relaxed.

“I’m happy it’s all over with, because I’m a little tired (after a retirement tour that started last spring). I enjoyed the fans today. I enjoyed all the waving and them wishing me luck.”

If anyone was nervous before the race, it might have been Julio Canani, the trainer of Patchy Groundfog. “Wouldn’t this be something,” Canani said, “if I could add a win with Shoe to the one I got in the Santa Anita Handicap (with Prized last year)?”

In the paddock, Canani accidentally slipped the No. 1 saddlecloth on Patchy Groundfog, before an aide called attention to the mistake. Canani had entered two horses, and Ofanto, who was scratched, had been scheduled to carry No. 1, with No. 1A on Patchy Groundfog.

Out of the gate, Shoemaker expected Oraibi, the horse outside Patchy Groundfog in the ninth stall, to go for the lead, but his jockey, Corey Black, took back and Gary Stevens, aboard Splendor Catch, went to the front.

On the clubhouse turn, both Stevens and Shoemaker thought Splendor Catch was going to go down, the 6-year-old gelding bobbling badly on a turf that was firm but still damp from recent rain.

Down the backstretch, some of the trailers tried to move on Splendor Catch and Patchy Groundfog, but Stevens and Shoemaker held them off.

“My horse never got a breather,” Stevens said. “By the time we got to the stretch, I had lost confidence in staying up there, but I was confident Shoe’s horse might win it.”

When Patchy Groundfog edged ahead inside the eighth pole, Stevens yelled to Shoemaker, “Go on!” Upstairs, Trevor Denman, the track announcer, lost his usual composure and said, “Come on, Shoe!”

Exemplary Leader was ahead of only two horses coming out of the turn. Happy Toss was just ahead of him, and when Exemplary Leader started to accelerate, Delahoussaye had to take up because there was no room.

Exemplary Leader picked up the running again in his new lane, and inside the sixteenth pole Delahoussaye squeezed him through a hole that had Splendor Catch on the inside and Patchy Groundfog on the outside. Shoemaker hit Patchy Groundfog six times with the whip from the right side, but his mount was hanging when it counted.

Santa Anita, anticipating a storybook finish to a storybook career, had Hal Roach, 98, waiting in the winner’s circle to make the trophy presentation. Roach, one of the track’s founders and the movie producer who had introduced Laurel to Hardy, among other things, was ready to hand the trophy to the jockey who was riding off to a training career.

Instead, Roach got Delahoussaye. “I don’t care what the fans think,” Delahoussaye said. “It’s a competitive business and you go out to win. You don’t go out to play games. I read some articles (about the jockeys not trying) that were just sickening. I’ve been in this business for 20 years, and it’s been good to me. Shoe’s been a good person and a great jockey himself, and he knows nobody in this race was going to give him anything.”

Exemplary Leader, whose last win came at Del Mar last July, paid $26.80 to win, running the mile in a swift 1:34 1/5. Patchy Groundfog was 1-20 in the early betting, then went off at 7-10 odds. Had Shoemaker won, many of the $2 tickets would have become uncashed souvenirs.

There were others besides Shoemaker who were glad that Saturday was over.

Inger Drysdale, a free-lance photographer, was so concerned about (a) shooting Shoemaker and (b) her trainer husband, Neil, winning Saturday’s La Canada that she drove her car into a ditch on the way to the track. Inger Drysdale got her pictures and Neil Drysdale won the La Canada with Gorgeous.

All week long, Gary Stevens fretted about whether the speedy Akinemod would recover from a fever and run against Gorgeous. She didn’t and was scratched.

“That worry was over Friday night, but I was still on edge,” Stevens said. “I went to a dinner honoring Shoe, and I told my wife Toni that there was an atmosphere like the night before a Kentucky Derby.”

On Saturday morning, Stevens worked some horses, but he found his mind still wandering.

“I don’t get too emotional about anything,” Stevens said. “But on Friday night, at that dinner, I got tears in my eyes when they showed that film about Shoe’s career. He’s been something. I think the fans in Southern California took him for granted, but none of us who ever rode against ever did.”