Leaving in Style : On March 12, 1966, Jockey Longden Rode His 32,413th--and Final--Race

In the Santa Anita turf club, Don Pierce was yelling for George Royal as loud as anybody, even though he had bet $100 on Hill Rise, the horse he would have been riding if the stewards hadn’t suspended him.

This was 25 years ago, on March 12, 1966, when Johnny Longden, rode the 32,413th and last race of a 40-year career and, at 59, won the San Juan Capistrano Handicap by a nose on George Royal.

Not many of Longden’s 6,032 winners--the record until Bill Shoemaker broke it at Del Mar in 1970--came easily, and the last one might have been the most difficult of all. Almost 60, Longden, ravaged by arthritis and a recent injury, was trying to ride 1 3/4 miles on a 5-year-old who, like his rider, hadn’t done much lately.

George Royal and Longden had won the grass stake the year before, but there hadn’t beenmany hurrahs since. Longden had finished 1965 winning on about 12% of his mounts, about six points down from his career average. And at Santa Anita in the winter of 1966, Longden had won with only eight of 107 mounts.

A few weeks before the Capistrano, one of Ben Ridder’s 2-year-old fillies had kicked Longden, and he was still suffering from a pinched nerve in his right leg.

Only days before the $125,000 race, Longden was driving to a small sports gathering in Pasadena when he decided to end his career. He would announce his retirement that night, and after the Capistrano, his riding days would be over.

Longden, who turned 84 on Valentine’s Day, remembered that night last week.

“Other people had had me retiring for a long time,” he said. “It was a hard decision. But I made it and I decided to tell everybody that night. Win, lose or draw, George Royal would be my last ride. I wasn’t as coordinated as I used to be. I wasn’t doing justice to my riding. If I didn’t quit, I was going to hurt myself or hurt somebody else.”

Unlike Shoemaker’s last ride a year ago, which followed an international retirement tour that started in 1989, Santa Anita had little time to prepare for Longden’s farewell. Word spread quickly, however, and 60,792 turned out on a chilly, overcast afternoon, the smog and mist obscuring the San Gabriel Mountains.

Taking four mounts for the day, Longden had already added victory No. 6,031 before the Capistrano.

George Royal would go off at 6-1, the third choice in the nine-horse field, but the betting pattern was more indicative of sentiment than good sense. George Royal had won only two of 12 races since winning the race the year before, and that season at Santa Anita he had been no better than fifth in four starts.

Hill Rise was the favorite at 2-1. Two years before, in the Kentucky Derby, Hill Rise had almost beaten Northern Dancer, who ran a record 1 1/4-mile time and won by a neck. Manny Ycaza, winner of the A division of the Capistrano with Cedar Key in 1964, was substituting for the grounded Pierce.

Shoemaker was riding Cedar Key in 1966. Cedar Key and George Royal had the outside posts and were the last two horses to leave the tunnel that led to the track before the race. Shoemaker was laughing so hard that he had trouble staying in the saddle.

“I’m going to take my best shot,” Longden had told him. “You guys better get the hell out of the way, because I’m coming through, no matter what happens.”

If there would be any interference, the stewards could suspend Longden for as many days as they wanted. Any penalty would be academic because he would never be around to serve it.

So Longden did what he had to do, and the chariot race from “Ben-Hur” could have been his inspiration.

Don Richardson, the trainer of George Royal who had also ridden the horse, knew Longden didn’t need prerace instructions. And in the walking ring, Eric Longden, the jockey’s son, said, “Don’t take any fool chances. And keep off the damned rail.”

Johnny Longden smiled. “What do you think I’ve been doing for most of my life?” he said.

Early in the race, George Royal and Longden crowded Shoemaker and Cedar Key. That helped eliminate the 4-1 second choice. After half a mile, Longden had George Royal running easily on the outside, but they were in last place, 15 1/2 lengths behind. Plaque, ridden by the fiery Bobby Ussery, was leading, but Hill Rise had Longden’s immediate attention.

When Longden moved into the final turn, Walter Blum, aboard Oret Argent, tried to follow him.

“My horse couldn’t do it,” said Blum, now a steward at Miami’s Gulfstream Park. “I had a good view of Longden’s horse. At the three-eighths pole, he was in a perfect position.”

Longden cut the corner going into the stretch, forcing Ycaza to steady for an instant on Hill Rise. Now there was only Plaque to catch, running on the inside.

George Royal inched ahead at the eighth pole, but Plaque wasn’t finished. They were at each other’s throats to the wire. Plaque seemed to stick his nose in front with about 100 yards to go, but George Royal kept coming. Ussery was whipping furiously; Longden was hand-riding. They didn’t call him “the Pumper” for nothing.

Laz Barrera, who trained Plaque, thought he had won. As the jockeys pulled up their horses, Shoemaker and Cedar Key came alongside Longden.

“Did you win, John?” Shoemaker asked.

“I think so,” Longden said. “I either won or it was a dead heat.”

The crowd was quiet for the only time that day. Already there were tears. The difference on the official photograph was about a quarter of an inch, and when the placing judges put 10--George Royal’s number--on the board, the place erupted.

“That was a real finish,” Longden says now. “That was a good way to go out. I was worried about the distance of that race, because I had ridden the horse the previous time and got real tired that day. It was quite a big deal.”

Longden’s ride that day has been voted the greatest moment in Santa Anita history. Recently, a New York poll rated it the third-best ever, behind Shoemaker’s seeing-eye victory aboard Ferdinand in the 1986 Kentucky Derby and Chris McCarron’s near-disastrous stumble with Alysheba the next year at Churchill Downs.

The $2 win payoff was $15, the time 2:48 4/5, two seconds slower than George Royal had run the year before.

“If I was going to lose to anybody, I was happy to lose to Johnny Longden,” Barrera said.

Blum added: “Boy, would I like to go back to that day. It was like something out of a storybook. It was like a movie. I was as happy as if I had won it.”

Dan Smith, chasing quotes in the Santa Anita jockeys’ room, went up to Ussery.

“I tried to put the thing in historical perspective,” Smith said. “I said something about, ‘It’s probably good that Johnny won, because otherwise the guy who beat him might be kind of remembered like the guy who shot Jesse James.’ Ussery wasn’t having any of that. He said he wanted to beat that old . . . real bad.”

A week later, Frank McMahon called Longden to Florida, offering him some horses that started him on a successful training career. Longden saddled McMahon’s Majestic Prince, the 1969 Kentucky Derby winner. That made Longden the only horseman to win the Kentucky Derby two ways, since he had ridden Count Fleet, his best horse, to a sweep of the Triple Crown in 1943.

Shoemaker, who retired with the record of 8,833 victories, is hard-pressed to name the best horse he ever rode, but Longden isn’t.

“It was Count Fleet, by far,” he said. “He was a freak. He was fast and he could run short or long, it didn’t make any difference.”

Officially, Longden gave up his stalls at Santa Anita a year ago, but the one horse he owns, a 3-year-old claiming filly named Witches Fling, ran fourth at Golden Gate Fields last week and he drove the 400 miles in his 27-foot motor home to saddle her.

Longden’s late wife, Hazel, the first woman to saddle a stakes winner at Santa Anita, died in 1989. He lives in Banning, not far from the second hole on a golf course, and plays three times a week, frequently breaking 100.

In 1912, when Longden was 5, his mother, three sisters and he had tickets on the Titanic, which was sailing from Liverpool, England. They were going to Canada to join Longden’s father.

Longden remembers the train ride to Liverpool. Luckily for his family, and for horse racing, the train was late.