She Lived Fast and Died Young : RUFFIAN; Burning From the Start, <i> By Jane Schwartz (Ballantine: $18; 278 pp.) </i>

The moment was, to be sure, one of the most dramatic seen in sport in the decade of the 1970s, and certainly among the most electrifying ever witnessed in the long history of thoroughbred racing in America.

It began late in the afternoon of July 6, 1975, with nearly 20 million people watching on national television and more than 50,000 others crowding the stands at Belmont Park, when two of the fastest 3-year-old racehorses on earth--the brilliant, undefeated filly, Ruffian, and that year’s Kentucky Derby winner, the bay colt Foolish Pleasure--stepped into the starting gate at the end of the 1 1/4-mile chute. Promoted as “The Great Match Race,” it became known popularly as “The Battle of the Sexes,” a girl-meets-boy affair that stirred lively interest across the nation. Like the Billie Jean King-Bobby Riggs tennis match, it fed upon a powerful social current, the women’s movement, and quickly grew larger than the event itself.

It was just a horse race, but nothing of its sort had been seen in the racing game. I was covering the race for Newsday, the Long Island paper, and can still hear the gusting roar of the crowd as the gates opened and those two exuberant animals sprang like cats from their stalls and began charging down the chute as if joined in a team, head and head, faster and faster, the big, black, fine-boned filly sweeping rhythmically to a slight lead, the smaller, stockier colt scooting low to the ground right next to her. It was an extraordinary sight, those two racing like the hammers of hell, battling for the lead in The Great Match Race.

Then it was over. Forty seconds into it, a startled pigeon flew up in front of them and Ruffian suddenly bobbled, her head rising and dipping as she slowed, and the track announcer began yelling: “Ruffian has broken down!” The crowd’s roar, so intense a moment before, cut to silence, as though turned off by a switch.

Like an army of the dumb, thousands simply stood mute as jockey Jacinto Vasquez struggled to pull Ruffian up. She careened to the right, hobbling, to the outside fence, while Foolish Pleasure sailed away alone for the far turn.

With Ken Denlinger, a sportswriter for the Washington Post, I bolted down the clubhouse stairs and onto the crown of the track. Forgetting Foolish Pleasure was still out there, I started across and then froze as I heard the oncoming thump of his hoofs. As the colt galloped past, we ducked under the rail, took off across the mammoth infield lawn and ended up draped across the backstretch fence as Dr. Manuel Gilman, kneeling at her front legs, fitted Ruffian with an inflatable cast.

Rising, Gilman had blood on both hands. He was ashen. “She shattered both sesamoids in her right ankle,” he said, referring to the nugget-sized bones on which the ankle pivots. They had exploded out through the skin.

It sounded like a sentence of death, as indeed it was. Nine nightmarish hours later, after veterinarians tried but failed to save her, Ruffian was put to death with a lethal injection of phenobarbital.

Sixteen years have passed since Ruffian blazed across the American turf, and her life and death have transformed her irresistibly into racing legend. What has been missing, all these years, was a voice to tell her tale. In “Ruffian: Burning From The Start,” author Jane Schwartz has written, with considerable grace and evident love, a superb, painstakingly researched portrait of this most remarkable of thoroughbred fillies, perhaps the single greatest female runner ever to touch foot to a racetrack.

It may be argued, with unwavering confidence, that the decade of the 1970s was the true golden age of racing in America, beginning with the star-crossed Hoist the Flag, a horse of phenomenal ability, and ending with Spectacular Bid, the gray tiger. Between them were Triple Crown winners Seattle Slew and Affirmed, whose foil was the doughty Alydar, and the great gelding, Forego. Of course, the giant of the decade was Secretariat, of whom the late dean of turf writers, Charles Hatton, once wrote, “His only point of reference is himself.”

Then came Ruffian. Like Secretariat, her kindred spirit--they were related by blood too, along their sires’ lines--Ruffian transcended the breed and emerged, in truth, as a force of nature all her own, shattering time records with an eerie insouciance. In 10 lifetime starts, excluding the match, she was first at every call in every race in which she ever ran, an unprecedented feat. Even in the match, she was on the lead when she broke down. At the bell, Ruffian took off like a bird from a branch, and she was gone.

Schwartz begins her story on the eve of the match, but throughout the narrative, leading up to the race, she flashes back to detail Ruffian’s life--from her birth at Claiborne Farm in Kentucky on April 17, 1972, to her early training and then to her dazzling performances, both in morning workouts and at the races. Schwartz’s novelistic touches are particularly deft in the sketches she draws of the people, like Vasquez and trainer Frank Whiteley, who surrounded the filly. (I’ve known both men for 20 years, and her re-creations of their speech, in dialogue, are so true that I can hear their voices.) She writes well, and the only complaint here is about her excessive, almost compulsive, use of the exclamation point. There are hundreds of them hanging in bunches through the text, at times so many that whole paragraphs, if you stare at them long enough, begin to look like banana plantations.

That aside, the narrative is well-written and tightly focused, building smoothly through the final chapters to the race itself and its aftermath. The scene was chaotic back at the barn, where the filly was reeling in pain and shock as several veterinarians worked, at times at cross-purposes, to stabilize her. That evening, at a nearby hospital, she was fitted with a cast and now lay quiet under anesthesia. The prose here is clean.

“Ruffian lay on the floor of the recovery room . . . Except for the rising and falling of her chest, the big filly was still. She had lost so much fluid that her body seemed shrunken and caved in; each rib was outlined with a painful, delicate precision. Even her face had grown gaunt in the last few hours.”

As she regained consciousness, still lying down, she began churning her legs as if running, thrashing so hard that she knocked the plaster cast against her elbow, breaking the elbow, too. And so the vets came to put her down.

Even as she fell asleep, the filly was running, churning on the lead. “Ruffian was starting to run again, leading with her right leg . . . faster and faster now, finally released, no more bit in her mouth, no rider on her back, no cast, no pain . . . she was flying, the sun blazed all around her, she was running now, easily, straight into the light, free.”

She was a rare creature, that black deer with the white star, and Schwartz has served the memory well.