Long Ride Over for Jockey Neves : Horse racing: Declared dead after a race, he dies of cancer 59 years later.

Ralph Neves, a Hall of Fame jockey who walked out of a mortuary after he had been declared dead by a track physician at Bay Meadows in 1936, died in his sleep early Friday in a nursing home in San Marcos.

Neves, who won 3,771 races, among them 173 stakes, had been ill for several years and recently was undergoing treatment for lung cancer. Accounts of his age differed, but family members said he was 79.

Neves was voted into the Racing Hall of Fame in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., in 1960, four years before he retired. Long before Neves was winning big races, however, he achieved national notoriety because of a bizarre incident at Bay Meadows.

On May 8, 1936, the teen-age Neves was riding a horse named Flanakins in an early race on the card at the San Mateo track. On the far turn, Flanakins was leading when he either tripped or broke down, throwing Neves into the wooden rail. Neves was trampled by trailing horses, and three physicians--one from Bay Meadows and two from the crowd--rushed to the unconscious jockey.

The track doctor could find no vital signs and after Neves was removed on a stretcher, Oscar Otis, the track announcer, told the crowd: “We regret to inform you that jockey Ralph Neves is dead. Please stand in silent prayer.”

Neves was moved to a nearby hospital, then transferred to a mortuary. In a 1986 interview with The Times, Neves said that his toe had been tagged in the mortuary.

“They treated me like I was a stiff,” he said.

Neves was told later that his friend, Dr. Horace Stevens, showed up at the mortuary and gave him a shot of adrenaline in the heart. Half-conscious, Neves said that he wandered out of the mortuary, dressed in one boot and a torn, bloody pair of riding pants. He went to a cab stand where a friend, “Portuguese Joe,” gave him a ride back to Bay Meadows.

“Bing Crosby had promised a $500 watch to the jock who led the meet in wins,” Neves said. “I was a couple ahead of Allen Gray with only one day to go, and I wanted that watch.”

After startling other riders when he showed up in the jockeys’ room, Neves was sent to the first-aid room, where he received treatment. But the stewards wouldn’t allow him to ride the remaining races on the card. He rode the next day, closing day. He won no races, but had five finishes in the money and won the watch.

He kept a scrapbook and once showed a reporter several pages of headlines and stories reporting his “death.”

Neves was involved in other nasty spills, suffering temporary double vision after an accident at Golden Gate Fields in 1953 and surviving brain surgery after he went down at Hollywood Park in 1959. He had served in the cavalry during World War II and broke his back when he fell from a horse at Ft. Riley, Kan.

The fiery Neves, called “the Portuguese Pepperpot,” was respected by trainers and other jockeys and applauded by bettors for his devil-may-care, ground-saving style.

It was a style, however, that frequently led to trouble with track stewards. They once suspended him for six months for hitting another horse with his whip, an infraction Neves denied.

“I couldn’t have reached that horse with a fishing pole,” he said.

From the Boston area, Neves was 5 when he moved with his family to Northern California. He was riding in rodeos as a youngster and lied about his age to get started at the track and to obtain work as a stunt rider in the movies.

“I was hungry,” Neves said, “and too nervous to steal.”

He looked like actor Frankie Darro and did the stunt riding for him in the film “Broadway Bill.” Neves said that the pay was $10 a day, but he got a $200 bonus for falling from a horse in a scene that required four takes.

On the track, Neves was riding for $5 a mount in races that had $300 purses. He became a contract rider, at $15 a month, for a stable at the Longacres track in suburban Seattle, where he rode his first winner. Neves said that he never received his full pay at Longacres, and there were reports that his contract was sold for $25,000 to Californian Charles S. Howard, the owner of Seabiscuit, who paid Neves $200 a month.

Howard’s main jockeys were George Woolf and John Adams, but Neves won the 1939 Sunset Handicap at Hollywood Park on Howard’s Sorteado, who gave the jockey one of his first important victories.

Neves won the Sunset three times and was a three-time winner of the Hollywood Derby. He also won the Santa Anita Derby with Sweepida, the Hollywood Gold Cup with Solidarity, the San Juan Capistrano with Royal Living and in 1957, at 105 pounds, won the Santa Anita Handicap with Corn Husker.

He finished third in the 1957 Kentucky Derby with Round Table, whom he called the best horse he ever rode.

Bill Shoemaker, who rode against Neves for 15 years, once summarized the experience.

“If you tried to get a horse through on the rail with Ralph, you could count on getting crucified,” Shoemaker said. “He wouldn’t let you through if your horse was last and his was running next to last. I think he did it just to keep in practice.”

Another Neves contemporary, the late Hubert Jones, described him this way:

“He was a reckless rider. He would admit that he didn’t know how to rate a horse, but he would just ride hard, all the time.”

Neves later ran a restaurant in Pasadena but sold it in 1983.

He was married three times and is survived by three children, five grandchildren, one great-grandchild and two sisters. Burial arrangements are incomplete, with Allen Mortuary in San Marcos in charge.

His last name, spelled backward, was seven, and Neves would joke about that any time he had ridden a No. 7 horse to victory. Ironically, he died on July 7: 7/7/95.