GREAT RACES IN GREAT PLACES

Seabiscuit and Johnny Longden saved their best for last at Santa Anita. Over the last 100 years, there haven’t been two moments in Southern California racing to compare with the farewell heroics of the rejuvenated old-timer and the aging jockey.

Twenty-six years apart, they broke the drama meter with performances that left most witnesses weak-kneed and teary-eyed. Writing about Longden’s last ride, Bion Abbott of The Times said: “It couldn’t happen this side of a movie studio, but it did.”

That was on March 12, 1966, when Longden and George Royal beat Plaque by a nose in the $125,000 San Juan Capistrano Handicap. Longden, 59, had made an impromptu retirement announcement a couple of days before the race. George Royal gave Longden, who had been riding for 40 years, his 6,032nd win. That was a record until Bill Shoemaker chalked up win No. 6,033 aboard a horse named Dares J. on Sept. 7, 1970 at Del Mar.

George Royal wasn’t favored, but on March 2, 1940, Seabiscuit and his stablemate, Kayak II, were bet down to 7-10 odds for the sixth running of the Santa Anita Handicap, mostly because Kayak II had won the race the year before. Seabiscuit’s jockey, the oft-injured Red Pollard, couldn’t really fathom all the money that was bet on his horse. “We’re just a couple of old cripples,” Pollard said before the race.

But Charles S. Howard, Seabiscuit’s owner, badly wanted the race that had eluded his horse twice before, even if his crotchety trainer, Silent Tom Smith, thought the undertaking was ill-advised.

Hardly in a sentimental mood was Webb Everett, Santa Anita’s racing secretary, who plunked 130 pounds on Seabiscuit’s back. Seabiscuit had been the 1938 horse of the year, but he had gone lame in 1939, running only once, and now he was a 7-year-old who had run 88 times.

A couple of days before the 1940 Big ‘Cap, Smith worked Seabiscuit three furlongs in just over 34 seconds. “If he can stand up under that, he can stand up under anything,” the tight-lipped trainer said.

As the field reached the gate for the Big ‘Cap, Howard and Smith, in their box seats, had trouble holding their binoculars steady. Howard’s wife said she couldn’t watch, but at the last minute she ran from her outpost at the barn to the nearest rail, which was at the start of the chute that would send the horses down the homestretch a first time.

In a 13-horse field, Seabiscuit broke alertly and was in second place going by the stands. Already Pollard sensed that this was going to be their day. At the head of the stretch, to the roar of 68,526, the leader Whichcee had wilted and Seabiscuit forged to the front. The only horse who could trash the script was the stablemate, and racing historian B.K. Beckwith wrote that Kayak II was “coming on the outside like a big black locomotive.”

But at the wire, it was Seabiscuit by one length over the Argentine-bred; he collected $86,650, enough to surpass Sun Beau as the record money earner.

Just as Seabiscuit gave the nascent signature race at Santa Anita the boost it needed, he had also been a bellwether for Hollywood Park, the track that had opened in 1938, four years after Santa Anita. The first Hollywood Gold Cup-- worth $56,150 then and $1 million now--was won by Seabiscuit, carrying 133 pounds. In all of California, the only horse to carry more weight and win has been Ack Ack, who toted 134 pounds when he won the Gold Cup for owner Greer Garson in 1971.

Had the Gold Cup been in a midlife crisis, Native Diver would have been the perfect antidote. For three years, 1965 through 1967, no one could touch the free-running Native Diver in the Hollywood Park race. “Mr. and Mrs. Louis K. Shapiro were listed as the owners,” Mary Fleming Simon once wrote, “but for seven seasons during the 1960s, Native Diver galloped into the hearts of California racing fans like no other runner before or since.”

Trained by Buster Millerick, Native Diver won 37 of 81 starts, and with his third victory in the Gold Cup, as an 8-year-old, he became the first California-bred to go over the $1-million mark in purses. Speed-crazy as a young horse, the near-black Diver was ridden by several prominent jockeys, but he did his best under Jerry Lambert, who rode him in all three of his Gold Cup wins. In 1967, two months after winning his third Gold Cup, Native Diver died from an intestinal infection and was buried near the paddock at Hollywood Park.

No other horse has even won the Hollywood Gold Cup twice. The only horse to repeat in the Santa Anita Handicap has been John Henry, another redoubtable gelding who won in 1981 and was moved up to first by the stewards the next year after Perrault, drifting out in the stretch run, beat him by a nose.

There’s a goodly list of controversial disqualifications in California--more recently, Stuka’s win after The Wicked North had outrun him by 11/2 lengths in the 1994 Big ‘Cap--but for Perrault’s trainer, Charlie Whittingham, John Henry’s second Big ‘Cap win was especially lumpy going down.

In the final 70 yards, jockey Laffit Pincay went to a left-handed whip on Perrault, causing him to shift into John Henry’s path. “If Pincay had switched his stick 1/8to the right hand 3/8, it never would have happened,” said the legendary Whittingham, who won nine Big ‘Caps before his death in 1999.

The crowd of 75,752 erupted when John Henry’s winning number went up.

In the early 1980s, the well-traveled John Henry was a national phenomenon, winning on grass and dirt as he cranked out two horse-of-the-year titles, the second as a 9-year-old in 1984. John Henry was bi-coastal, but the refugee from the claiming ranks, bought privately by New Yorker Sam Rubin for $25,000, was based at trainer Ron McAnally’s Santa Anita barn through it all.

John Henry’s second Big ‘Cap win was the 10th for jockey Bill Shoemaker in the stake, and he would win one more, with Whittingham’s Lord At War, in 1985. For decades, Whittingham and Shoemaker were a deadly pair, the salty ex-Marine sending out horses that were trained to the minute, and the soft-handed, 100-pound jockey giving them the extra edge they needed from the saddle. In 1986, their partnership reached a pinnacle with a colt who could do no better than third in the Santa Anita Derby. A month later, Ferdinand won the Kentucky Derby, sending Shoemaker and Whittingham into the winner’s circle at Churchill Downs. The trainer was 73 and the jockey was 54.

Two years after Ferdinand, Shoemaker would win his eighth Santa Anita Derby with the Whittingham-trained Temperate Sil. Having broken Longden’s career-win record at Del Mar in 1970, Shoemaker continued to reel off the milestones: Win No. 7,000 came at Santa Anita in 1976, No. 8,000 was recorded at Hollywood Park in 1981. On Feb. 3, 1990, with the win meter at 8,833, the career of racing’s winningest rider ended when Shoemaker, 58, rode Patchy Groundfog to a fourth- place finish at Santa Anita. Then this Dec. 9, Pincay rode I Be Casual to a win at Hollywood Park to tie Shoemaker at 8,833. The next day, Irish Nip gave Pincay his record 8,834th victory.

Shoemaker’s promising career as a trainer was derailed when he was left paralyzed from the neck down after a one-car accident in April 1991. He returned to train from a wheelchair that fall, but gave up his stable six years later.

One of Shoemaker’s four Kentucky Derby winners was Swaps, who had won the 1955 Santa Anita Derby with Longden aboard. Sore-footed and California-bred, Swaps was a lively calling card owner-breeder Rex Ellsworth and trainer Mesh Tenney. Swaps didn’t merely win races, he inhaled them with some record-breaking clockings, and the weight the racing offices piled on made no difference. Four times at Hollywood Park, Swaps won with 130 pounds on his back, including the Hollywood Gold Cup in 1956. When Swaps was retired in 1956, with 19 wins in 25 starts, his earnings of almost $850,000 ranked behind only Nashua, Citation and Stymie.

Another horse closely identified with Shoemaker was Spectacular Bid, who won 12 of 13 races with the California jockey aboard. Four of those wins came in 1980 at Santa Anita, including a sweep of the Strub series and a five-length win under 130 pounds in the Santa Anita Handicap. “He was the best,” Shoemaker said. “He could run on any kind of track, he could carry weight and he ran all over the country.”

From another era, Citation was the Spectacular Bid of his day. He won 32 of 45 starts, but was closer to the end than the beginning by the time he reached Hollywood Park in 1951. The late Warren Wright of Calumet Farm had left a request that Citation race until he reached $1 million in earnings, and Jimmy Jones, the horse’s trainer, hit the plateau when his horse earned $100,000 by beating his stablemate Bewitch in the Hollywood Gold Cup.

In 1948, when he was a 3-year-old, Citation won 15 straight races. He sat out 1949 because of injury and increased the streak to 16 in his first race of 1950. In 1994, Cigar, a horse who had been sent to New York because he was ineffective on California’s grass courses, switched to dirt and tied the Calumet horse’s record. Cigar’s streak started modestly with an allowance-race win at the end of 1994. He won one more race that year, then went undefeated in 10 starts in 1995, including a victory in the Hollywood Gold Cup at mid-year. In 1996, win No. 16 for Cigar came in the Citation Challenge Stakes at Arlington International, but on Aug. 10 at Del Mar he got caught up in a speed duel with Siphon in the Pacific Classic, and Siphon’s stablemate, Dare And Go, beat Cigar by 31/2 lengths.

Best Pal was a Del Mar horse, foaled not far from the track and winning his first stake there in 1990. He raced all over California for owners-breeders John and Betty Mabee, even finishing second in the 1991 Kentucky Derby, and retired in 1996 with 18 wins in 47 starts and purses of $5.6 million, still a record for a California-bred. The hard-knocking gelding won the Santa Anita Handicap in 1992 and the Hollywood Gold Cup in 1993.

Another Cal-bred, Silky Sullivan, earned only $157,000, but he was one of the most popular horses to ever race in the state. In 1957, when he was a 2-year-old, Silky Sullivan was already stockpiling charisma with his out-of-the-clouds, stretch-running theatrics. In one race, at 61/2 furlongs, he came from 40 lengths behind to win. Silky Sullivan easily won the 1958 Santa Anita Derby, his magnetism swelling the crowd to 61,123, but a month later, ballyhooed all over Louisville and bet down to 2-1, he fell far back early and finished a punchless 11th at Churchill Downs.

By the early 1980s, national racing leaders were looking for a vehicle that would sustain a year-round focus on their sport. After the Triple Crown topped off in June, racing frequently reverted to a regional game, and Eclipse Awards voters were sometimes baffled because there was a dearth of definitive races at the end of the year. Thanks to the leadership of John Gaines, the Kentucky horseman, the Breeders’ Cup was hatched, and in its first year-- 1984--the nationally televised event, featuring seven races worth $10 million, was held at Hollywood Park.

A celebrity-studded crowd of 64,254--Elizabeth Taylor created a parting-of-the-Red-Sea effect when she left the turf club for one winner’s circle presentation--was treated to a wild finish by Wild Again in the $3-million Breeders’ Cup Classic, the richest race ever run. In a ding-dong rush to the wire with Gate Dancer and Slew O’ Gold, the 31-1 Wild Again won by a head, the result declared official after the stewards deliberated for eight minutes. Their only disqualification was demoting the bad-mannered Gate Dancer from second to third place.

The Breeders’ Cup returned to California four more times, at Santa Anita in 1986 and 1993, and at Hollywood Park in 1987 and 1997. Each time, there was high drama. In 1986, Skywalker’s unexpected win in the Classic was transcended by Lady’s Secret’s win in the Distaff, which clinched horse-of-the-year honors for trainer Wayne Lukas’ filly. The next year, Ferdinand, with Shoemaker aboard, nosed out another Kentucky Derby winner, Alysheba, in the Classic. In 1993, Arcangues, an arthritic longshot from France, furnished a 133-1 shocker in the $3-million race. Then in the last California Breeders’ Cup of the century, in 1997, Skip Away buried the opposition but still lost a controversial horse-of-the-year vote to Favorite Trick, an undefeated 2-year-old colt who also won one of the races at Hollywood Park.

Lady’s Secret was only one of 20 champions that were campaigned by Lukas, the former basketball coach who set up shop in California but reinvented horse-training by shipping his stock at will to any track that put up an attractive purse. “Wayne off the plane” became the watchwords, as Lukas, through 1997, led the nation’s trainers in purses for 14 out of 15 years. In 1988, his Winning Colors became the second filly to win the Santa Anita Derby and the third to capture the Kentucky Derby

Gary Stevens, who credited Winning Colors with jumpstarting his career in California, shocked horsemen and fans alike on opening day at Santa Anita in 1999 by announcing his retirement at 36 in the middle of the racing card. Stevens, whose knees had been subjected to multiple surgeries, rode 4,512 winners, seven of them in the Santa Anita Derby, during a 21-year career.

In the 1990s, there were no walkovers for Lukas in his own backyard. Other trainers headquartered in California, such as Richard Mandella and Bob Baffert, began to tilt Lukas’ windmills. Baffert won the Santa Anita Derby with Cavonnier, Indian Charlie and General Challenge, and shipped their stablemates, Silver Charm and Real Quiet, back to Churchill Downs to win the Kentucky Derby. Mandella, in an unprecedented feat, won six straight $1-million races in California: From mid-1996 until 1998, the Hollywood Gold Cup, the Pacific Classic and the Santa Anita Handicap belonged to his barn. Just one of those wins--Dare And Go’s extinguishing of Cigar--would have been enough for most trainers.