Bay Meadows' race is run
Published: Sunday, August 17, 2008 at 3:00 a.m.
Last Modified: Sunday, August 17, 2008 at 9:06 p.m.
SAN MATEO - As the shadows encroached on the old track late Sunday afternoon, 3-year-old filly You Lift Me Up won the 10th and last race at Bay Meadows. It was not just the last race of the day. It was the last race ever, the last race period.
The race was named “The Last Dance Stakes” with good reason. Bay Meadows is dead.
The track opened Nov. 3, 1934, and on Sunday it closed. They charged one buck general admission for the final day, and the fans flooded in to experience the end — the track almost never got that crowded anymore. Most days, Bay Meadows would attract a little more than 6,000 fans. You couldn’t really call that a crowd.
It was an intimate gathering of a loyal dying breed.
Bay Meadows was a small track by the standards of Churchill Downs or Santa Anita or Hollywood Park. It was comfortable and intimate and charming, and inside the Turf Club where someone played the piano on the final day — played every Saturday and Sunday — it felt like you’d passed through a time warp and entered a luxury hotel from the post-World War I era, a hotel with little nooks and crannies and private lounges with dark wood walls, and bars with fancy drinks and insiders having fun.
For 15 years, the rumors swirled, “It will close this season.”
Sunday the day came, finally. Soon they will start tearing down Bay Meadows, the grandstand and the barns in the infield and the railing along the track, and they will dig up the smooth sand-colored track, and they will tear up the deep-green turf course and pull down the concession stands and tear up the parking lots, and they will put up homes and office buildings and a park. Life moves on and what once was young fades into history.
Horse racing is becoming an anachronism except for big races like the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes. In the early 1960s, Belmont Park drew bigger crowds than the New York Yankees. Not any more.
In those days, fans had to wager at the track. Now they can bet online or at off-track parlors, and that makes tracks — the real thing with real horses, those beautiful animals running for real — seem redundant.
And the pace of life has changed. A day at the races is a disappearing pleasure, people leisurely reading the Daily Racing Form, taking time between races, enjoying the day, enjoying the pageant, taking time.
Well, it’s all gone.
The final “official program” for Sunday’s last day of racing replicated the very first program, which cost 15 cents in 1934 and $2.25 in 2008 — a bargain. The cover was simple, the left profile of a thoroughbred. Only one detail distinguished this program from all others, the dates 1934-2008 over the head of the horse. The dates told of a lifespan, of a birth and a death. Bay Meadows is defunct and gone with it is a way of life.
These are some of the great horses who ran at Bay Meadows:
The best of all was Seabiscuit, who won the Bay Meadows Handicap in 1937 and 1938. And there was Citation. And there was Cigar, who won 16 in a row in 1995 and 1996, the first horse to do that since Citation. And there was Noor. And there was Determine — California bred, won the Kentucky Derby in 1954. And there was Sonoma County’s Cavonnier who won the El Camino Real Derby in 1996 and lost by a nose in the Kentucky Derby. And there was Native Diver, a great California horse. And there was the filly Brown Bess, the first Northern California horse to win the Eclipse Award (1989). And, of course, the second NorCal horse so honored was Lost in the Fog, rest in peace, who also ran at Bay Meadows.
These are some of the great jockeys who competed at Bay Meadows:
I’ll start with Johnny Longden because he did something special. In 1969, he was the trainer of Majestic Prince when the Prince won the Kentucky Derby — Majestic Prince got started at Bay Meadows. And that made Longden the only person to win the Kentucky Derby as both jockey and trainer. And Red Pollard and George Woolf both rode Seabiscuit and competed at Bay Meadows. And, of course, Russell Baze rode here — although on Sunday he was riding in Seattle. Which may or may not mean something. Baze became the all-time winningest jockey in North America on Dec. 1, 2006, when he won race No. 9,531 at Bay Meadows — he’s won more than 10,000 now.
But the best jockey story, bar none, belongs to Ralph Neves, the “Portuguese Pepper Pot” who had a serious accident at Bay Meadows in 1936, so serious they carted him to the morgue and tagged his toe.
That was that until he woke up and registered a serious objection. He jumped into a cab and zoomed right back to the track, but they wouldn’t let him ride that day as he was so recently returned from the dead. He rode the next day.
These are some of the all-time firsts presented at Bay Meadows:
The first all-enclosed electric starting gate; the photo finish; the first track where horses were flown in — to the parking lot — and then raced and won; Bill Shoemaker won his first stakes race at Bay Meadows; and it was the first track to have quarterhorse racing.
And it was the first track to invite leading jockeys from around the world to compete against the local jocks. Britain’s Lester Piggott raced at Bay Meadows and Steve Cauthen also raced there.
Sure, Cauthen is American, but now it gets interesting.
“I interviewed him when he had a Kentucky accent and when he had a British accent and when he had got back his Kentucky accent,” Sam Spear told me.
Spear has been the producer and host of the Nightly Race Report on Channel 26 since Labor Day 1978. Cauthen had gone to England to race, and along with the lifestyle he picked up the accent and then he came home and didn’t need the accent anymore and he gave it up.
But that was in a long-ago past that seems almost mythical.
In the hard present, everything at Bay Meadows is for sale. You can go online August 23-25 at www.greatamerican.com and bid for the jockeys’ scales and the track’s TV studio and the grandstand seats and the track lights and the stables and the restaurant and bar equipment — 2,500 items in all. You can buy history and own the fading relics of a bygone era.
Everything changes if you live long enough, and Bay Meadows is now defunct.
You can reach Staff Columnist Lowell Cohn at 521-5486 or lowell.cohn@pressdemocrat.com.
All rights reserved. This copyrighted material may not be re-published without permission. Links are encouraged.
Comments are currently unavailable on this article