Few in the Saturday-night crowd of 1,685 at Los Alamitos realized they were in the company of a movie star. But there he was: second race, No. 5 in the program and No. 1 in the hearts of horse lovers from Vermont to California.
This was Rich In Dallas, a 9-year-old Arkansas-bred gelding who gave Tobey Maguire, playing jockey Red Pollard, his first ride in "Seabiscuit," the movie that was nominated for a best-picture Oscar.
Early in the film, the Pollard character is introduced to the still-unaccomplished Seabiscuit by trainer Tom Smith, played by Chris Cooper.
"How far do you want me to take him?" Maguire says.
"Till he stops," Cooper says.
Then Rich In Dallas takes off across a stone bridge, up a hill, through a woods and into a meadow. Maguire is whooping with joy along the way, because he realizes what sort of equine engine he has underneath him.
At Los Alamitos on Saturday night, in a $5,900 race for thoroughbreds going 4 1/2 furlongs, Rich In Dallas, making the 69th start of his career, showed just a glimmer of that open-field speed. Last in a field of seven early, at the top of the stretch he and jockey Gary Boag didn't even look like they were going to hit the board. But then Rich In Dallas split horses near the wire and got up to take second place. He was beaten by 3 1/2 lengths, earning a $1,305 share of the purse for his owners, Bill Wildes and Ken Phillips, and trainer Curley Ortiz.
After the race, however, Rich In Dallas, instead of being led off to Ortiz's barn, was taken to the barn of trainer Jaime Gomez. Ortiz was handed a slip that said Rich In Dallas had been claimed out of the race by Gomez for $2,500.
Rich In Dallas won't race again. His purchase was paid for by an anonymous California donor who was part of an 11th-hour, Internet-generated plan to retire the horse to a happy life on a Maryland farm.
"I [claimed the horse] as a favor to an old friend," Gomez said.
A woman in Florida, who also preferred to remain anonymous, has pledged to the Exceller Fund the cost of a van, approximately $1,200, that will transport Rich In Dallas to his retirement home. The Exceller Fund, which is run entirely by volunteers on the Internet, was founded in 1997, the same year that Exceller, a Hall of Fame horse from the late 1970s, was turned over to a slaughterhouse in Sweden. Ferdinand, the 1986 Kentucky Derby winner, was reported to have met the same fate in Japan last year.
