'SEABISCUIT' DESERVING OF LAURELS.

Byline: David Kronke TV Critic

THE SAGA OF the racehorse Seabiscuit is a quintessential feel-good story about an equine Horatio Alger, as evidenced by the fact that Laura Hillenbrand's book on the pony remains on best-seller lists two years after its publication and will soon hit the big screen courtesy of writer-director Gary Ross (``Big,'' ``Pleasantville''). Tonight's ``American Experience'' documentary, ``Seabiscuit,'' is a nice, no-nonsense film explaining why the story continues to resonate today.

As the documentary's writer Michelle Ferrari notes, Seabiscuit was ``a masterpiece of faulty construction,'' a reticent, overrun and underachieving horse descending from Man O'War who caught the eye of trainer Tom Smith, who paired it with a hard-luck, Shakespeare-quoting jockey named Red Pollard, who never admitted he was blind in one eye for fear of being thrown out of the sport.

Together, they thrilled a nation in the throes of the Great Depression - Seabiscuit earned $144,000 in winnings in a year when the average American did well to scrape by on $500. When Seabiscuit challenged War Admiral, Man O' War's son, in a highly touted race, one in three Americans listened to the race on the radio. And Pollard, though hobbled by a pair of debilitating accidents, took the horse after a mishap of its own to challenge for the big-stakes Santa Anita Handicap, with a winner-take-all purse of $100,000, long after the horse was considered to have passed its prime.

This rags-to-riches story is so perfect in and of itself that Hollywood couldn't possibly improve upon it with any embellishments (Seabiscuit's story already received the movie treatment, in 1949). Here, director Stephen Ives gets good mileage out of archival footage and sportswriter Gene Smith's poetic description of the hectic minutiae of a diminutive jockey's job atop a galloping rocket amid a rampage of horses. It's a wire-to-wire winner.

SEABISCUIT - Three stars

What: ``American Experience'' documentary about the legendary racehorse.

Where: KCET.

When: 9 tonight.

In a nutshell: A great American Depression-era story.