ADMIRERS RECALL GIANT OF A JOCKEY\Accident at Santa Anita was fatal for Woolf in '46.

Byline: Kevin Modesti Daily News Staff Writer

Fifty years ago today, a weary George Woolf sat in his Arcadia living room and told a friend and fellow jockey, Bill Buck, he wished he could skip the afternoon's races at Santa Anita.

Buck remembers Woolf saying: "Damn it, Bill, I don't feel a bit good today. But if I take off, they'll say, 'He's at it again.' "

Woolf was a diabetic who protected his health against the strain of making weight by keeping his schedule light, frustrating trainers who knew him as the greatest big-race rider of the era.

Buck drove Woolf to the track on Jan. 3, 1946. And he was watching from the grandstand when, in the fourth race, Woolf set out for a one-mile journey aboard a 3-year-old named Please Me and took a wrong turn into the sport's hazy folklore.

Buck, now 87 and living in Northern California, swears he saw Please Me clip the heels of another horse and stumble. Other accounts say the colt was running along smoothly, close to the leaders and near the inner rail in the clubhouse turn, when Woolf simply fell off. One theory was that Woolf went into insulin shock and passed out.

There are no films or photographs of the incident. Depending on which retelling you believe, Woolf either struck the dirt track head-first, or his helmeted skull first struck the wooden rail.

Woolf, who was 36 and had a wife, Genevieve, but no children, never regained consciousness and died of brain injuries at 3:20 the next morning.

Buck remembers the date easily enough. It's his birthday.

"He was a funny character," Buck said of the Canadian-born Woolf, whom he met when both rode in Calgary before California legalized parimutuel racing in 1933.

Woolf was known for sometimes-brutal honesty and legendary for his calm, which earned him a nickname, "The Iceman." Even before major races, he could sleep in the jockeys' room up to the moment he was called to the saddling paddock, and he could go back to sleep in a minute afterward.

"They'd say, 'George doesn't have a nerve in his body,' " Hall of Fame trainer Charlie Whittingham said. "Nothing bothered him."

Noble Threewitt, another of Santa Anita's octogenarian trainers, remembers how Woolf's independent spirit could get him in trouble.

Like the time Woolf was booked to ride the favorite in the Agua Caliente Handicap, then an important event, in Tijuana. Trainer Woody Fitzgerald asked him to exercise the horse the morning before the race; when Woolf didn't show up, Fitzgerald went looking for him.

"He found him at home, in Chula Vista, lying in bed eating chocolates and reading a western magazine," Threewitt says. Woolf lost the mount.

On the track, Woolf's trademark was his patience, making him comparable to Eddie Delahoussaye, Santa Anita's leading rider today. That sit-and-wait style carried him to the winner's circle in a healthy 19 percent of his races. Woolf died with 721 victories - a paltry total until you remember he sometimes rode only five or six horses a week.

He picked the right horses. Woolf won the first Santa Anita Handicap with Azucar in 1935, the Hollywood Gold Cup with Seabiscuit ('38), Kayak II ('39) and Challedon ('40), and the Preakness with Bold Venture ('36). And he rode Seabiscuit to famous match-race victories over War Admiral at Pimlico and Ligaroti at Del Mar in 1938.

"He was one of the best," Whittingham says.

Woolf is one of two jockeys to die in thoroughbred races at Santa Anita, the other being Alvaro Pineda, who was 29 when his skull was crushed in the starting gate Jan. 18, 1975.

Santa Anita has honored Woolf every winter since 1950 by presenting the George Woolf Memorial Jockey Award to a rider selected by his peers for bringing honor to himself and the sport. Gary Stevens will receive the award later this season in a ceremony not far from Woolf's statue in the Santa Anita paddock gardens.

The Kentucky Derby is pretty much the only major U.S. race Woolf didn't win. So it's ironic that his career is memorialized in words and pictures on the walls and menus of the Arcadia restaurant called The Derby. Woolf was one of The Derby's early owners and sometimes lived in an upstairs apartment, now used as a private dining room.

The woman who answered the telephone at The Derby on Tuesday said the restaurant's management is well aware of today's anniversary. But she said nothing special is planned to commemorate it.

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PHOTO

Photo A statue on the Santa Anita grounds in Arcadia pays tribute to George Woolf.