No team of yipping dogs held in check by straining handlers. No biography read over the loudspeaker to the mob of fans. Just quiet. And quite a bit of empty space between musher No. 14 and musher No. 16.

Then it was announced that Robert Moore had scratched.

For Moore, standing about 50 feet away along the start-line fencing at the Wasilla Municipal Airport, it was like being a spectator at his own funeral.

Actually, though, he looked pretty good for a guy who less than 24 hours earlier lay face-down in a ditch beside the Glenn Highway. Knocked briefly unconscious during one of the several sled crashes of his 20-mile run from the downtown Anchorage race start to Eagle River, in his desperation to stay in the race, Moore remembers nearly tackling a woman trying to call 911 to get him an ambulance.

Ultimately, he became a reluctant scratch and pulling out was one of the toughest decisions of his life. Of course, if he hadn't, he understood very well that officials might be talking about a real moment of silence for him at the finish in Nome.

Moore's calamitous cruise to Eagle River was less a measure of competence than a test of mind over matter, the culmination of a three-month ordeal. Moore was a mess after back surgery, torn muscles, internal bleeding and an infection. For six weeks he must pump 18 million units of penicillin daily through a tube into his chest - a dosage 30 times the volume of a single needle shot in the butt.

So Moore's Iditarod goes down as one of the shortest on record. But it does count. That's what mattered so much to him. To be in the book, to be in the standings. But the real tale is in how he could stand at all this weekend.

The Iditarod is a magnificent-obsession event, a sporting challenge that at times defies logic. All entrants acknowledge there is a little bit of crazy in them, or they wouldn't guide dogs over mountains and through blizzards while reducing their savings accounts to pennies. But love will strike where love will.

Moore fit right in. About 6 feet tall, in glasses and gray hair, though with more poundage around his middle than he wants, he is a 63-year-old family doctor from Vero Beach, Fla. - the first Iditarod competitor from that state.

Smitten with mushing after his first dog-sled ride in November 1997, Moore started setting dollar bills on fire immediately by buying a team and housing it in Knik. Then he qualified for the 1999 Iditarod by completing the Knik 200 and the Klondike 300 in 1998. That quieted some doubters back home who thought a senior-citizen beginning musher who drove a vehicle with Florida plates reading "Iditarod," to be "a simple fool," as he put it.

No more foolish than many of the 55 other starters in this year's Iditarod. There are stars chasing a $54,000 first prize, top-20 contenders, and probably two-dozen mushers like Moore, just hoping to reach Nome, 1,100 miles away, in one piece.

Moore didn't make it to Anchorage in one piece, though. Suffering from a longstanding, degenerative condition affecting two vertebrae, on Dec. 7 he underwent 31/2 hours of surgery. Doctors removed 30 fragments of disks wedged against his spinal cord. On Dec. 22, on his first sled ride after the operation, he crashed his sled, ripping muscles near the surgical wound. Blood flooded the area. Then the injury got infected.

A few weeks ago, doctors assessed his chances of starting the Iditarod at 5-to-1 against.

Wednesday, three days to blastoff, Moore climbed on a sled for the first time in nine weeks. It hurt bad, but Moore mushed 14 miles. He reassessed. Forget Nome. But because the Anchorage start is ceremonial, he didn't feel it counted. He wanted to reach Knik, the first official checkpoint.

"For that moment in time, I will have been in the Iditarod," said Moore.

On Fourth Avenue, Moore was in agony.

"I was worried," said his wife, Irene, who had to pull on his boots because he couldn't bend. "He is my sweetie."

Tears streamed down Moore's cheeks and a gizmo the size of a hardcover book was under his parka, pumping penicillin faster than oil streams through the trans-Alaska pipeline. He supplemented the penicillin with painkillers.

Didn't help. The short run to Eagle River was bruising, and in a midnight phone call with race marshal Mark Nordman, Moore scratched.

"I told him, 'I don't want something to happen to you,' " said Nordman. "As soon as I assured him that he had started the 1999 Iditarod and he was part of history, he was OK with the decision."

Is Moore satisfied? Not really. But he was part of the Iditarod.

"You can't take it away from me, either," said Moore.

Now the physician must heal himself. From the infection.

There is no cure, of course, for the mushing addiction.

* This column is the opinion of Daily News sports editor Lew Freedman

Published: 3/8/99