And these creepy jockeys with frilly, silky outfits who straddled you tightly with both legs, all the while spanking you with a riding crop. What the hell was that about? I mean, that was strange even for Kentucky, where owners of horses wore plaid pants with red blazers, and women, to their credit, refrained from pointing and laughing out loud. Then again, maybe the women couldn’t actually see the men for all that Derby hat.
And that ghastly starting gate – it was one long line of tiny little jail cells, and once you were locked in there they would scare the crap out of you with that unbearable bell. RINGGGGGGGG!
Even when you knew it was coming, that thing was frightening, and Zippy Chippy would need a moment or two to compose himself and get his bearings, and, well, in horse racing, where trainers are often seen draped over fences staring at stopwatches, these are known as very valuable seconds.
Native Dancer and Northern Dancer be damned! They were Zippy’s ancestors and they were great racehorses, but really, where does greatness stop? He may have been just a gangly little foal, but Zippy inherently knew a few things to be true: to compete against those deemed better than you, to challenge for the lead and hold it, to thrive and drive and whirl away and find another gear – those were the dreams of his forebearers, not his. He had smaller dreams that played in slow motion, and these did not include being fawned over by the owner’s family in the winner’s circles of American tracks, having his picture taken by the official photographer, or having blankets of roses draped round his neck. A quick glance at his stats tells you that Zippy may in fact have been allergic to flowers and felt that jockeys who came in first all the time were just showing off.
No, not everybody dreams in color or yearns to finish first or takes losing to heart. Zippy would go on to have fun and frivolity in his career as a racehorse – something that, if you’ve ever seen the movie Seabiscuit, you know that horse never had. All that blood and guts and the lower-body injuries – man, give it a rest! Chill would have been an excellent name for this gamboling, devil-may-care four-footer. His casual gait and wandering mind spelled RELAX in caps and boldface. “Stop and smell the fumes that little filly Heart’s Desire is giving off down the row” – that was Zippy’s motto.
No, Zippy Chippy would not go on to become what sports writers call a “phenom,” an exceptional athlete who defies the odds by surprising everyone with a series of eye-popping victories. The only thing Zippy Chippy and Secretariat had in common was that they ate from food buckets and randomly soiled the straw in their stalls. Yet Zippy would go on to defy everything and everybody, especially those people who handled him. And in the end, what he accomplished was nothing short of phenomenal. Very few thoroughbred horses ever run one hundred races, and none ever accomplished that feat with the zeal and admiration, the aplomb and the arrogance, the style and the dash of the Zipster. (Okay, dash may have been a bad choice of words.) Secretariat may have set the racing world on its ear establishing track records at will, but he never once lunged at his closest competitor and bit him in the ear!
Oh, Zippy Chippy would run, alright, at a time and place and pace of his choosing, but he would never bide a harness willingly or bear a saddle kindly. Leather straps and blindfolds, time trials and claiming races – that was the stuff of trainers and track masters, handicappers and long-shot bettors. He was neither a speedster nor a steeplechaser, not a long-haul closer or a railside racer. He was Zippy Chippy, a free spirit at large and far from the grind of greatness, not sweating but celebrating the small stuff of life. He was at all times a professional racehorse, thriving, indeed rejoicing, in a quirky little world of his own. They broke the mold when they made the Zipster – to which many, particularly people who bet on horses to win, would say quite frankly, “Thank God.”
And what was his reward for showing such rugged individualism and singular focus early on in his career? They cut his nuts off, that’s what they did. No warning, no consent form, no “It’s your last night as a real stud so we left a stable door open for you. Heart’s Desire. Third on the left.” No, it was four swipes of the scalpel, and two prairie oysters hit the stainless steel surgical dish. Oh yeah, this is not a pretty story. But still, I think it’s a pretty good one.
SIMPLIFY! CLARIFY!
WHAT DOES ALL THIS NONSENSE MEAN?
Maidens and stakers, stables and rakers, starting gates and handicap weights. Program hawkers, railside gawkers, betting touts, and workout clockers. I know what you’re thinking – this horse racing stuff is way too complicated. No, not really.
When soccer and the World Cup first came to the United States in 1994, Americans were confused by the strange rules and unusual terminology of this sport that the rest of the world was madly in love with. So the brilliant Tony Kornheiser, then a columnist with the Washington Post, wrote a primer explaining “footie football” to the uninitiated.
Don’t call it a game, it’s a “match.” Don’t call it a field, it’s a “pitch.” … You don’t get a penalty, you get “booked.” … Referees give out a yellow card for a cautionary penalty. If you get two yellow cards in one game, or commit a blatant foul, you get a red card, which means immediate ejection from that game, and the next game as well. If you get a green card, you can work at 7-Eleven. If you get a gold card you can charge all your purchases at 7-Eleven.”
And sports fans embraced it all with gusto – “Okay, got it. Blow the whistle, drop the ball, and pass me a cold tallboy.”
From a weanling to a yearling to a rambunctious young colt, a male foal grows into a stallion. Same with a filly until she is five; then she’s a mare, and sometimes a broodmare, raising her own little hellion.
A horse wearing blinkers can still see the track, while trailing in the field or leading the pack. He prefers the jockey’s hand ride without the whip, but if it’ll help them win, then he’ll respond to the clip.
A handicapped horse is not in any trouble. You can bet him to win or put him in the double.
A horse can lead, stay close, or bring up the rear. He can lose and get claimed or become Horse of the Year. He can struggle to hold the lead as the finish line nears, but the real champions switch to even higher gears.
While a light ride given to a horse is a hack, the equipment of the rider is known as tack. A length is a measuring of eight or nine feet. The leader at the stretch, that’s the horse to beat. Horses in a pack are all in the fight; while the sprinters rush to lead, the champions sit tight. A horse can win by a nose or lose by a head. When they finish in a photo, the results hang by a thread.
A furlong is not too far to run, for a rider and a horse weighing half a ton. A gelding can never be a sire, and a speedster wins leading wire to wire. They run on grass, they run in mud; horses eat hay, cows chew cud.
The speedster is the rabbit the rest of them chase. The closer is a winner coming from far and away. More than just speed, pace makes the race. And somebody – as the song goes – always bets on the bay.
TWO
Money, horse racing, and women – three things
the boys just can’t figure out.
Will Rogers
Not a lot is known about the early days of Zippy Chippy’s career, because apparently nobody wants to take the blame for it. Born with great promise on that spring day at Capritaur Farm in upstate New York, Zippy had impeccable bloodlines, which included La Troienne, the greatest brood mare of the twentieth century.
As a foal Zippy was allowed to romp and roll around with other newborns on the farm, occasionally being hand-walked for a little formal exercise when he was two or three months old. Although he was probably teased and called a “weenie” by the other foals on the farm, he was technically a “weanling” until his first birthday, when he was separated from his dam, Listen Lady. Between the ages of one and two, Zippy’s training gradually got more serious, with circle walks on a lead and wide rotations followed by tight turns, all directed by voice commands and a lunge line to keep him out and away from the trainer. Slowly he got
used to a bit in his mouth and a saddle on his back. Then on gangly legs he was allowed to “hack” or run at his leisure across the fenced-in countryside, getting a sense of his own strength and speed. One day a rider began carefully lying across his back with his belly over the saddle so the horse could feel the weight of a person on him. The rider patiently let Zippy tire himself out from all the physical protesting. The saddling and mounting procedures became easier with each outing as the young colt got used to the routine. Soon the rider started to actually mount him, left foot into the stirrup and right leg over the top.
From “Rider up!” it was only a matter of time before Zippy was galloping with a jockey on board, slowly at first, alone and then with other horses his age. Soon Zippy was ready to assume the title of professional racehorse. Even as a youngster he was a bit of a comedian – always sticking his tongue out at people, smiling for strangers with cameras, and tear-assing off in the opposite direction of his pack of one-year-old pals. Yet with a few rehearsal races under his belt, the son of Compliance and Listen Lady was off to the races to make a name for himself. And that he would do in spades, but not like any other thoroughbred ever had, not like any of his handlers had ever planned.
Charles “Bill” Frysinger, an oil and gas executive from Ohio with a passing interest in racehorses and a not-so-keen eye for investing, became Zippy Chippy’s first owner, by proxy. He met a New York financial track manager who created thoroughbred investment packages for moneyed men like himself. Everything from the purchase of the horse to the training, boarding, and racing schedule was handled by the manager. All Frysinger had to do was provide the cash and watch his investment grow. Except anything to do with racehorses is a huge gamble, and though Bill couldn’t have known it at the time, Zippy Chippy would go on to a great career of disappointing bettors. He was to gamblers what carpal tunnel syndrome is to a little old lady addicted to slot machines.
Much like Zippy Chippy, Belmont Park was the product of blue blood and high breeding. August Belmont II built a European-style racecourse on 650 acres of prime New York real estate at Elmont, the “Gateway of Long Island.” This property already included a stunning and turreted Tudor Gothic mansion, which later became the track’s exclusive Turf and Field Club. On May 4, 1905, forty thousand racing fans made a muddy mess of the narrow dirt road leading up from New York City, and most missed the first race, in which August Belmont’s Blandy held off the 100–1 shot Oliver Cromwell to win the $1,500 Belmont Inaugural, a princely sum of a purse back then.
Five years later, Wilbur and Orville Wright drew 150,000 spectators to their international air show at Belmont Park. The “Back the Attack” war-bond promotion held there in 1943 raised nearly $30 million in a single day.
Belmont Park hosts the third jewel in racing’s Triple Crown, a unique honor bestowed upon a horse who has already won the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs and the Preakness Stakes at Baltimore’s Pimlico Race Course. So rare is a Triple Crown winner, Belmont Park has witnessed this grand finale only twelve times in its 111-year history. This crucial race, the longest of the three at a mile and a half and known as the “Test of Champions,” has crowned some of the finest racehorses that ever entered a starting gate, from Sir Barton in 1919 to Gallant Fox, Omaha, and War Admiral in the 1930s; Whirlaway, Count Fleet, Assault, and Citation in the 1940s; Secretariat in 1973, Seattle Slew in 1977, Affirmed in 1978, and now American Pharoah in 2015. It was here in 2007 that Rags to Riches beat Curlin to become the first filly in 102 years to win the Belmont Stakes. Whereas most of his royal relatives triumphed regularly at historic Belmont Park, one of America’s classiest tracks, Zippy Chippy would put up numbers that showed he had no sense of history.
For his very first professional race, on September 13, 1994, three-year-old Zippy Chippy was naturally nervous. Opening days, first dates, and debuts are perilously unpredictable. At best it’s a crapshoot, at worst a pratfall. Even people paid to analyze such events seldom predict how a “first ever” will actually unfold.
On that warm fall day, the Belmont Park dirt track was fast, and the field of maidens were all anxious to put their very first win up on the board. Jockey Julio Pezua would have had no reason to expect great things from Zippy Chippy, who went off at a long but reasonable odds of 15–1. The rookie racehorse broke from the gate’s sixth pole position only to lag the whole way round and finish eighth in the six-and-a-half-furlong test. With Zippy well out of the money, it was a most forgettable coming-out party. For an athlete of his breeding, there should have been a crowd of fans, or at least a good luck banner. Instead, a few thousand people watched a young horse with a funny name come in eighth in a field of ten horses. Life is seldom fair, for horses and humans alike.
Not one of the horses that finished ahead of him had Zippy’s precious pedigree. Disheartening was the fact that he got beat by D’Moment, a loser by forty-seven lengths in his first four races. Retired after only six races, D’Moment won just one race in his career – this one. And for this first race, Zippy earned nothing. By contrast, Funny Cide, a Kentucky Derby winner who would one day share a retirement home with Zippy, earned $25,800 for his debut win and $93,000 for every outing after that. More awful than auspicious was this debut of Northern Dancer’s grandson.
Back at the same Belmont track ten days later, under an overcast sky and on a muddy oval with Julio Pezua aboard again, there was reason for the owner to be encouraged. Zippy struggled from tenth at the start to fifth down the stretch, and finished third behind Mantequilla and But Anyway. Frysinger pocketed $3,360 from the $28,000 purse for Zippy’s third-place finish. Not bad.
Eight days after that race, on October 1, with a new jockey named Robbie Davis aboard, Zippy took wide turns in a lackluster performance over just more than a mile on dirt, disappointing his bettors by coming in fourth. Thinking grass might be more to his liking, trainer Carl Domino entered Zippy in a one-mile race on turf. On only five days’ rest, Zippy broke from the gate well and held strong to hit the wire third. Jose Santos, a very capable rider who would one day win the Kentucky Derby with Funny Cide, had given Zippy every chance to win the race. Still, with Zippy finishing only three lengths behind the winner, Lord Basil, third place showed some promise. He earned $3,600. Zippy was knocking on the door of success but not showing any real desire to come in and join the party.
Ten days later, with the talented Mike Smith on his back, Zippy Chippy finished twenty-eight lengths behind the winner, Captain Bainbridge, consequently decamping from the classy track of Belmont Park out of gas and out of the money. When a wealthy owner attaches himself to an aristocratic racetrack that’s all about money, he expects his horse to contribute to the equation. Zippy, so far, was having none of it. What seemed odd to his owner and trainer was the fact that despite five straight losses, Zippy was still eager to run, accepting the saddling-up session with gusto. When Belmont Park closed in mid-October, Carl Domino moved Zippy and the rest of his stable of horses from Long Island to the “Big A” in Queens, New York.
Aqueduct Racetrack opened its turnstiles in 1894 under the directors of the Queens County Jockey Club. Horse racing had flourished in North America in the nineteenth century, with the city of Toronto boasting no less than six dirt racetracks, where the grounds were shabby, the rules were fuzzy, and some results were highly suspicious. However it wasn’t unusual at the admission price of twenty-five cents to have eight thousand spectators attend a day of racing in that city. The sport crashed in the late 1800s when widespread corruption kept the crowds away from small tracks. Massive racing enterprises like Belmont and Aqueduct marked a great cleansing of thoroughbred racing on the continent. Though Aqueduct lacks the great architecture and rich history of Belmont Park, spectacular horses like Seattle Slew, Nashua, Excelsior, and Count Fleet have brought it great prestige. It also boasted one of the largest restaurants in New York City. Crowds of over seventy thousand spectators came here to watch thoroughbreds like Cigar win his first two races, the beginning of an amazing
sixteen-race winning streak. In 1973, the incomparable Secretariat was publicly retired here. Pope John Paul II said mass to seventy-five thousand believers at Aqueduct on October 6, 1995, including dozens of heathens who had misunderstood the phrase “From your lips to God’s ear” and showed up hoping for insider tips on long shots.
On October 28, two weeks after he arrived at Aqueduct, Zippy was entered in the second race of the day on a firm track, along with eleven other horses also looking for their first win. With Robbie Davis up, Zippy got off to a good start, keeping pace with the leaders around the first half mile of turf. Then he hit the stretch and, as it turned out, the proverbial wall. He tired and finished ninth, twenty lengths behind the winner, Crosskate, who finally shook off the label of “maiden.”
Nineteen days later and back on dirt, Zippy lagged badly and finished eighth in an eight-horse field, an incredible fifty-four lengths and a neck behind the winner, Viva La Flag. Even worse, he finished fifty-four lengths behind the second horse, which was named Sixfeetunder. That’s when you know you’re in way over your head.
This last disastrous outing marked the end of Zippy Chippy racing at class tracks for five-figure purses. Except for two brief appearances at Aqueduct the following year that resulted in unremarkable seventh- and tenth-place finishes, Zippy was dropped from major-league racing for his failure to crack the winner’s circle. In his last appearance at Aqueduct he did, however, add a little comic relief to the afternoon program. It was eight days into the new year of 1995, with Richard Migliore on the whip, when Zippy created a match race out of a miserable finish. Even though nine of the horses had crossed the finish line, a real nail-biter broke out in front of the grandstand, and you could hear the excitement in the track announcer’s voice: “It’s Zippy Chippy and Witchcraft Star, Witchcraft Star and Zippy Chippy as they come neck and neck to the wire!” Appreciating the slapstick, the fans cheered wildly. In a brutal and personal duel down the last eighth mile of dirt, Zippy clipped Witchcraft by a neck at the finish line … thereby coming in tenth in an eleven-horse race. Although a real crowd-pleaser, it was the kind of performance that had handicappers imagining these two horses eventually pulling tourist carriages in Central Park.
The Legend of Zippy Chippy Page 2
