Zippy Chippy was subsequently demoted to the minor leagues and motored down the New York State Thruway to a small track in Farmington, a half-hour drive south of Rochester. Basic and built in the early sixties, today Finger Lakes Gaming and Racetrack survives on the money it pulls in from off-track betting and the cavernous casino where hundreds of bettors play the slots, oblivious to the horses racing on the track out back. In the 1920s there were no less than 300 thoroughbred racetracks like Finger Lakes operating in North America. Today there are 54 tracks and 1,560 casinos, with 10,000 racehorses competing for gaming dollars against 50,000 slot machines. These days the local fairgrounds can’t sustain a weekend racing card, but the local charity can host “Casino Night” a dozen times a year. As many tracks battle bankruptcy, often there are more horses in the barns than spectators in the seats out front. It’s a diehard demographic that still comes to watch the ponies. Yet the cigar-smoking, beer-before-noon crowd of eccentrics cannot save the sport. The horses are eager, their handlers are willing, but the crowds just don’t come anymore. On most afternoons, as few as fifty people watch the races from grandstands built for five and ten thousand. Today, the Finger Lakes Racetrack in Farmington, New York, is a great place to watch the ponies … if you like to be alone.
Great jockeys like Angel Cordero, Pat Day, and Bill Shoemaker have ridden at Finger Lakes, as has female pioneer Julie Krone. Its greatest moment was Independence Day in 2007, when the track doubled its normal purse to $100,000 for the Wadsworth Memorial Handicap in order to attract Funny Cide, winner of the Kentucky Derby, as well as the Preakness. A record crowd of twelve thousand fans came out to watch this handsome chestnut gelding win while barely breaking a sweat.
Early on, Funny Cide was gelded because he was a ridgling, meaning he suffered from an undescended testicle that made it painful for him to run. Zippy Chippy had no such excuse for his early failings. On November 26, 1994, the track was fast, the weather was cloudy, and each contestant was looking for his first career win. The $6,000 purse offered for race five was a full $24,000 less than Zippy had been used to, reflecting the drop in class of the horses he was now running against.
With the benefit of a new trainer, Ralph D’Alessandro, as well as a new jockey and a bunch of slower horses to run against, Zippy’s Farmington debut was not nearly as disastrous as his coming-out party at Belmont Park had been. Kevin Whitley gave Zippy a good ride and kept him comfortably in third spot halfway around the oval. But Zippy “flattened out,” according to the race footnotes, finishing fourth and thereby collecting just $300 for his effort.
On thirteen days’ rest, Zippy did a little better in his next start at Finger Lakes. D’Alessandro had even talked Finger Lakes legend Leslie Hulet into riding his gelding. The winningest jockey ever at the Farmington oval, Hulet earned almost $18 million in purse money for the owners of his mounts. After stumbling from the number one position to seventh, Hulet did manage to bring Zippy up to the number two spot for most of the race and a solid third at the wire. Zippy finished just three lengths behind the winner, Byby Fran’s Kitchen, and he earned $570.
Four days later Zippy took a lackadaisical five-and-a-half-furlong lap around the dirt track, bringing home $183 for coming in fifth, with David Gordon in the saddle. “Late again,” read the footnote on the results chart. Astarforevermore he was not; that horse came in third. He finished just two lengths behind winner Enchanted Mind, and Zippy was definitely in the hunt as the crowd of horses rushed to the wire. From last to fifth in the race for home, Zippy had, at the very least, shown some late speed and tenacity.
On the move again, as the Zipster’s purses were going south, he was headed east to Beantown.
A STUD WHO TOOK
HIS JOB SERIOUSLY
Much like his grandson Zippy Chippy, the great Northern Dancer could be an ornery critter. During his career, the horse’s home was Barn 7A at Woodbine Racetrack on the northwest outskirts of Toronto. Nobody dared get into Northern Dancer’s space except for his handlers and his flamboyant Argentine-born trainer, Horatio Luro. From the horse’s steady stream of fan mail came a letter from a blind boy in Brantford, Ontario, who hoped one day to meet The Dancer. Weeks later a limousine pulled up to the barn, and out stepped Mrs. E.P. Taylor, the queen of Toronto’s socialite scene, with the little guy in tow. It’s safe to say that “Winnie,” who often entertained royalty at Windfields Estate in Toronto and their gated mansion in Lyford Cay in the Bahamas, had never been in Northern Dancer’s stall.
Meanwhile, back at the barn, the horse was in such a foul mood that Luro couldn’t get a halter on him. When he did finally manage to get him strapped, Northern Dancer turned on the trainer, who desperately scrambled out of the stall, under the webbing, with hooves flailing and teeth gnashing at his heels.
With peppermints in her purse, Winnie arrived on the shed row calling out, “Where’s my baby?” Northern Dancer went still. As she gently talked to her horse at the stall and guided the boy’s hands to the horse’s forelock, Northern Dancer obliged like a pet puppy. Witnesses to the event said the transformation from aggressive colt to lap dog was nothing short of incredible.
E.P. Taylor’s prized stakes winner began breeding at Windfields’ Oshawa farm before being shipped out to the Maryland farm, and Northern Dancer took to “studding” eagerly and often.
If a trailer pulled up to the barn filled with hay or equipment, Northern Dancer never batted an eye. But if a trailer pulled up transporting a mare, the horse would try to kick his way out of the stall to get at her. Eventually his handlers moved him to a stall in the back where there was less distraction.
In the midst of his busy breeding schedule at the Oshawa farm, The Dancer was brought by E.P. Taylor to Woodbine for a final farewell, a much anticipated victory lap for his legion of devoted fans. As he arrived at the track he got confused and assumed he was being led to the breeding shed, also known as the “love shack.” Well, afternoon delight!
That’s when Northern Dancer, as they say at the track, “dropped his manhood.” The dapper Horatio Luro, trainer to the wealthy and friend to Hollywood stars, almost died of embarrassment. For his last public and oh-so-memorable appearance on a fall afternoon in 1969 at Woodbine Racetrack, Northern Dancer greeted his many fans with a full erection. Thank God in those days there was no such thing as “selfies”! Lewd, but given his current profession, quite fitting. Like a baseball slugger saying goodbye to the crowd with a grand slam. There were many reasons why Zippy Chippy was gelded, and now we can add this one to the list.
THREE
Horse sense is the thing a horse has which
keeps it from betting on people.
W.C. Fields
Since 1935, Suffolk Downs in East Boston, Massachusetts, has always been a blue-collar track, where a charity event called the Hot Dog Safari drew more spectators than the races. Owned for a time by the wonderfully entertaining Bill Veeck (as in wreck), a P.T. Barnum wannabe, the venue once held twenty-four thousand Beatles fans attending a late-summer concert in 1966, the largest crowd ever to fill the stands. Cigar and Whirlaway have both won on this one-mile dirt oval, and in 1937, a capacity crowd of forty thousand watched Seabiscuit and the legendary John “Red” Pollard smash yet another record to win $70,530 and the Massachusetts Handicap. A Canadian hard-luck kid, Pollard, who rode Seabiscuit to eighteen major victories, was blind in one eye and didn’t tell anyone until he retired.
On a cold and rainy winter’s day, January 23, 1995, the four-year-old Zippy Chippy made his thirteenth professional appearance, with a new jockey in Jorge Vargas and a new trainer in Sherryl Meade, the latter having been brought in to break the horse’s habit of losing. Still owned by Bill Frysinger, Zippy appeared to be up to his old tricks, none of which involved outdistancing other racehorses. Because he was no longer running with the elite, Zippy should have found the high ground against horses like Upbeat Music, Campo’s Legend, and Atlanta Gold, the usual suspects who lurked at the back of the pack.
> An optimist might characterize Zippy’s first race at Suffolk as encouraging. Starting from the number one pole position, Zippy dropped back to the rear of the race and floundered in ninth spot until the homestretch, where without warning he decided to crank it up and outdistance half the field. It was a valiant effort in a losing cause. From a healthy purse of $11,000, he came away with $330 for coming in fifth on a muddy six-furlong track. Far from encouraging was the fact that Zippy finished a glaring twenty-six-and-a-quarter lengths behind the winner, Frank’s Return. To put that in perspective, the lineups for tickets by the crowd of 22,169 fans who came to watch Cigar win his fifteenth race in a row at Suffolk Downs in 1996 were not quite as long as twenty-six-and-a-quarter lengths.
As for the horses Zippy managed to beat? Well … He’s Been Lucky wasn’t. I’mjumpinjackflash didn’t. And Brave and Crafty looked kind of timid and dull. Roberto’s Shadow frightened himself back into ninth place. But still, Zippy had dispatched half the pack of ten and earned a little prancing-around money. Things could have been worse.
And pretty soon they were, because on February 15, Zippy finished dead last in a field of a dozen four- and five-year-old thoroughbreds. Frysinger and Meade must have thought their horse’s performance to this point was Beyond All Reason, the horse that finished seven places ahead of him.
Seven days later, as he raced through rain and over mud, Zippy dashed any hope of sustaining a pattern of improvement. From the ninth and worst pole position, Zippy took off out of the gate like a rocket and led the field well into the first turn. After a stiff challenge from Military Band and Field Game, Zippy flatlined his way to the finish line.
Undeterred, surprisingly enough, Zippy came charging out of the gate a month later, on March 10, a clear and dry day at Suffolk Downs, only to finish eighth and last. “Outrun” was an understatement in describing the horse that broke bad to finish eighteen lengths behind the victorious Irrawaddy. Eight out of eight by eighteen lengths – there was some weird mathematical retrogression going on here.
“When you fall off a horse that goes that slow,” yelled one disgruntled fan, summing up Zippy’s performance and taunting jockey Jorge Vargas at the same time, “at least you can’t get hurt!”
On April 12, Zippy broke his habit of coming in last by finishing fourth in a field of six maidens, again with Jorge Vargas aboard. The Lion Wins won. Randy First came in third. The effort by Shininlikediamonds (where in the hell do they get these names?) was tarnished with a second-place finish. Zippy collected $550 for his improved outing.
In his last Boston contest, on April 28, 1995, Zippy used a late rally from sixth position at the halfway mark to finish in third place. While the winner, Military Band, was described as going “all out,” Zippy was all done at Suffolk Downs and going home. Jorge Vargas had proved to be his loyal rider or, as some would say, a masochist. In a half-dozen races against horses that had also never actually won a race, Zippy had finished an astonishing combined total of ninety-two lengths behind the winners, shying away from the finish line like he was afraid he might trip over it.
Looking way back to when the redcoats gathered on Boston Common, it’s safe to say that if Paul Revere had mounted Zippy Chippy instead of Brown Beauty for his midnight ride to warn of the impending British attack, Americans today would be drinking warm beer with their bangers and mash and Hank Aaron would hold the record for 715 career broken wickets.
Zippy Chippy distinguished himself at Suffolk Downs with routine efforts clocked at humdrum speeds, but nobody told the horse he was in a rut. No guidance counselor came to his pen to discuss alternative career choices. Zippy approached each race with a professional air and a keenness to compete. No slouching, no sadness in the eyes – Let’s get it started. Zippy’s people were now completely flummoxed. Whereas most horses would get depressed or stressed after eighteen career losses, Zippy remained sound and sane. Most losing horses would report to work listless and exhibiting the body language of defeat. Not Zippy. On race day he came to the paddock stoked and returned to his stable triumphant. It was only during the actual race that he looked less like a real winner.
So after starting eighteen times on well-regarded tracks like Belmont, Aqueduct, and Suffolk Downs, Zippy Chippy had six third-place finishes and three second-place finishes to show for his best efforts. That’s no wins and a few close calls, but still to come, as luck would have it, was a double-wide horse van full of second chances. Zippy, though nobody could understand why, lived for his next big race.
Worrisome was the fact that in that last outing, an exasperated Frysinger had entered Zippy Chippy in a claiming race, which meant anybody with a track license and a fat wallet could take ownership of him. In each case there were no takers at $5,000, the claiming price hanging over Zippy’s head. But the message was clear from the owner of the horse the media had dubbed “the Zipless Wonder” – I’ve had it, he’s yours, show me some money.
The greatest danger in claiming a racehorse is that any damn fool can do it. Take my nephew David, for example. Having spent a good part of his college days at the races, he and two fellow ne’er-do-wells decided to make a move up the track ladder from losing bettors to thoroughbred owners. So one day they walked into the administration office at the Fort Erie Race Track, just across the Canadian border from Buffalo, New York, and told the clerk that they wanted to claim a horse.
“She looked at us like we were high on crack,” David later recalled. Undaunted, they talked to a track guy who knew another guy who had a license, and $2,000 later they were the proud owners of a professional racehorse.
“Yeah, we named him Threeguysonthesauce.” (You see now why the crack was unnecessary?) So there they were, three college kids strutting around the paddock like a trio of Kentucky straw-hat dandies and coming this close to speaking with a southern drawl. “A syndicate of investors” was what they preferred to call themselves.
All went well, and the girls were impressed – until the first vet bill came in at $1,000, along with a monthly $500 tab for room and board. A sobering experience, that. Soon thereafter, the ungifted horse became a “regift” and went off to be a jumper at a show farm. The boys gave up sipping Kentucky bourbon and went back to being two-dollar, beer-swilling hunch bettors.
In the longest shot on the board of life, my nephew went on to become a responsible and successful human being. Today he lives in Atlanta, creates training programs for a living, and oversees a staff of eight people, who I hope never read this book.
SERIOUSLY, WHO NAMES A HORSE
TAKIN’ UP SPACE?
When it comes to naming a racehorse, why do so many owners employ a really warped sense of humor? Forget for a moment the obscene names that never got by the censors, like Arfur Foulkesaycke, Oil Beef Hooked, Pee Nesenvy, and Wear the Fox Hat. Think about an honest horse somebody named Sham, a healthy horse called Ivegotabadliver, or a perfectly innocent colt registered as Ohnoitsmymotherinlaw. I understand Deweycheatumnhowe to be a crooked salute to the legal community, but Odor in the Court? And Toss the Rider doesn’t exactly get your horse and his jockey off to a rollicking start.
British soccer star Wayne Rooney once tried to name his two thoroughbreds Hoof Hearted and Norfolk Enchants. Profane but clever. And remember, the track announcer has to yell these names out loud over the public address system. Another Horse did sneak past the naming officials, so that whenever he was in the lead, the track announcer had to say, “Another Horse has taken the lead.” Confusing? You want confusing? Try Olivia Loves Jesus for the name of a racehorse!
Another British owner had the name Big Tits rejected by the English racing authorities, so he had it registered in France, where it doesn’t translate. Similarly, in her last career victory at Aqueduct, Bodacious Tatas beat A Wink and a Nod by almost three lengths. Dick Face, Harry Azzol, and Ivanna Humpalot never stood a chance of censorship approval, although Passing Wind made it through. They look fine on paper, but try saying them out loud. Sofa Can Fast
actually won approval by the censors. I can imagine the track announcer calling in sick when he saw that horse on the next day’s program.
Worse than these names are the ones that stigmatize the horses as real losers even before they’ve run a race. Zippy Chippy ran against horses named Sixfeetunder, Dearly Dunce, Takin’ Up Space, and Imgonnabiteyourass. At Finger Lakes he shared the backside with Stinky Dinky. Thank goodness he never appeared in a program with Bag o’ Bones, Born Loser, Three Legs and a Prayer, Horse-Apples, Whipping Post, or (okay, this one has a certain cachet) Nag Nag Nag. As does Fiftyshadesofhay. I can’t imagine what name his owners would have given Zippy Chippy after they’d seen him run a few times. Maybe a real long one like We’rewaitingonzippychippytofinishinordertodeclarethisraceofficiallyover.
Weird names make for strange coincidences. In two years, 1919 and 1920, the magnificent Man o’ War won an unimaginable twenty of his twenty-one high-stakes races. The only horse ever to beat the champion of champions was a horse named … Upset.
The Legend of Zippy Chippy Page 3
