Finishing faster than ever before, Zippy was short of a win by a neck! A neck! Fully extended, that’s about a quarter of a length! Two feet, for godsake. First a nose and now a neck! Good lord. Zippy was running out of body parts used to measure his near wins, and if he kept this up he might become the first racehorse in history to lose a race by a groin. Felix dined out on those two Herculean efforts by the pet favorite of his stable. “Backa tabacka!” he would say to the press and horse people alike in his soft Ricky Ricardo accent. “My horse, he comes second twice in a row!”
After those two oh-so-close calls, Zippy suffered long stretches of really bad losses, agonizing slumps of six, nine, and seventeen races in a row. These dismal performances caused great grief for the trainer. Once buoyed by two excellent efforts, Felix now grew more disillusioned with each new outing. But – and with the horse with the oversized ass, there was always a butt – Zippy still thought of himself as the prize in the Cracker Jack box. Before each race his head bobbed sharply and resolutely. Put me in, Felix, I’m ready to run. After each race his head nodded in confidence and his tail arched high in triumph. In his mind he had won.
Felix tried every trick in the manual to make Zippy Chippy a winner. Although not the most successful trainer at Finger Lakes, Felix was not used to having a horse that lost continually. After all, he had trained Carrie’s Turn to eight first-place finishes, earning her owner about $100,000 in purse money. As he watched the horse that beat Zippy have his picture taken in the winner’s circle, Felix, mashing yet another metaphor, said to his daughter Marisa more than once: “The victor gets spoiled.”
So, in order to change things up, Felix tried different jockeys, shorter races, longer workouts, more days off. When that didn’t work, exercise riders were switched, saddles were changed, and routines were altered. He mixed up Zippy’s feed bucket – always oats, sometimes with corn, then sweet feed one week and bran the next. Firing off ideas in all directions, Felix was in a bit of a fog, strategy-wise. The tactics sounded like they came from Lewis Grizzard’s book Shoot Low, Boys – They’re Ridin’ Shetland Ponies.
About thirty months and almost fifty losses later, in the early spring of 1998, without warning or any noticeable improvement in training or tactics, Zippy decided to put a little streak together. On April 14, on a fast track under cloudy skies at Finger Lakes, Zippy Chippy was a slow fifth out of the gate for the short five-furlong test, but quickly closed to third and then second at the far pole. This time it was a horse named Sir Hillard Lewis that caught Zippy’s fancy.
With his sights on the leader, Zippy was now challenging instead of sniffing a bunch of bums down the backstretch. The horses moved head to head down the dirt track in front of the grandstand. Zippy’s jockey, Benny Afanador, was wearing the green and white silks of trainer Felix Monserrate, as well as a very surprised look on his face. As he moved into the homestretch, Zippy boldly dueled with Sir Hillard Lewis, who looked like he might be tiring. Alas, nearing the end of the short trip, Zippy’s opponent proved to have more in the tank than him, finishing first by a length and a half.
On just six days’ rest, Zippy had finished a respectable second, earning a whopping (for him) $1,020 in purse money. Comments listed on the results page regarding Zippy’s almost-excellent performance included “held his place” and “broke in air,” which caused some people familiar with the horse’s off-track antics to assume that Zippy had somehow gotten into some bad curry the night before.
Eleven days later, on the same track at the same distance, Afanador took an awkward turn in the saddle when Zippy broke badly from the gate’s number one position. Athousandthunders was out first and Zippy was last as the herd left the gate and pounded down the back stretch in a flurry of drifting dust.
Steadily gaining ground on the rest, Afanador moved Zippy up nicely into the third spot at the far pole. He held that spot all the way down into the homestretch, where he made a valiant move to nail Rings of a Angle at the wire. A tad late, but still gaining ground on Rings, Zippy finished second by a single length, again earning $1,020 for his second-place finish. Totaling $2,040 for his last two races, Zippy was unaccustomed to such extravagance.
The owner of the winner, Edward Perdue, had a champ as well as a problem with grammar on his hands – not Wings of an Angel or even Rings of an Angel, but Rings of a Angle? This might be the only horse ever to win a race with both a jockey and a typo on his back – except, of course, for American Pharoah, whose misspelled name was talked about so much that the horse started wearing ear plugs. (Honest – he wore ear plugs!).
Nonetheless, Zippy was on a roll. Missing by a length and a half and then just a length showed great improvement on his performance chart. Two close calls usually meant a horse was about to strike gold the next time out and – in horse racing parlance – finally “break his cherry.” Handicappers would expect him to impress even more moving forward.
“Yeah, he run real constant here,” said Felix. Constant? For Zippy Chippy, two second-place finishes in a row was like capturing the Derby and the Preakness.
“For a while there he run pretty good,” said a beaming Felix, a man who could see the positive side of the earth taking a direct hit from another, bigger planet. It only took the odd “backa tabacka” to put the spring back in this trainer’s step.
By not winning in those hair-raising efforts, Zippy missed out on his very own “Donut Day.” In this quaint backside tradition, whenever a horse wins a race, the next morning that jockey’s agent or the jockey himself must show up with a box of donuts and muffins, enough for the half-dozen people working in that particular barn. Zippy had a habit of ruining Donut Day by turning it into the Breakfast Club for One. Never mind that he snagged Emily’s muffin or Felix’s black walnut square – if he got close enough to the guy carrying the box, well, I suppose cardboard could taste good if it had enough Krispy Kreme stuck to it.
“It was his favorite day of the week,” remembered Marisa. “I mean, we’d give him one anyway, but that was like a teaser.” While most racehorses turn up their noses at human treats the way a cat will ignore bread, Zippy was a snackaholic. With the exception of sugar cubes and raw carrots, most horses stick to whatever’s in the feed bag. Zippy, on the other hand, loved everything that was sticky: cupcakes, ice cream, candy canes, chips, popcorn, chocolate bars, pizza, and peanuts, shells and all.
“Pop-Tarts, brown sugar and cinnamon flavor, that was his favorite,” recalled Marisa. She was a sweet kid who adored her dad but still had great difficulty with the fact that although she could not have hard candy, her dad always had a pocketful of peppermints for Zippy. Pop-Tarts may have been his favorite when Marisa was around, but a bag of Doritos and a cold bottle of beer was the number one snack combo Zippy shared with Felix.
Had Zippy Chippy fully understood the reason behind Donut Day, I’m convinced he would have won a race or two. Three, if Felix had hung a dozen chocolate-frosted along the finish line.
Zippy had accomplished the rare and somewhat twisted feat of seventy-six losses in a row, and his popularity was wreaking havoc on the tote board. It was now obvious to Finger Lakes officials that the horse was attracting a large following of fans. And boy, were they betting on him! If Zippy had gone off at realistic odds of 35–1, he would have returned about forty dollars to the two-dollar, second-place bettor. Instead, in his last race he had paid only $4.90 to place. The track stewards were grateful that Zippy Chippy was filling up empty seats, but they were puzzled as to why anybody would bet on him.
Compared to the nearly $5,000 he’d made in his two second-place streaks, Zippy usually settled for the chump change of fourth- or fifth-place finishes. Returning to his stable, however, he always did a little Irish jig to let his stall pals know he’d been successful. He was washed, cooled down, fed, blanketed, and asleep within the hour. To his credit, losing was something this horse seldom took to heart. Zippy lost races but never any sleep over it.
Those two consecutive second-pl
ace finishes proved to be Zippy’s most successful stretch of racing so far as a thoroughbred. The horse brought joy to his owner sparingly, and Felix cherished those special moments of relative success.
“Not everybody can be a winner,” Felix would say to reporters, who were now taking an unusual interest in a horse headed for his seventy-seventh outing. When a sportswriter asked the owner if his horse, who was often described in the race footnotes as “no threat,” was showing signs of melancholia, Felix was quick to put him straight: “No, he wanna run, he’s always ready to go.” Then, rubbing Zippy’s nose and slipping him a candy, he added, “But he don’t always go too good.” Although Felix’s message was usually upbeat, he was wearing his “Zippy Chippy” peaked cap a little lower over his eyes than normal these days.
They bumped along like that – the cocky, underachieving racehorse and his cockeyed, optimistic trainer. In their division of duties, Zippy let Felix do the worrying. Unfazed by his track performance and up to his usual shenanigans, Zippy, it seemed, loved to – no, lived to – torment Felix. Never having cuddled up together in the winner’s circle, Felix and Zippy weren’t even that comfortable with each other in the barn. “Once, I take my eye off him, and just like that … he got me!” said the trainer.
They were standing in front of the horse’s stall when Felix turned to pick up a bucket, and Zippy turned to pick up Felix. The trainer found himself suspended in midair, yelling for help and flailing his arms around behind him, trying to get Zippy to release him. Zippy had picked him up by the collar and was holding him a foot off the ground. Felix’s angry shouts at the horse to put him down were answered by the loud laughs of a few track people watching the two of them perform this shed-row slapstick act. The louder Felix screamed, the more raucous the laughter of the bystanders, many of them workers now coming over from other barns.
Eventually Zippy got tired of the gag and put his owner down. “He’s a strong horse,” Felix said, now that his feet were back on terra firma. “He can hold you up for a long time.” Forget Man o’ War and Bold Ruler; Zippy Chippy’s most influential ancestors may have been Laurel and Hardy!
Strangely, despite the growing winless streak, the teacher and his petulant student had settled into a strongly bonded team over the last couple of years. Zippy would defy his jockey or misbehave on the backside, and Felix would make excuses for him. The trainer would make predictions of great success, and the horse would dash them by ten lengths. The owner would often punish his prankster by locking him in his stall and closing the shutters, but then he would check in on him frequently to make sure he was okay. As discouraged as the man might become, Felix was still reluctant to enter Zippy in “claiming” races, where his chances of winning would be much better against less talented horses, but for the price of a few thousand dollars, anybody could take possession of him after the race was over.
“I don’t want some crazy person owning Zippy Chippy,” said Felix. The rolled eyes of his fellow trainers indicated that might already be the case.
Given Zippy’s fiery temper and irritable disposition, nobody within nipping distance was safe from the poopy-brown horse when he was in a bad mood. When his ears went straight back and his lips suddenly parted to reveal his long, yellowed teeth, you had just been warned! Zippy Chippy bit more handlers than anyone can remember and drove off every potential buyer who dared to come size him up in the barn. Any new owner coming to examine Zippy in his stall with the intent to buy him would have been wise to wear a helmet and hockey gear.
Emily “Pull No Punches” Schoeneman is friend and family to the Zipster, but not always a fan.
“I tell you, Zippy Chippy is a miserable thing who’s crabby all the time, wants everything done for him when he wants it, makes faces, bites, kicks, and …” – and here’s where the sugar-coating ended – “is not very intelligent.” (On a personal note, as a man who was married once, and was occasionally accused of insensitivity, my question to Emily: “And your point is …?”)
“Oh yeah, he can be mean,” said Felix, in a painful understatement. “Once, he pin me in the corner of the stall for almost an hour.” Felix demonstrated how he had crouched and faked left while the horse blocked right. “I go this way, he go too. I go that way, he’s already there.”
Every head fake Felix made was met by a bigger head. Felix went down on all fours and the horse reared up on his hind legs.
“And he get his foot up in the air like this, like he’s gonna kick you too!”
Finally, while still backed into the corner, Felix stopped trying to outmaneuver the monster, and Zippy dropped his striking hoof. A groom with a handful of alfalfa distracted the horse long enough for the trainer to escape the stall. Zippy Chippy’s ample appetite always trumped his anger.
“He won’t let nobody near him but me. Except my daughter Marisa,” said Felix, his voice cracking a little.
IN THE DEPTHS OF DESPAIR,
NEVER, EVER GIVE UP!
Having been saddled up for five times as many races as the average thoroughbred, Zippy would circle the paddock before every outing, suspicious of the other horses and contemptuously eyeing his competition. He must have felt like Colonel Lewis B. Puller, surrounded and outnumbered by Chinese troops during the Korean War. With no air support and all reinforcements snowed in twenty miles away, “Chesty” Puller’s two marine regiments were trapped in the Chosin Reservoir by sixty thousand Chinese troops. At twenty-five below zero, the food was frozen, the equipment was frozen, and his men were frozen. Each man was ordered to keep a bag of plasma in his underwear to keep it from freezing, until he was shot and needed it.
“There are Chinese on our right flank and Chinese on our left flank,” said one of the most decorated members of the U.S. Marine Corp after a reporter covering this doomed venture into hell asked him to assess the situation. “There are Chinese in front of us for as far as you can see and there are hundreds of Chinese troops coming up behind us.”
“And your prediction, sir?”
That’s when the general hesitated, a bit like Zippy Chippy before he made his final decision to leave the starting gate. Said Chesty, with all the resolve of a military man worthy of his stripes and vaunted title, “Those bastards won’t get away from us this time.”
Zippy Chippy subscribed to this maxim of survival. In every race he ran and lost, until the word Official came up on the betting board results, Zippy had those sweaty buggers well within his sights and exactly where he wanted them.
SIX
Our bravest and best lessons are not learned
through success, but through misadventure.
Amos Bronson Alcott
At some point, when Zippy had almost eighty losses under his girth belt, Felix admitted that maybe his horse wasn’t as fit as his rivals. A unique labor shortage was likely to blame, because after he bucked off nearly every exercise rider at the track, none of them would go near him. Taking Zippy Chippy – an athlete who preferred not to practice – out for a workout could be a career-ending experience for an exercise boy, or, at the very least, a big pain in the ass that required frequent attention with ice packs. So Felix had Marisa introduce Zippy to the exercise barn … and the exercise barn made a lousy first impression.
Also known as a Eurociser, the exercise track is an open-air barn partitioned into separate sections with heavy-duty rubber breakers. It allows several horses to jog at the same speed and at the same time, as the overhead apparatus moves in a circle like a midway ride. The function of the machine is to lead the horses around automatically at a pre-set pace, thereby freeing up the track hands to leave and do other chores.
On Zippy’s first visit to the barn, he challenged the basic design and purpose of the Eurociser. Ignoring her father’s rule that Zippy be alone in the jogging circuit, Marisa thought she’d save time by putting another one of their horses, Cowboy, in the section in front of Zippy. Once she got the machine going and the horses jogging, she went back to the barn. The system worked for
five, maybe ten, minutes before she heard a great commotion and the kind of noises generally attributed to stallions in a death fight over a filly. For whatever reason, Cowboy had stopped abruptly, and the partition between him and Zippy had hit him hard in the buttocks.
“Hint, hint! Move forward! But Cowboy was one dumbass,” remembered Marisa.
When the bumper swung back and slammed into him a second time, Cowboy froze in place, and the thick rubber barrier went up and over top of him. Suddenly Zippy and Cowboy were in the same section and moving forward at a good clip. Zippy couldn’t believe his luck – he had found a playmate in the boring old exercise barn.
Marisa watched in horror as the two delinquents ran wild, wreaking havoc on the circulating system, getting their reins crossed, and butt-bumping each other at every turn. A couple of track hands ran to the rescue and shut the power off, and tried to get hold of the calmer of the two culprits first.
“Every time those guys got close to corralling Cowboy, Zippy would interfere and they had to start all over again. Zippy was having way too much fun,” recalled Marisa.
It took twenty minutes to get control of Cowboy and another ten to harness Zippy, and when everybody left the barn it was in shambles – the power line sheared off and two bumpers smashed up.
“You could hook a hundred, a thousand, horses up to the jogging machine and this would never happen,” Marisa said. Typical Zippy Chippy – whenever trouble was not following him around, he’d go looking for it.
The Legend of Zippy Chippy Page 5
