The Legend of Zippy Chippy

by William Thomas

  The next time Zippy visited the exercise barn, Felix took him there himself, along with a groom and a walker. Circling the covered track in a stately fashion, Zippy appeared to enjoy it at first. Showing off for his audience of three, Zippy pranced around like he was one of those painted horseys on an antique merry-go-round. That’s when Felix and the handlers felt confident enough to return to the barn.

  It didn’t take long for Zippy to become bored with the routine – or, worse, feel he was being ignored. So he kicked out the top board of the track’s outer fence and crushed the electric box that operated the automatic apparatus. With a vengeance, Zippy proceeded to smash the jogging machine to pieces until he was unceremoniously escorted from the premises. Not willing to risk a third demolition derby, the barn manager banned Zippy from the exercise station. Mission accomplished: he would never have to train there again.

  Handlers who couldn’t get Zippy his food on time simply refused to bring it. They knew too well the penalty for a late delivery. Zippy had adjusted the Domino’s Pizza delivery promise to suit his temperament: dinner arrives within twenty minutes or you get free first aid.

  “He can be mean with people and other horses,” admitted his trainer, “but he’s a horse with lots of personality.” Yeah, that’s what prison inmates say about that special brand of criminal on death row – lots and lots of personality.

  Felix’s partner Emily heartily disagreed: “He’s not really mean at all. He doesn’t realize he’s hurting you. Like that time he bit Felix in the back, he just stood there like, What’s up?” Just goofing around is all.

  Zippy’s idea of fun was different from that of other horses but not unlike the eye-poking, hair-pulling, nose-twisting slapstick of the Three Stooges. If owners named horses based on performance and personality, “the Fourth Stooge” would have fit this one to a T.

  After a few more consecutive last-place finishes in the late spring of 1998, Felix rested Zippy for a few months – time off for bad behavior. Mostly he would hang out in the paddock with Felix’s other horses between an early breakfast and suppertime. Soon Zippy’s mood improved remarkably. He didn’t bite anybody for almost two weeks. He was happy being hot-walked around the barn, and he ate a lot fewer hats than normal. It was obvious this horse was quite content to enjoy the home life of a racehorse, without actually racing. It was becoming clear that Zippy Chippy saw the barn as more of a frat house than a place to rest and recover between races. He enjoyed the company of other horses, just not competitively.

  Yet Zippy would get visibly excited by all the sounds that precede the trumpeter’s call to post. “He hear the horn that start the race and … he look around … he stretch his neck way up to listen, like this,” said his trainer. For a 130-pound Puerto Rican, Felix Monserrate does an excellent impersonation of an 1,100-pound horse.

  “His head go side to side to listen for the bell, and his feet start to go … oh yeah, he want to run,” concluded Felix, although it was never entirely clear in which direction Zippy would go once he escaped from the starter’s gate.

  So Felix put the racing saddle back on his friend, and the horse responded with more performances that ranged from mediocre to terrible. At this point, the tension between horse and handler was becoming heated. Whatever new idea Felix came up with, Zippy ignored. Whatever strategy the jockey tried, the horse did the opposite. Felix and Zippy were butting heads again, and their bouts were akin to playground prattle.

  “Go!”

  “No!”

  “Will too!”

  “Will not!”

  “Screw you!”

  Felix was putting on a brave face for the growing press corps that was constantly characterizing Zippy Chippy as – and the conspiratorial, left-leaning bias of the American media was never more evident than in their coverage of this proud horse – a loser.

  “You see, one day he will be a winner,” said the horse’s trainer and self-appointed public defender. Desperate for a win and seeking the company of slower horses, Felix began entering Zippy Chippy in the occasional claiming race. But as everybody knew, especially the loyal band of locals who gathered to cheer the Zipster’s every outing, the possibility of somebody matching the claiming price was real. A fat check from a licensed trainer would force Felix to forfeit the horse. The owner had never taken that risk before; now their relationship, such as it was, could end with the very next race.

  “Zippy’s like one of the family. I didn’t want to lose him, but …” Felix’s brave face was fading fast. When the tallest member of the Monserrate family posted losses approaching eighty in a row, Felix began to lose confidence in his now six-year-old boy.

  “We sent him away to a farm to see how he like retirement,” he recalled, with a mix of shame and sadness in his voice. Put to pasture at a nearby boarding farm, Zippy was more than put out. He wouldn’t eat. He wouldn’t even graze. Zippy Chippy not eating was like Lance Armstrong not doping. At that point, you just know they’re losing the will to compete.

  “He was always pacing in his stall. He was miserable. So we bring him home. And he was so happy …,” said Felix, smiling, almost tearing up.

  On Saturday, May 2, 1998, the backside at Finger Lakes was still buzzing about Real Quiet winning the Kentucky Derby and earning $738,800 for two minutes and two seconds of work. Later in the month, on May 23, Zippy Chippy would run in race two at Finger Lakes for a purse of $5,100. When it came to prize money, Farmington, New York was about three planets northeast of Louisville, Kentucky.

  On this clear day, on a fast track, although Thornden Park and Prince de Naskra finished ahead of Zippy, Dune Drive was eating his dust. With Benny Afanador on his back and a $7,500 claiming price hanging over his head, a rejuvenated Zippy came in third and earned $510 for his stable.

  A week later, on May 30, he could only manage to finish fourth, overtaking tired rivals in the stretch. Dr. No took most of the $8,500 purse, and Zippy was stuck with loss number eighty-one. Not that Zippy’s frequent failure to win a race carried criminal consequences, but in this test, Khale Police was just a few lengths off his tail.

  Two weeks later, on an overcast afternoon in mid-June at Finger Lakes, Zippy crashed and burned after he and Benny Afanador got squeezed at the start and looked awkward for the remainder of the race. This too was a claiming race, but thankfully the price was a steep $15,000.

  Zippy’s pattern of finishes continued to go up and down like the proverbial toilet seat. One day he was nudging the butt of Toes Goes, the next he was speeding past Nixs Trick like that horse was tied to the fence post. It was there for all to see: Zippy was out of sorts and off his game, and Felix was becoming despondent.

  In this loss, number eighty-two, Zippy came seventh in a race of eight maidens, finishing sixteen and three-quarters lengths behind Hilary’s Kid – certainly not the longest distance he had ever put between himself and a winner, but it was a five-furlong race, which is as short as they get. On a clear and fast track, Zippy had barely managed to beat Leonard Elmer, a badly named horse who got bumped at the start and was left sputtering at the rail like an overheated car abandoned on the shoulder of the road. The men in straw hats with stopwatches were shaking their heads at Zippy’s finishing time.

  But Felix never paid attention to the math or the tick of a track man’s watch. When he led Zippy Chippy around the paddock before a race, Felix was showing the fans not a horse but the other half of a longtime, rough, but hard-earned friendship that would someday defy the skeptics and make him proud. The fans who passed clippings of Zippy over the fence for Felix to autograph sensed some sort of history in the making.

  Felix was not delusional. He did not dream of a three-race set of victories like the Triple Crown or the Breeders’ Cup; he wanted just one lonely little win on any track, anywhere, with lots of witnesses present. “Once, just once,” he would say to Marisa, “I want to lead Zippy to la tierra prometida.” At Puerto Rico’s racetracks, a victory circle is called “the promised land.” That’
s all the poor man asked.

  Word about the horse’s adversity to winning was spreading around the world, and the columnists writing about Zippy could be cruel. He could live with the headline THE LEGEND OF INEPTITUDE; it was the line “ugly, stupid, and nasty with an international fan club” that was hard to take. Felix needed a victory to end the mockery of the media and reward Zippy’s followers for their loyalty.

  With no prospect of a win and running out of jockeys, Felix’s record with Zippy was six second-place finishes, ten thirds, and earnings to date of $27,803, barely enough to cover his keep. While food and board bills pile up quickly, vet bills can blow the budget wide open. For the first time ever, Felix was seeing the glass as half empty – or, worse, cracked and leaking cash he did not have. Did he think of getting rid of Zippy?

  When confronted with this question, Felix Monserrate nodded his head up and down slowly, then looked away and quickly changed the subject. “Backa tabacka” was just a memory, and maybe as good as it would ever get for the eccentric equine half-appropriately named Zippy Chippy. It was small consolation to his owner, but the only upsides to this horse’s career were the growing legions of fans who would come to see him race at Finger Lakes and the large number of followers on simulcast programming who were betting on him from tracks all across North America. Complying with the request to pose for photographers, Felix sensed there was something curious going on here. Was it the souvenir ticket stubs the bettors were after? Proof they had the sense of humor to bet on a horse that couldn’t win? Nobody, least of all Felix, knew.

  A big, strong girl who worked with Emily in the same backside barn had it figured out.

  “Zippy was like an ‘opposite,’ ” recalled Krystal Nadeau. She was just thirteen years old and showing cows at the local 4-H club in the Finger Lakes when she first heard of Zippy Chippy.

  “Everybody was talking about him. All my friends said, ‘We gotta go and see him race.’ I thought he must be a great horse like Secretariat, but” – and she giggles before she continues – “he was like the opposite.”

  More like opposite poles of the earth – Secretariat clinched the Triple Crown by winning the Belmont Stakes by thirty-one lengths, while occasionally Zippy’s toughest opponent to the finish line was the setting sun.

  Meanwhile, back at Zippy’s stall number seven, Felix was staring at his horse in silence, wondering what the hell he was going to do. Getting rid of him would not involve a sale, since nobody wanted him, even as a “claimer.” Getting rid of him could mean giving him up to a second career as a jumper or a show horse or an aging pet on a hobby farm. And retirement? They had already tried that, with disastrous results. Getting rid of him could also mean offering him up at an auction where horses are bought in large lots by the owners of slaughterhouses in Mexico and Canada. Although America has banned such butchery, its neighbors to the north and south have not. Sentencing a horse to death, by auction or otherwise, is such a horrid thought for caring horsemen that they can only speak of it in code: “A little girl fell in love with my horse.”

  Felix’s mind was in panic mode as he prepared Zippy for an early morning workout and the exercise boy stuffed cotton batten in the ass of his pants. The sheer weight of their situation came crashing down on him as he saddled up his brown-eyed boy. First came the chamois grip that keeps everything on top of it from slipping off the horse’s back. Should he simply and quietly hand him off to another trainer who might have better ideas and more luck? With this horse’s record and appetite, even a giveaway would be a tricky deal. He might get a few thousand dollars for Zippy, but what would a new owner do with him? On went the sponge saddle pad. A new owner would definitely not race him, and Zippy loved the track. He threw the wool saddle blanket over the pad. He couldn’t afford to keep Zippy as a pet on the farm – he needed those paltry $500 and $300 paydays for fourth- or fifth-place finishes to help pay for the horse’s upkeep. He neatly arranged the saddlecloth across Zippy’s back, the one with the number seven on the sides. Felix had received, but never answered, a call from an entertainment agent who wanted to “exploit Zippy Chippy’s notoriety.” Finally, on went the saddle, and he tightened the girth belt around the horse’s torso. Everybody at the track had told Felix to get rid of him, but what did that even mean? Saddled up and ready to run, Zippy was just superstitious enough not to mess with their long-practiced routine, so he bit Felix gently on the arm, for old times’ sake. And Felix, after making sure he didn’t need stitches, seemed to appreciate the gesture. Getting rid of a horse was normally easy. Getting rid of Zippy Chippy was proving impossible.

  Although the Zipster appeared keen to run and indeed went into a funk when he didn’t, his owner, his trainer, and the best friend he had ever had was losing his enthusiasm to race him. When Felix Monserrate was faced with the dark dose of reality that Zippy Chippy might have to be dispatched, it was the second worst moment of his life.

  ZIPPY CHIPPY AND MARV THRONEBERRY:

  BEAUTIFUL LOSERS, BOTH OF THEM

  Bad horses – I mean really bad horses, like Ferby’s Fire and Ordvou, who earned the wrong kind of fame when they were beaten by Zippy Chippy – need not hang their heads all that low. Zippy’s losing ways may have left a dark stain on the track, on which these two horses may well have slipped.

  Case in point: Marv Throneberry, one of the most unpredictable major-league ballplayers to ever pick up a bat and glove. Marv played first base for the 1962 New York Mets, widely regarded as the worst team in modern baseball history, with just 40 wins in a 160-game season. This team was so bad that the manager, Charles Dillon “Casey” Stengel, looked up and down the Mets dugout one day and screamed, “Can’t anybody here play this game?” New York City’s wonderful slice-of-life columnist Jimmy Breslin wrote a bestseller posing that question as the title.

  At practice one day, weak-hitting “Marvelous Marv” was bouncing ground balls off his glove like it was made of solid steel. That’s when the legendary manager, seventy-two years old at the time, relieved him at first base. Stengel hadn’t played the game in more than thirty-seven years, but he was sure he could still show Throneberry a thing or two. “Stand over there, Marvin, and watch!”

  Stengel barked at the catcher to hit him a ground ball, which he did. The soft roller went through Stengel’s legs. (I did mention he was forty-three years older than Throneberry, right?)

  “Hit it like a man!” he yelled. The catcher complied, and that one went over Stengel’s shoulder.

  “One more,” screamed the manager, and that one hit him in the shin before he could quite bend over.

  Stengel dropped Throneberry’s glove and kicked it across the foul line, and as he stomped off the field he yelled back over his shoulder, “Throneberry, you have fucked up this position so badly, nobody can play it!” Practice was cancelled due to severe laughter.

  Later, on Throneberry’s birthday, Stengel, whose nickname was “the Old Perfessor,” eased up on his favorite first baseman. “We were going to get you a cake, Marvin,” said the manager, “but, well, you know, we figured you’d drop that too!”

  “The Lovable Klutz” and “America’s Lovable Loser” – for the sake of comic relief and memorable entertainment, some days players like these bring more value to their sports than the ones who play them well. And that’s what it’s all about, because if you take entertainment out of sports, all you have left are the stats.

  Despite the utter futility of the 1962 Mets – you have to go back to 1899 to find a team with more season losses – the fans came out in droves. Their total attendance of 922,530 spectators was the sixth highest in the league that year. Who doesn’t love an underdog?

  SEVEN

  A dog looks up to a man. A cat looks down on a man.

  But a patient horse looks a man in the eye and sees him as an equal.

  Anonymous

  His worst moment ever still brought fear into the eyes of Felix Monserrate when, years later, he remembered that dreary day in late November
1997, during one of Zippy Chippy’s worst losing streaks. In the midst of one of his horse’s most cantankerous spells, Felix lost sight of his darling daughter Marisa. With her chubby cheeks and dark hair, she was precious, a sparkle of kindness in his rough world of soiled stables and vocal disbelievers. A dervish in rubber boots, one second she was beside him and then she was instantly gone.

  Every day before she scooted off to school, Marisa would help Felix clean the stalls and feed the twenty or so horses her father boarded and trained at the family farm near the track. Marisa was only seven years of age and in grade two at the time, but in the barn she was a fully developed groom, washing horses and shoveling shit with the best of them. Home from school in the late afternoon, she would again plunge into her chores, doing the job of a stable boy, working alongside her dad.

  Even then Marisa was small for her age, a fact comically confirmed by a photo of her standing in a feed bucket in the corner of a stable, half of her below the rim, holding on to the edges.

  When Marisa was ten, she mesmerized the rest of the kids at Victor Elementary School by riding Peanut, her big, black Quarter Horse, into her grade six classroom for show and tell. Every kid in the world wants a pony; Marisa had her own horse. The plan was to have Peanut appear for only an hour, but when the word got out she had to take him into every classroom in the school, and they spent the whole day on tour. Marisa wanted to bring Zippy Chippy to the event, but schools back then did not have a security routine known as “lockdown.”

  Marisa can’t remember a time when she was not smack-dab in the center of the business of horses. As a two-year-old she would sleep in the cap of Emily’s red pickup truck, parked beside Felix’s barn. They would arrive at the dark hour of five in the morning, and Marisa would sleep off and on until eight. Beside her was her cousin Keri Cordero, six months older and the niece of the Hall of Fame jockey Angel Cordero. They talked about their favorite horses and played hide and seek, crawling around the truck’s floor like two lumps under a bank of blankets and giggling until they cried. Once the girls were awake, Emily would bring them into her tiny tack room and give them a cereal breakfast before she was due back on the hot-walk circuit. The kids played games and watched TV in what can only be described as a glorified shed.