The Legend of Zippy Chippy

by William Thomas

  One day – and this usually meant trouble, if not outright disaster – Felix came up with an idea. This was not the result of a sit-down family meeting with Emily and Marisa to create a new plan for Zippy Chippy, since the old one (horse racing) had not been working out so well. Over time, in nearly forty years of teaching horses how to race, Felix had noticed two things that were both related and irrefutable. First, horses run faster than humans. This idea may have come to Felix as he was picking himself up off the ground after being head-butted by Zippy from behind. Horses were definitely faster on their feet than people, which is why you would never see the 130-pound Felix Monserrate in a race around a dirt oval track with the 1,100-pound Zippy Chippy splayed across his shoulders, although I understand men do that in Finland with their wives. Honest – it’s called eukonkanto.

  The second thing Felix knew to be true was that humans loved to watch horses run, especially his own little impulsive imp. Bingo! Humans watching horses race against humans. Bottom line: have fun for a change, because all this losin’s gettin’ real old.

  Luis Rivera, a former jockey and president of Rochester’s Puerto Rican Festival, championed the idea of just such a celebrity match race, because Zippy Chippy was badly missed by his local fan base since he had been given the heave-ho from Finger Lakes. Dan Mason loved the idea because outrageous stunts were part of his job as general manager of the Rochester Red Wings.

  The event was billed as the “2000 Red Wings Derby” and scheduled for an early summer’s evening at Frontier Field, home of baseball’s Triple-A International League Red Wings. Zippy Chippy, with a career record in losing to horses, would race against Jose Herrera, the Red Wings’ speedy center fielder with an impressive 155 career stolen bases. “Man against Beast” flashed on the scoreboard. The posters read “Horse against Human.” Zippy’s followers lapped it all up. If any horse in the world needed a win, any kind of a win – against a human, a tractor, a senior citizen on one of those electric scooters – it was Zippy Chippy!

  The mood was light and breezy at Frontier Field as approximately nine thousand spectators showed up to party with the Zipster and watch the race, which was staged before a night game that pitted the hometown Red Wings against the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Red Barons. Although there was no betting, money still changed hands (“I’ll take the exactor – horse to win, human to come second”), with lots of laughter and family fun. At the concession booths, the ballpark’s traditional white hot dogs crackled and the Scotch ale spilled into large plastic cups, leaving a beige head of froth at the top. Hootin’ and hollerin’, the faithful brought gifts of food for Zippy and newspaper and magazine clippings for Felix to sign. Felix might have looked skyward and given a grateful thumbs-up to circus impresario P.T. Barnum. This sideshow was coming together nicely.

  A confident Pedro Castillo sat comfortably in the saddle, which was belted over a green and white blanket emblazoned with Zippy Chippy’s name. Pedro wore white silk pants, a Red Wings tunic over a black long-sleeved shirt, and a great big grin. With a white braid running the length of his neck, white leather reins and bridle to match, and four white leggings wrapped from ankles to knees, Zippy looked absolutely angelic. Trotting onto the dirt warning track, he kept nodding and looking up at his fans, who were packed onto the walkway above.

  Wearing tight white pants, a black T-shirt, a gold chain, and his Rochester Red Wings hat sideways, Jose Herrera looked like he meant business. This was not a new or unusual situation for the speedy ballplayer. He told the press the story of how he used to race against horses on a farm in his native Dominican Republic, which makes you wonder what the game of baseball looks like in that country. No naïve rookie, Herrera had already spent two seasons in the big leagues with the Oakland A’s.

  Up in the grandstand, nobody dared to go to the bathroom, and everybody had an opinion. Finger Lakes Racetrack handicapper Dave Mattice said the odds favored Herrera because the distance was too short. “If Herrera had to carry a jockey,” Mattice joked, “it would be a lot more fair.”

  The racecourse had been meticulously mapped out in the outfield with double lanes of white lime that would keep the competitors a healthy distance from each other. Zippy had never bitten a ballplayer before, so there was that temptation Felix had to worry about.

  Approaching the start, a groom steadied Zippy on one side while Felix and a beaming teenage Marisa held him on the other. Manager Dan Mason beckoned the racers to the starting line, where he held a black and white checkered flag high above his head. Dan raised his free hand to engage the crowd, and immediately they began the countdown in unison.

  “Ten!”

  “Nine!”

  The players on the sidelines razzed Herrera unmercifully.

  “Eight!”

  “Seven!”

  Herrera and Castillo exchanged words in Spanish and then laughed like hell.

  “Six!”

  “Five!”

  Zippy’s fans punched the air with their fists, keeping time with the chant.

  “Four!”

  “Three!”

  The happy mob waved their ball caps high over their heads, and their cheers could be heard out on the street.

  “Two!”

  A cameraman on the sidelines, jockeying for a better angle, crashed into his sound technician.

  “ONE!”

  The flag came down, a roar went up from the crowd, and the starter yelled, “Go!”

  The race unfolded like one of those TV dream-scene ripples: a horse nods knowingly toward the stands, bowing to his retinue of admirers, while a skinny guy in red and black runs for his life. The same horse starts to graze the outfield grass, thinking, Man, this is a lot better than that scraggly stuff at the track. Suddenly the crowd is yelling, pointing at the sprinter. The jockey slaps the horse on the rump. From the sting of the crop the horse bolts, the base stealer hits top gear, and the Red Wings Derby is on.

  The noise was deafening, the runners covered the distance quickly, and the whole thing was over in less than seven seconds. Given that Zippy’s distant relative Man o’ War had a full stride of 28 feet and Usain Bolt, the world’s fastest human, legs it out at 9.35 feet, the result of the race was a logical and foregone conclusion. Keeping in mind the biological precept that horses are naturally faster than humans, the race wasn’t even close.

  Zippy Chippy lost by three lengths. Yeah, horse lengths. A human beat a horse in a footrace! Even though one of their own species had won the race, the humans in the stands were stunned and disappointed.

  There’s no doubt that Zippy was eating grass when the flag came down, but it’s entirely possible that when Dan Mason yelled “Go!”, Zippy took that as a term of encouragement and started eating faster. Herrera definitely broke from the starting line early, but no inquiry was called and no umpire was present. One fan claimed that when the ballplayer took off, Zippy gave one last long look at the guy in the stands hawking soft pretzels. Yum. Sweet mustard.

  Years later, I tracked down Pedro Castillo in Philadelphia, where he was struggling to make a comeback as a jockey. Dividing forty yards by two disparate strides, my question to Pedro was one of basic mathematics.

  “Pedro, WTF happened there?”

  “All I can say,” said the jockey, an affable man with a gleaming white smile, “that horse, he be very unfocused. Very unfocused.”

  Castillo, who had seen many of Zippy’s failed starting-gate strategies, said, “Just as the checkered flag came down, Zippy got hungry.” Off to a terrible start, Zippy did, however, have Herrera running for dear life at the finish line, but the distance of forty yards of outfield turf was not enough for the horse to overtake the ballplayer.

  “We close pretty strong,” said Castillo. “But we run out of real estate.”

  New rule governing contests of speed between two distinctly different species: Most, I repeat, most racehorses, but not all racehorses, are faster than human beings.

  The speedy center fielder was carried off the fie
ld in triumph on the shoulders of his teammates high-fiving everyone in sight. Zippy got back in his transport trailer and went home to have supper. Good lord, he must have thought as he looked out the window of the trailer, now I’m probably banned from ballparks too!

  Highlights of the race were shown during that night’s news hour on all three major American networks. Later, clips would appear on the Today Show, Good Morning America, and ESPN’s SportsCenter. Newspapers from around the country ran humorous features on the human-versus-horse race, including USA Today and the New York Times. Fortunately for Zippy, there are dozens of TV monitors at racetracks but none in the barns.

  Jose Herrera got more press running away from a food-obsessed horse than he ever did stealing bases. At year’s end, Baseball America heralded the race as their top minor-league promotion of the year, and Dan Mason was the toast of the town. How typical, Zippy running his little heart out in order to make some other guy look good.

  “He let Jose win to make him feel good,” said Felix. Yes, the curse of courtesy had crept back into Zippy’s sense of fair play. Although it rocked his own personal theory about the velocity of two-legged versus four-legged animals, Felix took the loss rather well. “Forty yards is not enough for him to get warm,” said the trainer. The scribbling reporters could only laugh.

  Ever the stubborn trainer, Felix still believed his horse could outrun a human being. The racing strategy did not change: stay the course and soon, very soon, they would celebrate victory together. The solution was simple – all they needed to do was find a slower ballplayer. Yeah, they were having fun again.

  THE GREATEST WORST

  OLYMPIAN EVER

  Does the name Michael Edwards ring a bell? How about “Eddie the Eagle”? Failing to make the British national team as an alpine skier, Eddie took up ski jumping since few others would dare. Eddie was just marginally better than most of the spectators who came to watch his event. When he got word that he had qualified for the 1988 Calgary Olympics, he was working as a plasterer in a mental institution in Finland.

  The Brits had never had a ski jumper and did not possess a ski jump anywhere in the country. An oddity, Eddie became a world-famous ski jumper in the same way that four guys from a country without snow became the legendary Jamaican bobsled team: he applied for a job that didn’t exist in his country. Eddie offered to throw himself off the end of two ramps that stood 230 feet and 295 feet above the ground, respectively. “Brilliant,” cried the Brits. “What’s the worst that can happen?”

  So there was Michael Edwards at the Calgary games, an Olympian mainly because he wasn’t afraid of heights, wearing six pairs of socks to fill ski boots that were three sizes too big and a loose nylon jacket over three layers of jerseys. He was twenty pounds heavier than his closest competitor and extremely farsighted, which explained the big round glasses with lenses the thickness of Coke bottles. Once his ski goggles went on over his glasses, fog covered the lenses so that he was partially blinded as he barreled down the jump track. As one cruel description of him read, “A fat, blind tub of lard hurtling though the air on a pair of skis was England’s greatest hope in jumping.” Because he always had a goofy smile behind the huge glasses, the press dubbed him “Mr. Magoo.”

  Despite the fact that Eddie looked more like a welder than an Olympian, his keenness to participate in a strange and dangerous sport and his unflinching drive to go head-to-head with the best endeared him to sports fans and television viewers around the world. Although British TV referred to Eddie as “the world’s worst ski jumper” and described his style as “flying through the air like a stone,” they always added, “but we love him.”

  Like a true anti-champion, the more Eddie struggled and lost, the more he short-jumped to a last-place finish, the more wildly popular he became. Finishing dead last in both jumping events, he drew bigger crowds than any other athlete, becoming the runaway sensation of the Calgary games.

  Flying through the air with the greatest of awkwardness, almost overnight Michael Edwards became Eddie the Eagle. He had accomplished his wild and lifelong dream: he was an Olympic athlete. If entertainment value and courage count for anything in sports, then he was the best of the lot.

  At the closing ceremonies, Calgary Olympics chairman Frank King etched Eddie’s legacy in stone: “At these games, some competitors have won gold, some have broken records, and some of you have even soared like an eagle.” The crowd went berserk, chanting, “Eddie! Eddie!” until they became hoarse.

  Just as with Zippy Chippy, the power of the media and the faith of his following had made Michael Edwards the world’s best-known athlete, with his earnings jumping from £6,000 a year to £10,000 an hour. He had willed himself into a superstar with the talents of an ordinary bloke.

  Similar in style and identical in record, Eddie the Eagle and Zippy Chippy were kindred spirits. Both underdogs, they had nothing to lose, which made them free: free of pressure, free of pretentiousness, free of losing. Free. If these two guys had ever met, there’s no doubt in my mind that Zippy still would have bitten that crazy Brit in the ass and eaten his plastic goggles.

  We humans have always rooted for the underdog, with the same innate decency that forbids us to kick a man when he’s down. Not only is it the right thing to do to encourage and trumpet the efforts of the less blessed, like Zippy Chippy, Eddie the Eagle, Daniel “Rudy” Ruettiger, Job, and the ’62 Mets. But also, there but for the grace of the gods and lucky charms go we. Help the guy who’s drowning, lest someday you fall into the drink yourself.

  SEVENTEEN

  You’re better off betting on a horse than betting on a man.

  A horse may not be able to hold you tight, but he

  doesn’t wanna wander from the stable at night.

  Betty Grable

  At Rochester’s Frontier Field the following August, they found him – the slower ballplayer, that is. In “Man against Beast II,” prior to a Wednesday evening game pitting the hometown Red Wings against the Ottawa Lynx, Zippy Chippy lined up next to center fielder Darnell McDonald in another “four hooves versus two feet” match race. This time Red Wings general manager Dan Mason had insisted on a fifty-yard dash, ten yards longer than the last one, “in order to give the horse a chance.” Felix, who either ignored the slam or didn’t get it, had agreed.

  Aside from the fact that the human wore sunglasses and the horse wore blinkers, and that the ballplayer was single by choice and the thoroughbred was a bachelor by surgery, the two were pretty well matched. McDonald wore his team’s black and white colors, while Zippy wore Jorge Hiraldo, dressed in red, white, and blue silks. With just fourteen wins in 213 starts that season, Hiraldo needed a victory almost as much as Zippy did. Pedro Castillo, Zippy’s former jockey, was not available for this sequel. After losing to a human being, Pedro changed his name to Wedgie White and moved to a U.S. nuclear testing site in the Pacific.

  The twenty-two-year-old McDonald, who had been a phenomenal high school football player, tried to badmouth his opponent: “We all know who’s gonna win. This horse knows too. I will come out victorious.”

  “You better,” said his teammates, knowing that if he didn’t, he would never live it down.

  But everyone – as William Shakespeare demonstrated so well – has a fatal flaw, even a two-hundred-pound speedster drafted number one by the Baltimore Orioles. McDonald’s Achilles’ heel, as they say in sports, was that he did not spend enough time watching television reruns. If he had, before he started with all that trash talk in Zippy’s face, he would have known that “a horse is a horse, of course, of course, and no one can talk to a horse, of course, that is, of course, unless the horse is the famous Mr. Ed.”

  The hype was high, the crowd was huge, and redemption was on the minds of Zippy Chippy’s ragtag band. Many thought McDonald cheated, taking off at the start before the flag came all the way down. Felix didn’t notice, because he was still jabbering away at his jockey, standing on the starting line. Zippy didn’t notice either
, because … What the hell’s that up there? A buttered popcorn wagon? What did they do, switch the warm pretzel thingamajig with …

  Ouch! Zippy took one to the tush. “And they’re off!” Sprinting all out, it was obvious that Darnell McDonald was not just racing Zippy Chippy; he was running against the precedent set by last summer’s winner, Jose Herrera. A loss would mean a season fraught with horse jokes from teammates and a lot of neighing from the opposing dugout.

  The ballplayer held his early lead until the forty-yard mark. Jorge Hiraldo stretched his horse out, and Zippy’s full stride overtook McDonald’s short, pumping progress. It was those last ten yards that put Zippy between the ballplayer and the finish line, as he blew by McDonald at the wire by one length. It was close but a win is a win, and a win by Zippy Chippy causes people to make the sign of the cross all the way from Rochester to the Vatican.

  “I might have got him at forty yards, but that extra ten yards put him over the hump,” said McDonald. “From behind I heard this dah-doomp, dah-doomp, dah-doomp. At this point I knew it was over. Zippy had an extra gear today.”

  Jorge Hiraldo was over the moon: “Zippy was ready today. Last year he was a little nervous.” The jockey was also relieved. Returning home to the backside to explain how you and your horse got beat by a guy wearing his ball cap backwards is never an easy thing to do. Jorge was particularly pleased to still be aboard Zippy Chippy at the end of the race. No rider of horses likes to be bounced over the outfield fence like a ground rule double.

  The thousands of Zippy fans – salt of the earth and compassionate to a fault – who had come to the ballpark early to be photographed with the record-breaking racehorse went wild. Zippy’s reward was not a purse of first-prize money but a twenty-five-pound bag of carrots, which he demolished as soon as he returned to his trailer. Surrounded by smirking media types, Darnell McDonald was eating crow.