The Legend of Zippy Chippy

by William Thomas

  Even the family was impressed with Zippy’s first-ever win over anybody or anything. “He may not have won against other racehorses, but he won today,” said a beaming Marisa, Zippy’s good luck charm. For Marisa and two of her girlfriends, accepting the great big trophy (which Zippy tried to eat) to the applause of the crowd was the thrill of a lifetime. Proud as a father watching his kid get his first hit or score his first goal, Felix must have looked at Zippy and then over at the Ottawa dugout and thought, I wonder how fast one of them Lynx can run?

  Darnell McDonald had never lost a race to a human before, let alone a horse. He, of course, blamed his manager: “They should never have added those extra ten yards.” The loss ended his career as a professional ballplayer. Disheartened and demonized, he spent the rest of his life traveling the country by bus and later hitchhiking, trying to win races against other horses, then donkeys, then ponies, first the sad ones that come to town with the carnival and finally miniature ponies that can fit inside a dog’s traveling cage. Eventually, homeless in Florida, he was arrested for trying to break into the Pensacola Greyhound Track. Darnell once raced a chicken across the road and then just sat there wondering why.

  Okay, the truth is, Darnell McDonald had a pretty good career in Major League Baseball, playing for five teams, including the New York Yankees, over eight years. But he would never race a horse again. He had that written into his contract.

  Zippy, however, was enjoying hanging out with his new two-footed rivals, probably because they didn’t fart and snort as much as those who were – okay, born in a barn. Enthusiastically, he took on one more ballplayer the following summer, easily beating outfielder Larry Bigbie by four lengths over the forty-five-yard course. The media coverage of Zippy was so intense that Bigbie, who went 0–4 at bat that day, was still a highlight on ESPN’s SportsCenter that evening.

  The unsung hero of these races was longtime Frontier Field groundskeeper Mike Osborne, who followed Zippy’s every move … with a shovel. “I volunteered,” he said, “because I love horses and I love baseball.” A lesser man, when told he ought to have loftier goals in life, might have replied, “What! And quit show business?”

  At the ballpark with thousands of people cheering for him, Zippy had left his bad attitude back at the track. He was easy to handle and a pleasure to ride. Carefully considering his new and improved record of two wins and one loss to humans, Felix sounded almost cocky: “He ran to win. He doesn’t want to lose anymore.”

  Inspired by beating a person, Zippy Chippy would go on to triumph over fellow horses – but, sadly, not thoroughbreds. On St. Patrick’s Day at Freehold Raceway in New Jersey, he beat Paddy’s Laddy, a Standardbred horse. Paddy’s Laddy was a pacer rigged in such a way as to prevent him from running free and at full stride. Heavily harnessed, a pacer does a kind of fast and rhythmical goose step around the track. With no such restrictions, Zippy nipped the fancy dancer at the wire.

  Similarly, at Batavia Downs, a harness track near Buffalo, New York, Zippy went up against a trotter named Miss Batavia, who was also trained and tied in such a way as to not actually run. Zippy won yet again against a horse that was handicapped by a harness. Oh, and by the way, Standardbred horses? They also have to drag carts behind them. And the people sitting in those carts are an awful lot larger than jockeys.

  “They just love that horse,” said John Clifford, the publicity director of Batavia Downs. “Everybody, even people who knew nothing about racing, knew who Zippy Chippy was.”

  The attendance at Batavia Downs doubled for Zippy’s appearance, and his legion of relentless followers showed up to fawn over him and take photos. The first one thousand fans through the door received a Zippy Chippy T-shirt. Along with the $7.50 chicken BBQ special, you could get a free photo taken with Zippy Chippy, but you had to hire an off-duty cop to protect your plate of food.

  “People were crazy about him,” remembered Clifford. “Everybody knew him. Everybody knows his name. Ask anybody who won last year’s Kentucky Derby and they’ll hem and haw. But mention the name Zippy Chippy and they say, ‘That’s that horse that never wins!’ ”

  Zippy’s diehard fans brought bags of carrots, small homemade gifts, and copies of People magazine for Felix to autograph. Although Zippy embodied the track’s motto, “You will always be a winner at Batavia Downs,” neither win against the Standardbred horses improved his official record. They did, however, show that all things being unequal, he could be a champion.

  Enjoying the banquet circuit more than his racetrack schedule, Zippy was also feted at a Christmas cocktail party at the Moose Lodge in Canandaigua, just down the road from Felix’s barn. Hors d’oeuvres were served on a plate, not in a bag, and the music was provided by Mixed Emotions. All proceeds went to the local charity Happiness House, where a plaque now sits, honoring the horse’s fundraising fight against cerebral palsy. Zippy’s hooves are imprinted in cement, bringing to mind more bad jokes than I have space for in this book.

  However, the life of a celebrity and one of America’s most fascinating personalities is not as glamorous as you would think. At his second charity appearance, also at Moose Lodge, Zippy got third billing behind the guest speaker, a guy named Jarod who told his signature story about how he once encountered a wolf cub. A few Rochester Rhinos soccer players also made an appearance. To add insult to injury, Zippy was featured last on the program, behind a classic car show, a raffle, and – have these people no sensitivity whatsoever? – a tortoise-and-hare race. Man, this horse might as well have been owned by Rodney Dangerfield and named Itelly​a​I​get​no​respect.

  All well and good, but Zippy’s social calendar was cutting into his racing program. With four straight wins on his chart – two against guys who don’t run too well while they’re laughing and two against horses shackled at the shoulders and legs – it was time to get the Zipster back on the track and doing what he did best: watching the world and other horses go by.

  IF ZIPPY CHIPPY WERE A CITY,

  HE’D BE BUFFALO, NEW YORK

  Unlike those folks who slag the “Queen City” for its snow, Super Bowl record, and contribution to fine dining – chicken wings – I quite like the place. (I still hold Frank and Teresa of the Anchor Bar personally responsible for my high cholesterol.)

  Buffalo has great bars and restaurants, “talking proud” citizens, the quaint and colorful Broadway Market, and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, one of America’s finest. Having reclaimed their water-front and rediscovered their Frank Lloyd Wright architecture, Buffalo right now is enjoying an amazing makeover. With its skating rinks in the winter and paddling on the Erie Canal in the summer, Canalside is an outdoor wonderland attracting tens of thousands of visitors. From 1972 to 1979, the Buffalo Sabres boasted “the French Connection,” the most exciting line in hockey history.

  As a university student in 1970 I was certain I was going to win the contest to name Buffalo’s new NHL team with the Buffalo Badgers. As an expansion team with a rocky road ahead, I thought the badger was perfectly emblematic – a nasty and aggressive little weasel who will not only come into your campsite and gorge himself, he will also urinate on what’s left over so nobody else can have it! Our slogan was going to be: “Oh sure, you might come into our rink and beat us but when you get dressed to go home, you’re not going to smell so good!” Instead they went with the Buffalo Sabres.

  Yet Buffalo has, in the past, suffered from Zippy Chippy Syndrome – you take one great stride forward, and somebody bumps you two lengths back. Thirty years ago, the symbol of the city’s cultural renaissance was a work of art called Green Lightning, commissioned by the city and created by sculptor Billie Lawless. Everybody supported the project, but nobody really understood what it was. It just looked like an unlit jumble of neon tubes on a silkscreened background.

  But when they plugged it in on the night of the grand unveiling, oh yeah, they knew what they were looking at! When the neon lights lit up the sculpture in the sky, mayor Jimmy Griffin’s he
ad almost exploded. His guests, dignitaries including governor Mario Cuomo, either stared at their feet in embarrassment or put their hands over their mouths to stifle laughter.

  Billie Lawless’s neon-and-wire masterpiece, meant to spearhead the rebirth of Buffalo’s entertainment scene, was a vivid depiction of – wait for it – two penises dressed like the Planters peanut character, doing a snappy little dance number and wearing top hats, white gloves, and tails. Yeah, Green Lightning – shuckin’ and jivin’ with well-dressed junk. For cartoon characters, they sure had heart, these two dicks dancing like crazy.

  Going ballistic, Griffin pulled the plug immediately and then tried to have the artwork destroyed after dark, for which he was later found guilty in court of violating Mr. Lawless’s civil rights. Apparently there is nothing in the United States Constitution about the “right to bear schlongs.” Oddly, Green Lightning was displayed in Chicago for the next ten years without a whisper of protest.

  I’m thinking it was just a matter of a bad title. Green Lightning was abstract and meaningless, and just confused everybody. I’ve always been a believer that the title of a piece of art should state exactly what the beholder is looking at. My first choice for a title would have been It’s Just One F—king Thing after Another. And, talking titles, “Billie Lawless” may have been a better name for the Zipster than “Zippy Chippy.”

  Buffalo and Zippy Chippy – hard not to love them, even if they’re an acquired taste. Like suicide wings, beef on weck, and Flutie Flakes.

  EIGHTEEN

  If you have raced with men on foot and they have worn

  you out, how can you compete with horses?

  Jeremiah 12:5

  Wow! Jeremiah, the double threat – a bullfrog and a prophet! For Zippy’s eighty-ninth career race, in mid-February 2001, Felix moved him to Penn National Race Course in Grantville, Pennsylvania, just outside the state capital of Harrisburg. Despite dwindling attendance, Penn National still offers thoroughbred racing almost fifty-two weeks a year, four days a week. It’s survival was assured when it was twinned with Hollywood Casino, which boasts six restaurants, including the Celebrity Grill and Glitterati’s. Really? Grantville, population 3,650, has “glitterati”?

  Though Felix was pleased that so many fans showed up in Pennsylvania to watch Zippy race, his gut must have been churning. With all of those consecutive losses, it was always hard to get excited about the next race, and almost impossible to build upon something positive from the last. Plus, Zippy’s eighty-seventh loss, his greatest race ever, in which he was repeatedly bumped and eventually nosed out at the wire by Black Rifle – that one still hurt. And yet here was his horse, staring at a much younger field, sashaying onto the track like a champ. Zippy Chippy at ten years of age was not only sound, he was irrepressible.

  On this day, the dank, cold air chilled the bones of horses and helpers alike. The $10,000 purse attracted a higher brand of horses than Zippy was accustomed to running against, and it showed. Zippy’s six-furlong trip around the dirt track was as unremarkable as the ride given him by his jockey, Pedro Carrasquel. The goofy gelding was outclassed by a bunch of four-year-olds – he finished last and nearly thirty-three lengths behind the winner, Bidakeno.

  It was not the loss that boggled the minds of track officials but the 4–1 odds Zippy carried from the gate to the finish line. “The odds were a lot lower than they should have been,” said one track steward. “A lot of people bet with their heart and not their head.”

  Race number eighty-nine had not been Zippy Chippy’s lucky number. At least, not as lucky as it was for the late Anna Nicole Smith when she married a guy that age, thereby inheriting $475 million when he suddenly died a year later of – and here’s where it gets interesting – old age!

  As he trotted happily back to the barn, it was clear that nobody had more fun losing – and this was his eighty-ninth loss in a row – than Zippy. Except maybe a feisty but somewhat untalented ballplayer just up the road from Harrisburg. There, in the city of Williamsport, Pennsylvania, lived Zippy’s human double.

  Asked to name the greatest catchers in baseball, a fan might suggest Yogi Berra or Johnny Bench. Maybe Carlton Fisk or “Pudge” Rodriguez. Now, add Dave Bresnahan to the list. Three decades ago, Dave Bresnahan was a twenty-five-year-old second-stringer with the Class AA Williamsport Bills. Both the catcher and his team were headed nowhere. In a meaningless late-season home game against the Reading Phillies, Dave remembered why he’d gotten into the game of baseball in the first place: fun! Sports, games, balls, and bats were designed to create fun. You were supposed to feel a sense of joy tear-assing around the bases and making diving catches just so you could get grass stains on your pants and drive your mother crazy. But with the Bills mathematically eliminated from the playoffs, nobody was having much fun on this hot day in August of 1987.

  So instead of throwing the ball back to the pitcher, Dave pulled a potato out of his pocket and fired it over the head of the runner on third base. Earlier that day, he had taken care to sculpt the potato into the shape of a baseball. In fact, he had gone through an entire bag of potatoes until he found one that was just the right shape and size. Nobody could believe what they saw: a catcher wildly throwing the ball over the third baseman’s head into the left field. Certainly not Rick Lundblade, the runner at third who trotted home on the overthrown pass ball to score what he thought was the easiest run of his young career.

  Before Lundblade touched home plate, however, Dave pulled the game ball out of his catcher’s mitt and tagged him out. Bedlam ensued. Spectators exchanged strange looks; this was followed by nervous applause, a few boos, and finally lots and lots of laughter. The umpire who finally figured out what the hell had happened confiscated the potato and awarded Lundblade a scored run on the play. Even the guys in the Phillies’ dugout were cracking up. One teammate took Lundblade aside to give him the bad news – he’d been traded for a potato to be named later! Everybody was having fun again.

  The Bills’ parent club, the Cleveland Indians, saw little humor in the practical joke, first fining Dave Bresnahan, then firing him from the organization. “Jeopardizing the integrity of the game” is how they put it. As if Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, and Sammy Sosa had enhanced the integrity of baseball by using performance-enhancing drugs to put up record-breaking numbers.

  Plus, the Cleveland Indians were hardly the New York Yankees. Back in the Tribe’s bad old days, as they toiled on the natural grass field of futility, nobody could understand why a capacity crowd of 74,438 would come out each spring on opening day, especially to the rundown concrete mausoleum of Cleveland Stadium, nicknamed “the Mistake by the Lake.” Erie, it really was. The puzzling part was that attendance dropped to a meager few thousand diehard fans for the next game and all of those that followed. The explanation came from a long-suffering Indians supporter, who said, “Every baseball fan in Cleveland comes out on opening day because it’s the last chance to see the Tribe play before they’re mathematically eliminated from the playoffs!”

  So it was with a high degree of hypocrisy that the Cleveland Indians gave Dave Bresnahan his walking papers. The catcher left the game quietly, like the soft sound of a spud landing on outfield grass. Suddenly unemployed, the ex-catcher said he might run for governor of Idaho … on the potato ticket.

  But soon others also remembered that baseball was originally a playful pastime and not the nasty business it had become with false records, ridiculous contracts, corked bats, spitballs, and grown men peeing in bottles. The Chicago Tribune named the ex-catcher the “1987 Sports Person of the Year.” Jumping on the Bresnahan bandwagon, the Williamsport Bills started hosting charity Potato Nights – “Bring a potato and get in for a dollar.” In 1988, they held “Dave Bresnahan Day” and retired his number fifty-nine uniform. More than four thousand fans showed up to pay tribute to the world’s most famous “tater tosser,” hearing the former catcher deliver the best deadpan sports quote of the decade: “Lou Gehrig had to play in 2,130 consecuti
ve games and hit .340 for his number to be retired. All I had to do was hit .140 and throw a potato.”

  When you’re not having fun, sometimes you have to invent some. Today the potato sits preserved in a jar in a baseball museum in Southern California, and “Spuds” Bresnahan, as famous as Zippy Chippy and for all the right reasons, is still having fun. Sometime later, U.S. vice president Dan Quayle claimed it was the best potatoe trick he’d ever scene.

  ZIPPY CHIPPY MAY HAVE LOST,

  BUT HE NEVER CHEATED TO WIN

  At Delta Downs in Vinton, Louisiana, on January 18, 1990, a very mediocre horse by the name of Landing Officer miraculously upset the nine-horse field and won the race by a convincing twenty lengths. A stunning feat, it was a full thirty-two lengths better than his last outing. Nobody could believe it. Actually, nobody could see it! Just before the starting bell rang, a dense fog had descended upon the track, and the announcer had to stop calling the race because he could no longer see the horses.

  Sprinting through this “pea souper,” it seemed that Landing Officer was so fast, the jockeys who believed their horses had come in first and second had not even seen the winner hit the wire.

  But then a steward higher up in the booth counted only eight of the nine horses as they sped past the grandstand the first time. Taking a page from the infamous Rosie Ruiz’s racing strategy – “how to win a marathon without actually running” – Landing Officer and his jockey had hidden in the wet, white mist at the top of the stretch, sitting out the first lap of the race. When they heard the field coming around the far turn, they sprinted to the finish line by those twenty lengths that were suddenly not so convincing. Just as Rosie was photographed at the finish line of the Boston Marathon wearing fresh makeup, Landing Officer was barely breathing hard.