“I’ll remember that day forever,” said Judy Peck. Yes, it had been a memorable day, a milestone day, a beautiful day. It just wasn’t Zippy Chippy’s day.
Anxiety, remorse, worry – these were all emotions unknown to this horse. Sometimes victory is not flashy or splashy, like those racecar winners who continue the moronic tradition of dousing each other with perfectly good champagne. Sometimes victory is as simple as a quiet voice that says, I really tried my best, I did, and … well, I’ll bet that bastard who won was using performance-enhancing drugs.
A reporter at the scene described the final curtain call of this distinguished actor who had had a record-setting run in the theater of thoroughbred racing: “He didn’t kick. He didn’t pin his ears back. He didn’t move. His big, brown eyes turned glassy and he blinked. His head dropped a little and he drifted off to sleep.”
Sweet dreams, unconquering hero. Hail the horse that used his less-than-illustrious career to fight against overachieving, winning at all costs, and, of course, unnecessary perspiration.
OLD GUYS DOING LAPS
AROUND THE TRACK
Zippy Chippy and jockey Frank Amonte Sr. serve as inspirational examples to all of us who are aging faster than Big Pharma can increase the price of the pills that are supposed to keep that from happening. (I love it how so many of us now refer to ourselves as “middle-aged.” Accurate in my case only if I make it to 138.)
In his last start, the one hundredth of his career, Zippy ran against seven horses, all ten years younger than himself, and despite a “buck” and a “bore” he came back for more and caught up to the youngsters in the stretch. A year later, on that very same Northampton Fair track, Frank Amonte Sr. became the oldest jockey to win a thoroughbred race when he booted home Cuff the Quote, cleverly threading his mount through the pack until they were three lengths ahead of the rest at the wire. Those who put two dollars on him got back a princely sum of $22.60. “Father Time,” as the other riders called him, was just one day short of his seventieth birthday.
Born in 1935, Frank starting riding in New Orleans, and since then, he’s ridden in every place with a pari-mutuel window, including Cuba back in the days when they were still chasing Castro around the mountains.
In July of 2001 at Brockton Fairgrounds, the sixty-five-year-old Amonte got banged up in a three-horse collision, suffering three broken toes, a chipped ankle, and a concussion. Three days later he rode Flight Path to the wire and then the winner’s circle. “You can’t devote much time to recuperating at a place like this,” he said.
The father of nine children, Frank was still riding at seventy-six when officials at his home track of Suffolk Downs forced him to quit. They labeled him an “insurance risk.” Fit, vegetarian, and holding a doctor’s certificate of good health, Frank fought forced retirement all the way to court.
Although Frank was well liked, many jockeys filed complaints against the aged jockey because quite often when he was coming down the stretch, weaving in and out of traffic, he would forget to turn his blinker off.
Can you imagine if they ever teamed together? The Zipster, with one hundred outings, and Senior Frank, with 1,734 career mounts, using their longevity and experience to outsmart and outlast the entire field to win Saratoga’s Stool Softener Stakes? (In that winner’s circle, they inhale oxygen instead of champagne.)
The remarkable African American baseball pitcher Satchel Paige was right after all: “Age is a case of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it don’t matter.”
TWENTY-FOUR
Every story has an end. But in life,
every ending is just a new beginning.
From the movie Uptown Girls
There are bad ideas, there are horrible ideas, and then there was the choice of Zippy Chippy’s second career. It was a good but onerous decision for Felix to retire his horse from active racing, after ten years and ten times that many trips around the track.
“The racing officials at Northampton wanted Zippy to run again, but we stay home,” he said. “We had bad luck the last couple races. Zippy, he’s tired.”
Of course they wanted Zippy, and especially his entourage, back. Squeezed by casinos and a burgeoning state lottery, the racetrack was now desperate for spectators. Sadly, exactly one year and one day after Zippy’s last race on September 10, 2004, the track closed down for good. It’s a shame they didn’t invite Zippy back for the closing day; he would have loved to have taken the barn down all by himself. The nearly two-hundred-year-old Three County Fair continues to operate to this day, but sadly, another American horse track is now a vacant lot. Today only California offers horseracing at fairgrounds.
In December 2004, three months after his final race, thirteen-year-old Zippy Chippy began a new career as an everyday exercise pony at Finger Lakes Racetrack, minutes down the road from Felix’s home stable. The owner was not his usual over-the-moon, optimistic self when it came to Zippy’s occupational transition: “I’m not sure he’ll like it, but I’m going to give it a try.” Not sure? As a father, Felix never handed his teenagers hard liquor along with the car keys and then hoped for the best, but somehow he thought this might be a good idea?
In his new position as a track pony, Zippy would be a kind of paid escort. With a handler riding him instead of a jockey, he would tag along with horses as they limbered up before eventually arriving at the start. He would accompany thoroughbreds before and sometimes after races, offering companionship and helping to keep them calm.
Once the champion of also-rans, Zippy was now a red carpet date, a rental horse being paid to prop up real racehorses, just like he was not so very long ago. Suddenly he had been reduced to a stable pony after being the headliner in many of his one hundred races, during which he had become one of the most photographed racehorses in America. What could possibly go wrong with this plan? Ironically, Zippy’s job was to help other racehorses at the same track that had banned him for life for dwelling – that is, not racing. So yeah, there was still some bitterness there.
Apparently, Felix had not fully explained the job description of an exercise pony to Zippy, but that was not unusual. According to Marisa, her father did not possess … how can I put this … keen communication skills. Marisa’s love for her father hardly stops her from teasing him. “My dad’s very funny,” she said. “He just doesn’t realize it.” Between keeping Zippy out of trouble and keeping his ears from becoming snacks, Felix was not always calm and focused.
“He would be all excited and he’d say, ‘You gotta go right now and get Flying Free from the exercise barn!’ ” said Marisa. “And I’m like, what the hell? And then he gets even louder, and his hands are going and he’s yelling at me. ‘You know, Freedom Fighter. You gotta go and get him right now.’ And I’d say, ‘Do you mean Floating Alone? That’s his name. Floating Alone!’ And he would say, ‘Yeah, that’s the one. Go get him!’ ”
Marisa’s fondest memory of growing up working with her father was another one of his misspeaks. Instead of saying “Marisa, you’re so beautiful, to me,” he would say “Marisa, you’re so beautiful, like me.” “I mean, I know what he meant,” she recalls, “but it still cracked me up.”
Not well schooled in his new duties, Zippy assumed he was supposed to race against the horses he was being paid to accompany. He kept challenging the horses to a run, and the fact that neither one of them had to get into the starting gate pleased him even more. When that didn’t work, Zippy dug deep into his bag of skills, honed during a decade of racetrack chicanery, and … he began biting the other horses. He also bumped the other horses, which had the opposite effect of calming them down. Then he bucked off his exercise rider. Then he raced up the stairs of the grandstand, broke into the track official’s office, and kicked the crap out of the stewards who had banned him from racing at this very track. Okay, that one I made up.
After only a few trips onto the track accompanying other horses, it became abundantly clear that Zippy was having the same soothing effect on the o
ther horses that cocaine had on Charlie Sheen. In short, Zippy Chippy did everything a track pony was not supposed to do, and his escort career ended just like his racing career: with great relief all around. And why wouldn’t it? He had gained national fame and a following of millions doing pretty much the opposite of what a racehorse is expected to do. You don’t rack up one hundred losses by toeing the line, listening to the manager, or just going along to get along. Zippy Chippy had used his ten-year professional career to become a superb and internationally recognized shit disturber. And now they wanted him to be My Friend Flicka?
It was rugged individualism that made his first career such a success, and it would be this same singular spirit that would cost him his second. Sorry, but he didn’t need a playmate while he was in the serious business of losing a record number of thoroughbred races, and he wouldn’t pretend to be a chaperone now that he no longer answered the call to post. If Zippy had been allowed to procreate, I am absolutely certain he would have fathered the first foal in history to be born with a middle finger. The best that can be said is that no animals were seriously harmed in the implementation of this experiment, thank God.
As a result, Finger Lakes Racetrack established a new rule that all horses applying for the job of exercise pony must first put up a damage deposit. Okay, I made that one up too, but seriously, what the hell was Felix thinking? What next, Pete Rose for commissioner of baseball? Richard Nixon’s mug up on Mount Rushmore? Rob Ford for mayor of Toronto? Hey, wait a minute, that car wreck actually happened!
AS THEY SAY IN THE BARN,
LOVE IS A MANY-SPLINTERED THING
Felix loved Zippy Chippy in much the same way that Roy Rogers loved his golden palomino, Trigger.
Referrring to a woman in his songs as “gold diggers” and “tight-waisted, winky-eyed flirts,” it became clear that the King of the Cowboys was spending way, way too much time alone on the range.
Apparently, Dale Evans, the love of Roy’s life, his co-star, and his wife for fifty-one years, was not much of a feminist. I mean, she heard those lyrics and she carried a gun, yet she let Roy live to the age of eighty-six.
Zippy’s one hundred races were matched by almost one hundred films that Roy and Trigger starred in together. Friends, pets, and business partners – Felix and Roy adored their horses.
Trigger and the “Singing Cowboy” danced together as he sang about that four-legged friend who would never let you down in the end.
I too have loved and lost three wonderful four-legged friends. My tabby Wedgie, I buried by the creek where he liked to torture frogs. Malcolm, my buck-toothed cat, was cremated, as was Jake, the best and most handsome dog in the world. (Was too! Was too!)
Call me unadventurous, but it never once crossed my mind to have any of them stuffed. In a feat of taxidermal engineering, Roy Rogers had Trigger stuffed in a rearing-up-on-his-hind-legs position and displayed him proudly in the foyer of his California home. As soon as you opened Roy and Dale’s front door, there he was, this muscular beast, all golden coat with a flaxen mane, in his attack mode, just waiting to kick the gun out of your hand.
Although I still have trouble believing anyone would want to stuff a pet, I do remember hearing Dale Evans on a radio talk show promoting her autobiography, Rainbow on a Hard Trail. The host of the show finally got around to asking her the question I’d have led with: “Why in the world would Roy have Trigger stuffed?”
“Because,” replied Dale with great enthusiasm, “Roy just loved him so much.”
Since then, every time I touch the urn of one of my pets, I have a kind thought for Dale Evans. I can’t tell you how relieved I was that Roy died before Dale did, because I know … he just loved her so much.
TWENTY-FIVE
Oh, my friend, it is not what they take away from you that counts.
It’s what you do with what you have left.
Hubert Humphrey
“Domestic terrorism orange alert! Warning to all American retirement institutions that accept horses as residents: Zippy Chippy is looking for a home!” For the owner of a boarding farm, receiving a request to permanently room and board Zippy Chippy was akin to learning that Mike Tyson was booking a long stay at your quaint little B&B.
Six years of semi-retirement had passed uneventfully for Zippy Chippy since he had last raced in 2004 for his one hundredth consecutive loss. Reflecting on his victories – two against baseball players and two against horses in leg restraints – it seemed that thoroughbred racehorses had been Zippy’s more persistent problem. Unofficial retirement for Zippy included training sessions during the season with Felix’s other clients at the Clifton Springs stable and wintering at Whispering Winds Farm in nearby Penfield, NY.
Approaching twenty years of age, Zippy looked good, his health was fine, and he remained unusually agile, suffering no long-term effects from the pounding punishment he had endured in a decade chasing faster horses around some of racing’s most unforgiving tracks. Zippy was in good shape. Except for the scars and bruises in the shape of a horse’s hoof, Felix was in pretty good shape too. Emotionally, though, Zippy’s trainer, owner, and father figure wavered back and forth about the horse’s future. “I’ve got him for a long time,” he said. “Then somebody take him from me? I don’t think so. Even if he retires, he will always be in my barn.”
After a turbulent decade of racing, Felix still believed that Zippy might race again: “He’s still strong for a horse his age.” Of course, having been pinned to the wall occasionally, Felix knew Zippy’s strength firsthand.
Although he could have used the money, Felix was dead set against selling Zippy or any of his other horses, a real problem in a business where most trainers traded their underachieving prospects like baseball cards. When it came to Zippy’s ornery nature and abysmal track record, few doubted the owner when he said, “If this horse was in somebody else’s hands, he be dead by now.” With any other owner in thoroughbred racing, this horse would have likely gone to auction and then to a processing plant north or south of the border.
Although Emily and Felix had been in the thoroughbred horse business almost all their lives, for them it had never been a matter of business. They had sold a few horses, but only to people they knew, horse people who shared their love for these beautiful beasts.
“We keep the horses Felix buys. We take care of our horses,” Emily said, without having to add that a lot of other owners do not. The quick-flip sellers of thoroughbreds who buy low and sell a little higher after the horse has had a promising race or a strong time trial are called “churners.” The Monserrates, all four of them, were definitely not churners.
“One week after we had Zippy Chippy, I knew Felix would never sell him, as bad a horse as he might be,” recalled Emily. “No, he was ours for good, plus … well, he wasn’t all that sellable, to be honest with you.”
Maybe not back in his racing days, but now, with all his hard-earned notoriety, Zippy Chippy, who had somehow escaped all those claiming races, was very “sellable.” Oh, the irony of it all.
The great horses, from Secretariat to Seabiscuit, retired in ankle-deep Kentucky bluegrass, frolicking for the cameras and procreating their brains out on the off chance they might sire another hall of famer. But where do the ordinary horses go? The lame-gamers and last-placers and not-so-hots whose names nobody can remember a week after their last trip around the track? Sadly, these “orphans of the oval” have no value to racetracks or owners once their careers are over.
Such horses “go to glue,” as Felix once said, with the despair shared by every backside worker who has seen firsthand the sweat, the struggle, the gallant efforts these animals have given to their years at the track abandoned quickly once their earnings end. Zippy filled up a lot of race cards in his time. A hundred, to be exact.
A few discarded thoroughbreds might earn their keep as show horses or riding horses. Fewer still are the lucky ones who become pets of big-hearted rural landowners or helpers at equestrian centers. The situ
ation has become so dire that some old horses go to rescue and retraining farms where they are cared for by prison inmates. (They’re keeping Zippy away from this program, because frankly, the really hardcore criminals wouldn’t stand a chance!)
After years of dithering about Zippy’s future, Felix received a novel proposal from Michael Blowen, founder of Old Friends Equine, a retirement home for unwanted thoroughbreds. Michael’s rescue operation, located on the outskirts of the small town of Georgetown, Kentucky, not far from Lexington, is a model sanctuary for over the hill stallions and unmemorable mares who left their hearts out on the track. Old Friends now cares for about one hundred and fifty-four retired racers, who cost about $2,500 each in annual care. In their prime, these same horses earned a combined total of more than $90 million for their owners.
Michael made the offer to purchase Zippy Chippy after he set up a second farm, Old Friends at Cabin Creek, near Saratoga Springs, New York. The plan was to use Zippy as the retirement home’s poster boy and, naturally, its main attraction. With a million dollar operating budget to care for his growing brood of abandoned horses, Michael needed a familiar face for fundraising campaigns and a well-known ambassador to promote the humane treatment of old racehorses. He needed America’s most famous also-ran. He needed Zippy Chippy.
It was a brilliant marketing strategy to build on Zippy’s celebrity status and use him as a kind of Walmart greeter at Old Friends at Cabin Creek, where he would attract fans of horse racing to come and meet yesterday’s warriors. Merchandising Zippy Chippy memorabilia would earn funds to support the retirement and care of horses at both of Michael Blowen’s retreats.
The Legend of Zippy Chippy Page 20
