The Legend of Zippy Chippy

ALSO BY

WILLIAM THOMAS

The True Story Of Wainfleet … With Lies By William Thomas

Guys: Not Real Bright and Damn Proud Of It!

The Cat Rules (Everything, Including the Dog)

Never Hitchhike on the Road Less Travelled

The Dog Rules (Damn Near Everything!)

Margaret and Me

Malcolm and Me: Life in the Litterbox

Hey! Is That Guy Dead or is He the Skip?

The Tabloid Zone: Dancing with the Four-Armed Man

For Monica Rose, who worked so long and hard at reading, typing, and shaping the manuscript of this book that she deserves a co-author credit.
She won't get one, but dammit, she should!

The Curse: “Winning isn't everything;

it's the only thing.”

Like a runaway, riderless horse on the track, deceit is running circles around professional sports today, while corruption in everyday life has honesty and decency beat by two and a half lengths. And everything duplicitous and immoral is acceptable – unless of course you get caught. The scandals in sports and society are coming so fast and so frequent, we North Americans have lost our capacity to be shamed: where once we gasped or cursed under our breaths, now we shrug.

Cyclist Lance Armstrong, the closest we've come to watching a real-life Superman in action, systematically set out to bully and destroy the reputation of whistle-blower Betsy Andreu, desperate to keep the lid on all the lies he told about using performance-enhancing drugs. New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, a fabulous athlete, felt the need to deflate footballs in order to gain an unfair advantage over his opponent.

What in hell's name was the team from Spain thinking at the 2000 Paralympics in Sydney, Australia, when they bypassed tests in order to send out fifteen perfectly abled athletes to beat young people from other countries suffering mental and physical disabilities?
Yeah, Spanish athletes pretended to be handicapped in order to steal medals from amputees and kids with Down syndrome!

And who can forget Tonya Harding (though many of us have tried)? Tonya won the 1994 U.S. Figure Skating Championships in Detroit, Michigan, after some doofus from her camp wielding a metal baton kneecapped Nancy Kerrigan, her chief rival. (Not being the sharpest blade in the skate rack, I swear the first thing Harding would have done if she had ever won an Olympic gold medal would have been to … have it bronzed!)

What exactly has inspired such reprehensible conduct by people who still stand proudly as their national anthem is played? Winning at all costs. Take no prisoners. Just bring home the gold. Period. “Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing.” First attributed to UCLA Bruins football coach Henry “Red” Sanders and often repeated by the legendary Green Bay Packers, Vince Lombardi, that edict has seriously damaged professional sports and, by extension, degraded the ethics of North American society since the 1960s. Before players adopted this near-suicidal attitude, they helped each other up after a hard hit and scolded a teammate for taking a cheap shot. Strategy, not trash, was the topic of talk. Players respected the game and knew full well that it was bigger than any one of them. In the last half century professional sports has gotten bigger but not better, and uglier. Team owners have become media moguls instead of community leaders, and players are now brands instead of true teammates. There used to be a thing called “fan allegiance” whereby you lived and died with your favorite team, be they great, awful, or ordinary. Today a struggling team like the Toronto Maple Leafs can expect to be roundly booed by their fans, who then toss their team jerseys onto the ice like so much expensive litter.