The Legend of Zippy Chippy (14 page)
Read The Legend of Zippy Chippy Online
Authors: William Thomas
“Disbelievable,” said Felix. At the track steward's behest, he had worked Zippy in front of them that very morning, demonstrating how well his horse was doing getting out of the gate. Time after time, the bell went off and so did Zippy Chippy. New trick, same act. Like Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown to kick, Zippy had promised to do it right this time, and Felix had landed flat on his ass. Apparently, the Zipster had just been messing with them.
With this, his second dwell in a row, Zippy was put on forced vacation. “For the protection of the public,” read the track's official statement, “we've recommended that the horse take some time off.” Not really an outright ban, but nothing you want to see on your year-end job review. “We just want him to take some time off now, and if he shows he can break, then he can run again,” said a steward.
The sixty-day temporary ban went into effect immediately after his eighty-fourth loss, and the “three-strikes-and-you're-out” rule was implied but not stated. Nobody was counting on a win from this horse, but there were some expectations that he would at least run. A second or even a third once in a while would keep bettors happy and the stewards at bay. It's pretty much a given at every racetrack â if you can't get out of the starting gate, then leave the barn by the back door and don't bother coming back. Once somebody suggests attaching one of those backing-up beepers to your bum, you're in serious trouble.
Felix lamely defended his stop-and-go gelding. “He just want to see the other horses out in front of him before he run.” Absolutely. At eleven lengths behind the pack at the first turn, he had a very clear picture of the task at hand.
This strategy of sizing up your opponents ahead of time often works in short-track cycling or long-distance running. But on a track, you're not likely to see Usain Bolt hanging back in the starting block after the gun goes off in order to identify which sprinter he has to run to ground in order to win the one hundred meters. Sorry, but even on
The Biggest Loser
you won't see a contestant sitting around scarfing Twinkies in order to give the others a bit of an edge.
“Then, after he wait, Zippy tries to catch up to them,” added Felix, who by this point had personally trained his mount to a total of sixty-four losses, twelve in the last year alone.
Although Finger Lakes officials were not backing off their temporary suspension, they were rather impressed by Zippy's many fans and frequent bettors, who were illogically putting their money on him to win, thereby reducing what should have been very long odds. Despite having lost by a total of fifty-five lengths in his previous three races, Zippy still went off at 2â1 instead of a realistic 35â1. A storm of protest erupted in the press when Zippy was suspended, prompting one steward to suggest, “Maybe he's reached cult status.”
Consequently, Zippy was placed in temporary retirement at a nearby boarding farm where the owners were quite taken by the fun-loving delinquent and especially by his spreading fame. Fans were soon knocking on the barn door for an impromptu meet 'n' greet with the Zipster.
“People like to see him run,” said Felix, still not grasping the seriousness of the situation. “The old-timers who come to the track, they ask about him every day.”
It wasn't just the old boys in the clubhouse who were enamored with Zippy Chippy. Families came to watch their lovable underachiever, bringing kids wearing Zippy Chippy hats who couldn't yet see over the trackside fence. The jaded backstretch workers
rarely left the barns to watch a race, but they did come to the frontside to see Zippy run, curious as to what calamity he might cause.
Felix had a way of taking the sting out of a painful predicament with unexpected humor. When track officials and media asked him about Zippy's erratic behavior, he said, pushing his blue Zippy Chippy cap to the back of his head, “I dunno. Every time, I ask him what the problem is, but he don't answer me.”
When pressed about his lopsided devotion to this particular horse when he had a stable full of racers he was training back in Clifton Springs, Felix scratched the scar on his back and reached into his bag of favorite parables, but he â¦Â he missed by two lengths. “Say you have three horses, and two are in university and they do well, but the other one ⦔ Either that was a slip of the tongue or the entrance-level qualifications for universities in New York State have fallen lower than those of Mississippi.
If Zippy could not see the ghosts of bridesmaids past down the track, Felix surely could. Gussie Mae and Really a Tenor were taunting Zippy Chippy just around the next bend of the next race. With eighty-five straight losses each, these two hapless non-winners made up the kind of club that if they're willing to accept you as a member, you don't wanna join. With eighty-four losses, Zippy seemed to be knocking on their clubhouse door.
And his losing streak had become contagious, spreading to Felix's other twenty-seven horses. The previous year, Felix's horses had gone winless in eighty-eight starts. When asked if he was embarrassed by the poor performance of his four-footed friend, Felix became defensive: “No, no. Maidens, if they don't win, trainers dump them fast. Zippy, he's happy when he runs, and that's all I want. A horse that loses like that, you think maybe he stop eating or he lay down in his stall, but â¦Â but he don't do that stuff. He's a happy horse, and healthy too.”
Although Zippy was attracting a wider circle of fans, jockey Benny Afanador was suddenly not one of them. The rider was furious at having been stranded in the starting gate for a second time, like he was riding a coin-operated children's pony down at the mall. With his newfound fondness for hanging out in the starting gate, this horse had managed to piss off his most faithful jockey, the one who'd been in his saddle for eleven almost consecutive rides. “This horse is making me look bad. I will never ride him again,” said Afanador. One of the few jockeys at Finger Lakes willing to mount the horse was good to his word â he never rode Zippy Chippy again. While jockey Victor Espinoza likely earned ten percent, or $300,000, for American Pharoah's Triple Crown romp, Afanador, after eleven trips around the track with Zippy Chippy, was still waiting for his first winner's share of the purse.
Deeply hurt by this parting of ways (Felix and Benny had come to America together), the trainer's outward response was a shrug and then a visit to the jockeys' room.
Although he loved Benny like a brother, he knew that for the “jock mount” of $75, at this level of racing, it would not be difficult to find Zippy's next silken-clad victim.
Team Zippy may have lost its favorite rider, but never its loyal captain.
AND BARNYARD ANIMALS
That's what they all had â Felix and Zippy, Penn and Teller, Minnie and Mickey, Mickey and Billy â togetherness and team loyalty.
New York Yankees legends Mickey Mantle and Billy Martin, with twelve World Series rings between them, were best friends as well as hunting buddies. After his playing days were over, Martin did such a good job of managing the Texas Rangers that they nicknamed the team the “Turn Around Gang” and presented him with a very expensive hunting rifle, which he was dying to use. By way of explaining the devotion players had for their manager, Mantle tells his favorite story on a YouTube video by claiming that if Martin told his players to jump off a roof, they would because “they knew Billy would jump off with them.” (This is also the reason that NASA scientists and neurosurgeons at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore do not fear losing their jobs to professional baseball players.)
Warning: This story may be apocryphal, which means it could have been concocted by these two gentlemen in the back seat of a hired car as they drank beer from a cooler and took turns knocking the driver's hat off. As the story goes, Mantle had a friend who owned a hunting ranch near San Antonio, Texas, and off they went. The former doctor and rancher was only too happy to see the great Mickey Mantle at his door (Martin waited in the car) and told him they could shoot all the deer they wanted, but â¦Â he had a favor to ask. Very reluctantly, Mickey agreed to put the doctor's twenty-year-old mule â a decrepit animal they had seen standing in the barnyard as they'd driven up to the house â out of its misery.
On the spot, Mantle decided he was going to “pull a joke on Billy.” So he stomped back to the car looking angry, grabbed his rifle, and headed for the barn.
Martin was startled. “Whatsa matter?”
“We drove four hours to get down here to go deer huntin' and this guy says we can't go deer huntin'. I'm gonna shoot his mule!”
Martin tried to stop him, but Mantle ran toward the barn with his gun and â¦Â bang! He shot the mule right in the neck.
As the mule hit the ground, dead, Mantle heard one, two, three cracks of a rifle from behind him.
“Bam! Bam! Bam! I turned around, there's Billy with his gun! I said, âBilly, what're you doin'?”
Martin, loyal teammate that he was, said, “I got three of his cows.”
That's what true teammates share: loyalty as blind as that doctor's dead mule.
My horse was in the lead coming down
the homestretch, but the caddie fell off
.
Samuel Goldwyn
While trying to ride a stalled horse, Benny Afanador was hardly the first jockey to be pricked by the pin of mockery. Because of their slight build, those in his profession are easy marks for low humor, the butt of bad racetrack jokes. One British wag defined a jockey as “an anorexic dwarf in bright colors who drives a large car with cushions on the seat and blocks on the pedals.”
Truth be told, a jockey must be madly in love with horses, crave speed, and be able to dismiss fear with a shrug. Think about it: In what other profession are you followed around by an ambulance? And yet jockeys make it look as easy as a musical carousel. The bugle and bells, the clips of the whips, the pounding of hooves, the crowd that rises as one, and the applause that swells to the top of the stands â these are the sounds of music that serve as the soundtrack to the two-minute colorful chase scene of a thoroughbred horse race. Jockeys are the minstrels who bring that music to life.
Jockeys have often been viewed as second-class athletes, because they don't run or jump or throw a ball. In fact, these
men of small stature and women of slight build are the most fearless and powerful participants in professional sports. A study by sports medicine specialist Dr. Robert Kerlan and University of Texas researcher Jack Wilmore tested 420 athletes from all professional sports for conditioning, reflexes, coordination, and strength. Pound for pound, the jockeys, the drivers of thoroughbred horses, rated highest of them all for strength of body and quickness of mind.
With only bare hands and body mass, they must maneuver a charging animal ten times their weight through a stampede of hulking horses running hell-bent for leather at forty miles an hour, each trying to lunge out front of the other. Sitting on a saddle that weighs less than two pounds, protected only by a helmet and a flak jacket, they must often push a half ton of heaving flesh through a three-foot gap in a thick pack of thoroughbreds in order to get to the finish line first. Wiry warriors, they work in two-minute bursts through a minefield of peril and mayhem from wire to wire. Never mind that at age fifty-four, Willie Shoemaker gave Ferdinand the ride of his life to win the 1986 Kentucky Derby, and the brilliant Rosie Napravnik won the $2 million Breeders' Cup Distaff in 2014 aboard her favorite filly, Untapable, while she was seven weeks pregnant. That's Willie Shoemaker, who rode a horse almost delicately, “as if he had just asked it to dance,” and the incomparable Rosie Napravnik, who softly sweet-talked her mounts into doing everything her brave heart desired.
A horse race is a high-speed stampede of mass and chance, with a drove of thoroughbreds barreling around every post and turn, then hammering down the stretch to a climactic finish. At any juncture of that trip, an innocent clip of one hoof can send humans and horses into a mangled pile-up in the dirt. Imagine yourself in a forty-miles-per-hour car crash, minus the car.
Danger surrounds the racetrack just like its white wooden fence. Always injured or on the mend, jockeys ride as often as seven or eight times a day; a few die every year on the track, face down in the dirt. But that is not their biggest fear.
