The Legend of Zippy Chippy (15 page)

Strong and efficient, Canadian jockey Ron Turcotte guided the splendid Secretariat to the 1973 Triple Crown, the first in twenty-five years. Turcotte's greatest fear in sixteen years of racing was not death but being crippled. On July 13, 1978, at Belmont Park, his filly, Flag of Leyte Gulf, got bumped and crumpled beneath him. When the outrider arrived at the scene of the crash, Turcotte was lying in a heap of his own limbs. He said, “My back is broken. I'm paralyzed.” He was, and sadly it marked the end of his career.

The most durable jockeys ride into their forties and fifties, and there is sadness when a rider's days are done. “When a jockey retires,” lamented Eddie Arcaro, “he just becomes another little man.” Unless, of course, you have left a mark so deep and distinctive in the history book of racing that your legacy lives long after your saddle is hung in the Hall of Fame. Like Eddie Arcaro himself, who shares the record of five Kentucky Derby wins with Bill Hartack. Like Johnny Longden, so workmanlike they called him “the Plumber,” or Laffit Pincay, who so often came out of nowhere to steal a race that they nicknamed him “Pincay the Pirate.”

Of all these daredevils who have risked death daily over grass and dirt, one still stands out today, 122 years after he rode his last race. Handsome, smart, and the son of a slave, Isaac Murphy shot to the top of American thoroughbred racing in the 1800s, when almost all jockeys were African Americans. Murphy was the first rider to win the Kentucky Derby three times – in 1884, 1890, then again in 1891 – and the secret to his success was that he whispered to his horses and never used the riding crop. He won 628 of his 1,412 starts – an unprecedented 44 percent winning
average and a record, like Man o' War winning twenty of twenty-one races, that will likely never be broken. Unswervingly honest, he refused to be bribed to lose the 1879 Kenner Stakes, booting Falsetto home, a winner. He attracted great crowds, people wanting to see the jockey who won races with words instead of whips.

Frank X Walker, the first African American poet laureate of Kentucky, claimed that at the height of his career, “Isaac was as famous as Jack Johnson, as fast as Jesse Owens, as dignified as Jackie Robinson, and as admired as Michael Jordan” Walker imagines him in his poem “Murphy's Secret” as a modest man who would explain his riding style this way:

Isaac Murphy died of pneumonia in 1896, at age thirty-six, remembered with the words: “Famous Negro Jockey From Lexington, KY.” In 1967, Murphy's remains, initially buried in an unmarked grave, were found and, in a eulogy that needed no words, reinterred beside Man o' War (1917–1947) at the entrance to the Kentucky Horse Park. The monument reads: “Honor and shame from no condition rise. Act well your part, there all the honor lies.” Fellow Kentuckians, the very best in their sport of thoroughbred racing, two legends in one gravesite – sometimes the world gets it right.

Ask not for whom the bell tolls;

it tolls for thee, Zippy! Zippy? Wake up, Zippy!

For two months, Zippy Chippy practiced long and hard on breaking cleanly from a starting gate. He was inspired by three familiar and highly motivational words: “Run, Forrest, run!” The procedure was simple: three nervous horsemen, including Felix, would wrangle Zippy into his metal cubicle, then one would slam the bar down behind his butt and another would hit the bell. RINGGGGGGGG! Zippy broke free and clear every time. They repeated the routine until it started getting dark and everybody got tired and went home. Clearly a third dwell would not be tolerated by the track stewards at Finger Lakes. They had been embarrassed after the second fiasco in which Zippy was a non-starter; a third non-start would warrant most serious consequences.

When Felix was not working his horse, he was worrying about him. Constantly reminded by hecklers, the handlers, and the media of the looming distinction of eighty-five straight losses, Felix struggled to remain optimistic: “One of these days, he gonna snap out of it. He gonna win a race. You see.”

When reminded that his horse was earning the nickname “Cellar Dweller,” Felix begged to differ. The suggestion to change
Zippy's name to Bringing Up the Rear was entirely unhelpful. Felix was sticking to his story, which made Zippy look like a candidate for Mr. Congeniality. “It's not that he refuse to go,” he said. “He just wants the other horses to go first, and he follow later.”

Yeah, simple courtesy. Of all the things Zippy Chippy has been called – moody, stubborn, mischievous, cantankerous, skullduggerous, and three other things that require a “bleep” button – the word
courteous
has never been one of them. I mean, Zippy might bow and let another horse go ahead of him, but only so he could clip his hoof and trip him from behind.

While on his second “vacation,” Zippy had a good rest, great food, and lots of attention from Marisa and the family. Mostly he would prowl the paddock with the other horses, talking mostly about the good ol' days before they were gelded. And Marisa – oh, how Zippy looked forward to her visits – would lock down the barn and play hide and seek with him. She knew the secret cubbyholes and passages. Zippy knew her scent; it was a pretty intense game, which she usually lost by a giggle.

After a few weeks, Zippy got bored. Felix would show up expecting to walk him but instead had to endure the sight of his horse going stir-crazy. Zippy would paw at the floor while neighing loudly, and then he'd haughtily thrust his nose in the air. His ears would twitch and his nostrils would flare. Zippy didn't want to walk. He wanted to race. Troubled, Zippy was snorting a lot and cocking his head, listening for the sounds of the track. Or maybe he smelled a chip wagon out on the highway or somebody eating a cupcake in the next county. Nobody knows for sure. But everybody agreed he was not happy killing time.
C'mon, let's get it started!

“He just want to run. He want to compete again,” claimed Felix.

So four days after his sixty-day ban was up, Felix and Zippy arrived early in the morning at the Finger Lakes track by truck
and transport trailer. At two-thirty in the afternoon, Zippy would challenge eight other maidens over a distance of a mile and one-sixteenth on dirt. Felix took note of the race conditions: the sky was cloudy, the track was sloppy, and Zippy was unusually chippy. The distance was a bit of a long haul for a horse that hadn't raced in two months, but he appeared up to the challenge. In the barn he snapped at anybody who got near him, and in the paddock he sneered at the other horses. Those days of practicing at the starting gate had improved his break but not his tenor. The Zipster was in fighting form.

On this day, Tuesday, September 8, 1998, nervous tension suffused the atmosphere of the track, and you could feel it all the way up in the glass booth where anxious officials sat with binoculars on their desks. Zippy's new rider, Juan Rohena, must have been wondering,
Why me? Why must my name go into the record books alongside this guy?
Benny Afanador was riding Flavor o'th' Month instead of Zippy, the fans' flavor of the day. Zippy's former jockeys – Leslie Hulet, Pedro Castillo, and Jose Gutierrez – had wisely chosen other horses in this race.

Felix was confident there would be no car wreck today. He had pushed the possibility of the futility record out of his mind and instead convinced himself that this was Zippy's “must win” day. A win on this cool fall afternoon would solve an awful lot of problems. Immediately he'd get the stewards off his back. A victory meant Zippy could never have his name attached to the eighty-five-losses-in-a-row mark. And finally the horse would be the winner his true blue-capped companion always believed he could be.

“He look real good today,” the trainer enthused. True enough, but nobody knew if Zippy's grumpy demeanor meant he'd challenge the others on the track for the prize of $11,200 or go after the purse of an old lady in a nearby strip mall.

Amateur bettors love sloppy tracks and long shots, and although Zippy should have been the unlikeliest shot on the board, particularly over a long and muddy mile race, as usual he went off as one of the favorites. Despite the lousy weather, Zippy's followers were out in force, but they remained strangely silent on this day. The consequence of a dwell weighed heavily on the crowd – from amateur punters to professional trainers and everybody in between. Zippy did not go easily or willingly into his number two post position, but then, he seldom did. Sister Kate was acting up as the horses entered the starting gate, but Glory a Go Go looked cool. Zippy's big butt was the last to disappear in the starting gate and – RINGGGGGGGG! – the bell went off a split second later. But when the track announcer yelled, “And they're off!”, one of them clearly wasn't. The horse in the prime pole position of number two failed to leave the premises.

Despite Juan Rohena's best efforts, Zippy froze at the bell and hesitated before leaving the gate. Starting out a distant ninth, he held that final position over the long course that brought him past the grandstand twice, finally finishing last thirty-eight lengths behind the winner, Glory a Go Go. Benny Afandor and Flavor o'th' Month finished nineteen lengths ahead of him. Only the guy on the John Deere tractor who raked the track after the race hit the wire later than Zippy.

Leaving the gate last, Zippy had taken a leisurely lap around the dirt track. He had had enough time to rub his itchy nose on the near pole, stop to catch his breath at the half pole, and take a leak on the quarter pole before entering the stretch. Zippy had arrived at the finish line just as the track photographer was preparing to have his photo transferred to a milk carton.