The Legend of Zippy Chippy (23 page)

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 consecutive 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
.

Perfection is attained by slow degrees;

it requires the hand of time
.

Voltaire

An athlete on a hot streak catches everybody's attention. Joe DiMaggio's record fifty-six-game hitting streak brought America to a breathtaking halt in those summer afternoons of 1941. Cal Ripken's 2,632 consecutive games played astounded baseball fans and team doctors everywhere. From 1915 to 1940, the Edmonton Grads women's basketball team put up 502 wins, 78 of them in a row. Pakistan's professional squash ace Jahangir Khan won 555 straight matches between 1981 and 1986. However, for the believers, apparently it doesn't matter if the record is going the wrong way, accumulating losses instead of wins. Records are records, and Zippy was setting a new one every time they wrangled him into the starting gate … hoping like hell he would find his way out.

The year 2001 marked the one hundred and eighty-third consecutive year of the Three County Fair and the seventy-first year of operation for its racetrack. At ten years old, Zippy had just gone through a long, cold winter in the snowbelt of the Finger Lakes, and with retirement still a possibility, there was some doubt as to whether or not he would be back for the start of the race season.
Over the past six months, he had received more fan mail, appearance requests, and media interviews than ever before. Concerned about the absence of the track's biggest draw, a reporter from the
Daily Hampshire Gazette
called Felix at home.

“You better believe we be there,” said the trainer. “If I die, fuhgeddaboudit. But if I don't die, we be there.” Track officials at Northampton took that as a yes. No doubt about it, Felix and Zippy shared some admirable traits – like enthusiasm that could not be dampened by a hailstorm, and the work ethic of a Canadian beaver.

On Sunday, September 9, the first day of the fall meet, the midway smells of popping corn, frying onions, and accidents at the pig races wafted around the track. As he strode out onto the reddish dirt for the ninetieth race of his career, Zippy Chippy looked like the embodiment of confidence. And why wouldn't he answer this call to post with an ounce of bravado and a strut in his step? He was coming off what for him was a winning streak. In a relatively short span, he had trounced two baseball players and two non-thoroughbred racehorses that were trussed up and lugging vehicles behind them.

It was apparent from the outset that the little fairground track in Northampton was not prepared for the media hype celebrating Zippy Chippy's blind perseverance and dogged willpower to continue to run professionally. Racing against a field of maidens with a combined 0-for-132 loss record, Zippy attracted a feature writer from
USA Today
, the
CBS Sunday Morning
television crew, and staff writers for all the major newspapers from Boston to Albany. Looking past the hordes of cameras and microphones at the other horses, who were not surrounded by reporters, Zippy knew only too well that he was the star of this show. A nip here, a hat grabbed there – his unpredictable antics kept the media both on edge and keenly interested. If he could have read his own press
clippings, there's no doubt that at this point in his career he would have been communicating with Felix through his agent.

When the bell rang, Zippy, with Juan Rohena aboard, broke clean and chased a couple of young pacesetters during the early stages of the race. From the fifth position out of the chute, he wound up fifth at the finish. His performance was described tersely as “through early,” which is great if it's Friday and you're trying to beat the traffic home. Not so good if you finished sixteen and a half lengths behind the winner, Love Flight. The only horse he beat was Steel Surfing, who failed to finish after “buck jumping” and “high kicking” his way out of the gate. Perhaps he was just mocking Zippy's running style. Who knows?

In his next start at Northampton six days later, again with a modest purse prize of $3,100, the chart described Zippy's performance as follows: “dueled, steadied second turn, bore out all three turns, tired.” Well, at least he dueled instead of dwelt. However, floating wide on the turns cost him his stamina, and loss number ninety-one was in the books. Oddly, Limited Speed came in first and Timing Perfect came dead last.

One disgruntled bettor loudly voiced the opinion that Zippy Chippy was so slow that his jockey had to call home from the halfway mark to tell his wife he'd be late for dinner. True enough: Zippy Chippy, more than any other professional racehorse, did not like to be rushed. He was never ahead at the wire, but he was certainly ahead of his time and well out in front of today's “slow movement.”

Speed boils our blood these days, while deadlines dominate our brains. Soon we will have “virtual assistants” to read our books and give us thumbnail summaries. After Toyota got rid of the “andon cord,” which every employee could pull to stop the assembly in order to address a fault immediately, production
increased dramatically. So did the problems the company was postponing fixing. Today Toyota is the world's largest manufacturer of cars and the world's largest recaller of cars, thirty-one million and counting.

One-Minute Bedtime Stories
is a popular collection of fables parents can read to their children in sixty seconds or less. They're a little different, in that Snow White is a neurotic chain smoker and two of the dwarfs are named Speedy and Gonzales. These nano narratives accelerate those quality moments with the kids so you can spend more time lying in bed not sleeping, worrying about all the things you have to get done tomorrow, most of which you didn't have time to get done today.