The Legend of Zippy Chippy (4 page)

For his very first professional race, on September 13, 1994, three-year-old Zippy Chippy was naturally nervous. Opening days, first dates, and debuts are perilously unpredictable. At best it's a crapshoot, at worst a pratfall. Even people paid to analyze such events seldom predict how a “first ever” will actually unfold.

On that warm fall day, the Belmont Park dirt track was fast, and the field of maidens were all anxious to put their very first win up on the board. Jockey Julio Pezua would have had no reason to expect great things from Zippy Chippy, who went off at a long but reasonable odds of 15–1. The rookie racehorse broke from the gate's sixth pole position only to lag the whole way round and finish eighth in the six-and-a-half-furlong test. With Zippy well out of the money, it was a most forgettable coming-out party. For an athlete of his breeding, there should have been a crowd of fans, or at least a good luck banner. Instead, a few thousand people watched a young horse with a funny name come in eighth in a field of ten horses. Life is seldom fair, for horses and humans alike.

Not one of the horses that finished ahead of him had Zippy's precious pedigree. Disheartening was the fact that he got beat by D'Moment, a loser by forty-seven lengths in his first four races. Retired after only six races, D'Moment won just one race in his career – this one. And for this first race, Zippy earned nothing. By contrast, Funny Cide, a Kentucky Derby winner who would one day share a retirement home with Zippy, earned $25,800 for his debut win and $93,000 for every outing after that. More awful than auspicious was this debut of Northern Dancer's grandson.

Back at the same Belmont track ten days later, under an overcast sky and on a muddy oval with Julio Pezua aboard again, there
was reason for the owner to be encouraged. Zippy struggled from tenth at the start to fifth down the stretch, and finished third behind Mantequilla and But Anyway. Frysinger pocketed $3,360 from the $28,000 purse for Zippy's third-place finish. Not bad.

Eight days after that race, on October 1, with a new jockey named Robbie Davis aboard, Zippy took wide turns in a lackluster performance over just more than a mile on dirt, disappointing his bettors by coming in fourth. Thinking grass might be more to his liking, trainer Carl Domino entered Zippy in a one-mile race on turf. On only five days' rest, Zippy broke from the gate well and held strong to hit the wire third. Jose Santos, a very capable rider who would one day win the Kentucky Derby with Funny Cide, had given Zippy every chance to win the race. Still, with Zippy finishing only three lengths behind the winner, Lord Basil, third place showed some promise. He earned $3,600. Zippy was knocking on the door of success but not showing any real desire to come in and join the party.

Ten days later, with the talented Mike Smith on his back, Zippy Chippy finished twenty-eight lengths behind the winner, Captain Bainbridge, consequently decamping from the classy track of Belmont Park out of gas and out of the money. When a wealthy owner attaches himself to an aristocratic racetrack that's all about money, he expects his horse to contribute to the equation. Zippy, so far, was having none of it. What seemed odd to his owner and trainer was the fact that despite five straight losses, Zippy was still eager to run, accepting the saddling-up session with gusto. When Belmont Park closed in mid-October, Carl Domino moved Zippy and the rest of his stable of horses from Long Island to the “Big A” in Queens, New York.

Aqueduct Racetrack opened its turnstiles in 1894 under the directors of the Queens County Jockey Club. Horse racing had
flourished in North America in the nineteenth century, with the city of Toronto boasting no less than six dirt racetracks, where the grounds were shabby, the rules were fuzzy, and some results were highly suspicious. However it wasn't unusual at the admission price of twenty-five cents to have eight thousand spectators attend a day of racing in that city. The sport crashed in the late 1800s when widespread corruption kept the crowds away from small tracks. Massive racing enterprises like Belmont and Aqueduct marked a great cleansing of thoroughbred racing on the continent. Though Aqueduct lacks the great architecture and rich history of Belmont Park, spectacular horses like Seattle Slew, Nashua, Excelsior, and Count Fleet have brought it great prestige. It also boasted one of the largest restaurants in New York City. Crowds of over seventy thousand spectators came here to watch thoroughbreds like Cigar win his first two races, the beginning of an amazing sixteen-race winning streak. In 1973, the incomparable Secretariat was publicly retired here. Pope John Paul II said mass to seventy-five thousand believers at Aqueduct on October 6, 1995, including dozens of heathens who had misunderstood the phrase “From your lips to God's ear” and showed up hoping for insider tips on long shots.

On October 28, two weeks after he arrived at Aqueduct, Zippy was entered in the second race of the day on a firm track, along with eleven other horses also looking for their first win. With Robbie Davis up, Zippy got off to a good start, keeping pace with the leaders around the first half mile of turf. Then he hit the stretch and, as it turned out, the proverbial wall. He tired and finished ninth, twenty lengths behind the winner, Crosskate, who finally shook off the label of “maiden.”

Nineteen days later and back on dirt, Zippy lagged badly and finished eighth in an eight-horse field, an incredible fifty-four lengths
and a neck behind the winner, Viva La Flag. Even worse, he finished fifty-four lengths behind the second horse, which was named Sixfeetunder. That's when you know you're in way over your head.

This last disastrous outing marked the end of Zippy Chippy racing at class tracks for five-figure purses. Except for two brief appearances at Aqueduct the following year that resulted in unremarkable seventh- and tenth-place finishes, Zippy was dropped from major-league racing for his failure to crack the winner's circle. In his last appearance at Aqueduct he did, however, add a little comic relief to the afternoon program. It was eight days into the new year of 1995, with Richard Migliore on the whip, when Zippy created a match race out of a miserable finish. Even though nine of the horses had crossed the finish line, a real nail-biter broke out in front of the grandstand, and you could hear the excitement in the track announcer's voice: “It's Zippy Chippy and Witchcraft Star, Witchcraft Star and Zippy Chippy as they come neck and neck to the wire!” Appreciating the slapstick, the fans cheered wildly. In a brutal and personal duel down the last eighth mile of dirt, Zippy clipped Witchcraft by a neck at the finish line … thereby coming in tenth in an eleven-horse race. Although a real crowd-pleaser, it was the kind of performance that had handicappers imagining these two horses eventually pulling tourist carriages in Central Park.

Zippy Chippy was subsequently demoted to the minor leagues and motored down the New York State Thruway to a small track in Farmington, a half-hour drive south of Rochester. Basic and built in the early sixties, today Finger Lakes Gaming and Racetrack survives on the money it pulls in from off-track betting and the cavernous casino where hundreds of bettors play the slots, oblivious to the horses racing on the track out back. In the 1920s there were no less than 300 thoroughbred racetracks
like Finger Lakes operating in North America. Today there are 54 tracks and 1,560 casinos, with 10,000 racehorses competing for gaming dollars against 50,000 slot machines. These days the local fairgrounds can't sustain a weekend racing card, but the local charity can host “Casino Night” a dozen times a year. As many tracks battle bankruptcy, often there are more horses in the barns than spectators in the seats out front. It's a diehard demographic that still comes to watch the ponies. Yet the cigar-smoking, beer-before-noon crowd of eccentrics cannot save the sport. The horses are eager, their handlers are willing, but the crowds just don't come anymore. On most afternoons, as few as fifty people watch the races from grandstands built for five and ten thousand. Today, the Finger Lakes Racetrack in Farmington, New York, is a great place to watch the ponies … if you like to be alone.

Great jockeys like Angel Cordero, Pat Day, and Bill Shoemaker have ridden at Finger Lakes, as has female pioneer Julie Krone. Its greatest moment was Independence Day in 2007, when the track doubled its normal purse to $100,000 for the Wadsworth Memorial Handicap in order to attract Funny Cide, winner of the Kentucky Derby, as well as the Preakness. A record crowd of twelve thousand fans came out to watch this handsome chestnut gelding win while barely breaking a sweat.

Early on, Funny Cide was gelded because he was a ridgling, meaning he suffered from an undescended testicle that made it painful for him to run. Zippy Chippy had no such excuse for his early failings. On November 26, 1994, the track was fast, the weather was cloudy, and each contestant was looking for his first career win. The $6,000 purse offered for race five was a full $24,000 less than Zippy had been used to, reflecting the drop in class of the horses he was now running against.

With the benefit of a new trainer, Ralph D'Alessandro, as well as a new jockey and a bunch of slower horses to run against, Zippy's Farmington debut was not nearly as disastrous as his coming-out party at Belmont Park had been. Kevin Whitley gave Zippy a good ride and kept him comfortably in third spot halfway around the oval. But Zippy “flattened out,” according to the race footnotes, finishing fourth and thereby collecting just $300 for his effort.

On thirteen days' rest, Zippy did a little better in his next start at Finger Lakes. D'Alessandro had even talked Finger Lakes legend Leslie Hulet into riding his gelding. The winningest jockey ever at the Farmington oval, Hulet earned almost $18 million in purse money for the owners of his mounts. After stumbling from the number one position to seventh, Hulet did manage to bring Zippy up to the number two spot for most of the race and a solid third at the wire. Zippy finished just three lengths behind the winner, Byby Fran's Kitchen, and he earned $570.

Four days later Zippy took a lackadaisical five-and-a-half-furlong lap around the dirt track, bringing home $183 for coming in fifth, with David Gordon in the saddle. “Late again,” read the footnote on the results chart. Astarforevermore he was not; that horse came in third. He finished just two lengths behind winner Enchanted Mind, and Zippy was definitely in the hunt as the crowd of horses rushed to the wire. From last to fifth in the race for home, Zippy had, at the very least, shown some late speed and tenacity.

On the move again, as the Zipster's purses were going south, he was headed east to Beantown.