The Legend of Zippy Chippy (8 page)

Those two consecutive second-place finishes proved to be Zippy's most successful stretch of racing so far as a thoroughbred. The horse brought joy to his owner sparingly, and Felix cherished those special moments of relative success.

“Not everybody can be a winner,” Felix would say to reporters, who were now taking an unusual interest in a horse headed for his seventy-seventh outing. When a sportswriter asked the owner if his horse, who was often described in the race footnotes as “no threat,” was showing signs of melancholia, Felix was quick to put him straight: “No, he wanna run, he's always ready to go.” Then, rubbing Zippy's nose and slipping him a candy, he added, “But he don't always go too good.” Although Felix's message was usually upbeat, he was wearing his “Zippy Chippy” peaked cap a little lower over his eyes than normal these days.

They bumped along like that – the cocky, underachieving racehorse and his cockeyed, optimistic trainer. In their division
of duties, Zippy let Felix do the worrying. Unfazed by his track performance and up to his usual shenanigans, Zippy, it seemed, loved to – no,
lived
to – torment Felix. Never having cuddled up together in the winner's circle, Felix and Zippy weren't even that comfortable with each other in the barn. “Once, I take my eye off him, and just like that … he got me!” said the trainer.

They were standing in front of the horse's stall when Felix turned to pick up a bucket, and Zippy turned to pick up Felix. The trainer found himself suspended in midair, yelling for help and flailing his arms around behind him, trying to get Zippy to release him. Zippy had picked him up by the collar and was holding him a foot off the ground. Felix's angry shouts at the horse to put him down were answered by the loud laughs of a few track people watching the two of them perform this shed-row slapstick act. The louder Felix screamed, the more raucous the laughter of the bystanders, many of them workers now coming over from other barns.

Eventually Zippy got tired of the gag and put his owner down. “He's a strong horse,” Felix said, now that his feet were back on terra firma. “He can hold you up for a long time.” Forget Man o' War and Bold Ruler; Zippy Chippy's most influential ancestors may have been Laurel and Hardy!

Strangely, despite the growing winless streak, the teacher and his petulant student had settled into a strongly bonded team over the last couple of years. Zippy would defy his jockey or misbehave on the backside, and Felix would make excuses for him. The trainer would make predictions of great success, and the horse would dash them by ten lengths. The owner would often punish his prankster by locking him in his stall and closing the shutters, but then he would check in on him frequently to make sure he was okay. As discouraged as the man might become, Felix was still reluctant to enter Zippy in “claiming” races, where his chances of
winning would be much better against less talented horses, but for the price of a few thousand dollars, anybody could take possession of him after the race was over.

“I don't want some crazy person owning Zippy Chippy,” said Felix. The rolled eyes of his fellow trainers indicated that might already be the case.

Given Zippy's fiery temper and irritable disposition, nobody within nipping distance was safe from the poopy-brown horse when he was in a bad mood. When his ears went straight back and his lips suddenly parted to reveal his long, yellowed teeth, you had just been warned! Zippy Chippy bit more handlers than anyone can remember and drove off every potential buyer who dared to come size him up in the barn. Any new owner coming to examine Zippy in his stall with the intent to buy him would have been wise to wear a helmet and hockey gear.

Emily “Pull No Punches” Schoeneman is friend and family to the Zipster, but not always a fan.

“I tell you, Zippy Chippy is a miserable thing who's crabby all the time, wants everything done for him when he wants it, makes faces, bites, kicks, and …” – and here's where the sugar-coating ended – “is not very intelligent.” (On a personal note, as a man who was married once, and was occasionally accused of insensitivity, my question to Emily: “And your point is …?”)

“Oh yeah, he can be mean,” said Felix, in a painful understatement. “Once, he pin me in the corner of the stall for almost an hour.” Felix demonstrated how he had crouched and faked left while the horse blocked right. “I go this way, he go too. I go that way, he's already there.”

Every head fake Felix made was met by a bigger head. Felix went down on all fours and the horse reared up on his hind legs.

“And he get his foot up in the air like this, like he's gonna kick you too!”

Finally, while still backed into the corner, Felix stopped trying to outmaneuver the monster, and Zippy dropped his striking hoof. A groom with a handful of alfalfa distracted the horse long enough for the trainer to escape the stall. Zippy Chippy's ample appetite always trumped his anger.

“He won't let nobody near him but me. Except my daughter Marisa,” said Felix, his voice cracking a little.

Our bravest and best lessons are not learned

through success, but through misadventure
.

Amos Bronson Alcott

At some point, when Zippy had almost eighty losses under his girth belt, Felix admitted that maybe his horse wasn't as fit as his rivals. A unique labor shortage was likely to blame, because after he bucked off nearly every exercise rider at the track, none of them would go near him. Taking Zippy Chippy – an athlete who preferred not to practice – out for a workout could be a career-ending experience for an exercise boy, or, at the very least, a big pain in the ass that required frequent attention with ice packs. So Felix had Marisa introduce Zippy to the exercise barn … and the exercise barn made a lousy first impression.

Also known as a Eurociser, the exercise track is an open-air barn partitioned into separate sections with heavy-duty rubber breakers. It allows several horses to jog at the same speed and at the same time, as the overhead apparatus moves in a circle like a midway ride. The function of the machine is to lead the horses around automatically at a pre-set pace, thereby freeing up the track hands to leave and do other chores.

On Zippy's first visit to the barn, he challenged the basic design and purpose of the Eurociser. Ignoring her father's rule
that Zippy be alone in the jogging circuit, Marisa thought she'd save time by putting another one of their horses, Cowboy, in the section in front of Zippy. Once she got the machine going and the horses jogging, she went back to the barn. The system worked for five, maybe ten, minutes before she heard a great commotion and the kind of noises generally attributed to stallions in a death fight over a filly. For whatever reason, Cowboy had stopped abruptly, and the partition between him and Zippy had hit him hard in the buttocks.

“Hint, hint! Move forward! But Cowboy was one dumbass,” remembered Marisa.

When the bumper swung back and slammed into him a second time, Cowboy froze in place, and the thick rubber barrier went up and over top of him. Suddenly Zippy and Cowboy were in the same section and moving forward at a good clip. Zippy couldn't believe his luck – he had found a playmate in the boring old exercise barn.

Marisa watched in horror as the two delinquents ran wild, wreaking havoc on the circulating system, getting their reins crossed, and butt-bumping each other at every turn. A couple of track hands ran to the rescue and shut the power off, and tried to get hold of the calmer of the two culprits first.

“Every time those guys got close to corralling Cowboy, Zippy would interfere and they had to start all over again. Zippy was having way too much fun,” recalled Marisa.

It took twenty minutes to get control of Cowboy and another ten to harness Zippy, and when everybody left the barn it was in shambles – the power line sheared off and two bumpers smashed up.

“You could hook a hundred, a thousand, horses up to the jogging machine and this would never happen,” Marisa said. Typical Zippy Chippy – whenever trouble was not following him around, he'd go looking for it.

The next time Zippy visited the exercise barn, Felix took him there himself, along with a groom and a walker. Circling the covered track in a stately fashion, Zippy appeared to enjoy it at first. Showing off for his audience of three, Zippy pranced around like he was one of those painted horseys on an antique merry-go-round. That's when Felix and the handlers felt confident enough to return to the barn.

It didn't take long for Zippy to become bored with the routine – or, worse, feel he was being ignored. So he kicked out the top board of the track's outer fence and crushed the electric box that operated the automatic apparatus. With a vengeance, Zippy proceeded to smash the jogging machine to pieces until he was unceremoniously escorted from the premises. Not willing to risk a third demolition derby, the barn manager banned Zippy from the exercise station. Mission accomplished: he would never have to train there again.

Handlers who couldn't get Zippy his food on time simply refused to bring it. They knew too well the penalty for a late delivery. Zippy had adjusted the Domino's Pizza delivery promise to suit his temperament: dinner arrives within twenty minutes or you get free first aid.

“He can be mean with people and other horses,” admitted his trainer, “but he's a horse with lots of personality.” Yeah, that's what prison inmates say about that special brand of criminal on death row – lots and lots of personality.

Felix's partner Emily heartily disagreed: “He's not really mean at all. He doesn't realize he's hurting you. Like that time he bit Felix in the back, he just stood there like,
What's up
?” Just goofing around is all.

Zippy's idea of fun was different from that of other horses but not unlike the eye-poking, hair-pulling, nose-twisting slapstick of
the Three Stooges. If owners named horses based on performance and personality, “the Fourth Stooge” would have fit this one to a T.

After a few more consecutive last-place finishes in the late spring of 1998, Felix rested Zippy for a few months – time off for bad behavior. Mostly he would hang out in the paddock with Felix's other horses between an early breakfast and suppertime. Soon Zippy's mood improved remarkably. He didn't bite anybody for almost two weeks. He was happy being hot-walked around the barn, and he ate a lot fewer hats than normal. It was obvious this horse was quite content to enjoy the home life of a racehorse, without actually racing. It was becoming clear that Zippy Chippy saw the barn as more of a frat house than a place to rest and recover between races. He enjoyed the company of other horses, just not competitively.