The Legend of Zippy Chippy (2 page)

Every time professional sports crank it up a notch with more intensity, more violence, and more blind will to win, they use the mantra “Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing” to sell their juiced-up product. Over time that quote has become an easy excuse for abhorrent and dangerous behavior.

With sports our metaphor for life, ordinary citizens have become, by osmosis, much like the professional athletes they pay too much to watch. As long as results are attained, cheating is okay. Sabotaging a colleague is smart strategy, and greed really has become “Wall Street good.” The means justify the end, and the means – drugs, lip readers, bullies badgering their own teammates, bounties paid to injure an opponent, concussions, suicides – really are mean. If “Kill or be killed in order to win” is the curse, then a quote by Cassius Longinus might lead us to the cure. “In great attempts,” said the Greek philosopher, “it is glorious even to fail.” Trying and striving and persevering – those are the elements that spell true success in the field of sports and in the game of living. Winning is a welcome reward, but losing ought not to be a life-or-death consequence.

Stupendously, at the turn of this century, a racehorse by the name of Zippy Chippy became America's greatest “attempter.” Glorious was this horse in failure, tireless in the trying game. There was no winning, no cheating, no million-dollar contract for this remarkable athlete, because when all was said and done and put out to pasture, he was the great Zippy Chippy – a record-setting, always-struggling, full-striding scoundrel who became the best thoroughbred in professional racing at stealing people's hearts.

A champion runner doesn't even know he's in the race.

He runs because he loves it
.

Anonymous

Zippy Chippy was bred to be a champion. He was procreatively designed not just to keep pace with other racehorses but to verily blow them all away coming down the homestretch. He was conceived by two half-ton horses rutting for money at the end of a long lineup of remarkable heritage. Sparked by spectacular bloodlines and infused with expensive sperm, Zippy Chippy's pedigree was steeped in high-stakes success.

Zippy was the great-great-grandson of Native Dancer, the dominant “Gray Ghost” who lost only once in his career of twenty-two races. Zippy was also the great-great-grandson of Bold Ruler, the father of Secretariat, the greatest thoroughbred of them all. He was a direct descendent of Triple Crown winner War Admiral, who won twenty-one of twenty-six starts, nosing out Seabiscuit to become Horse of the Year in 1937. War Admiral was the son of Man o' War, the horse who smashed world records and won races by as much as one hundred lengths on his way to winning twenty-one of his twenty-two starts. Count Fleet, the 1943 Kentucky Derby winner who captured the Triple Crown by twenty-five lengths in the Belmont Stakes, also contributed to Zippy's
DNA
chart.

Zippy Chippy was the grandson of none other than the great Northern Dancer, the little Canadian colt that was passed over at his 1962 yearling auction, forcing corporate tycoon E.P. Taylor and Windfields Farm to keep him.

The runt of the 1961 litter that stable hands joked looked like a golden retriever was not small but low, stocky, and powerful. Built like a military tank, Northern Dancer was fearless, unyielding, and above all, feisty. This muscular colt had more than a will to win; he had an unnatural hatred of losing. The “Pocket Battleship” seemed to have something to prove to his doubters every time he went to post. And he did.

In a brief two-year career, the bonny bay colt had fourteen victories in eighteen trips around the track, never once finishing out of the money. His short, choppy strides worked like the pistons of a powerful V8 engine. Detroit could not manufacture the horsepower Northern Dancer naturally possessed.

In 1964 Northern Dancer won the Kentucky Derby in a jaw-dropping time of two minutes flat, breaking an eighty-nine-year-old record. He then won the Preakness and Canada's Queen's Plate, the oldest continuously run sports event in North America. His earnings of $32,258 per start would soon pale in comparison to the money he'd make for a one-night stand with an ovulating mare.

Cited by the National Thoroughbred Racing Association as “one of the most influential sires in thoroughbred history,” Northern Dancer was, simply, the most magnificent stud in the history of thoroughbred racing. His initial stud fee of $10,000 was higher than any Canadian horse before him and it quickly skyrocketed as his first crop of youngsters started piling up victories. In 1970 his son, Nijinksy II, became the first horse in thirty-five years to win the English Triple Crown. In the early eighties, servicing up
to forty mares a season, his stud fee was $300,000 and his annual income was $12 million. In 1981, ten of Northern Dancer's offspring sold at an auction for $13,335,000; the sire himself had been passed over at $25,000. Soon he was earning $1 million for one regal roll in the hay. (Although technically, that's not how it's done.) In the spring of 1982, Windfields Farm's syndicate of shareholders, led by Charles Taylor, turned down an offer from a French consortium to buy the horse for $40 million. Northern Dancer was twenty-six years old at the time; the life expectancy of a thoroughbred is twenty-five to thirty years. Still, with great riches came low humor. When Taylor asked his right-hand man how an afternoon's breeding session had gone, stable manager Joe Thomas replied, “Perfectly. Except he spilled about half a million dollars' worth on the floor.”

By the time of his death in 1990, Northern Dancer was genetically responsible for one thousand stakes-race winners; his progeny of 295 winning horses amassed career earnings of $183 million. In the 2015 Kentucky Derby, a full twenty-eight years after Northern Dancer bred his last mare, every one of the eighteen horses entered in the race often called “the two most exciting minutes in sports” boasted this stud's name on the sire side of their charts. That's more than strong genes; that's Kryptonite
DNA
delivered by bullets.

When aficionados of horse racing hear the names Northern Dancer, Man o' War, Count Fleet, Bold Ruler, Native Dancer, or War Admiral – all ancestors of Zippy Chippy – they put their hands together and look to the heavens. Zippy's blue-blooded ancestry was royalty at its absolute richest! You have to go back to King Solomon to strike gold that glitters more brightly than Zippy Chippy's natal star. This planned production was akin to breeding a Princess Grace of Monaco with a King Juan Carlos
of Spain and … unfortunately coming up with a Prince Harry. Look, it's not an exact science, okay?

It didn't take long at all – kind of a “Wham! Bam! Thank you, Listen Lady.” She would be Zippy's mom; Compliance was his dad. Odd that the mother of Compliance was a mare called Sex Appeal and the grandfather of Listen Lady was a stallion named What a Pleasure. Stud services rarely come with this sort of civility.

Eleven months after the romp in the rutting barn, on April 20, 1991, a slime-soaked little foal slipped out of dam Listen Lady and onto the soft straw floor in a stall at Capritaur Farm in upstate New York. This dozy, all-brown baby with his big head, spindly legs, and a tiny white pyramid imprinted on his forehead struggled to his feet, took two steps forward, and stopped.

He was not hesitating at the shock of his new and unfamiliar surroundings, because even back then, Zippy Chippy was fearless. He was not hesitating at the uncertainty of his physical capabilities, because really, he would develop into an “iron horse” of sorts, making a mockery of the statistic that the average thoroughbred makes about fifteen starts.

At only a few minutes old, Zippy Chippy came to a full stop in order to look around and get a handle on things. He took his sweet time gazing off into the distance at nothing in particular, or possibly a cloud formation in the shape of a bunch of carrots. Taking his time and daydreaming – this would be his style and his philosophy of life. And really, who are we to judge a dreamer as being less relevant than a doer?

So this cute little unstable fellow stood his ground in that barn on that spring day so many years ago, and his body language verily screamed,
Hell no, I won't go!
But nobody listened to him, so he lay down and had a nap.

Men seldom do listen. They refuse to stop and ask for directions when they're lost, which prompted comedian Roseanne Barr to say that only a man can read a map because only a man can imagine that one inch equals ten miles.

Men never listen when it comes to horses, either, believing that they know best when it comes to how to breed 'em and bet 'em, how to train 'em and ride 'em. They also don't listen to their horses – the very reason we have “horse whisperers” but not “human whisperers,” although a certain former U.S. president sure could have used one: “No, Bill, hit that thing with a gavel or something. Nobody's going to believe that intern is coming to the Oval Office to deliver a pizza!”

Somewhere from the back of the small crowd straining to peek into the stall, a voice, maybe that of a seasoned trainer or a wizened stable boy, said, “He's on his feet and lookin' good!” And based on that assessment, Zippy Chippy was destined for a career as a racehorse. Every race day his handlers would haul him out of his comfortable stable and lead him onto a track, where he got his shoes all dirty; if it had been raining, the muck would splash all over his chest and sometimes right in his face. Along with a healthy appetite, Zippy Chippy's quirkiness was established at birth.

There is little doubt that Zippy wanted to run … east to the Adirondack Mountains, where he'd do a bum slide across a frozen Lake Placid, or north up to Canada, where he would seek refuge as a “track dodger” and score a sweet healthcare package. Running free over grassy knolls with your mane being combed by the wind – that's what horses were meant to do. He just didn't want to run in a race with other horses. That was demeaning, and too confrontational. Being saddled in leather and then decorated with silks of bright, tacky colors – good gawd. Was there no
trainer in North America who had ever heard of soft tones, like camel or even taupe?