The Legend of Zippy Chippy (7 page)

Success consists of going from failure to

failure without losing enthusiasm
.

Winston Churchill

In those first twenty races before Felix Monserrate acquired Zippy Chippy for a pre-owned vehicle with rust spots, the horse had lost on dirt and grass and muddy tracks, under skies that were clear, cloudy, sunny, and rainy. The horse had failed to win with three different Davids in the saddle, two Joses, a Gerry, a Richard, a Mike, a Julio, a Jorge, a Carlos, and a Leslie, as well as a Robbie and a Bobbie. He lost going outside on Inside News, and on another occasion he managed to slip away from Eileen's Embrace. Then he got beat by an Angry Cop. He earned two thumbs down for finishing behind Two Chums Up, and he lost to Nine Years, though Zippy himself was only four. In all those trips to the track, the officials' footnotes described him as “baring out,” “swinging wide,” “drawing off,” “showing little,” “fading fast,” “weakening,” and at best making a “mild bid between foes” to come in third. Zippy Chippy was once even described as “failing to menace” a horse named Shadow Lark, ridden by a guy named Dennis!

Alas, the seasons changed, but Zippy Chippy did not. The losses piled up like bales of hay in the barns out back, one disappointment atop another. The best results the Zippy and Felix
team produced were two unexciting third-place finishes in their first seven races together. In both cases, with David Rivera aboard, Zippy had rallied well in the stretch but was too late to overtake the winners.

No matter what the new plan was, Zippy Chippy went out and proved it wasn't the right one. But then suddenly the sun would break through the dark clouds hanging over Zippy's career, and he would show signs of brilliance. In the first race of the day at Finger Lakes on September 23, 1995, the track was muddy and the purse was a paltry $3,700, to be divided up between eight horses, maidens every one. Zippy got off to a good start but then tapered off to sixth place at the first turn, where to Felix it looked like business as usual. But into the backstretch Zippy surprised everybody by pulling ahead of London Lucky and Me Native Buddie to take sole position of fourth.

Slowly and with confidence, Zippy passed the pack, moving from fourth to third to second and finally to first by a head at the far pole and driving hard. Coming into the homestretch, a real donnybrook broke out between Zippy and Ginger's Appeal for first place. Shoulder to shoulder, they came pounding down the dirt track, two geldings who had never caught the whiff of victory, each believing his time had come. The race caller's voice took on an edge of excitement while fans of long shots and underdogs rushed to the rail to get a closer look.

Jorge Hiraldo used the whip on Zippy while Pedro Castillo hand-rode Ginger's Appeal a half length into the lead. Neither horse faded; both barreled down to the wire at full speed, and when they hit it, Ginger's Appeal won by a nose! A nose! One bloody foot, from eyelash to flaring nostril. One length represents one-fifth of a second in speed. A nose means Zippy lost the race by the blink of an eye, one-fortieth of a second.

The finish-line photo showed two dark noses, one touching the wire and the other, the nose with the star at the top, close to the first horse's ear. Zippy had been wrong-footed. By the luck of the stride, if Zippy had been leaning in and the other horse recoiling, they would have switched places on the results board, with Zippy breaking his losing streak at number twenty-eight. But for the length of one sweat-soaked snout, Felix would look like the genius who had decoded the Zippy Chippy enigma machine, and his horse would shake off a rash of bad outings as well as all the taunting and criticism that came with it.

Zippy the bridesmaid earned $740, which was $1,480 less than the winner. Incredibly, Ginger's Appeal would be retired after twenty-four races with one single win in his entire career: his victory over Zippy Chippy.

Zippy had given it his best shot, Hiraldo had given him a good ride, and Felix, a man who gratefully accepted the small surprises his job offered up, was pleased with both of them. He affectionately slapped the sweaty neck of his favorite horse. “Real close today. Real close. Tomorrow we be closer,” he said with a smile.

Felix held that happy face for a full ten days, and on October 3, on the same track but at a slightly shorter distance, Zippy turned his trainer's facial expression into an all-out grin. With only a furlong left to go in the race, the two horses challenging for the win could not have been further apart. Boardwalk Runner had led the entire way around the track, and Zippy had held down sole position of last place all the way into the homestretch. In an amazing burst of late speed, with the sharp clip of his riding crop, Jorge Hiraldo had Zippy Chippy closing in on the leader like a runaway train in a Denzel Washington movie. From ninth place and behind by five lengths at the top of the stretch, Zippy sped past seven horses on the outside to almost, but not quite, catch
Boardwalk Runner at the finish line. He closed with a rush to beat the third horse, Doctorraisedwell, handily.

Finishing faster than ever before, Zippy was short of a win by a neck! A neck! Fully extended, that's about a quarter of a length! Two feet, for godsake. First a nose and now a neck! Good lord. Zippy was running out of body parts used to measure his near wins, and if he kept this up he might become the first racehorse in history to lose a race by a groin. Felix dined out on those two Herculean efforts by the pet favorite of his stable. “Backa tabacka!” he would say to the press and horse people alike in his soft Ricky Ricardo accent. “My horse, he comes second twice in a row!”

After those two oh-so-close calls, Zippy suffered long stretches of really bad losses, agonizing slumps of six, nine, and seventeen races in a row. These dismal performances caused great grief for the trainer. Once buoyed by two excellent efforts, Felix now grew more disillusioned with each new outing. But – and with the horse with the oversized ass, there was always a butt – Zippy still thought of himself as the prize in the Cracker Jack box. Before each race his head bobbed sharply and resolutely.
Put me in, Felix, I'm ready to run
. After each race his head nodded in confidence and his tail arched high in triumph. In his mind he had won.

Felix tried every trick in the manual to make Zippy Chippy a winner. Although not the most successful trainer at Finger Lakes, Felix was not used to having a horse that lost continually. After all, he had trained Carrie's Turn to eight first-place finishes, earning her owner about $100,000 in purse money. As he watched the horse that beat Zippy have his picture taken in the winner's circle, Felix, mashing yet another metaphor, said to his daughter Marisa more than once: “The victor gets spoiled.”

So, in order to change things up, Felix tried different jockeys, shorter races, longer workouts, more days off. When that didn't
work, exercise riders were switched, saddles were changed, and routines were altered. He mixed up Zippy's feed bucket – always oats, sometimes with corn, then sweet feed one week and bran the next. Firing off ideas in all directions, Felix was in a bit of a fog, strategy-wise. The tactics sounded like they came from Lewis Grizzard's book
Shoot Low, Boys – They're Ridin' Shetland Ponies
.

About thirty months and almost fifty losses later, in the early spring of 1998, without warning or any noticeable improvement in training or tactics, Zippy decided to put a little streak together. On April 14, on a fast track under cloudy skies at Finger Lakes, Zippy Chippy was a slow fifth out of the gate for the short five-furlong test, but quickly closed to third and then second at the far pole. This time it was a horse named Sir Hillard Lewis that caught Zippy's fancy.

With his sights on the leader, Zippy was now challenging instead of sniffing a bunch of bums down the backstretch. The horses moved head to head down the dirt track in front of the grandstand. Zippy's jockey, Benny Afanador, was wearing the green and white silks of trainer Felix Monserrate, as well as a very surprised look on his face. As he moved into the homestretch, Zippy boldly dueled with Sir Hillard Lewis, who looked like he might be tiring. Alas, nearing the end of the short trip, Zippy's opponent proved to have more in the tank than him, finishing first by a length and a half.

On just six days' rest, Zippy had finished a respectable second, earning a whopping (for him) $1,020 in purse money. Comments listed on the results page regarding Zippy's almost-excellent performance included “held his place” and “broke in air,” which caused some people familiar with the horse's off-track antics to assume that Zippy had somehow gotten into some bad curry the night before.

Eleven days later, on the same track at the same distance, Afanador took an awkward turn in the saddle when Zippy broke
badly from the gate's number one position. Athousandthunders was out first and Zippy was last as the herd left the gate and pounded down the back stretch in a flurry of drifting dust.

Steadily gaining ground on the rest, Afanador moved Zippy up nicely into the third spot at the far pole. He held that spot all the way down into the homestretch, where he made a valiant move to nail Rings of a Angle at the wire. A tad late, but still gaining ground on Rings, Zippy finished second by a single length, again earning $1,020 for his second-place finish. Totaling $2,040 for his last two races, Zippy was unaccustomed to such extravagance.

The owner of the winner, Edward Perdue, had a champ as well as a problem with grammar on his hands – not Wings of an Angel or even Rings of an Angel, but Rings of a Angle? This might be the only horse ever to win a race with both a jockey and a typo on his back – except, of course, for American Pharoah, whose misspelled name was talked about so much that the horse started wearing ear plugs. (Honest – he wore ear plugs!).

Nonetheless, Zippy was on a roll. Missing by a length and a half and then just a length showed great improvement on his performance chart. Two close calls usually meant a horse was about to strike gold the next time out and – in horse racing parlance – finally “break his cherry.” Handicappers would expect him to impress even more moving forward.

“Yeah, he run real constant here,” said Felix. Constant? For Zippy Chippy, two second-place finishes in a row was like capturing the Derby and the Preakness.

“For a while there he run pretty good,” said a beaming Felix, a man who could see the positive side of the earth taking a direct hit from another, bigger planet. It only took the odd “backa tabacka” to put the spring back in this trainer's step.

By not winning in those hair-raising efforts, Zippy missed out on his very own “Donut Day.” In this quaint backside tradition, whenever a horse wins a race, the next morning that jockey's agent or the jockey himself must show up with a box of donuts and muffins, enough for the half-dozen people working in that particular barn. Zippy had a habit of ruining Donut Day by turning it into the Breakfast Club for One. Never mind that he snagged Emily's muffin or Felix's black walnut square – if he got close enough to the guy carrying the box, well, I suppose cardboard could taste good if it had enough Krispy Kreme stuck to it.

“It was his favorite day of the week,” remembered Marisa. “I mean, we'd give him one anyway, but that was like a teaser.” While most racehorses turn up their noses at human treats the way a cat will ignore bread, Zippy was a snackaholic. With the exception of sugar cubes and raw carrots, most horses stick to whatever's in the feed bag. Zippy, on the other hand, loved everything that was sticky: cupcakes, ice cream, candy canes, chips, popcorn, chocolate bars, pizza, and peanuts, shells and all.

“Pop-Tarts, brown sugar and cinnamon flavor, that was his favorite,” recalled Marisa. She was a sweet kid who adored her dad but still had great difficulty with the fact that although she could not have hard candy, her dad always had a pocketful of peppermints for Zippy. Pop-Tarts may have been his favorite when Marisa was around, but a bag of Doritos and a cold bottle of beer was the number one snack combo Zippy shared with Felix.

Had Zippy Chippy fully understood the reason behind Donut Day, I'm convinced he would have won a race or two. Three, if Felix had hung a dozen chocolate-frosted along the finish line.

Zippy had accomplished the rare and somewhat twisted feat of seventy-six losses in a row, and his popularity was wreaking havoc
on the tote board. It was now obvious to Finger Lakes officials that the horse was attracting a large following of fans. And boy, were they betting on him! If Zippy had gone off at realistic odds of 35–1, he would have returned about forty dollars to the two-dollar, second-place bettor. Instead, in his last race he had paid only $4.90 to place. The track stewards were grateful that Zippy Chippy was filling up empty seats, but they were puzzled as to why anybody would bet on him.

Compared to the nearly $5,000 he'd made in his two second-place streaks, Zippy usually settled for the chump change of fourth- or fifth-place finishes. Returning to his stable, however, he always did a little Irish jig to let his stall pals know he'd been successful. He was washed, cooled down, fed, blanketed, and asleep within the hour. To his credit, losing was something this horse seldom took to heart. Zippy lost races but never any sleep over it.