The Legend of Zippy Chippy

by William Thomas

  Those who watched the race but declined to bet rated their chances of cashing a winning ticket on Zippy Chippy as about the same as seeing a man go to the moon in a lawn chair propelled by a bunch of helium balloons. Hey, it could happen, but …

  As his people gathered in the barn after the race, rubbing his nose and spoiling him with treats, the press cornered Felix with one question in mind: Would he finally stop the bleeding at ninety-nine losses, or would he go for one hundred even?

  “We’re just taking everything a day at a time,” he replied. Smart thinking, because if you don’t think every day is important in its own right, try missing one once in a while. But as he walked away, clutching Zippy cautiously by his leather lead, Felix shook his head and smiled to himself. The media, he thought, they never ask the right questions. The correct question was, What do we have to lose?

  WHAT EXACTLY ARE THE ODDS OF A MAN

  GOING TO THE MOON IN A LAWN CHAIR?

  A lot better now that Larry Walters of North Hollywood, California, has pushed that envelope up into the jet stream.

  Time magazine’s Man of the Year for 1982 was the computer, “Machine of the Year.” Bad choice. Me, I picked Larry Walters, who went where no man had dared to go before, at least not in a lawn chair. Larry accepted the challenge of the human spirit and showed amazing resourcefulness, and although (as any woman could have predicted) he did screw up big time, he also did not die. Far too many men perish after uttering the words “Watch this!”

  Larry had experienced a Peter Pan–style dream in which he hooked himself to a bundle of balloons and floated high past the sprawling Los Angeles metropolis and into the desert beyond. This, I think, is the dream of every man who wears a cap with a red feather on the side and a leotard that is way too tight. So Larry built his dream ship, which consisted of a fold-up aluminum lawn chair attached to forty-five helium-filled weather balloons and a bunch of milk jugs full of water for ballast. Simple by design, Larry’s homemade dirigible had going-up power, coming-down weight, and a lawn chair where a cockpit would normally be. His on-board equipment consisted of a two-way radio, an altimeter, a wristwatch, a Coke, a sandwich, and a pellet pistol. Because he lacked a pilot’s locker, Larry’s aviation tools were selected for their ability to fit in the front pockets of his pants.

  I know what you’re asking yourself: Why the wristwatch? Well, that was so Larry could make it home in time for supper after his inaugural flight. The purpose of the pellet gun was to shoot out the weather balloons in the event he had to make an emergency landing.

  On the morning of July 2, 1982, Larry strapped himself into his helium-charged contraption, christened Inspiration 1, intending to follow his flight plan, which went over Long Beach and then headed three hundred miles east, over the Mojave Desert. Southwest Airlines was a little peeved, because normally that’s their route.

  Larry was tethered to earth by three ropes tied to his Jeep; his girlfriend cut the first one and the other two snapped unexpectedly, and – WHOAAAAA! – “Lawn Chair Larry” launched prematurely.

  Rising faster than a speeding basket, he reached an altitude of fifteen thousand feet in a matter of minutes. Witnesses agreed that anything that leaves the ground that fast is usually taking supplies to the space station. Not one but two commercial airline pilots, from Delta and TWA, reported the sighting of a man in a lawn chair flying through the primary approach corridor of the Long Beach Airport. Drug testing being what it is in the airline industry, it took great courage for the pilots to report Larry to the control tower.

  Still rising and getting dizzy in the cold, thin air, Larry began his descent by shooting out the weather balloons, until he accidentally dropped the gun overboard. Lawn Chair Larry came down out of the sky faster than … well, faster than a guy strapped into a lawn chair and attached to really heavy milk jugs. As he headed for a crash landing on a golf course, the balloons’s cables somehow wrapped themselves around a power line. Dangling from the wire like a tangled-up puppet, Larry miraculously failed to die. Eventually he was rescued by some golfers, who were given a Breathalyzer test by police after they reported what they’d seen.

  Larry subsequently appeared in magazine ads for Timex, the maker of the wristwatch he was wearing during his flight. Larry’s Timex took a licking and kept on ticking, but for years his face twitched every time he spotted a lawn chair.

  Larry was paid $1,000 for the Timex ad and fined $1,500 by the United States Federal Aviation Administration for entering international airspace without an airplane.

  Free-falling from three miles out of the sky in a lawn chair – guys like Larry and horses like Zippy Chippy do not fold, no matter what the odds.

  TWENTY-THREE

  When the world says, “Give up,”

  Hope whispers, “Try it one more time.”

  Anonymous

  On a gorgeous late summer afternoon in Northampton, Massachusetts – September 10, 2004 – the trainer and his horse-for-life went through their early pre-race routine. Zippy was fed and watered, washed and dried. The track vet had been by earlier to check his legs, jogging him up and down the shed row to make sure he was sound. No swelling and no limping meant no late scratch necessary. Zippy was fit as a fiddle. Okay, an old fiddle, in that he was being prepped for race number one hundred while the total number of races of the seven other horses was eighty-two.

  Felix gave him the game plan: break clean, keep pace with the pack, and sprint for the wire mid-stretch. The horse nodded in agreement, and when Felix turned to grab his harness, Zippy knocked the trainer’s hat off with his nose.

  “Zippy is healthy and happy,” said Felix. “He wants to run. We get a terrible ride Saturday, but with a shorter race and another jockey, I think Zippy can win his one hundredth race and then probably retire.”

  There they were, striding side by side, headed for Zippy Chippy’s historic one hundredth post parade. Together still, despite so many things that could have derailed their relationship along the way. During that extraordinary number of races, Zippy could have suffered a career-ending injury. Similarly, Felix could have suffered a career-ending injury, delivered by Zippy’s large teeth or back feet. Zippy’s record of ninety-nine consecutive losses didn’t seem to bother either the man or the mount – at least until some smart-ass hot-walker strolled by their stall singing, “Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, ninety-nine bottles of beer …”

  Zippy Chippy seemed to attract wise guys like flies to an unkempt pen. Back home in Rochester, the hot topic of the day was the naming of the new commuter ferry that would link that city to Toronto. The Breeze seemed to be a clear winner, until a letter from Mike Mumford of nearby Greece, New York, appeared in the Democrat and Chronicle. “Good name but bad bet,” it read. “In honor of the legendary racehorse Zippy Chippy, I suggest the ferry be renamed Zippy Shippy.” Zippy had always been the butt of jokes by America’s most high-profile comedians. Now the amateurs were weighing in.

  Calm and all saddled up, Zippy heard the paddock judge yell for one last time, “Riders up!” With a push from Felix, Willie Belmonte vaulted up and aboard the horse. Jockey and mount were comfortable with each other. Zippy had shown the rider the respect of never having tossed him down the track like a human bowling ball. Many of the horse’s exercise riders wished they could make that claim.

  It was twenty minutes to post time, and the odds were tumbling fast in Zippy’s favor. The jockeys took one turn around the paddock’s walking ring, feeling the quiet power of the beasts beneath them and getting a sense of their dispositions on this day. Today the paddock was a free-for-all, with fans three deep at the fence and parents holding children on their shoulders. Willie Belmonte had to smile at the irony of the horse with the worst record in the race getting all the attention of a Derby winner.

  A steady crowd still poured through the fairgrounds gate, half of them climbing the steps into the covered grandstand, the rest staking out prime positions with lawn chairs down on the tarmac. With Zippy r
unning in the second race, many of them had arrived late. It was a brief five furlongs with a low purse of $3,100, but none of that really mattered, because this was not your usual racetrack crowd. These people were common, mostly rural folk, here to watch their lovable aging gelding close out his career. They were loud with laughter and effusive with their affection for this unpredictable half ton of trouble who, when he twitched those ears and bared those teeth, could easily be mistaken for a jackass.

  The real racetrack aficionados could be identified by the forms in their hands and the pencils behind their ears. Most stood in front of a row of eight television monitors that were simulcasting races from other tracks. Others sat quietly handicapping races in “The Clubhouse,” which here at the tri-county track was really a multi-vehicle garage set up with long tables and folding chairs. A few people with programs in their back pockets lined up at the Steak on a Stick stand. Northampton was no “Big A” like Aqueduct; its dining area was more coffee-truck concession than four-star establishment.

  At 1:45 p.m., everyone, even the track staff and vendors, gathered to watch the horse of the hour prance out onto the dirt oval for his one hundredth appearance as a professional thoroughbred racehorse. When the bugler called for the parade to post, there was a smattering of applause for the first six horses that emerged from the paddock and sauntered onto the track. But when horse number seven came into view, the party at the fair was on. Women screamed, men whistled, and the cameras clicked like never before, because this was Zippy Chippy’s century entry, most certainly his last race. This was small-town history anointed with national importance. This would become the kind of firsthand folklore reminiscing that seniors pass on to their bored grandchildren.

  With his bright-orange silks nicely matched to his dark-brown mount, Willie Belmonte waved for the cameras and winked at the crowd gathered at the rail, close enough to touch. With eleven wins in five days of racing, he was the leading jockey at this meet. “He’s pretty photogenic, huh?” he said, as Zippy took it all in stride, bobbing and nodding and teasing his flock.

  Once out onto the track that had so many tight turns it was nicknamed the “bull ring,” perhaps sensing that his rider was stealing the spotlight, Zippy threw a hissy fit. He reared up and kicked backwards until Felix and a handler ran onto the track to calm him down. Belmonte quickly dismounted before he got tossed and added his weight to this tug-of-war. First the crowd laughed, and then they applauded; they had already gotten their money’s worth, and Zippy hadn’t made it to the starting gate yet. Subsequently, the Baltimore Sun ran a photo on the front page of its sports section showing the horse up in the air, ass-first, with three men struggling to bring him back to earth. The headline read, AT RACE 100, HARD TO BLAME “ZIPPY” FOR BEING CHIPPY.

  Not optimistic about the outcome of the race, Belmonte remounted his number seven horse and joked that it would be better if Zippy got his photos taken “at the other end of the race.” He meant, of course, the winner’s circle, a place Zippy had avoided all his life like it was the showcase for buyers from a French canned food company called Viande de Cheval.

  The punters of this short race ignored Zippy Chippy, considering him a non-factor. At the other extreme, fans of Zippy Chippy, both here at Northampton and at tracks all across North America, pushed enough money through the betting windows to make him the 2–1 favorite. That is, one chance in two of winning for a horse that had lost ninety-nine races in a row. With this, his eleventh career appearance at Northampton Fair, the management could have divided the wagering windows into two categories, with one marked “Bet with Your Head” and the other “Bet with Your Heart.”

  This fall fairgrounds classic pitted Zippy Chippy, the veteran who had pounded it out at ten racetracks, two Standardbred ovals, and one baseball outfield against a bunch of snot-nosed (really, when they get all excited and sweaty, the stuff is flying everywhere) three-year-olds who would never know the feeling of losing ninety-nine times in a row. The total age of any four horses in this race was twelve. Zippy was thirteen. Ageless, Zippy Chippy was losing races when some of these young bucks were ponies being rented out for birthday parties.

  Judy Peck, a fifty-eight-year-old mother of six from nearby Springfield, Massachusetts, wearing a Zippy Chippy T-shirt and a Zippy Chippy hat and carrying her Zippy Chippy scrapbook under her arm, spoke for the entire faithful flock when she said, “I guess I’m always cheering for the underdog. We’re hoping one hundred will be the charm.” A Boston Red Sox fan as well, Judy had a large framed photograph of Zippy on her kitchen wall at home.

  The odds on her hero had risen to 7–2, making him the second favorite in the race by the time the bell sounded to open the starting gate and the field of horses rushed to the rail. All except Zippy, who turned to the crowd and reared up slightly, doing what appeared to be a poor imitation of Mel Gibson’s stallion in Braveheart.

  “It was really something to see,” remembered Judy. “All of us – and there was a lot of us – were yelling and screaming Zippy’s name, and as soon as he left the gate he stopped to look to see who was calling him. He knew his name, and he kinda turned to the crowd to acknowledge the applause.”

  Taking a bit of a bow on his two hind legs was an entirely new maneuver for Zippy, as far as anybody could recall. Leaving the gate like a walking circus horse was almost as unique as not leaving the starting gate at all. I mean, really … a curtain call! Who saw that one coming? Willie Belmonte, who had somehow managed not to get thrown off during this spectacle, hustled his mount back up into the pack, but the late start and extra speed needed to catch the others cost them dearly. The leaders forced Zippy to the outside, and Belmonte took him five wide around the first turn. Zippy definitely did not need the extra distance added to his trip round the tri-county oval.

  Coming into the homestretch, Zippy was closing in on the third horse, Trick Me Not, who was only four lengths behind Big Shoulders, the leader. His head was bowed, his legs wobbled a bit, but in closing, he never wavered. Even his following beyond the fence found it quite amazing that the Zipster, after his bow-to-the-crowd start, was challenging the front-runners all the way down the backstretch.

  And then he faded, gradually at first, and then badly. Seven steeds in front of him rushed past the grandstand as one. As Biggs surged to a two-length win at the wire, it wasn’t hard to spot Zippy Chippy – alone, lagging, flagging, and last.

  While Biggs and his jockey, Jesse Hall, were being photographed for posterity in the winner’s circle, Zippy was having his riding saddle unceremoniously removed from his back. While Biggs had a floral wreath hung around his neck, Zippy was walking back to the barn in his sweaty and somewhat wrinkled birthday suit. While Biggs’s record would list just this one win in a short and shabby career of eleven races, Zippy could only dream of a victory in nine times that many trips around the track. Plus one. This one. But whereas Biggs heard only the clicking of a camera, Zippy Chippy listened to the applause of an adoring entourage who had gotten exactly what they came for.

  “Broke in the air from the gate” is how one sportswriter described Zippy’s start. “And the beat, or better yet, the beatings, go on for Zippy Chippy” is how he summarized the final scene.

  Felix seemed to dive headfirst into a deep pit of denial. “Zippy got a bad break today, but what are you going to do?” he said. “You have to take what they give us.” Desperation even brought a religious bent to his way of thinking: “We said we were going to win, but God said no. Zippy had bad luck this week and bad luck last week, and I hope to God he gets better luck next week.” This was strange stuff indeed. Normally after a big loss, Felix would console himself with a couple of cold beers and a President Kennedy misquote.

  “I want to keep him running until he tells me he doesn’t want to run anymore,” said Felix. “The curves here are just too sharp.”

  Scraping the bottom of the barrel of blame with this landmark one hundredth loss, Felix first put it on God, then on lady luck, and finally on
the track. Fortunately Zippy’s greatest fan, Judy Peck, wasn’t standing nearby, or he would have blamed her too.

  “We were pretty sad,” said Judy, “but Zippy really tried his best. He nearly caught up to the rest.” After the horse was toweled down, cooled off, and blanketed down, Felix treated Zippy to a cold beer, which the cocky horse mistook for champagne.

  In his less-than-illustrious career of running in one hundred races and even more training sessions with approximately seven or more horses in front of him each time, or galloping in those early time trials behind the round rumps of a rotating roster of young thoroughbreds, not to mention the one hundred parades to the post following the backsides of all those additional exercise ponies, Zippy Chippy had looked out at the bulging haunches and writhing buttocks of thousands of … okay, to put this in better perspective, in his lifetime Zippy Chippy had to look at more horses’ asses than President Barack Obama did the last time he addressed a joint session of Congress. Not a pretty sight for man nor beast.

  You hear it a lot in sports: “There’s always next year.” But not for this guy, at least not on a racetrack. There wouldn’t be one more race, or another season. They say that when the going gets tough, the tough get going. When the going got impossible … well, that was the beat that the Zipster covered. Zippy Chippy had lost ’em all and won none, and yet who looked like the champ by the time he got to the backside? The Zipster did a little winning spin, preening for the cameras and inhaling sugar cubes from the sticky fingers of those who had stuck by him all these long years.

  Then, standing along the wall of his stall, lost in his thoughts, Zippy seemed to let it all sink in – one hundred saddlings, one hundred bugle calls, one hundred bells, one hundred trips around a circular track with the crowd rooting almost exclusively for him. At this monumental moment, Zippy was likely talking silently to his life partner. Felix, I have to say, you were there for me when I was very nearly sent to the meat factory. You were there in my corner when I lost eighty of my one hundred fights. You were there when I almost won but got nipped at the wire by a nose and then a neck. And you were there when I lost a race to a man in short pants. Felix, as the old joke goes, you’re a f—king jinx!