The Legend of Zippy Chippy

by William Thomas

  TWENTY-SIX

  For when the One Great Scorer comes to write against your name,

  He marks – not that you won or lost – but how you played the game.

  Grantland Rice, “Alumnus Football”

  Oh, what a career the Zippy horse had: one hundred races, eight second-place finishes, twelve thirds, a whole bunch of fourths, four owners, four trainers, thirty-four jockeys, ten racetracks, one ball field, two harness tracks, a one-vehicle demolition derby, and total earnings of $30,834 on the track.

  Tack on his new friend for life and stablemate Red Down South, and now two adoring families who love him dearly, and you’ve got a horse that could have costarred with Jimmy Stewart in It’s A Wonderful Life. (Although there’s little doubt in my mind that after spending time with Zippy Chippy, George Bailey would have jumped off the bridge over Bedford Falls, mercifully bringing that movie to an end a full hour earlier.)

  And how did he do it? Cleanly – no drugs. The hard way, with not even a little help from his faster friends, who once in a while let him come close to winning but never allowed him to seal the deal. Zippy did it with dogged determination – fifty losses would have been more than enough to break down a normal thoroughbred. He did it with courage – not one horse in racing’s Hall of Fame could endure ten straight losses, let alone ten times that many, and keep on high-stepping onto the track, ready to rumble. And he did it with a lot of crashing and bashing noises. When Zippy entered a barn, anyone who had anything to do with exercise or discipline got extremely nervous.

  People say life is unpredictable, but that’s putting it mildly. Life can be downright diabolical. Did you ever think you would see the day when a horse who lost one hundred races would go down in history as a genuine folk hero, while a guy who won seven Tour de France titles will forever be remembered as a liar and a cheat?

  “He was an honest horse,” remembered sports columnist Bob Matthews of the Zipster. “I didn’t bet on him, but he ran hard. He gave you an honest effort every time out.”

  Every day there’s the temptation to cut corners, juice the results, spin the truth, double dip, and fudge, just a little. Don’t. Zippy Chippy never did, and someday, I believe, he will be in the Hall of Fame. Maybe not the official Hall of Fame in Saratoga Springs, New York, but certainly in America’s Underdog Hall of Fame, located in the hearts of all of us who try and fail and live to try another day.

  The media had a field day with THE CHAMPION OF FUTILITY and THE GOLD MEDALIST OF MEDIOCRITY and ZIPPO! NINETY AND NAUGHT – a lot of deflected sticks and stones, as far as Zippy was concerned. If you scanned a list of every reporter who came up with a clever Zippy Chippy putdown, you would not recognize even one of their names today. Call it fortuitous or even serendipitous, but the best thing Zippy Chippy ever did was never win a race. If he had won one or even two races, he’d have been known as a “nag.” A win would have only served to blemish his perfect record. With his unbroken losing streak, Zippy is special – a beautiful, lovable, cantankerous oddity, a professional plodder, a hero to those who may hit rough times but always find a way to better themselves. The believers, they were the ones who bet on him and kept the tickets in order to remember why.

  He certainly was not the world’s slowest racehorse, not by a long shot. The aforementioned English horse Quixall Crossett racked up 103 losses in his career, often finishing a race when it was getting dark. Japan’s Haru-urara topped that by two with 105 consecutive losses. And a Puerto Rican horse by the name of Dona Chepa lost a mind-boggling 135 races. She truly did earn her nickname, “the Hobby Horse,” like the mechanical one that gives toddlers a bumpy ride in front of the supermarket.

  Zippy wasn’t even the slowest American thoroughbred ever. Thrust put up bigger numbers: 105 losses back in the 1950s. Somehow, all those sportswriters giving Zippy credit for being the “losingest” horse in North America had overlooked Thrust. They had followed the lead of sports columnist Bob Matthews, who, looking back, says simply, “Google got it wrong.” So did Guinness World Records.

  But none of these also-rans ass-kicked and head-butted their way into thoroughbred racing’s Hall of Infamy. Not the way Zippy did. In Britain, Quixall Crossett never lost a race to a cricket player. In Puerto Rico, depressed as she might have been, Dona Chepa never ate a box of cheese-filled quesitos all by herself. And Thrust never took a curtain call out of the chute while the rest of the horses disappeared around the near turn.

  Namewise, he was hardly zippy, but when you total up all the bruises, bite marks, broken equipment, and dented trucks he left in his wake, this horse sure as hell was chippy. And, okay, oddly enchanting, with an attitude that would make a mule seem obedient. Zippy bit, bucked, kicked, and dwelt his way through a remarkable career until he earned – with no small amount of hubris – the right to be called the World’s Worst Racehorse, a banner Zippy Chippy will wear proudly up until his last day in the pasture. No horse can ever lay claim to that title, at least not while winning over as many supporters along the way.

  Zippy’s ten-year career as a thoroughbred racehorse was a Herculean quest to excel, to do his best despite the odds, which were always stacked against him. More workhorse than racehorse, more warhorse than exercise pony, Zippy Chippy challenged life head-on and took on all the tight curves and high hurdles that came with it. And now, romping around the big green paddock with his new best friend, both of them dropping to their knees and rolling around in the dust and dirt before galloping down the pasture’s edge, he has ultimately won the stakes race of his life. Today, the unlucky gelding that the media often called “the little horse who can’t” is this close to getting an appointment secretary. Zippy was never a champ, not nationally and not even at local fairgrounds. He was, however, a world-class scamp. In a world woefully short of eccentrics and real characters, this horse more than filled the bill for those of us who believe boredom is one of life’s mortal enemies.

  Survival with a splash of fun – that was Zippy’s recipe for success. In racing, defeat was not the outcome this horse sought, but neither was it his life’s undoing. Not to have tried time after time, that would have been his downfall. Failure is not a pratfall, the inelegant act of falling down in the face of adversity. Failure is not getting up to fight, again and again, in the end knowing you’ve done your absolute best, leaving the rest to fate. For that alone he can never be forgotten, and long after the remarkable races of other, more successful horses fade, Zippy Chippy will be remembered.

  Above all else, Zippy Chippy was an artist. His self-portrait displays strong strokes of defiance and tenacity, but take a few steps back and you see that the big picture sparkles with life, dazzles with revelry and draws love from those around him. Zippy Chippy was the center of his very own weird and wonderful universe.

  At one juncture of his storied career, Zippy Chippy was almost the star of his own movie. On a five-year film option offered by that L.A. screenwriter/producer, Felix had received about $40,000 for the rights to Zippy’s story, which he always believed would one day be made by Disney. I have seen the filmmaker’s “teaser” video and the photography is excellent, with streaks of gold from a setting sun spilling through windows and cracks. A dozen other horses are heard neighing contentedly in shed row stalls as the star of the show is led out of his pen and down the concrete walkway. They stop. Marisa fetches a box of grooming products and begins primping and fussing over Zippy. Felix is holding Zippy on a tight leash, obviously suspicious that this is all going too well. Zippy is cooperating like he fought to get the part in casting, and then … without warning or malice aforethought, Zippy rips a really loud fart. It’s the kind of noise usually preceded by lightning and followed by heavy rain, and I’m thinking, Good Lord, starring in the film is not enough for this horse. Now he wants creative control!

  Zippy Chippy was a horse that simply could not live with success, but strangely enough, in the end it came to him anyway. We live in a world inhabited almost entirely by great attempters. W
e try and try and try our best, and then we do a little victory dance. Our triumphs are small, our celebrations personal, and that’s how we slowly but surely build better lives inside a cold and bitter world. Small steps, one foot after the other, steady and determined down the hard but right path.

  So if you were the kid who got picked last for the team – or, worse (and none of us today are proud of this), the fat kid we sent out onto Mud Lake before the hockey game started in order to test the thickness of the ice, or the girl who couldn’t get a date for the prom, or the student who died a thousand deaths standing dumbstruck at the blackboard in front of the class, or the idiot who rubbed his contact lenses after cutting up crazy-hot chili peppers for the pizza when he was stoned and in college (sorry, sometimes I still tear up for no apparent reason!), or the person who got picked on, criticized, beat up, and centered out – here then is your poster boy, Zippy Chippy, America’s lovable loser. This was the horse who showed the world that no matter how impossible things seem at the time, you can still come out alive and well down at the other end. Try hard and do good and there’s a cool green pasture waiting for when you finally get off that treadmill – as good a reward as any of us can expect.

  America, it is said, is the land of second chances. Zippy Chippy proved that America is a country of eternal hope, offering up ninety-nine second chances as long as you’re willing to try. As the fame game flourishes in social media and on TV, more of us are meant to feel like losers every day. There’s no doubt that the lives of the rest of us are a lot closer to the Zippy Chippy model than that of Secretariat, Man o’ War, or Northern Dancer.

  Oh yeah, the world will most definitely remember Zippy Chippy, with his perfect record of one hundred losses and his heart the size of that ’88 Ford he was traded for, and we will be better for the lessons he taught us in living and striving and giving our all. Sometimes just getting through a rough day takes everything you’ve got. Following the Zipster’s lead and his take on life might just be our best shot. In the end, Vince Lombardi, the legendary coach, came to believe that a winner was not necessarily the man photographed holding the trophy over his head or the woman wearing the finish line across her chest. In the end, Lombardi believed that it was the one who worked tirelessly, relentlessly, unflinchingly for a good cause and the betterment of all those around him. In the end, Lombardi was often heard quoting these lines from “Thinking,” a poem by the little-known Walter D. Wintle:

  Life’s battles don’t always go

  To the stronger or faster man.

  But sooner or later the man who wins

  Is the man who thinks he can.

  HARU-URARA FOR ZIPPY CHIPPY

  AND HIS DOUBLE IN JAPAN!

  Trouble doubled: Zippy Chippy had a doppelganger. Zippy’s track twin was a Japanese horse named Haru-urara. By the time Zippy registered his one hundredth loss, the eight-year-old mare from the northern island of Hokkaido had clocked in at 106 straight misses. Okay, so she was more productive than Zippy. It’s that relentless Japanese work ethic, I tell you!

  Her name in English was Glorious Spring, and she became the undisputed darling of the Japanese media. Her story of athletic artlessness grew to legendary proportions in the Land of the Rising Sun. Workers all over the country bet on Glorious Spring, hoping the losing tickets would serve as lucky charms. A crowd of 13,000 fans attended one of her last appearances, and five hundred lucky Haru-urara horsetail souvenirs sold out in less than three hours. At an end-of-the-season ceremony at the Kinki University (folks, I do not make this stuff up!) – affiliated with Hiroshima High School, the principal talked about Haru-urara and Zippy Chippy. “Despite their lengthy string of failures, they were popular,” he said. “Please cherish your individuality, don’t give up your dreams, and work hard to achieve them.” Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi cited the filly as “a good example of not giving up in the face of defeat.”

  There have been poems written and songs sung about Haru-urara, with a movie deal underway. According to a piece in Newsweek magazine, the horse had been “inundated with food, fan letters and even cash.” (Wow! All Felix Monserrate ever got was a nip on the neck and a steep bill each month from Farmington Feed and Seed.)

  In the midst of a sluggish economy, Zippy’s counterpart became a major cult figure as millions of Japanese equated the horse’s shortcomings with their own financial hardships. They tucked her losing tickets away in sacred places, believing their blessings would ward off bad luck and help them keep their jobs. In their slow economy, the Japanese rallied around this slow horse, and yes, the nation’s finances did improve. (Why didn’t we think of that? Instead of, you know, bailouts?)

  At these two horses’ peaks, which were really their lows, racing fans and sportswriters in both countries championed the idea of a match race between Zippy Chippy and Glorious Spring. Yeah, an “our loser is worse than your loser” kind of contest. Such a match race would be a very bad idea. Think about all that courtesy Zippy Chippy showed to male horses by letting them go first out of the gate, the chivalry that got him banned from Finger Lakes. Can you imagine the kind of gallantry he would offer a damsel in the stretch?

  Hail Haru-urara! Long live the Zipster! And may these beautiful losers never meet, because if they did, the unthinkable would become the inevitable, and one would have to win. The silver lining to all this doppelganger business was that Felix Monserrate had never heard of comedian Steven Wright, who said, “If I ever had twins, I’d use one for spare parts.” I mean, he did want Zippy Chippy to go on racing forever!

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Winning isn’t everything. Period.

  Consider for a moment two great golfers: Tiger Woods and Jim Nelford. You’ve heard of Tiger Woods, who despite his scandalous meltdown years ago continued to be one of the most exciting golfers in the game. An elegant and powerful athlete, Woods lived by the words “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.”

  Intense, obsessed, and motivated to win at all costs, Tiger Woods referred to the golfer who came in second in a tournament as the “first loser.” Really? By extension, then, every Olympic podium would feature the gold-medal winner flanked by tarnished silver and rusted bronze.

  You might not have heard of Jim Nelford, who was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, and had a stellar amateur career. Considered one of the best ball strikers in the game, he made his mark on the PGA Tour when he finished second after Fuzzy Zoeller at the 1983 Sea Pines Heritage Classic at Hilton Head, South Carolina. The following year, at the Bing Crosby Pro-Am, Nelford was ready and more than able to be crowned king of “Crosby’s Clambake.” A helluva golfer, Nelford had the Pebble Beach, California, tournament all but locked up and in his bag, with one hole to go. With the clubhouse lead, he watched Hale Irwin, the only golfer on the course who could beat him, dump his drive on the eighteenth hole into the seaside rocks below the fairway. For Nelford, Irwin’s suddenly disastrous predicament was the moment in which the brain switches from anxiety to relief to “Who do I need to thank?”

  But wait! Irwin’s errant drive did in fact hit the rocks along the shore of the Pacific Ocean, and then … defying logic, and the naked eye, it bounced back onto the fairway. With blessings aplenty, Irwin then nailed the flagstick, leaving his ball five feet from the cup. Many who witnessed those shots believed it proved once and for all that God really is American. Somehow, Hale Irwin had manufactured a birdie on the eighteenth, forcing a sudden-death playoff, in which he defeated the still-stunned Jim Nelford.

  Having watched his greatest personal triumph disappear in a fraction of a second, Nelford was utterly devastated and broke down in front of reporters at the airport. For Jim Nelford, it seemed things could not possibly get any worse. But wait! A year and a half later, a waterskiing accident nearly killed him and left his right arm severely damaged after it was sliced by the blade of a propeller. Doctors concluded he would never swing a club again.

  Cut down in his prime, did Nelford look upon the debacl
e at Pebble Beach as a curse in some sort of career-ending conspiracy? No, though many of us would. Instead, he went through prolonged and painful rehabilitation until he finally made it back to the top of the game. With his arm bolstered by pins and screws, covered with scars and skin grafts, the man slowly and painfully earned his way back onto the PGA Tour.

  He would never win a PGA tournament; that ridiculous twenty-yard bounce up and off the rocks at Pebble Beach had ended his best shot at a title. Still, during a highly successful career, Nelford won the Canadian Amateur Championship twice. He once beat the great Jack Nicklaus in an exhibition match. With Dan Halldorson, he won the World Cup of Golf in 1980 in Bogotá, Colombia. Once a TSN golf analyst, still a player, and a devotee of the game forever, today Nelford derives great satisfaction from teaching. In 1992 the Golf Writers Association of America presented Jim Nelford with the Ben Hogan Award for staying active in the game after such a devastating injury. Haunted by nightmares of careening golf balls and crashing boats, this guy definitely is not.

  At his Canadian Golf Hall of Fame induction ceremony at the Glen Abbey Golf Club near Toronto in 2013, Nelford talked about the love he has always had for the game, as well as the rewarding career it gave him. He also challenged Tiger Woods to a one-on-one match of words.

  “I don’t agree with Tiger Woods,” he said. “Second place isn’t first loser – it’s the silver medal, and there’s a bronze medal and then there’s participants. In this era we put so much emphasis on winning, winning, winning, and everybody that doesn’t win is a loser. That’s a horrible thing to tell our kids. No, you’re competing. You’re doing the best you can. It’s a long journey, and enjoy that. You’re a winner because you’re out there doing it.”