Free The Legend of Zippy Chippy by William Thomas

smiling, almost tearing up.
    On Saturday, May 2, 1998, the backside at Finger Lakes was still buzzing about Real Quiet winning the Kentucky Derby and earning $738,800 for two minutes and two seconds of work. Later in the month, on May 23, Zippy Chippy would run in race two at Finger Lakes for a purse of $5,100. When it came to prize money, Farmington, New York was about three planets northeast of Louisville, Kentucky.
    On this clear day, on a fast track, although Thornden Park and Prince de Naskra finished ahead of Zippy, Dune Drive was eating his dust. With Benny Afanador on his back and a $7,500 claiming price hanging over his head, a rejuvenated Zippy came in third and earned $510 for his stable.
    A week later, on May 30, he could only manage to finish fourth, overtaking tired rivals in the stretch. Dr. No took most of the $8,500 purse, and Zippy was stuck with loss number eighty-one. Not that Zippy’s frequent failure to win a race carried criminal consequences, but in this test, Khale Police was just a few lengths off his tail.
    Two weeks later, on an overcast afternoon in mid-June at Finger Lakes, Zippy crashed and burned after he and Benny Afanador got squeezed at the start and looked awkward for the remainder of the race. This too was a claiming race, but thankfully the price was a steep $15,000.
    Zippy’s pattern of finishes continued to go up and down like the proverbial toilet seat. One day he was nudging the butt of Toes Goes, the next he was speeding past Nixs Trick like that horse was tied to the fence post. It was there for all to see: Zippy was out of sorts and off his game, and Felix was becoming despondent.
    In this loss, number eighty-two, Zippy came seventh in a race of eight maidens, finishing sixteen and three-quarters lengths behind Hilary’s Kid – certainly not the longest distance he had ever put between himself and a winner, but it was a five-furlong race, which is as short as they get. On a clear and fast track, Zippy had barely managed to beat Leonard Elmer, a badly named horse who got bumped at the start and was left sputtering at the rail like an overheated car abandoned on the shoulder of the road. The men in straw hats with stopwatches were shaking their heads at Zippy’s finishing time.
    But Felix never paid attention to the math or the tick of a track man’s watch. When he led Zippy Chippy around the paddock before a race, Felix was showing the fans not a horse but the other half of a longtime, rough, but hard-earned friendship that would someday defy the skeptics and make him proud. The fans who passed clippings of Zippy over the fence for Felix to autograph sensed some sort of history in the making.
    Felix was not delusional. He did not dream of a three-race set of victories like the Triple Crown or the Breeders’ Cup; he wanted just one lonely little win on any track, anywhere, with lots of witnesses present. “Once, just once,” he would say to Marisa, “I want to lead Zippy to
la tierra prometida
.” At Puerto Rico’s racetracks, a victory circle is called “the promised land.” That’s all the poor man asked.
    Word about the horse’s adversity to winning was spreading around the world, and the columnists writing about Zippy could be cruel. He could live with the headline T HE L EGEND OF I NEPTITUDE; it was the line “ugly, stupid, and nasty with an international fan club” that was hard to take. Felix needed a victory to end the mockery of the media and reward Zippy’s followers for their loyalty.
    With no prospect of a win and running out of jockeys, Felix’s record with Zippy was six second-place finishes, ten thirds, and earnings to date of $27,803, barely enough to cover his keep. While food and board bills pile up quickly, vet bills can blow the budget wide open. For the first time ever, Felix was seeing the glass as half empty – or, worse, cracked and leaking cash he did not have. Did he think of