Read Online The Legend of Zippy Chippy by William Thomas - Free Book Online

friend and family to the Zipster, but not always a fan.
    â€œI tell you, Zippy Chippy is a miserable thing who’s crabby all the time, wants everything done for him when he wants it, makes faces, bites, kicks, and …” – and here’s where the sugar-coating ended – “is not very intelligent.” (On a personal note, as a man who was married once, and was occasionally accused of insensitivity, my question to Emily: “And your point is …?”)
    â€œOh yeah, he can be mean,” said Felix, in a painful understatement. “Once, he pin me in the corner of the stall for almost an hour.” Felix demonstrated how he had crouched and faked left while the horse blocked right. “I go this way, he go too. I go that way, he’s already there.”
    Every head fake Felix made was met by a bigger head. Felix went down on all fours and the horse reared up on his hind legs.
    â€œAnd he get his foot up in the air like this, like he’s gonna kick you too!”
    Finally, while still backed into the corner, Felix stopped trying to outmaneuver the monster, and Zippy dropped his striking hoof. A groom with a handful of alfalfa distracted the horse long enough for the trainer to escape the stall. Zippy Chippy’s ample appetite always trumped his anger.
    â€œHe won’t let nobody near him but me. Except my daughter Marisa,” said Felix, his voice cracking a little.
    IN THE DEPTHS OF DESPAIR,
NEVER, EVER GIVE UP!
    Having been saddled up for five times as many races as the average thoroughbred, Zippy would circle the paddock before every outing, suspicious of the other horses and contemptuously eyeing his competition. He must have felt like Colonel Lewis B. Puller, surrounded and outnumbered by Chinese troops during the Korean War. With no air support and all reinforcements snowed in twenty miles away, “Chesty” Puller’s two marine regiments were trapped in the Chosin Reservoir by sixty thousand Chinese troops. At twenty-five below zero, the food was frozen, the equipment was frozen, and his men were frozen. Each man was ordered to keep a bag of plasma in his underwear to keep it from freezing, until he was shot and needed it.
    â€œThere are Chinese on our right flank and Chinese on our left flank,” said one of the most decorated members of the U.S. Marine Corp after a reporter covering this doomed venture into hell asked him to assess the situation. “There are Chinese in front of us for as far as you can see and there are hundreds of Chinese troops coming up behind us.”
    â€œAnd your prediction, sir?”
    That’s when the general hesitated, a bit like Zippy Chippy before he made his final decision to leave the starting gate. Said Chesty, with all the resolve of a military man worthy of his stripes and vaunted title, “Those bastards won’t get away from us this time.”
    Zippy Chippy subscribed to this maxim of survival. In every race he ran and lost, until the word
Official
came up on the betting board results, Zippy had those sweaty buggers well within his sights and exactly where he wanted them.

SIX

    Our bravest and best lessons are not learned
    through success, but through misadventure
.
    Amos Bronson Alcott
    At some point, when Zippy had almost eighty losses under his girth belt, Felix admitted that maybe his horse wasn’t as fit as his rivals. A unique labor shortage was likely to blame, because after he bucked off nearly every exercise rider at the track, none of them would go near him. Taking Zippy Chippy – an athlete who preferred not to practice – out for a workout could be a career-ending experience for an exercise boy, or, at the very least, a big pain in the ass that required frequent attention with ice packs. So Felix had Marisa introduce Zippy to the exercise barn … and the exercise barn made a lousy first impression.
    Also known as a Eurociser, the exercise track is an