Yale University

 

In Memoriam

Ogden Mills Phipps 


Ogden Phipps

from the New York Times

Ogden Mills Phipps, the patrician owner and breeder of top thoroughbred horses, including Orb, the winner of the 2013 Kentucky Derby, died on April 6th in Manhattan. He was 75.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, said his daughter Daisy Phipps Pulito, an owner and the racing manager of Phipps Stable, based at Belmont Park in Elmont, N.Y.

Mr. Phipps, known as Dinny, belonged to one of racing’s leading families. With wealth inherited from Henry Phipps, one of Andrew Carnegie’s partners in the iron and steel industry, in 1926 his grandmother Gladys Livingston Phipps started the Wheatley Stable, which bred, among many others, Seabiscuit and Bold Ruler, sire of Secretariat.

His father, Ogden Phipps, who died in 2002, raced legendary horses like Buckpasser, Easy Goer and Personal Ensign under his own silks — an all-black shirt and a cherry-red cap — to which his son added red cuffs when he, in turn, began running his own horses in the early 1960s.

Starting out with a handful of horses, the younger Mr. Phipps developed a breeding operation based on top-quality broodmares stabled at Claiborne Farm in Paris, Ky.

 “We are about the fillies: They provide consistency over generations,” he told The New York Times in 2013, the year that Orb, which Mr. Phipps owned with his cousin Stuart S. Janney III, captured the prize that had eluded the family for three generations. Orb went on to finish fourth in the Preakness Stakes and third in the Belmont Stakes, the other two legs of the Triple Crown.

Over the years the operation produced stakes-winning horses like Successor, the 1966 champion juvenile colt; Rhythm, the winner of the 1990 Travers Stakes; the Breeders’ Cup winners Inside Information and Storm Flag Flying; and Smuggler, named the champion 3-year-old filly in 2005 after winning the Mother Goose Stakes and the Coaching Club American Oaks at Belmont Park.

Mr. Phipps, the longest-serving chairman in the history of the Jockey Club — he held that office from 1983 to 2015 — was a racing anachronism. He did not buy from commercial breeders selling at the auctions that now dominate the industry, preferring to develop his own horses. In an age when owners look for precocious, win-early horses to recoup their investments quickly, he took the patient approach, emphasizing soundness, durability and the bloodlines to generate future champions. He relied on the services of one trainer, Claude McGaughey, known as Shug, who began working for him in 1985.

Orb’s victory, Joe Drape wrote in The New York Times, “reminded the sporting world of a sepia-toned era in which old-money families with names like Whitney and Mellon and Vanderbilt ran horse racing like a private club, on handshakes and coin tosses.”

Ogden Mills Phipps was born on Sept. 18, 1940, in Manhattan. His mother, the former Lillian Bostwick, was the granddaughter of a founding partner of Standard Oil. George Herbert Bostwick, one of her brothers, was a top steeplechase jockey.

Mr. Phipps attended Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts and earned a bachelor of arts degree from Yale in 1963. A keen sportsman, he played championship-level court tennis, winning the national doubles title several times. He is scheduled to be inducted into the International Court Tennis Hall of Fame in the summer. He also engaged in tuna fishing and powerboat racing. Gordon Cooper, one of the original Mercury astronauts, piloted one of his oceangoing powerboats in long-distance races in the 1960s.

From 1976 to 1994 Mr. Phipps was chairman of Bessemer Trust, the private bank and investment adviser established by the Phipps family in 1907. He served as chairman of Bessemer Securities from 1982 until 1994 and sat on the boards of both companies until retiring in 2015.

Mr. Phipps was chairman of the New York Racing Association, the organization that runs the racetracks at Aqueduct, Belmont and Saratoga, from 1976 to 1983. As chairman of the Jockey Club, he was a leading voice for reform in the racing industry, calling for a much stricter policy on the use of equine drugs.

 “The facts are clear: if we care about the future of our sport, our equine athletes cannot be burdened by the taint of drugs,” he said in 2013.

Mr. Phipps lived in Palm Beach, Fla., and had homes in Old Westbury, on Long Island, and in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. In addition to his daughter Daisy, he is survived by his wife, the former Andrea Broadfoot; a son, Ogden Phipps II; four daughters, Kayce Reagan Hughes, Kelley Reagan Farish, Lilly Phipps Cardwell and Samantha Phipps Alvarez; and 24 grandchildren.

Remembrances:

by Jim Thompson:

      Dinny Phipps was a member of Pierson College and roomed across the hall from me and Hoy McConnell, my roommate, during sophomore year. He was a fun, down to earth guy, who enjoyed life and was interested in sports and horse racing. He was a good athlete with remarkable quickness for a man his size (about 6' and 245 lbs.) and he played squash and court tennis quite well. I asked him to play for one or more of Pierson's inter-college sports teams, football or baseball, but his travel schedule interfered with that. I can recall at breakfast one morning in the dining hall he was reading the New York Times and suddenly he raised his fist and said "Yes!" with real excitement.

According to the Times his horse, Hitting Away as I recall, had just won one of the big three races, the Belmont stakes as I recall. We enjoyed a great breakfast celebration. He indulged in several eccentricities which oddly enough were all linked together: parking tickets on York Street; never dry cleaning his new J. Press shirts; and losing his assigned reading books for a semester, then seeking to borrow mine. Since he lived in New York City, he'd travel home or to other parts of the country on weekends often following sports teams he liked (or had an ownership interest in) like the New York Yankees.

This caused him to return to Yale late Sunday nights or early Monday mornings and he'd park his car on York Street adjacent to Pierson and in front of J. Press and go to bed. He never got up in time to move it before it was ticketed and/or occasionally towed by the New Haven police. After accumulating a score of tickets, he made a deal with the manager of J Press to either have his car moved or pay his tickets on a timely basis. It helped that Dinny would buy most of his dress shirts and suits, to the extent he wore them, from J. Press.

This helps explain the tickets and the shirts, but what about his books? Dinny was not much on keeping his room neat or tidy or in taking his clothes and shirts to the dry cleaners. So he'd wear a new shirt for several days, then discard it in a pile next to the door in his room. As the semester progressed, his pile of new shirts grew to shoulder height and covered a chair next to the door. Upon his return one Sunday night several days prior to the beginning of the semester exams, he came into our room across the hall in a panic asking to borrow my books and assigned readings in two classes we took together. He said he'd lost his books or they were stolen. He then led us back to his room to demonstrate his absence of books.

As Hoy and I helped him look around, we noticed his pile of shirts. I suggested that he take them to a dry cleaner and grabbed an armful to move in that direction. As the pile receded, suddenly a box of unopened books appeared-- The Missing Books for the semester. Dinny was both pleased and embarrassed. He explained that he was a fast reader so exams wouldn't be a problem, but my class notes would help, which I gladly shared with him.

Dinny was a talented and good natured person who we enjoyed talking with and sharing ideas. I would have liked to know him better at Yale but our social and academic paths diverged. After graduation he became very successful in the horse racing field where he made his mark and I became a lawyer in Maryland. May he rest in peace.