Ogden “Dinny” Phipps, 1940-2016, Deerfield Squash Captain And U. S. Court Tennis Champion   
by Rob Dinerman

Dateline April 10th --- DSR has learned of the death this past Wednesday of Ogden Mills Phipps, 75, universally known as Dinny, a standout squash player in the late 1950’s at Deerfield Academy who later won multiple national court tennis doubles championships and had an outstanding career in horse racing both as an administrator (his 32-year tenure from 1983-2015 as the Chairman of the Jockey Club is the longest in the history of that position) and as a breeder of top thoroughbred horses. The most notable of this latter group was Orb, who won the Kentucky Derby in 2013. A long-time Board member of the Racquet & Tennis Club, Phipps, who battled pancreatic cancer for the past 18 months, will be inducted posthumously into the International Court Tennis Hall of Fame at the Association’s annual dinner in December.

   During his senior year at Deerfield, he was captain and the No. 2 player on a stellar 1957-58 team coached by the legendary Ed Reade that posted a perfect 10-0 record against its New England prep-school counterparts (including a 3-2 victory over Exeter in which Phipps won the deciding match, 15-10 in the fifth, over Gayer Dominick), then swept to victory in the season-ending New England Interscholastic tournament. Phipps pushed that event’s top seed, Exeter’s Romer Holleran, to five long games in a semifinal tussle whose grueling nature may have played a role in the outcome of the subsequent final a few hours afterwards, in which Phipps’s teammate Bob Hetherington, who had lost to Holleran in the dual meet a few weeks earlier, was able to reverse that outcome in a fifth-game best-of-nine tiebreaker. Phipps, whose powerful volley and ground strokes were the cornerstone of his game in squash, tennis and court tennis, later won the court tennis U. S. Open Doubles four times in five years (in 1978 and from 1980-82) and the U. S. Amateur Doubles in 1979 – partnered by Ralph Howe, Phipps’s tennis doubles partner at Yale and a member of the U. S. Squash Hall Of Fame --- as well as in 1981 and 1982 with Gene Scott.

    As Chairman of first the New York Racing Association (from 1976-83) and then the Jockey Club, Phipps was a leading voice for reform of the racing industry, advocating a much stricter policy on the use of equine drugs. He is survived by his wife, the former Andrea Broadfoot, six children and 24 grand-children.