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.
