Keeneland Life’s Work Oral History Project #2: John Phillips

[Wandering Eyes]

TDN is proud to partner with the Keeneland Library and the Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Libraries in a very special new collaboration: the Keeneland ‘Life’s Work’ Oral History Project, a series of filmed interviews by TDN columnist Chris McGrath with significant figures in the Thoroughbred industry. The second of these, with John Phillips of Darby Dan Farm, appears here.

His grandfather’s greatest achievements, on the Turf, were all about looking outward; about opening minds and dismantling boundaries. Listening to John Phillips, however, you realize that the impetus for the whole adventure–for the mutual enlightenment, either side of the ocean, achieved by sending Roberto and Ribot in opposite directions–could not have been more definitively American.

Because as Phillips says himself, the story of John Galbreath might have been written by Horatio Alger. A kid raised in a large, poor family in the Ohio back country, whose dynamism and imagination generated a fortune from the steepling transformations of postwar real estate. Happily, as it is, the man charged with sustaining Galbreath’s legacy at the storied Darby Dan Farm proves no mean Alger himself, as reflective as he is eloquent.

“Grandfather was very proud of being an American,” explains Phillips. “That notion of rugged individualism. And if you studied his family–his uncles, his father’s father, and the like… classic Americans going all over the country making fortunes, losing fortunes, [with] a very entrepreneurial, ‘go for it’ attitude. He was never afraid of failure. Some things did fail for him, but he never looked back.”

Sure enough, Galbreath was equally at home with all ranks of society, from farmers in their fields to the boardroom. And it was his faith in American values that prompted him to hire Branch Rickey–the man who brought Jackie Robinson to Major League Baseball–to run his Pittsburgh Pirates.

“He felt that the United States needs to be a meritocracy in everything we do, including sports,” Phillips explains. “So although Branch Rickey was past his prime, it did set the tone for the Pittsburgh Pirates. And they ended up recruiting a lot of minority players with tremendous talent.”

One of these, in the rookie draft of 1954, was an African American from Puerto Rico with very little English: Roberto Clemente. Through the turbulent years of the Civil Rights movement, Clemente’s Hall of Fame career became a powerful symbol for Galbreath.

“The relationship really took a decade to develop, because there was a huge cultural gap between a farmer in Ohio and somebody raised in Puerto Rico,” Phillips recalls. “Nonetheless Roberto Clemente became a close friend. He was a very sensitive, very committed human being.”

In 1970, Galbreath decided to name the most athletic of his yearlings, a Hail to Reason colt, for Clemente; and it was the equine Roberto that farm manager Olin Gentry picked out as most eligible to be sent, on a pioneering mission, to Vincent O’Brien in Ireland.

“And off he went, with a ridiculous notion that some American could just pick out one horse, go off to Europe, and actually win the English Derby,” says Phillips. “But that was Grandfather.”
To read the rest of this story, watch the video, and hear the podcast, click here for the TDN Look.

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