A minor distinction, since it's all one stable and they wore the same colors, but it was actually "Dinny," aka Ogden Mills Phipps, Ogden Phipps' son, who owned and raced Pure Profit and her offspring, and he is also a really nice, down-to-earth man, considering the immense wealth and privilege he was born into. So many rich racehorse owners act all high-society, and if any of "the help" ever address them, it'd better be Mr. This or Mrs. That. Yet this guy, born into the highest of high society (his dad Ogden Phipps was buddies with Carnegie and Rockefeller and Pulitzer), Chairman of the Jockey Club, shows up at the barn every day wearing jeans, no socks, and loafers, and doesn't want anybody to call him anything but Dinny, PLUS he knows every groom, hotwalker, and exercise rider by name. A really nice rich man, which is too often an oxymoron.
I guess it's fair to say that Shug wouldn't have had the career he's had without getting the private trainer job for the Phippses, but I'd also say they wouldn't have had near the success they've had without him. I was with him when he got the job, and he'd already had one champion with Loblolly Stables, a horse called Vanlandingham, the only horse from that stable he kept when he took over for the Phippses. I was rubbing a horse named Mustin Lake at the time, and he'd won the Kentucky Jockey Club on Thanksgiving Day 1985, and I had dreams of running him in next year's Derby. But as luck would have it, a few days later we found out Shug was taking over the Phipps' horses, and I had to take the colt over to Rusty Arnold's barn, and turn him over to my buddy, Junior. I was one dejected racetracker that day.
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