DRF Feature about Pittsburgh Phil

[Calzone Lord]

Originally Posted by Calzone Lord

One of the interesting things about Pittsburgh Phil - is that he often gets portrayed as having this ability to be unfazed by all that goes on and a habit of never showing emotion.

That, almost certainly, was not true. In fact, Vosburgh described colorful temper tantrums he would have both after a betting loss or about a weight assignment in the racing office. He described him as a very sore loser - when he did lose.

Told one story about how the army was testing some kind of crazy explosive device a few miles from the track - and after one tremendous explosion - everyone was stunned and is asking what that blast was. One big guy in the crowd yells out 'it's just Phil kicking about another bad ride' and the whole crowd started laughing.

Not exactly a fine showing of story-teller memory on my part - I went back and looked at the article again:




And the opener from the same piece ....



I wonder what the douchebag gentleman who made that comment about the way people behave at the races a hundred years ago - would think about the way they behave on racing message boards today.