Waitsburg’s Horse Whisperer

WAITSBURG – When it comes to equitation, Doug Phipps has just about seen it all.

For some three decades, the smiley, wiry figure you may have seen around town in his broad hat, jeans and boots has trained as many as 100 riders and as many horses around the world.

From countries like Aus­tria, Holland, Germany, Spain, France, Israel and here at home, he has led a number of them to world titles in Western Pleasure, Reining, Showmanship, Trail, Hunter Under Saddle and English Pleasure.

But there’s something that bothers Phipps about the sport that made him one of the better trainers in the busi­ness. At its highest levels, it’s one of the most expensive pursuits around.

“These people have a lot of money,” he said about many of the clients he has worked with at home and overseas over the years. Consequently, he said, kids from a town like Waitsburg don’t have “too many chanc­es to compete with the rich­est kids on the planet.” And that, he wants to change.

As the first anchor ten­ant at the town’s revived fairgrounds equine center, Phipps is determined to make his own contribution to leveling the playing field.

“His passion is a gift back to the community,” said K.C. Kuykendall, who has spearheaded the stables’ revival and, along with Deb Callahan, is one of two city council members who serves on Fairgrounds Ad­visory Board with residents Sandra Farley, Kelly Rice and Karen Mohney.

“That gives me hope be­cause it resonates with our goal to make this an invest­ment in our youth,” Kuyken­dall said.

‘I held the horn and cried’

To see Phipps, 46, inter­act with a horse is a bit like watching a mother dote over her baby. Particularly if the horse is restless or excited, he might lift her head gently by the chin, move his own face over her nose, blow his breath across the nostrils to get her full attention and proceed to give her a kiss right on the lips.

“It calms them right down,” he said during a training session with a two- year-old mare at the fair­grounds stables last week. “It tells them everything’s going to be just fine.”

But if the well-traveled veteran trainer now seems fully in charge of his ani­mals’ emotions, it wasn’t al­ways like that. When he first mounted a horse at a very young age, it was the other way ‘round, he said.

Phipps was born in north­ern California in 1964. When he was 4, his family bought a five-acre ranch in Sunnyside, Ore., and he had his first horseback ride, if you can call it that. As soon as his ill-advised parents put him on the ill-trained ani­mal, it took off on a gallop, losing Phipps down the field. He stood up one broken el­bow later.

The next encounter wasn’t any more success­ful. Even before his elbow had a chance to heal, his older sister thought the little boy might be entertained by a horseback ride while she shirked her baby-sitting duties and took off with a friend. This time, the horse reared and fell over back­wards barely missing Phipps as it came down.

Then his dad, who owned a successful auto body shop in nearby Portland but didn’t know the first thing about horses, got smart and bought the boy a well-trained, award-winning Welsh pony.

By now, Phipps was deeply traumatized and wanted nothing to do with mounts no matter how safe they seemed.

“I remember holding the horn, crying,” he said as though he had just remem­bered stepping into an epi­sode of “Fear Factor.” Not only had he wanted a go cart instead of a horse, he was paralyzed with the dread of being thrown again. Even though he consented to the lessons, it took him months to let go of the horn.

Slowly something blos­somed and Phipps began to take to the sport his sister also enjoyed. His dad made it easy by getting him a Dad Potter (4-H-certified) quarter horse and, at age 6, the young rider beat several riders who were trained by Richard Shrake, the western “trainer’s trainer,” best-sell­ing author and syndicated columnist who was inducted in the Horse Expo Hall of Fame in 2008.

Shrake saw promise in Phipps and took him on as a student, personally or by handpicking other trainers, for the next nine years until the teenager began training his own future champions – horses and riders alike.

During those years, he was an apprentice and as­sistant trainer to master vaquero trainer Tony Gar­cia; learned from Arabian park horse champion trainer Patricia Richardson; and picked up knowledge from Arabian western horse train­er Don Ulmer.

“His technique is truly inspiring,” said Al Davis, whose stallion, Top Deck Trey, Phipps trained for Western Pleasure and Rein­ing last year.

Of mice and men

By his mid 30s, Phipps had trained 50 horses, some of which sold for a quarter of a million dollars. Just before the end of the 1990s, he received a phone call from someone in Israel, who needed a trainer for a well-heeled Jewish family in Capernaum on the Sea of Galilee, where he spent five months in residence.

After that, his overseas career took off, with stints in Germany, Spain, France and other European countries where riders sought him out for his gentle style and his success getting into the horses’ minds.

“Horses are like mice in a giant’s body,” Phipps explained. “It’s all about emotion. They want to feel safe, know that everything’s okay. You can be firm when needed, but only enough to get it (training) done.”

Phipps, a non-denominational Christian, said he has always been inspired by passages from the Bible in dealing with animals and training horses, particularly those verses that counsel gentleness.

But training horses is also about having the right variety of “tools,” which have grown during his career with the evolution of non- coercive methods, he said.

“Most training was from the Middle Ages,” Phipps said about the use of spurs and harsh bits to keep the animals in line. He likened the shortcomings of that method to the limits of using, say only a hammer, to get the job done.

Phipps said he likes to train horses to be soft in the mouth and more responsive to “buttons” created by re- peating and praising move- ments so often, they be- come muscle memory to the animal. These techniques, which have become more popular in recent decades, have helped him get the likes of C Royals Beauty, a Pinto Youth Champion, or Orions Delight, a many-times na- tional and Scottsdale Reining winner, to the top, just to name a few.

Leveling the field

Phipps, who said he could be training just about any- where in the country and be paid much better for it, recently moved to the Walla Walla area from Baker City, Ore., for personal reasons. With a number of clients in the Tri Cities and here, he welcomed the affordability of the fairgrounds stables, which rent for $60 a stall per month. No other facility in the area even came close to offering that kind of bargain.

But now that he’s here, he wants to make his train- ing available to as many horses and youngsters in the Touchet Valley as pos- sible. And he said it’s fine if some of them want to trade work for lessons, particu- larly if they can’t afford the $40 hourly rate or the $450 monthly package of lessons and training for horse and rider combined.

“I really want to make it work,” he said.

And that’s the spirit Kuykendall said his advi- sory board welcomes, especially in the first anchor ten- ant at the revived fairgrounds equine center.

“Doug has been very vo- cal in wanting broad partici- pation among area youths,” the city councilman said. “He’s willing to spend time with folks who want to learn about animals (even when he’s not paid). We hope he can be an inspiration.”

Kuykendall said Phipps has the bulk of the 15 stalls rented at the center so far. The stables have a total of 85, but a revenue-generating business plan is based on a more conservative count of 50 filled stalls. As the first big tenant, Phipps not only offers name recognition but a healthy backlog of clients whom he trains for championships that could in turn help put the Waitsburg equine center on the map.

“His clients are very im- pressed with his ability to work with the animals,” Kuykendall said. “He has quite an amazing background.”

He said that reputation may spur other trainers to consider calling the center home and, along with two or three equestrian events the committee hopes to stage next year, add to the critical mass the fairgrounds needs to become a destination for riding, training and shows.

“It takes people like Doug to make that happen,” Kuyk- endall said.