Personalities Archives - Hal Phillips

Ernie D Built the Big East, One Local College Basketball Broadcast at a Time

Hal Phillips — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 20:46:39 +0000

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (Jan. 5, 2024) — It’s never too late to mark and quantify the impact of Ernie DiGregorio. Not in New England. Not when the subject is college basketball. Yet here’s the immediate news peg, the reason to contemplate Ernie D and his attendant rabbit hole early in 2024: It was 50 years ago […]

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Adventures in Historiography: Why New Takes on U.S. History Rise or Fall

Hal Phillips — Thu, 23 Dec 2021 16:22:11 +0000

AUBURN, Maine (Dec. 23, 2021) — Let’s get to know Charles Beard, whose intellectual connection to the “controversial” 1619 Project may tar him in some quarters, but whose broader reputation has much to teach us. Born in 1874, Beard was perhaps the most influential American historian of the first half of the 20th century. We segment […]

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Trump’s subconscious is desperately trying to tell us something

Hal Phillips — Wed, 12 Aug 2020 17:13:16 +0000

WASHINGTON, D.C. (Aug. 12, 2020) — I’m starting to wonder whether Donald Trump’s subconcious is trying to tell us something important. To be specific, I’m worried he might have killed some young woman early in this century. Not sexually assaulted her. That’s something he’s apparently been doing, repeatedly, since the early 1980s. I mean killed […]

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Golf Shoe History: Kilties & Conformity from the Man Whom Clothes Never Made

Hal Phillips — Mon, 12 Aug 2019 20:15:10 +0000

[August 12, 2019] — Recalling my father, one should know that he abided by few fashion trends and set even fewer. However, on the 8th anniversary of his pasing, l will claim on his behalf one initiative to which he proved an early and canny adopter: He depised kilties. His aversion to those oddly fringed, […]

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‘You have no idea all the shit that I’ve built’

Hal Phillips — Tue, 09 Apr 2019 15:16:19 +0000

[Ed. I once heard at an Associated Press seminar that anyone, in the right hands, could well be the subject of a prize-winning profile. This one may or may not qualify, but it’s pretty darned good and has been widely shared in golf circles of late, mostly because this guy’s story truly is compelling. A […]

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A Man (in) Full: Headcheese, Jelly Sticks & my Dad’s Food Fetish

Hal Phillips — Tue, 28 Aug 2018 19:10:02 +0000

So, I try to write each August about my dad, the original Hal Phillips, who passed away seven years ago this month, all too soon. Hardly a day goes by when I don’t think of him in some way, shape or form. Many times, that moment comes when I open the refrigerator door and see […]

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Larry Sanders: I Never Knew Ye

Hal Phillips — Sun, 15 Apr 2018 21:18:46 +0000

[Ed. This piece was originally written/posted in 2011. It’s reprinted here to mark Gary Shandling’s recent passing.] I’ve never subscribed to HBO. There may have been a month here and there when it was provided to us here in New Gloucester, by mistake, or as part of some promotion, but when the cable monolith inevitably […]

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What the Willfully Blind Fail to See, Working Just Fine, All Around Us

Hal Phillips — Wed, 27 Sep 2017 18:37:16 +0000

Can we please stop talking about Bernie Sanders’ policy suggestions as if he were by some kind of unhinged fantasist? Sanders recently introduced to the Senate a bill that would expand Medicare to include citizens under 65 years of age — and you’d have thought he proposed the changing of water into wine. Hey, obstinate […]

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Dugmar GC: The Curious Story of a Golf Course Submerged

Hal Phillips — Sun, 17 Sep 2017 11:03:14 +0000

[Ed. This story appeared in March/April 2003 issue Golf Journal magazine.] The Swift River started rising in the rural Massachusetts town of Greenwich on Aug. 14, 1939, and soon enough the fairways at Dugmar Golf Club had become unseasonably soggy. After a time the layout’s bunkers and teeing grounds were completely submerged, and had the […]

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Flashback: Removing the Splinter from Our Collective Subconcious

Hal Phillips — Wed, 30 Aug 2017 15:40:29 +0000

This August 2002 essay appeared in the Portland Press-Herald, to which I contributed op-ed columns from 2000-2003. It should have made me famous: The next season, my theory having been realized, Boston took the Yankees to 7 games before falling in the 2003 American League Championship Series; in 2004, the Sox came back from a […]

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