Sometimes the most honest thing you can say is 'sorry'," and "He's a good egg but he isn't going to change, so don't take him to the edge and push him off." "I wouldn't go with anybody else again but Phil, because he's got the most amazing way with horses," said one. "He'll never ever let you down. He's the master. He just makes it all look easy." When, one morning a couple of years ago, I got my phone call telling me that our daughter Sarah had died, I was not able to see much beyond the shock and devastation at first. But as I drove home, I knew that we were going to need all the support we could get from Phil and the people who knew him well. As with any sudden trauma, we soon learned that there was a time limit for people to cope; the shock can be terrible in the first few days, and then it can pass. We needed to focus on that first bit. So Phil stepped in. It was as if he were reading my mind. Before we knew it, his help had arrived. By the end of the week, he and my other daughter, Clare, had organized all sorts of practical things to ease us through a period when Sarah was too weak to do anything. He had rallied local musicians to support us in a rock-and-roll fund-raising concert. He put his considerable persuasive skills into action. And by the time we came back to face the grieving ahead of us, he had provided an amazing safety net. We were touched by the generosity of Phil's friends, but we were also astonished by it. Why did they do all this for us? I think it goes back to the way in which Phil has always approached the horse world, in such a straightforward and straightforward way, and I think it also goes to how deep his regard for Sarah and her love for horses really was. He genuinely believes that horses are worth a little bit of heartbreak if it means they can be saved. He's not talking about "a nice lady who suddenly finds that her horse needs a new home because she's been involved in a car accident." I am a little bit of an expert on the first kind of horse—I know how much they are worth. On my first visit to Ireland, back in 1999, Phil took me to a show in Dublin, the same Dublin International Horse Show that he had been helping to produce since 1970. He gave me my own little riding lesson there. At least, I think it was a riding lesson. I couldn't get the horse moving. We were sitting on a hill, and there was a great slope in front of me. All I had to do was sit up. You see, I had a bad back from horseback riding—all that jumping had left my back permanently sore. I was really trying to avoid it—I didn't like going up and down the hill. But Phil was saying, "Climb up there," and I thought he was joking. I had trouble with it, but he put his hands around my waist and lifted me up there. I remember Sarah saying she thought it was hilarious that I had such a bad back and I couldn't ride at all, and then she suddenly realized that I was thinking it was a bad idea to go there. Then Phil put me on a beautiful horse that was just standing there doing nothing. He had me do a few exercises on that and then said, "Just go have a go." There was no problem. A few weeks later, he took me to a show in Wexford, the same place he had taken Sarah. That time he was having a big dinner, so I took an hour to have a nice bath, and when I got to Phil's house I went into the bathroom and stood on the sink and put my feet up in the air and jumped, because I had worked so hard. Of course, the whole time I was doing that, Phil was giving instructions to my horse, who ignored me. I ended up falling right out of the thing. When I got out of the bathroom, it seemed that there was an endless stream of people coming into the room to greet Phil. They had all been at the show he had put on, and they all had horses there that he had trained. It was quite a sight, really. At one point he walked off in one direction with a few people, and I went into another direction to have a word with my horse. When I went back toward the bathrooms, people were following me, saying, "Now you've got to have dinner. You have to eat with us." I said, "No, I'm not staying, I just had a bath." And they said, "No, no, you have to sit down now and have dinner with us." So I sat down. Then I went to the bathroom and the people followed me into there too, saying, "Now you've got to have dinner with us." So I sat there in a bath with a man pouring champagne into my backside. Then Phil came back, and they all went away, and we all went to have dinner. We were sitting at the table when we heard the doorbell ring. It was a little boy, maybe about six years old, and he said, "Hi, Mr. Doyle. Can I come in? Can I have some water?" Well, Phil said, "Well, yes, but there's a man with you." So the little boy came in and looked at me and said, "Hi, I'm Phil's wife." He was Phil's adopted son. I guess everyone was expecting Phil to adopt children. In the early 1980s, someone showed Phil a newspaper article that had been written about him by someone who used to be his boss and now was a journalist. The journalist asked Phil if he had ever thought about getting married. Phil replied that he had, but "I never thought I could find the right person." He went on to describe the kind of person who was suitable for him. Then the journalist wrote the article. "You know, that could be me," he told me, once the article came out. It did turn out to be him. Phil got married to a wonderful woman who loved horses and who also had a great sense of humor and just the right spirit to keep up with Phil's intensity. I think it's pretty clear why Phil could do the show business end of things so well—the show horse world is much easier to break into than the endurance-horse world, as long as you're willing to work in concert with other trainers who have a similar approach to what you want to achieve. The problem in endurance racing is that if you want to break a record, you need everyone in the racecourse community to agree to hold the record for the same number of days as you. In other words, if Phil wanted to run a three-day race, and he wanted to break the record, he had to get everyone in the racecourse community to agree to all hold the record for three days as well. So if one horse was going to run for eight hours on its own, and another horse wasn't, they might be at opposite ends of the country—Phil's going to have to persuade all these other people to agree to it. But at a show like the Dublin International Horse Show, you just need to make a single announcement. Phil is a great deal more comfortable when he's surrounded by like-minded people. Sometimes that attitude got Phil into hot water with the people who were working for him. Phil himself admits that he has a big ego and is an all-or-nothing man—he will go into a completely different mode when he has something to gain or when he thinks he's done something worthwhile. He takes that same stance when he's in the sport business world. He tends to assume a big role in whatever he is doing. In the early days, this characteristic caused problems for Phil with the horses he was showing. When he started going on stage, people would ask him to do things that he wasn't really capable of doing, and he would walk into the ring for the first class, and it would be something that he hadn't even thought of doing. On one occasion, he thought he had a very good hand on the horses and he wanted to see if he could take it to a top level. So he asked one of the top Irish competitors to coach him. Phil worked with this guy for a whole season, and there was no way that was ever going to work. It just wasn't natural for him to do it. So it was very hard for him to put his horses up for that level of competition. The only way he could do it was by not trying to do it. The next time he went to do something like that, he didn't have the coach, but there was nobody who wanted to come in and help him improve his show. So he decided, "It's not going to happen if I'm going to put myself down, so I'll just not bother." He was very stubborn like that. As he got more into the sport horse world, he noticed that there was a fair bit of favoritism in this business. A trainer would be given help with something—he'd be given this or he'd be given that—and there were other trainers who were looked down on and didn't get the help. He would come into this business and want to help himself to win, and the people around him weren't very happy with him doing that. He was not very well treated at times, but the times when he really did need help, and he wouldn