AMERICAN GLADIATOR: The Life And Times Of ... - The Book Locker

AMERICAN GLADIATOR
Zack Phelps
President of the Louisville American Association baseball club in the mid-1880s, the American Association
president during Louisville’s flag-winning and co-World Championship 1890 season, and for years a National
League attorney, Zack Phelps was born in Hopkinsville, Ky. on July 17, 1857. He came to Louisville at an early
age with his parents.
A brilliant student, Phelps was determined to become a lawyer. However, his studiousness and drive,
according to a Louisville Courier-Journal article the day after his death, forced him to relocate to Salt Lake City,
Utah for reasons of health. After two years of reading law, he was granted a diploma, and in 1880, his health
renewed by his protracted tenure in the West, Phelps returned to Louisville to practice law.
On January 1, 1881, Phelps formed a law partnership with a Judge William Jackson. On the same day, he was
married to Miss Amy Kaye. In years afterward, Phelps was fond of saying that that day was the beginning of two
grand partnerships: one with a graceful lady for life, the other with a good business friend that lasted until
Jackson’s death.
A highly successful criminal lawyer, Phelps had upwards of 300 cases on the docket at the time of his
untimely demise. And, he was a man who numbered friends in all walks of life. One was minstrel Al G. Field.
Upon learning of his friend’s untimely death, Field left the stage of the city’s venerable Macauley Theatre and
declined to go on during the remainder of the evening program.
Phelps was also busy in many other ways, as one might expect one of the town’s most distinguished citizens
to be. He was a member of several fraternal groups, and he was closely identified with several city charities.
Phelps was also an ardent Democrat, who espoused the causes of a number of political figures.
Unquestionably, the most prominent was the ill-fated William Goebel. The only sitting Governor
ever assassinated in this country, Goebel was shot down on January 30, 1900 by an unknown assailant outside the
Kentucky statehouse.
Phelps baseball resume was something, too.
From 1885 through 1887, he was the president of the Louisville American Association club. That
tenure included some celebrated run-ins with the hard-hitting and hard-drinking Pete Browning. Interestingly
enough, Phelps’ grave in Louisville’s historic Cave Hill Cemetery overlooks that of Browning’s.
In 1890, Phelps served as the president of the American Association, a position he re-assumed late in the
1891 season as the loop began its trek into permanent oblivion. One of the best-known baseball men in the
country, he was an also an attorney for the National League for a number of years.
Pneumonia claimed Phelps on August 29, 1901 after a 16-day siege, and his passing marked the exit of one of
Louisville’s and America’s greatest baseball patrons. Phelps is buried on a lot owned by his wife’s family. (Sadly
enough, his widow followed her husband to the grave some ten weeks later.)
Zack Phelps’ final resting place is a white marble cross over a granite circle with an inlaid ivy bed; his name,
lifedates and an inscription are in raised letters.
The inscription reads: “One who loved his fellow men.”
It is a worthy epitaph to be sure, yet as is the case all too often with summations for fine, productive men, it is
an understatement of the highest order.
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