Remembering “both King Leatherburys”
The King beat ’em, then left ’em laughing
Vinnie Perrone
February 12, 2026
After years of fretless waiting, King Leatherbury got the word. On a spring day in 2015, he answered the phone, learned of his election to the National Racing Hall of Fame and in that sing-song voice told the caller, “I demand a recount.”
The moment, in a sense, captured both King Leatherburys — the original who for decades ruled the Maryland circuit with a novel, hands-off training style that stifled, bugged and angered peers, and the elderly successor who charmed the air with yarns and riffs and well-told chestnuts.
Hall of Fame enshrinement looming, Leatherbury turned giddy at the prospects. The induction would validate his achievements and cement his legacy, he said, and offer something else to savor: a chance to use his acceptance speech to spring some trusty zingers on a new and unsuspecting audience.
“I can use a lot of my old stuff because it’ll be virgin ears,” he said, excitement barely reined. “You know how you buy a CD, The Best of Andy Williams? This’ll be the best of Leatherbury. I’m not gonna go through the stuff that only gets a small laugh. But I also can’t take for granted that I’m just gonna go up there and do some shtick. I’ve got to build that in gently and say how serious this is. This is the highest honor you can get in our industry, so I’ve got to acknowledge that.”
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In theory, the tools he’d used to master the shadowy claiming game — study, guile, finesse — would need to etch his oratory in the bright light of a national stage. In practice, it meant a smooth-enough transition from the spoken fruits of his labor to this favored plum:
A guy goes to the doctor and gets looked at, and the doctor says, “You know, you’re in pretty good shape for 50 years old.” Guy says,“Who said I’m 50? I’m 60.” Doctor says, “That’s even better then. How old was your father when he died?” Guy says, “Who said he died? He’s 80.” Doctor says, “Well, good – you’ve got good genes. So how old was your grandfather when he died?” Guy says, “Who said he died? He’s a hundred years old. In fact, he’s gettin’ married tomorrow.” Doctor says, “Why in the world would a hundred-year-old man want to get married?” Guy says, “Who said he WANTS to get married?”
On February 10, the quip lost its voice; King Taylor Leatherbury died at 92. His 65-year training career produced nearly as many victories, 6,508, as laughs and critiques and his own zealous parimutuel plays. The narrative arc to any biopic would need no embellishment.
Leatherbury’s early exposures set the harrows to his career track. His father, Taylor, owned and bred some horses on a small farm in West River, Md., and took his only child to Bowie or Marlboro racetrack on treasured Saturdays. After King graduated from the University of Maryland with a degree in business administration and took an Army office job, his most nourishing parcels from home bore the Morning Telegraph and other turf chronicles.
Service completed, Leatherbury considered professional options with the unorthodox rationale that would bless his career. Dad had a few forgettable claimers at Florida’s Sunshine Park, a cue he couldn’t ignore.
“I had no dreams,” he said of his horse-training outset in 1959. “All I wanted to do was exist. When I first started out, I wasn’t married; I had no responsibilities. I had a joke about it: All I wanted was a hundred-dollar bill in my pocket and a Cadillac convertible. I never did get the Cadillac convertible.”
Not that he couldn’t afford one after opening shop in Maryland and mass-producing wins without apology; he just refused to spring for it. He got his tweed sportscoats, khakis and dress shirts at T.J. Maxx. When Laurel Park honored him — with a trophy for his 5,000th victory — and John Hartsell – with a $1,000 check as top trainer one year in the 1990s — Leatherbury playfully offered to trade Hartsell the trophy for the check. In 2011, amid a possible Breeders’ Cup engagement for turf-sprinting firecracker Ben’s Cat, Leatherbury considered the $100,000 supplemental entry fee and ultimately passed for lack of outside financial help.
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As the dream fizzled, former horse owner Glenn Lane reconnected with Leatherbury after a near-20-year absence. King’s wife, Linda, answered the phone and told Lane, “Yes, he’s still very cheap. In fact, we’re talking on a rotary phone.”
Leatherbury kept his day rates low through much of his career, knowing that the winning 10 percent purse share would fatten his take. With assembly-line efficiency, he moved to the winner’s circle 365 times in 1976, then led the nation’s trainers the next two years with 322 and 304.
He brought a cardsharp’s moxie to the “claiming wars” with Bud Delp, Dick Dutrow Sr., and John Tammaro, the years-long rivalry feeding everyday racing programs with grist and intrigue. The trainers bandaged and placed horses with cunning and subterfuge, and Leatherbury went one better: Years before the publication of Beyer speed figures, he subscribed to the racing sheets of Len Ragozin (a horse-owning client), and later Jerry Brown, to better assess a runner’s true worth.
“He went to the numbers when nobody knew they existed,” trainer Donald Barr said in 2015. “He’s always been ahead of the game in many ways.”
For two decades, trainer Leatherbury presided over his Maryland stables as scripted, until audacious results lured new owners that gave him more runners than stalls. So he divided his stock between Pimlico and Laurel and devised a solution as to which barn he’d tend in the morning: neither.
“When I had to split my stable, it meant I couldn’t get to both places,” he said. “All I did was stay in the office [at Laurel] and talk on the phone, and have people come in and try to sell me things and agents come in hustling their riders, which they’re supposed to do, and you get to talkin’ so much you say, ‘What am I doing here? I can do this at home, and do it more efficiently.’”
It was, in his often-challenged view, a natural evolution. For a long time, telephones had been barred at racetrack stables in step with anti-bookmaking laws; the end of that prohibition, and his forced diversification, left Leatherbury to hire the best exercise riders he could find and savvy horsemen to run the stable and report back.
“My theory was a rider could feel a whole lot more than a trainer could see,” he said. “There have been a lot of trainers that go out there and watch their horses, but they’re not really watchin’ their horses – they’re talkin’. And they get around to tellin’ horse stories, and it’s fun to do that . . . but it’s more of a show thing, really.”
Traditionalists assessed his absence in degrees of horse-training sacrilege, feelings Leatherbury didn’t quell when he said, “I’m not a horse lover, per se; I’m a horse racing lover.” That he won 52 meet titles in Maryland and four in Delaware only stoked frustrations.
“Here’s a guy that didn’t even see his horses train most of the time, and he’d come out and beat ya,” said Dale Capuano, who retired from training as 2022 ended. “I’d scratch my head. I’m out here, it’s dark in the morning when I get to the track; when I’d get home, it’d be dark, and in the afternoon, I’m second to him. He’s beatin’ me, beatin’ me. It used to drive me crazy.”
Said Ferris Allen: “I was at Timonium, and I ran a little horse . . . and he broke his maiden for, like, 8,000 that day. And Leatherbury claimed him. And that pissed me off, because I was stabled in the same barn with Leatherbury at Timonium, and you just don’t claim a horse out of the same barn. I see King later in the day, and I said, ‘King, you took my horse; we’re in the same barn.’ He said, ‘We are?’”
“If I were them,” Leatherbury once said of his smitten competitors, “I’d probably criticize me too.”
In boom times and bust, King T. Leatherbury stood a reporter’s windfall — candid, honest, expansive. Better yet, quirky. He allowed one interview as he drove his hard-used Lexus like a hellion along the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, ignoring a cluster of flashing dashboard lights, bound for Horseshoe Casino. He was 82.
“Is it difficult to talk while you’re driving?” came the question.
“Hell no,” he said convincingly. “I handicap while I’m driving.”
His Hall of Fame election had spurred the discourse and these Leatherbury nuggets.
“Some of the feedback I got was that . . . in order to get this [induction], you had to perform at the very top level in racing. I’ve never run in a Breeders’ Cup race. Never run in the Derby. Never run in the Belmont. So you couldn’t compete on a mediocre level and expect to get in. And I thought that was a legitimate thing. And my answer was, I have received more awards and honors than any one man could ever expect in a lifetime, regardless of what the profession is. I just attained everything but that, so I certainly didn’t need that; I wasn’t lookin’ forward to it. It wasn’t a desire of mine, or an objective.”
He was just warming up. “The first time I was leadin’ trainer in the country, the HBPA sent me and my wife to Los Angeles, paid my way there, paid my way back, gave me a thing in one of the big hotels,” Leatherbury said. “My wife dances with Cary Grant, dances with John Forsythe. John Forsythe came up to me and said, ‘You had a nice acceptance speech. You did a very good job.’ And I was nervous as hell. But I don’t get nervous anymore.”
Then this postscript about the Hall of Fame ceremony in Saratoga. “It’ll end up costin’ me money. I gotta pay for my room up there. They don’t give you a room.”
And still he looked beyond the bottom line. He collected, wore and donated striking horsey neckties and gave away all manner of walking sticks. He’d started buying canes as cheeky gifts to friends who’d turned 50; they returned the gesture with such interest he’d amassed 200.
His eclectic doings also included carpentry, described this way:
“I put wallpaper on a wall and put trim around it . . .”
“Like a chair rail?”
“Yeah. And the stuff around the ceilings.”
“That would be crown molding.”
“Yeah.”
Into his 80s, as his clients died off and racing stock dwindled, Leatherbury evinced a more sensitive side. He said three buzzards had become regular guests outside his home, which more charmed than unnerved him. He named them Moe, Larry and Curly and treated them to raw pork — “only $1.70 a pound at Sam’s Club!”
Any wonder, then, that he wrote poetry? Here he declined to share the pages but recited, without inflection, a work he titled Two Days Over Fifty.
It’s only two days that I care about
Today and tomorrow are the ones with the clout
Yesterday is gone, will never be again
Today and tomorrow’s what I have interest in
Far ahead in the future is too hard to see
Today and tomorrow are important to me
Whether it’s work or play, whichever I choose
Today and tomorrow are the days that I’ll use
Call it a paradox of time: The very measure of horse-racing greatness and his own poignant evolution seemed to bring Leatherbury angst. In 2020, his once-hundred-horse stable left to four, Leatherbury expressed more gratitude than dismay. “This has been my life; it’s somethin’ that’s more than just a job,” he said. “I never got into it to make any money; I got in it because I loved it so.”
Even in sunset, longtime assistant Avon Thorpe reported, Leatherbury maintained his glow. “He’s the best,” Thorpe said. “I mean, hands down, he is the best. It’s tough to believe — bein’ 87, you wouldn’t even realize he’s that old. He’s still spunky. And he really hasn’t changed. I know he wishes we had more horses, but he don’t dwell on it. He says, ‘If we don’t get owners, we ain’t gonna have no work.’ And he tells it just like that.”
Leatherbury sent out his last horse in January 2023 but stayed squarely in the game, horseplaying in a semi-private room in the Laurel clubhouse, presenting the trophy to the winning owner of the King T. Leatherbury Stakes and effecting a dual role as Maryland’s horse-trainer emeritus and everybody’s favorite uncle.
Into his 90s, at gatherings planned and spontaneous, Leatherbury might find a clubhouse table and lavish flocking visitors with gibe and story. At a racetrackers’ reunion last April, a reporter stopped to thank him for all the time and insights he’d provided over 40 years.
“We were just doin’ our job,” he said with vintage pragmatism. “You, me, and the doctor treating Roger.”
He saw the blank expression and fixed it.
“Yeah, Roger was havin’ these terrible migraines. Doctor tells him, ‘We’ve exhausted every conventional treatment. At this point, I can only offer you something unconventional. When I feel a migraine coming on, I get into a hot bath — hot as I can stand it — put an ice-cold compress to my forehead and do that for 20 minutes. After that, I make love to my wife and the migraine disappears.’ ‘Okay, doc,” Roger says. ‘I’ll try anything.’ ‘Come back in two weeks and let me know,’ the doc tells him. Two weeks later, Roger returns looking rejuvenated. ‘Doc, you’re a genius!’ Roger tells him. ‘I had three migraines since I saw you, and each time your remedy worked like magic.’ Doc goes, ‘I’m thrilled.’ ‘You and me both,’ says Roger. ‘By the way, doc, you’ve got a lovely home.'”
At 92, King Leatherbury had made one more score.
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