Larry Murray: Maryland racing’s Renaissance man

Murray is responsible for all aspects of Sondra and Howard Bender’s perennially successful breeding and racing operation—selecting broodmares, planning matings, overseeing the farm and training a string of 20 runners at Laurel Park.
Story by Lucy Acton. Photographs by Barrie B. Reightler

When La Reine’s Terms—a battle-scarred 10-year-old who had not raced in more than a year—powered to victory in last year’s Maryland Million Turf, attention naturally turned to trainer Larry Murray.  

Low-key as ever, Murray, having just accomplished one of the most remarkable training feats in the history of the Maryland Million, directed all the attention right back to the horse.

“He trained himself,” said Murray. “If he acted like he wanted to do something, we didn’t stand in his way.”

It was just the kind of response you’d expect from Murray, who, though never at a loss for words, is often known to reach supreme heights of eloquence when his horses do the talking.

As the private trainer for perennially successful owners Howard and Sondra Bender, as well as the one who oversees their farm, chooses the broodmares (for a band of approximately 20) and plans the matings (typically to mid-priced Kentucky sires), Murray, 53, has built his career around quality horses while filling a role that is all but extinct in today’s racing world.

In some ways, Murray’s job is a throwback to the era when vast breeding operations such as Paul Mellon’s Rokeby Farm campaigned generation after generation of top-quality runners and relied on their private trainers to fine-tune the gene pool.

“We’re very lucky he’s our trainer—and nobody else’s,” said Howard Bender.

Curiously, the Benders were considered to be taking a big risk when they turned the stable over to Murray back in 1989. Howard Bender, president of Washington, D.C.-based Blake Construction Co., and his wife, Sondra, had entered the racing business full force in 1984 with longtime veteran Marvin Moncrief as their trainer. They enjoyed immediate success with numerous stakes wins in their first few years, topped by Southern Appeal’s victory in the 1985 Laurel Futurity-G1.

Moncrief’s death in the fall of 1988, at age 55 following a long battle with cancer, was a deep blow to the Benders personally as well as to their racing stable. “He was our friend, in addition to being our trainer,” said Sondra Bender.

For a while, the racing operation was in turmoil. The low point, recalled Howard Bender, came early one morning when the assistant trainer called the Benders and asked them what he should do with the horses that day. Their new trainer had disappeared from the job.  

Murray, meanwhile, was managing Glade Valley Farms, the Frederick, Md., breeding establishment in which Howard Bender inherited a major interest from his father, the farm’s co-founder Jack I. Bender.

No novice on the race track—he spent some of his formative years as assistant to Phipps stable trainer John Russell—Murray had never trained a stable on his own. But he wanted to take on the job. Glade Valley’s era as a prominent commercial establishment was coming to an end, and Murray figured he could both train the Bender horses and keep tabs on the farm operation.

“He threw his hat in the ring,” recalled Howard Bender. “And we trusted him. A lot of people told us we were crazy—that Larry didn’t know enough, that there were better trainers available.”

In the 17 years since then, Murray has trained 24 stakes winners for the Benders, almost all of them homebreds. A few years ago, the stable went on an exceptional roll, with the Benders taking honors as Maryland’s breeder of the year in 2001, ’02 and ’03. In 2002 it reached a zenith—nine horses bred by the Benders won stakes. Seven of those horses raced for the Benders, and together accounted for 13 stakes wins.

Although 2006 (so far) has been a lackluster season by those rarefied standards, the Bender stable campaigns one of the best older Maryland-bred distaffers in current competition, multiple stakes winner Promenade Girl.

On track
Murray’s daily routine begins like that of many trainers. Climbing into his battered gray 2003 Toyota Corolla (“I beat cars to death. It doesn’t make sense for me to have a fancy one.”), he leaves Glade Valley around 4:40 a.m. and about 50 minutes later rolls through the Laurel Park stable gate. His destination, Barn 5, sits in quiet anonymity—no banner hanging under the shedrow, no monogrammed feed tubs or webbings.

The barn decor is “probably a holdover from Glade Valley,” acknowledged Murray. Emphasis on function rather than show was the prescribed way for Dr. Robert A. Leonard, the longtime Glade Valley managing partner who hired Murray and mentored him on the running of the farm. “Doc Leonard [a veterinarian] believes in taking care of the horses the best you can as opposed to dressing up,” said Murray.

Many of the grooms, and assistant trainer Randy Bright, are already at work when Murray arrives, and he gives them all, along with the rangy calico cat Roxie, a friendly but businesslike greeting.

Murray’s assistant is a well-schooled horseman in his own right—a Camden, S.C., native who started out with Marion duPont Scott’s steeplechase stable in 1972, served as an assistant to trainer Billy Turner in New York, and followed up with a stint with Buckland Farm and trainer G. Allen Darlington. Bright was one of the first people Murray hired after taking over the Bender stable.

“We’ve been together so long, we think alike,” said Bright. “A lot of times he can look at me, and I’ll say, ‘I already did that.’ ”

Bright’s wife, Karyn—they met on the job and married nine years ago—is one of five full-time grooms employed by the stable. And she was the one entrusted with the notoriously difficult but much revered La Reine’s Terms.
 
“The reason I got him is that nobody else wanted him,” said Karyn. “He was so nasty, but he was better with women.” Karyn broke down in tears when La Reine’s Terms retired from the track and since then, in her words, she hasn’t been the same.

Most of Murray’s crew, also counting five hotwalkers and two exercise riders, has been with him a long time. One reason for the low turnover, he believes, is the fact that everyone gets a day off once a week. “Our pay is about average,” Murray said. “But we’re one of the few stables that gives a day off, and they really seem to appreciate it. The only ones who don’t have a regular day off are me and Randy.”
Murray is known as a gentle boss. “He never yells,” said Karyn. And he looks for the same quality in his help. “The last thing we want is for people to get rough with the horses,” he said.

Other key employees include Matt Dillon, the stable foreman who travels with horses shipping out-of-town; longtime groom Horacio Predanas; and exercise riders Henry Mesias and Whyatt Johnson, who take horses to the track in sets of two, often accompanied by Murray on his stable pony, an ex-race horse officially named Overreaching but known simply as “the pony.”

Both exercise riders have traveled a long route to be entrusted with the Bender horses. Mesias, 58 years old, has spent decades taking horses on their morning outings; he leaves Murray’s barn each day for another full-time shift as a track security guard. Johnson rode races with some success earlier in his life.

The number of horses in the barn hovers around 20 at any given time, though it dips slightly during the months when grass racing—a specialty of many Bender horses—is not being conducted. In mid-July, Murray had six 2-year-olds, with another four being brought along by Barbara Graham at the Middleburg Training Center and due to join the stable by the fall.

Every single one of the horses who joins Murray’s contingent at Laurel Park is a homebred and a Maryland-bred—foaled at Glade Valley from a mare owned by the Benders. Yearlings are raised at the home farm before being sent in the fall for their early education with Lucia Carroll in South Carolina. To say that Murray is intimately acquainted with them all would be an understatement. He can look at a 2-year-old filly and recall the most minute details involving her dam at exactly that same stage of development.

“When you stay with the same family, you tend to see the same things. One mare’s foals all have a left ankle; another has foals with bad feet. We try to breed those things out of them—sometimes we’re able to do that, and sometimes not,” Murray explained.

His training techniques, he admitted, tend toward the conservative. “I’m probably too easy on them,” he said. “But we start with a certain group, and that’s all we get. We don’t claim or buy a replacement if something goes wrong. The last thing I want to do is shorten their careers—I’m always looking toward longevity. We’re not geared toward 2-year-old racing.”

Developing stakes-caliber runners—often known as “Saturday afternoon horses”—is the goal. And Murray, if need be, will steel himself to lose an underachiever in a claiming race. “You have to place them where they can win,” he said.  

Although Murray doesn’t plan for it to happen that way, the Bender runners, for the most part, seem to be natural-born turf specialists. Murray makes a point of not training them on the turf course.

“If they’re going to like it, they’ll like it,” he said. “They’ve all worked well enough on the main track that we haven’t had to work them on the grass. Sometimes we let them gallop on the turf course as a treat.”

It’s also part of the trainer’s conditioning program. Horses get more exercise when they work on the dirt, he believes, and the extra conditioning gives them a boost when they race on the grass.

Training goes on until 10 o’clock each morning, interrupted only by the harrow break [routine track maintenance] around 8. During the break, Murray slips into his office—a dusty 10 by 10-foot cell-like space adjacent to the tack room—and chats with the boss(es). Most mornings both Howard and Sondra Bender are on the phone, precisely at 8:15, wanting to know what’s going on. It’s not that the Benders tell Murray how to run the operation; it’s just that they like to hear how their horses are doing—the good, bad and everything in between. “If they didn’t call, I’d figure I must have gotten fired,” said Murray.

As weekends approach, the talk often turns to dining room reservations, because the Bender horses almost never run a race of any significance—in Maryland or elsewhere—without the Benders on hand.

Traveling is unavoidable during the summer when live racing shuts down in Maryland. But Murray also sets his sights on stakes races year-round at tracks in New Jersey, New York, Delaware, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, as well as in his home state.

So the Benders and Murray can often be found on the road, —or in the Benders’ private plane—pursuing the kind of thrills that melt away years of effort.

Murray, after happily going about his morning chores in a safety vest and black helmet, slips easily into a coat and tie, looking like an executive—which he is. But the hands-on part of Murray’s job will quickly re-emerge as he goes to the paddock to saddle the horse.

“I have a lot of confidence in my help and I’m sure they’d do fine,” he said, explaining why he very rarely lets an assistant handle everything when horses race out-of-town. “But I couldn’t imagine sitting at home or in the Cracked Claw [off-track betting site] and watching one of the horses run.”

If he happens to be driving back late and alone from one of the New Jersey tracks, Murray, likely as not, will sleep that night on the frayed old sofa in his race track office, surrounded by winner’s circle pictures (one photo of each of the best ones he’s trained) and a glamour photo of his wife, Janice.

Farm life
However, Murray is at heart a family man, and his thoughts, and presence, are never far from Glade Valley—home to his own family and those of his horses.
Most days, after training hours are over, Murray heads home for lunch and then spends a few hours on farm business, consulting frequently with office manager Joy Flickinger and farm manager Mike Figgins.

Glade Valley houses not only the Benders’ 20 mares, but also four mares owned by a group composed of Howard and Sondra Bender and other members of the Bender family that does business as Glade Valley Farms Inc.

Strictly a market breeder, Glade Valley Farms Inc. bred one of the best runners to come off the farm in recent years, multiple stakes winner Some­thinaboutbetty (Forestry—Here Comes Betty, by Cox’s Ridge), who sold for $180,000 at the 2004 Saratoga Yearling sale. Resold to a partnership headed by legendary men’s basketball coach Rick Pitino for $300,000 at the Fasig-Tipton Calder Two-Year-Olds sale, Somethinaboutbetty has career earnings of $179,920 from 10 starts; she most recently placed second in the Lake George Stakes-G3 at Saratoga.

Howard and Sondra Bender, of course, breed to race, with only occasional forays as consignors at yearling sales. Each year, Murray arranges a few matings designed for commercial value—to improve the operation’s profit/loss status, as he explained. However, he added, he’s under no pressure to do it that way.

“Somebody once told me that the best way to run a horse operation is to sell the top third and the bottom third and race the middle third—because that’s where the good horses are most likely to come from,” Murray recounted. “I always thought that was sage advice.”

So is that the procedure? “No,” said Murray, with a smile. “Mr. Bender would never let us sell a third of the foal crop. The Benders love to race.”

This year, the Benders had two yearlings consigned to the Saratoga Select sale: a Hennessy colt out of Affirmed Class (by Affirmed); and a filly by Tale of the Cat out of the A.P. Indy mare Indy Power, from the family of their graded stakes winners Clever Power and Secret Odds. At Keeneland, Glade Valley is scheduled to sell a Harlan’s Holiday colt out of the Cozzene mare Maryland Mist, who is a daughter of the Benders’ outstanding producer (and 2003 Maryland broodmare of the year) Foufa (by Storm Bird).

Murray has set as his goal to “every year improve the stock and keep breeding better horses.” Choosing stallions who can make a good fit with the Bender mares is obviously a key aspect of Murray’s job, and it seems to be a challenge that he particularly enjoys.


“I think about it every day,” he said, while adding that Howard Bender’s assistant, Deepak Ohri, sometimes makes suggestions that are factored into the mix. Murray favors proven sires who had racing ability; he prefers horses who stood up well to training and showed speed. Perhaps ironically, he spurns turf horses—“for some reason they don’t seem to come up with runners,” he said.

Murray watches major stakes throughout the country with a sharp eye, noting subtleties that will influence his decisions when top horses enter stud. Most years, he makes a trip to Kentucky to check out new stallions.

One of the most memorable of these visits involved Giant’s Causeway. “He had so much heart as a race horse—if he saw you, he would beat you,” commented Murray. “And he had a terrible ride in the Breeders’ Cup.

“When I went to Kentucky, it made me weak in the knees just looking at him. He was standing for $125,000. I told Mr. Bender how I felt, and he said, ‘Why don’t we breed to him?’ The only way we could spend that much on a stud fee, I told Mr. Bender, was if we sold the foal. We didn’t breed to him, because Mr. Bender wouldn’t promise me he’d sell the foal.”

Murray believes in spreading the risk: He rarely breeds two mares to the same horse in the same year.

The Bender mares delivered 2006 foals by Alphabet Soup, Johannesburg, Smart Strike, Stormy Atlantic and Tale of the Cat, among others. All but Johannesburg were proven sires, noted Murray. He selected Johannesburg, a champion son of Hennessy, for a mating with stakes producer Nashly (by Island Whirl) with the intention of selling the foal.

“Nashly [dam of multiple stakes winner Cruise Along, by Runaway Groom] is 17, and we don’t know how many more foals we’ll get out of her,” said Murray, explaining his rationale. “Johannesburg had 140 2-year-olds in his first crop coming to the races this year, so we figured he had a pretty good chance of making it.” So far, Murray seems correct: through August 1, Johannesburg was the nation’s leading freshman sire.

Murray’s experience with the first crop of another sire—Tale of the Cat—offered an encouraging precedent. Glade Valley’s best sales success to date came with Tale of the Cat’s son Fearless Devil (out of Here Comes Betty), who sold at the 2001 Saratoga Yearling sale for $450,000.

The Benders own shares in eight stallions, but Murray utilizes only one of them on a regular basis: the three-time leading Maryland sire Not For Love. The others are Concern, Deputed Testamony (now pensioned), Partner’s Hero, Private Terms (recently pensioned), Runaway Groom, Waquoit and Wayne County (Ire).

Just as critical to their breeding operation is careful selection—and pruning—of the broodmare band. Generally, only the best of the Benders’ female runners are candidates for the program. “Some people will say, ‘So-and-so doesn’t seem to be making it on the race track, so I think we’ll breed her,’ ” observed Murray. “I just can’t imagine trying to breed horses that way.”

Asked to pinpoint the Benders’ best mare, Murray chose Wide River (1993, Broad Brush), who produced two stakes winners from her first two foals to race: Secret River, a 1997 daughter of Secret Odds who won the 2002 All Along Breeders’ Cup Stakes-G3 and Lady Baltimore Stakes, earning $242,540; and the Not For Love daughter River Cruise ($169,720), whose three stakes wins and placings included the 2003 running of the Maryland Million Oaks.

Wide River belongs to a family that has been in production for the Benders since the 1980s. They bought Wide River’s, dam Float Upstream (by Nile Delta), from Marvin Moncrief. Float Upstream was the dam of graded winner Runaway Stream ($402,693), whom the Benders raced but did not breed; the Benders did, however, breed her two stakes-placed runners: Stream Crossing (by Waquoit) and King’s Float (by King’s Nest).

In terms of investment, however, the lead broodmare is Promenade Girl’s dam, Promenade Colony. The handsomely bred daughter of Pleasant Colony cost a heart-stopping $460,000, in foal to Woodman, at the 1998 Keeneland November sale. Murray had never before asked the Benders to pay anything close to that amount for a mare. “I thought she was worth about $350,000, but Ohri gave me the elbow [urging him to keep on bidding],” Murray recalled. Promenade Colony, 14, has a 2006 filly by Tale of the Cat and is in foal to Smart Strike.

Other prominent members of the broodmare band include the young prospects Cruise Along (a foal of 1998) and Media Access (1998, Devil’s Bag), both stakes winners bred and raced by the Benders. Cruise Along has a 2006 filly by Smart Strike and is in foal to Tiznow; Media Access has a yearling colt by Mr. Greeley and a weanling colt by Langfuhr; she is in foal to Mr. Greeley.

And then there is Foufa—the 23-year-old matriarch who produced five of the Benders’ all-time best runners: stakes winners Foufa’s Warrior, Maryland Moon, Full Brush, Certantee and Media Access. Together, Foufa’s five stakes winners have earned well over $1.8 million. Foufa had a Diamond filly this year and was bred to St Averil but failed to conceive.

“She’s probably going to rest on her laurels,” said Mur­ray, “but we haven’t ruled out breeding her one more time.”

No farm operation can keep them all. To maintain turnover, Murray typically sends aging mares to commercially appealing sires, and sells them, in foal, at auction. “We won’t sell a mare who has no value,” he explained. “But if we can sell a mare who has a few more foals in her and raise some capital, that seems like the thing to do.”

The pensioners’ field at Glade Valley is home to five broodmares and Murray’s old lead pony.

Getting there
Rumor has it that Glade Valley Farms—a vast 560-acre facility only partially occupied by the Benders’ current operation—has found a buyer. The rumor is true, according to Murray. But he adds that no one expects the farm to change hands in the near future. Zoning issues are holding back the transaction—and could do so for the next 20 years.

Murray dreams of designing a smaller and more practical farm for the Benders’ horses. But if that time ever comes, leaving Glade Valley undoubtedly will be a wrenching process for him and his family.

When Murray arrived at Glade Valley back in 1979, he was a fresh-faced lad of 26—filled with energy and common sense but lacking even the most basic skills of farm life.

“I’d never even ridden a tractor,” said Murray, who grew up just outside the fence of Belmont Park in New York. “Doc Leonard taught me everything. He spent a year showing me how he wanted things done.”

Murray had already come in contact with the racing business from several different sides—from his father, Larry Murray Sr., who worked for many years as a mutuel clerk at the New York tracks; from his maternal grandfather, Mickey Miles, who had been a jockey (riding mostly in Europe because he had trouble making the weight in the U.S.); and from his uncle, Tom Miles, a longtime trainer in New England.
As a youth, Murray gravitated to the Belmont Park backstretch, where he walked hots on weekends and during summer vacations.

Deciding that college was teaching him few things he truly needed to know, he quit after completing two years at a community college when he was offered a job with the Ogden Mills Phipps racing stable in 1972—the year after its Numbered Account earned an Eclipse Award as the nation’s champion 2-year-old filly.

After a short time, Phipps trainer John Russell chose Murray as his assistant. “John Russell was a big influence on me,” said Murray. “He had a definite knack for developing horses, and he would go to great lengths to keep them happy. Also, I learned a lot from the old grooms up in New York. Some of them had been working for the same people for a long time, and they made grooming horses an art.”

With the Phipps stable undergoing transition, Murray left after four years and found a job with the Murty Brothers air transportation company. He stayed in that job for three years, accompanying horses in the cargo hold on trips to Europe, South America, Japan and South Africa, among other places.

Reflecting, perhaps, his own natural composure, Murray came away without any “nightmare stories of horses pitching fits,” according to his wife. But Janice Murray, who went on some of the travels, will never forget their trip to South America with 35 broodmares—“when the lights went out and one of the mares broke loose.”
It was Murray’s wife who helped land the two of them at Glade Valley. Janice Murray had been familiar with the farm all her life, having grown up in the Frederick area. Her sister, then working as an exercise rider at Glade Valley, told Larry and Janice that Leonard was looking for someone to step into the role of manager.

“Janice wanted to come back and be near her mother,” said Murray. “She told me, ‘If it doesn’t work out, we can always leave.’ ”

The Murrays had met four years earlier in Aiken, S.C., where he was training a string of the Phipps horses and she was working as a groom. They were married in 1980, soon after settling in at Glade Valley. By that time, as Larry recalled, he was too busy to get a haircut for his wedding day.

The couple has raised three children on the farm: Patrick, 24, a graduate of the University of Maryland, College Park, works as the billing manager for a physical therapy firm and lives in Rockville, Md.; Brian, 22, is an apprentice electrician; and Shea, 18, graduated from high school this past spring and is working as a nursing assistant with plans for a career as a registered nurse. The younger two still live at home.

Janice Murray—in addition to keeping the books for the Bender racing operation —works part-time at St. Peter’s Church in Libertytown, a job that keeps her close to the other major aspect of her and her husband’s lives.

Murray, brought up in an Irish-Catholic household, retains a deep religious faith. Both he and his wife volunteer many hours for their church, which is also the center of many of their social activities.

On summer evenings, their friends sometimes drop by to sit on the porch of the Mur­rays’ centuries-old stone house overlooking the farm pond and watch the sunset.

“They have a drink and as soon as the sun sets, they get up and leave,” said Murray. “Because they know what time I’ll be getting up the next morning.”