Many reasons to applaud King T. Leatherbury

Six thousand of just about anything is a stretch. Visit the grocery store once a week, and it will take you more than 115 years to log 6,000 trips.

In a mere 43 years, trainer King T. Leatherbury has won 6,000 races, an amazing feat by any measure. (Actually, Leatherbury was one win shy of that milestone when this magazine went to press.)

Imagine 6,000 winning mutuel tickets, each for a different horse on a different date, stacked in rows. Now picture yourself cashing every single one. . .

Arguably, Leatherbury has faced tougher hurdles while piling up stacks of wins than anyone else in history.

Only two other trainers, Jack Van Berg and Dale Baird, have reached the 6,000 milestone. Van Berg did it with divisions at tracks throughout the country, and Baird accomplished the feat in the lowly bygone days at Mountaineer Park, when quantity ruled over quality.
Leatherbury has done the vast majority of his winning on the tough Maryland circuit, where there is no escaping the competition.

A lifelong Marylander, King achieved success by finding a way that worked for him.
Nobody has described Leatherbury’s modus operandi better than the late Jack Mann, who profiled the trainer for Mid-Atlantic Thoroughbred back in 1993:

“Being King Leatherbury is never, ever having to wish you were anybody else, doing anything else that anybody, anywhere, does. Being a horse trainer, Leatherbury’s way, is doing everything that’s fun about racing, just about all the time, and not doing most of what isn’t fun. One does not find King Leatherbury in chaps and five-gallon hat astride an Appaloosa with stopwatch in hand early in the morning. In fact, one does not find King Leatherbury early in the morning. He is at home in Mitchellville, in his basement office, managing his 55 or 65 horses by telephone.

“Then, for the rest of the day, he does the part that’s fun: handicapping and betting. ‘Betting is my recreation, my hobby,’ he said. ‘You could say it’s my life.'

A trainer who chose not to be with his horses? There will always be that asterisk next to his name, as far as some people are concerned. But it hasn’t been like that throughout Leatherbury’s entire career. He started out grooming and hotwalking his own horses in the 1950s, and in recent years as his stable has shrunk, he can often be found in the barn.
Leatherbury’s stature as a trainer has been so all-encompassing that his other contributions have sometimes gone relatively unnoticed.

He has served as president of both the Maryland Horse Breeders Association and Maryland Million Ltd., and has been notably successful as a breeder in Maryland.
Leatherbury has bred more than a dozen stakes horses, including graded winners Thirty Eight Go Go ($871,229) and Notches Trace ($360,562).

At 70, Leatherbury could have many more good years ahead of him. Let’s hope so, anyway, because in all the history of Mid-Atlantic racing, there has been only one King.