Now 87, trainer King Leatherbury likes to tell a joke, the one about his destiny and his family’s burial plot.
“I feel perfectly good and healthy but when I visit my family plot down there, where my whole family has been buried, there’s this little sign. It says, ‘King Leatherbury, coming soon.'”
In the meantime, Leatherbury is not done yet or ready to walk away from a career that has earned him a spot in the Hall of Fame and fifth place on the list of all-time winningest trainers with 6,504 victories. He reached another milestone Friday night at Penn National when wining a $10,000 claimer with Paratycachaca (Jazil). In a streak that began way back in 1959 at Sunshine Park (now Tampa Bay Downs), he has now won a race for 62 straight years. It was his first win in over 10 months.
“That sounds great because it’s so many years. I didn’t even realize it had been that many years,” he said. “I saddled my first winner in 1959 and here it is 2020.”
But 2020 has been a difficult year for him. Having the sort of stable that struggles to win even one race in a year is something he will never get used to, not when he has won numerous training titles and has won as many as 365 races in a single year. He understands why: there aren’t many owners willing to hire someone his age.
“I’m 87 years old, for God’s sake. Nobody is going to give me horses,” he said.
Up until 2017, Leatherbury didn’t necessarily need a large stable to enjoy success. He was the owner and trainer of Ben’s Cat (Parker’s Storm Cat), the obscurely bred turf sprinter who won 26 stakes races and earned 2,643,782. But when Ben’s Cat was retired after just three starts in 2017, Leatherbury didn’t have anything to fill the void. He won just eight races in 2018, the first time in his career that his win total was in the single digits, and only two in 2019. This year, he is 1 for 19.
“Winning one race in one year is nothing to brag about at all,” he said. “Fact is, I am down to four horses and one of them is a young horse who is not ready yet. So I have three horses running and they are all turf horses, which restricts their ability to start because you get a lot of times when it rains and the races come off the turf. That’s the predicament I am in. I’m happy to have won that race, but winning just one race doesn’t mean anything.”
When Leatherbury was among the leading trainers in the country in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, he had no problem attracting owners. With Leatherbury among the best there was at playing the claiming game, his owners knew that their trainer would win races for them.
“I have had great owners in my career and have great stories about them,” he said. “They were wonderful people. They just died off. Generally, the owner is older than the trainer. I had Mr. (Woodrow) Marriott who bred horses and I always got eight to 10 from him. He lived to be 93 years old, but sooner or later you go. I had my own horses for as long as I could. Generally, if you own a horse you lose money. If you don’t you are extremely lucky.”
He is down to one owner, Norman Lewis.
“Last year as the year was coming to an end, he said, ‘King, what is your plan for next year?’ meaning whether I was going to retire or not. I said to him that since he was the only owner that I have it all depended on what he was going to do. He stuck it out. He is a breeder. When you train for breeders you don’t win as many races as you do when training for claiming outfits. A breeder gets very attached to his horses and has sentimental interest in them. You can’t manage them as aggressively. You don’t have the ability to drop them and lose them.”
Leatherbury doesn’t want to retire. Like many other trainers who have spent most of their adult lives doing just one thing, he can’t imagine not training horses.
“I don’t want to retire because this has been my life,” he said.” I love it. If I retired, what else would I do?”
But he understands that if Lewis gets out of the business he could find himself without any horses to train.
“I don’t want to retire but I might be forced to if I lose this one owner,” he said. “Then I’ll just throw the towel in. When it comes that time, I’ll have to face the facts.”
But he’s not ready for that day to arrive. As long as he has horses to train he will keep doing what he’s been doing for 62 years and look forward to his next winner.
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