When King T. Leatherbury was inducted into the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame in 2015, he walked up to the podium inside the regal Fasig-Tipton Sales Pavilion in Saratoga Springs, New York, looked out at all the blue blood owners and breeders whose fabulous wealth give horse racing its misnomer, the “Sport of Kings,” and began cracking old jokes.

“He really liked that because those were all virgin ears,” said Leatherbury’s son Todd, who, like his twin brother, Taylor, has performed comedy throughout a career in theater. “When you went to those horse award ceremonies, they were so boring. They get up there and thank their wives and kids, and he just wanted to tell jokes.”

Much of the audience that day didn’t know what to make of Leatherbury, who died Tuesday of natural causes at his home in Mitchellville. As a meat-and-potatoes horse trainer, he didn’t have a barn full of majestically bred steeds to compete on racing’s hallowed grounds at Saratoga, Belmont Park or Churchill Downs. He cut his teeth at wild bullring tracks such as Shenandoah Downs in Virginia and Charles Town in West Virginia but then rose to staggering dominance on the second-tier mid-Atlantic circuit, principally at Laurel Park and Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore, as well as Delaware Park.

In a career that began in 1959 and concluded in 2023 when he struggled to find owners willing to give horses to a 90-year-old trainer, Leatherbury piled up 6,508 victories, ranking him fifth all time, and nearly $65 million in purse earnings.

He won 56 race meet titles — 26 each at Laurel and Pimlico and four at Delaware — and led all trainers in North America in wins in 1977 and 1978. He went four straight years (1975-78) winning at least 300 races, 11 consecutive years with at least 200 victories and an incredible 63 straight years with at least one win. He accomplished the vast majority of this in what is known as the claiming game, where cheaper horses are for sale each race, far from the lofty ranks of champions such as Secretariat and Spectacular Bid.

“His numbers are better than they look on the surface because he did it competing for most of his career in what has always been an extremely tough racing circuit with good trainers,” longtime Washington Post racing columnist Andrew Beyer said in a 2011 interview with the industry publication The Paulick Report. “Most of those numbers were going up against Bud Delp, a Hall of Famer, and Dick Dutrow, widely considered maybe the best horseman ever in Maryland.”

Leatherbury, Delp, Dutrow and another trainer, John Tammaro Jr., were known as “The Big Four” in the late 1960s and 1970s, dominating racing at mid-Atlantic tracks. Unlike the other three, however, Leatherbury wasn’t renowned for his horsemanship, even though he was capable. Instead, he became one of the shrewdest handicappers ever, excelling in identifying undervalued horses, claiming them and then moving them up or down the ladder to levels where he thought they had the best chance to win.

His prolific claiming changed the nature of the game, making it far more aggressive than it had been.

Armed daily with his Ragozin Sheets, a system of speed figures developed by a handicapper named Len Ragozin, Leatherbury did far more work in his home office than at the barn.

“What he did was he ran them where they could produce,” said Leatherbury’s friend Hamilton Smith, 81, who still is a leading trainer in Maryland. “He wasn’t protecting his horses [from being claimed] as much as a lot of people do, and he had a barn full.”

“Back in those days, the early ’60s, no one claimed horses,” Leatherbury said in 2005. “Those were the days people started managing horses in a businesslike way.”

Relying heavily on the horsemanship of his assistants, Leatherbury plotted the course of his charges without working up close with them. His late rival and friend Delp, who trained the legendary Spectacular Bid, winner of the Kentucky Derby and Preakness in 1979, told a story to illustrate Leatherbury’s unorthodox prowess.

“We were at Bowie [Race Track] years ago, and King had a horse in the last race he’d claimed 45 days before,” Delp recalled. “I said, ‘I’m going down to the paddock to see if he likes his horse.’ I walked down and I said, ‘King, can you win this race?’ He said, ‘Love her, love her.’ Before she walked into the stall, I said, ‘What does she look like?’ He said, ‘I don’t know. This is the first time I’ve seen her.’ She won by 10.”

Leatherbury’s handicapping and claiming acumen turned rags into riches. A horse named Taking Risks didn’t win a race until his 20th start, and two races after that, in November 1993, Leatherbury claimed him for $20,000. The horse didn’t reappear at the track until the following February when, in Leatherbury’s care, he beat a field of 12 by seven lengths. Taking Risks won five stakes races, including a Grade 1 race — the highest level of racing — and was one of only two Grade 1 winners Leatherbury had in 36,256 career starts (the other was Catatonic in 1987).

He claimed another horse named Ameri Valay for $35,000 in January 1992, and the horse became a powerful stakes competitor, earning $743,529 in his career.

Leatherbury’s greatest horse, however, was one he bred himself — Ben’s Cat. By a largely failed stallion named Parker’s Storm Cat and a mare Leatherbury owned named Twofox, the nearly black gelding hardly looked like a prospect, having broken his pelvis when young and not making it to the races until he was 4 years old.

When he finally got there, Ben’s Cat won his first start, in a maiden claiming race, and then the following seven before being beaten. Then he kept winning and winning — 32 times in 63 starts, with 26 victories in stakes races and more than $2.6 million in earnings before Leatherbury retired him in 2017. By then, he was far and away the most popular racehorse in Maryland.

Asked if Ben’s Cat changed Leatherbury, Avon Thorpe, his assistant for 35 years, said: “No, he was the same person. Every horse was treated the same way. He was just a good horse. Everybody had pride in him. You’d only pump your chest that race because you could lose the next one. We didn’t expect him to win every time. He was just doing it. He was a super horse.”

In 2013, Leatherbury was honored at a ceremony at Laurel Park, accepting awards for Ben’s Cat being named Maryland-bred champion turf horse, older horse and horse of the year. He did seven minutes of standup comedy.

“A jockey walks into a bar,” he said as the crowd braced for another one. “He’s got a parrot on his shoulder. The bartender says, ‘Where’d you get him?’ The parrot says, ‘At Pimlico. There must be 30 of them over there.’”

King Taylor Leatherbury was born an only child on March 26, 1933, in Baltimore and grew up on his parents’ Craft Well Farm in Shady Side. His father, William Taylor Leatherbury, was in the water wells business and raised horses on the property. King was given his mother Evelin King’s maiden name.

He graduated from the University of Maryland with a degree in business administration and spent two years in the U.S. Army.

“And when he had his weekend passes, he would spend them at the track,” Todd Leatherbury said. “He figured, if I spend my free time at the track, I might as well make a career of it. He was either going to be a vet or a trainer. He told me he flipped a coin.”

Leatherbury, who won his first race in 1959 at Sunshine Park in Florida, did things his own way from the beginning. He never worked for another trainer, according to his son.

“He was his own man,” Todd Leatherbury said. “He used to be knocked for not being at the track, at the barn, in the morning. He said, ‘If I slept in the stall with the horses, it’s not going to make them run any faster.’”

Leatherbury loved to gamble and bet on the horses nearly every day, even after he retired. His son said they used to have big parties at the home of trainer and breeder Bill Boniface and play poker and craps. Regina Delp, the wife of Bud Delp, recalled going to parties Leatherbury and wife Linda threw at their house in Laurel, and he had a room full of live slot machines.

“I said to him, ‘How cheap can you get? People playing them to pay for your party?’” she said, laughing.

(“He obviously won a lot of money training,” Todd Leatherbury said.)

In the later years of his life, King Leatherbury lost none of his passion for racing, training, gambling, joking and his family.

“It was like King wanted to do more but he couldn’t,” Thorpe said.

At the awards ceremony at Laurel in 2013, Leatherbury joked about his vitality into his 80s.

“I really feel good, and I feel young, and I think young,” he said. “If it wasn’t for that one thing: I go down to my family plot, it’s a cemetery. Right where I’m going to be buried, the only thing that worries me is a little sign there that says, ‘Coming soon.’”