Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Marlins Man’s hobby
Sporting events aside, attorney Laurence Leavy races horses at Gulfstream
“I’m trying to make this a better country one game at time.” Laurence Leavy
This is for the dreamers. The schemers. The ones brave or odd enough to plot their own course in life and…
“Here he comes!” Marlins Man shouts and jumps from the best seat in the house, of course. He’s always in the best seat at World Series, Final Fours, NBA Finals, NFL playoffs — or, like here, at Gulfstream Park on a lazy weekday. “C’mon 4!” he shouts. This is like any of the 301 days he spent at sports events in 2015, covering 128 flights and 48 trips to 24 cities (he hasn’t com- piled 2016 stats yet). “He could get second!” he shouts. This is unlike those other events, too. He isn’t Marlins Man this day. He’s Peter Parker without the Spider-Man suit, Bruce Wayne without the Batmobile. He’s not wearing his signature Marlins orange jersey and cap. He’s not a radioactive presence in the corner of America’s televisions. “He could win!” he shouts. He’s just Laurence Leavy this day, a 60-year-old Broward lawyer sitting in his owner’s box as his horse, Starship Mars, a 7-to-1 underdog, comes down the stretch overtaking everyone ahead and … “He did it!” Leavy shouts. “He won!” He high-fives his horse’s trainer, Steven Dwoskin. He runs down and congratulates the jockey, four-time Eclipse winner Javier Castellano. He gets in the team photo in the winner’s circle with the horse, smiling
and laughing and only then realizing he forgot something.
“I was talking so much before the race I forgot to bet,” he says.
Even that worked out fine in the structured fantasy of Marlins Man’s world. Starship Mars earned $12,000 by winning the small-stakes claiming race.
Racing, you see, is Leavy’s hobby. Or sidehobby. Or maybe it’s a secondary business, after his workers’ compensation law firm headquartered in Davie with 37 employees.
He owns 102 horses, keeps a stable at Gulfstream and watches his horses race about four times a week under his Starship Stables, a name linking his love of horses and Star Wars. The stable’s motto: “May the horse be with you.”
“Why do I like horse racing?” he says. “It’s the only sport I go to where I can control the outcome. When I go to a baseball, football or basketball game, I’m just a spectator watching. “In horse racing, I might’ve picked who the mother was bred to the father. I might have bought the horse out of an auction. I might have claimed him. I can pick what distance, what surface, what jockey.
“What you just saw is I got really lucky. I got the best jockey in the United States to ride one of my horses that shouldn’t have been in this race at all.”
He watches the races from his Starship Stables box that’s lined up exactly with the finish line. It’s the only Gulfstream box with that sight line. The track owner, Frank Stronach, has a box beside Leavy’s, a few feet off the finish line.
Fans walked up to him on occasion at the track, curious and sometimes hesitant like the teenage boy this day. “Aren’t you …? “I am,” he says. He’s recognized everywhere these days. And he understands the odd view. When he’s invited to schools, he asks students if they consider him crazy in his orange jersey on TV. That leads into a larger discussion of not judging people by their color or appearance.
That also leads to one of his themes: “I’m trying to make this a better country one game at time,” Leavy says.
Another theme: He asks every stranger he invites to games, free of charge, to somehow “pay it forward.” He’s full of stories of how they have, from a simple beer bought to helping find jobs.
Leavy pays for everything himself, too. All the tickets. All the travel. Some companies, like Stubhub, have asked to advertise on his jersey. Others offer to fly him into games. He refuses.
“I’m not a brand, I’m not selling anything,” he says.
Here’s what he does allow: His name lent to causes. Kansas City’s fire department asked during an NFL playoff game if he’d wear a special hat to spruce sales to help two fallen firefighters. They hoped to sell 1,000 hats. They sold more than 7,000.
There might be Marlins Man socks coming out after a sports company asked him. Maybe a shirt and cap, too. But there would be a stipulation, if it works out, that every cent of the money goes to one of five charities the buyer can pick.
“I have all sorts of ideas to help people,” he says.
He, in fact, is overflowing with ideas and energy near the end of his first sports vacation since becoming Marlins Man in 2012. It was inspired back then by a diagnosis of liver cancer that proved false. What did he want to do with his new life?
“I loved going to games,” he says. “So I started going to all of them I could.”
Last fall, he became exhausted from years of coast-to-coast flights and also fearful for his safety after Cleveland Indians fans threatened him at the World Series (he’s since received so much positive mail from Cleveland fans he’s keeping a folder and plans to invite all of them to a game).
“I was talking with [Marlins players] Christian Yelich and Derek Dietrich and they said, ‘You’ve never had an offseason,’ ” Leavy said. “So I took my first offseason. I rested up. Now I can’t wait to get going again.”
He’ll return to Marlins Man form starting with the the World Baseball Classic games in Miami later this week. That starts a month of WBC events, a Dubai big-stakes horse race, the Florida Derby, Cubs-Cardinals season opener, MetsMarlins in New York, NCAA tournament championship in Arizona and — whew – Marlins home opener.
“My offseason is about over,” he says.
Until then, he’ll be at Gulfstream, watching his horses run. Or managing them. He scouted 16 horses he could buy at an upcoming auction in Ocala. He’s considering moving some of his horses to lesser competition in San Francisco.
“I’m not a spectator here, I’m in the game,” he said.
He’s also out of uniform. And, on days like this, he’s on the winning team, even if he forgot to place a bet.