In Ridgeway’s early days, there was no organized sports such as baseball, basketball, or football. There were local athletic contests, though, such as team pulling contests and tug of war, running, and jumping, wrestling, square pulling (where men would sit down and pull against each other) and horse pulling (man vs. horse – still trying to figure out how that worked). The most common sport was sprinting and every town of any size had its champion. Ridgeway’s own J. W. Leazenby could run 100 yards in 10.5 seconds in 1885. In 1886, he was able to shave that time down to 10 seconds with wearing the “Frazier Spiked Shoe”.
Sprinters were usually backed by a group of betters and found their races either by following state and county fairs or advertising a challenge in the local paper. Leazenby’s first race was in 1885 against Claud Blackburn of Bethany. Leazenby won that race and all but one of the 30-40 races he ran. He lost only one race in which his backers bet that he could win racing barefoot against a baseball player. He got so famous and his backers won so many bets that he had to enter races under an assumed name or he would be refused. His last race was in Des Moines, IA. He won in a two-mile race, a distance he’d never run before, but said “I became convinced there that the game was crooked and what was wanted was to make victims of the backers…Never since that day have I had a running shoe on. You can say, too, that I believe commercialism will kill any amateur sport, in the end.” Leazenby went on to become a successful businessman in Ridgeway, owning or investing in several local businesses, including the New Ridgeway Hotel. He also served as a state representative and was an avid fox hunter and active in the Northwest Missouri Fox Hunters Association. (St. Joseph News-Press, Mar 20, 1938.)
