by Josh Dean
“He’s comical,” Kimberly observes. “It’s like he’s saying, ‘Aren’t I cute?’”
CHAPTER FOUR
The Road to a
Championship Starts with a
Single Point
* * *
Dog shows are the trade shows where you bring your product and put it on display for other people to see and learn from and take advantage of in their breeding programs. That’s the entire premise of dog shows.
—AKC FIELD REPRESENTATIVE (AND FORMER PRO HANDLER) SUE VROOM
* * *
As Kerry Kirtley said, breeders never really know what they have in a particular puppy. They can make assumptions based on coloration or bone structure or the early indications of graceful movement, then hope he’ll be good, but the only real test is to get a dog into the show ring and see what happens.
Kimberly Smith, never having shown a dog in her life, didn’t know what to expect. She promised Kerry that she would at least attempt to show Jack, but she had no idea if he would be good. She didn’t even really know what being good meant. Certainly there were periods when she was worried—in particular an awkward teenage stage round about nine months when his frame was so gangly and his coat so ratty that she e-mailed Kerry expressing concern that he wasn’t going to live up to his potential. Give him time, Kerry told her; all Aussies have an awkward stage. Sure enough, Jack began to fill out.
And a few months after his first birthday, Kimberly decided to give it a shot.
The first goal for any show dog is to achieve the “Champion” title represented by the “Ch” you see prefixing certain names. The Champion designation itself is actually short for “Champion of Record,” and achieving this title is known as “completing his/her championship” or “finishing” your dog. It validates a dog as special and increases its breeding value and for that reason is the end goal of the average owner-handlers who make up the majority of entries in America’s dog shows.
In addition to attaching a measure of prestige, the Ch prefix affords a dog direct entry into the Best of Breed competitions at a given show; before he’s earned it, he has to first win his “class”—meaning the judge selects him from all contenders in a particular group of like animals. Every breed shares a handful of classes—specifically, puppy six to twelve months, twelve to eighteen months, bred by exhibitor (which means the person handling the dog is also its breeder), American bred (a dog whose parents were mated in America), open dog, or open bitch. The winners from each of those classes then face off before the same judge for the selection of Winners Dog (or Winners Bitch, as it were), and those two dogs—one male, one female—both receive points toward their championships. They also earn entry into Best of Breed.
To “finish,” a show dog needs fifteen points, including two “major” wins, and the dog must have received points from at least three different judges to eliminate the possibility of simply following around a friend who judges. Only Winners Dog and Winners Bitch get points, and you get one point for a small show and two, three, four, or five points by beating a big enough pool of dogs—anything over three points is a major. The overwhelming majority of wins are worth one point, and at many of the dinkier shows it’s not uncommon to have just two or three dogs vying for that point.
In the case of Aussies, there must be at least seven dogs of your dog’s sex entered in order to earn a major,* and to get a five-point major you’re talking upwards of twenty dogs. Those are hard points to come by, and dogs have been known to stall at twelve to fifteen points for months while waiting for a major to come along.*
Kimberly never really considered handling Jack herself. And it took only two attempts to be certain that her hunch that this would be a bad idea was spot on. The first time was at a show put on by the Australian Shepherd Club of America (ASCA),* and Jack was a disaster—too excited at the prospect of socializing with all these dogs: “So! Many! Dogs! Hooray!”—to actually follow orders. The second time he was even more distracted. Due to the initial fiasco, Kimberly was terrified to try again and walked around for an hour attempting to calm her nerves. She was the last person to pick up Jack’s number—assigned to each dog before a show and attached to the handler’s arm with a rubber band—from the judge’s table, just seconds before the steward called for the dogs to enter the ring.
When she finally steeled herself and walked into the ring, Jack was hyper and seemed more interested in sniffing around his competitors than beating them. Kimberly finally corralled him into line and reached under to pull his back end into alignment in the stack when she was greeted with a rather rude surprise. Jack was—let’s say—excited. The reason he’d been so hyper was that somewhere on the premises there was a bitch in heat. But when Kimberly reached under and found the surprise, Jack was as shocked as she was. The dog yelped as if a bear trap had just closed on his tail, and she was humiliated and convinced that everyone around her thought she’d smacked her dog.
The next day Kimberly asked a friend to take a turn. The poor guy, a college student who moonlighted as a handler for Summer’s breeder, didn’t know what he was in for. Jack jumped all over the ring, and when I ran into the young man a year later, he was still traumatized. “Maybe I’ll show Jack again someday,” he told me, and laughed nervously. “Like when he’s nine.”
It was time to find a professional handler, and for that Kimberly turned to the AKC Web site. Not all top handlers have AKC accreditation; the process is onerous, taking five years and numerous annoying inspections of home and travel facilities, and some handlers have no problem building impeccable reputations without it. But Heather Bremmer is not the sort to cut corners on anything, so she endured the process, followed the many rules,* and as of this writing was one of 116 on the AKC list. (Her husband, Kevin Bednar, has not yet worked long enough to apply. He will after five years and in the meantime enjoys residual luster by association.)
The job of professional dog-show handler isn’t one that gets much attention in the general public, and if it weren’t for the movie Best in Show, most of us probably would have gone through life oblivious to its existence. It is a very odd and specific job—caring for and preparing dogs to be judged at dog shows—and isn’t the kind of thing you can learn in school. Dog handlers emerge one of two ways: Either they’re born into it—many of the top handlers are second- or third-generation show participants who learned from their parents—or they studied the pursuit and its nuances the way all tradesmen used to, by apprenticing under a master.
Kimberly wasn’t thinking about a handler’s history; her method was hardly that scientific. She just wanted to hire someone she could trust, who would take good care of her dog, and who lived within driving distance of her home so she wouldn’t have to leave Jack overnight for extended periods—plenty of owners have no issue leaving their show dogs in the care of handlers for weeks and months at a time—and whose facilities she could personally inspect. Because Jack was her pet first and a show dog second.
Two handlers met her distance criteria, and she sent off e-mails to both. One of them, a woman named Shirley who works alone, wrote back very quickly, and Kimberly ventured out to meet her the next time a dog show came through the area.
It was a broiling July afternoon, and she left Jack in the car, with the A/C running, while she went to meet Shirley. And there they were, chatting alongside a gigantic, drooling bullmastiff that the woman was working with that day when who should appear at the feet of this hulking canine but Jack, a blur of furry black and white buzzing its ankles. Kimberly had forgotten to lock the windows, and Jack had lowered one and liberated himself when he got bored of watching from behind glass.
Putting Jack in Shirley’s hands was a marked improvement. American Kennel Club rules state that dogs can’t officially enter shows until they are six months old, at which time they’re eligible to enter the six-to-nine-month puppy class. And on July 11, 2009, Jack made his AKC dog-show debut at the Twin Brooks Kennel Club in Morristown, New Jersey. It was an aus
picious beginning. The fifteen-month-old dog won his class and was also named Winners Dog, earning two points toward his championship. He won again the next day, at the same site, earning another two points, and there was every reason to expect that Shirley could deliver a championship, but Kimberly was having doubts. She was uncomfortable with the fact that the handler’s setup was a van full of cages and fans. Jack was, she often said, her “baby,” and she couldn’t bear the thought of him sleeping in a cage inside a van.
When Heather finally responded to her e-mail, two weeks later, Kimberly went for a visit, to both the show setup and to her house. She loved the house, where good dogs were not caged, and especially her climate-controlled truck, where dogs spent hot days cooling in the A/C. What’s more, she liked that Heather didn’t automatically accept dogs and needed to evaluate Jack first. When the young handler told her that she’d love to have a chance to show him, Kimberly decided to make a change.
She paid Shirley in full for her services and threw her dog’s lot behind the young, spunky blonde. And a few days later, Heather and Kevin were enjoying a rare weekend off at the beach when her cell phone rang. It was Shirley, and she was pissed. “I spent hours going back and forth with Shirley and Kimberly trying to smooth things out,” Heather told me. “Kimberly didn’t tell me that she’d booked Shirley for more shows and that she’d signed a contract.* So when Shirley found out, she had a conniption. It was a whole goings-on!” (For the record, Kimberly recalls that the transition went far more smoothly.)
Several hours into it, Kevin pulled the cell phone out of her hand. “Really, Heather?” he said. “This is a class Aussie.* We’re on vacation. We don’t need this.”
Heather agreed, but she was too far committed to quit. She and Shirley smoothed things out, and the next weekend Heather and Jack were officially a team.
Based on first impression of his structure and overall appearance, Heather was excited to take this new Aussie on, and during a trial run in Lackawanna, Pennsylvania, she won two more points. This despite the fact that he sat during the down-and-back (“We get extra points for that, right?” she joked to the judge) and that overall she found him to be a total handful. “He could barely walk on a leash without killing himself,” she recalled. It seemed almost as if he hadn’t been trained, but Kimberly swore he’d been through handling classes, and the reality was that once Heather had him in the ring, Jack tended to settle down. He was somehow both totally wild and obedient at once.
Any professional handler has worked with bad dogs—including dogs that bark and/or bite at very inopportune moments—but this was something new. With a misbehaving dog, as Heather explains it, there’s an added complexity to her job that she describes as “putting together the pieces of a puzzle.” The majority of show dogs are very good at their job of following instructions and, within a few shows, are almost robotic in their ring behavior. They don’t make mistakes. Handlers actually like this, because if they have no worry about whether or for how long a dog will stack, they can focus on the little things that enhance the presentation. “My job is to pull it all together and make it perfect,” she says. Jack seemed to have the ability to be both a willing and an unwilling show dog, depending on his mood. “Jack is almost too smart for his own good,” she explains, and the notion makes her chuckle.
Even to a handler who’d worked with thousands of dogs, it was a real head-scratcher—not to mention a very intriguing challenge.
Some dogs take years to earn their championship. Jack took four months.
Conformation shows are a process of elimination, starting with a pool of hundreds or thousands of dogs and ending with one that is named Best in Show. Once a dog wins Best of Breed or Variety,* as Jack did on September 10, 2009, at Pocono Mountain, Pennsylvania, he goes on to the Group Stage. There are seven groups in total: Sporting, Hound, Working, Terrier, Toy, Non-Sporting, and Herding, the newest of the groups (added in 1983) and the one that includes Australian shepherds. Four awards are given out to the top four dogs in each group, but only the winner goes on to the final—in which a judge selects among the seven group winners for Best in Show.
Pocono, then, was Jack’s first appearance ever in the Herding Group—facing the winners of all twenty-four herding breeds—and that, too, went well. He took a Group 2, meaning he was judged to be the second-best herding dog in the entire show—one spot away from qualifying for the Best in Show competition. Two days later he won the breed again, and also a Group 4.
Had Kimberly been willing to put Jack in Heather’s hands every weekend, he’d probably have finished his championship sooner, because everywhere Jack showed up in his early days, he seemed to win. He was Winners Dog in Philly, and then, at the Northeastern Maryland Kennel Club show in West Friendship, Maryland, he took it again, emerging from his class to win the breed and capturing three points for his final major. On November 20, 2009, Jack won the title of Champion—just in time to make the deadline to qualify for Westminster, one of the few shows that admits only champion dogs.
Being a newbie, Kimberly didn’t realize that so much success so fast was unusual. It’s impressive and not the norm for a new dog to achieve a championship in a few months; it’s especially impressive when that same dog also wins several Best of Breed ribbons, over finished champions, and then group placings, out of the puppy class. It didn’t necessarily mean that Jack would always do so well, but it certainly showed that this was no ordinary show dog either.
CHAPTER FIVE
White Plains:
Meeting the Menagerie
* * *
Conformation: formation of something by appropriate arrangement of parts or elements; . . . correspondence, especially to a model or plan.
–Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary
* * *
I met Heather and Kevin and Jack and Kimberly for the first time on January 9, 2010, in White Plains, New York, a few months after Jack had become a champion and in the very early days of the next step of his experience as a burgeoning show dog: testing his mettle against other finished Australian shepherds to see if he had even greater potential—to be one of the best dogs of his kind in America.
New clients headed for their first show are likely to be bewildered by the sea of setups in which handlers operate. Heather always tells people to “look for all the pink stuff,” pink being Heather’s favorite color, and that’s how I found her—standing with a pink dryer and a pink brush in front of a pink tackle box, grooming Jack, who stood calmly atop a pink towel on a grooming table, which along with a good cool-air blow dryer is a handler’s most critical accessory.
Heather is a small person with a large personality. She is petite with white-blond hair, bright blue eyes, and bangs nearly always pulled tightly back by barrettes. She wore a purple satin Tahari suit (Tahari being her designer of choice, bought in multiples when found on sale) and black shoes that were about as stylish as possible when you’re looking for sensible flats you can stand on without breaks. Dog-show handlers expend great effort to find shoes conducive to ten or twelve hours of nonstop standing, and in the case of a handler like Heather, who also cares very much about her appearance,* shoes present a particular challenge. Of late she’d been happy with a pair of Geox, which come with air soles.*
Heather has only one mode—focused—and during working hours has little time for idle conversation. She is very friendly and always smiling (unless she’s mad at Kevin, and even then you’d have to be standing nearby to notice) but tends to speak in clipped sentences that closely resemble her e-mails and text messages, and she always seems to have one eye on the clock, which is understandable once you realize how frantic a day in the life of a successful dog handler is.
Depending on a particular show cluster’s duration—if it’s two, or three, or five days—Heather and Kevin pack up the dogs and the gear and head out first thing Wednesday or Friday. If it’s a winter show, they’ll more likely than not take the Chevy Astro van, because for that period it’s too co
ld to sleep in their twenty-six-foot trailer (the pipes tend to freeze). During those months Kevin and Heather sleep in whatever motel happens to be dog-friendly,* and, failing that, she has a Service Dog pass that allows her to get select sensitive dogs—or dogs that are particularly babied by their owners, like Jack—into others. In the summer, though, they sleep in the trailer and the dogs are in the truck, so the whole lot of them have no need to leave the show premises.
If you are the sort to panic when circumstances get chaotic, you wouldn’t want to consider a career in show-dog handling; circumstances are often, if not always, chaotic. On a given weekend, Heather and Kevin have at least ten and sometimes up to twenty dogs under their care. The mix changes regularly—they’ll show any dog they’ve checked out and decided is ringworthy, which means manageable and not difficult to handle, not necessarily that it is actually going to do well. It’s eighty-five dollars per dog per day for the handling, plus fifteen dollars for transport. If your dog should win, it’s an extra twenty dollars to show him or her again in the group competition, and should he/she win that, it’s one hundred seventy-five for the Group One, plus the additional handling required in the Best in Show ring. At that point, though, you’re thrilled to be writing the check.
Jack was what you’d call a semiregular client. He was a step above the day-rate dogs that come out here and there but a step below the dogs on monthly retainer, which Heather calls “the bread and butter.” Those dogs go wherever Kevin and Heather go, and their owners pay a flat rate of at least two thousand five hundred dollars per month for that privilege.
