by Josh Dean
Scott, sixty-eight, is a retired entrepreneur who sold his forklift company in 2007 and now backs dogs along with his “partner in all things,” the former professional handler Debbie Burke. He is the former chairman of the Harrisburg Dog Show and a thirty-plus-year participant in shows, but his greatest legacy will probably be his partnership with the Japanese poodle maestro Kaz Hosaka. For the past fifteen years, Scott has served as the backer to Hosaka’s top dog—or dogs—paying not only handling and travel fees but also for the hundreds of pages of advertisements that promote them.
It is frequently said that competition in poodles is especially fierce. “There is nothing that takes more work or money than poodles,” Pat Hastings told me. “It’s probably the hardest breed to win in as an owner-handler. The average owner simply cannot compete against professionals when it comes to scissoring and coat care. People have real lives.” I don’t know if this is the main reason the breed has become a magnet for wealthy backers or if the breed just has a cachet. Probably both things are true. As is this: Poodles win dog shows, proportionally more than any other breed. That’s what attracted Ron Scott.
Scott’s background was in Yorkshire terriers, a breed he fell into through his ex-wife. One dog turned into a breeding and showing hobby that metastasized into an all-consuming passion. Ron came to love the competition, and especially winning, but soon winning breed ribbons wasn’t enough. He wanted groups, and then Bests in Show. And he found that it was “very difficult to win Best in Show with Yorkshire terriers.”
“Some people want to continue to improve breeding stock, and finishing dogs is one way to prove to themselves that their stock is getting better. Some people say, ‘I have a dog that I think is really good, and I’d like to special it.’ They go out every week or most weekends and try to get enough breed wins that the dog is in the top ten for that breed.” The former would describe Kerry, the latter, Kimberly. Neither of these things was the appeal for Ron Scott.
“I just decided that if I was going to continue, I needed a breed that could be competitive in the Best in Show ring on a regular basis,” Scott explains. Looking around, he found that the choice seemed rather obvious. “Poodles do very well,” he explained. “There are probably more Bests in Show in one weekend by poodles than all the flat-coated retrievers would have in an entire year. And you could say that about a lot of breeds. It’s just the way it is.”
Scott didn’t exactly tiptoe into the poodle waters;* he cannonballed. By throwing his money behind a new arrival from Japan—a toy poodle named Spirit, handled by Kaz Hosaka, the master of the genre. “I loved his ability to transform a dog into something so beautiful and train it so well,” Scott says. “I had the best of all possible worlds—a really good dog and a person to make that dog the best it could be.” Spirit didn’t disappoint. He won twenty-five Bests in Show as well as Best of Variety at the 1998 and 1999 National Poodle Specialty shows. “And it really got me hooked on poodles.”
The partners combed the world for the absolute best poodles and piled up show wins. They won Westminster in 2002, with a miniature poodle named Spice Girl that Kaz himself bred. Their standard poodle Justin was the number-one Non-Sporting dog in America in 2005, and then the two men discovered Vicky, “this little toy poodle bitch at Smash Kennels in Japan.” Vicky went on to be the number-one dog in America, all breed, in 2007 and then the top winning toy poodle of all time, with 108 Bests in Show. “She was just an extraordinary little animal to watch.”
Scott had found his poodle source. “Our deal is simple,” he explains. The proprietors of Smash Poodles, a mother-son team in Fuji City, Japan, offer Scott first pick of every litter born and send the dogs off to America to be campaigned by Kaz. Scott pays nothing for a dog but picks up all the expenses and then returns it home to be bred once retired. By charging nothing for a dog that comes back to them a year or two later, the breeders have in essence shorted the dog like a stock. And while Scott pays nothing for the dog, he pays plenty to campaign it. “I’m too old to be breeding dogs.” And this arrangement, he says, is ideal. “I get to pick the best dogs, show them, and send them back to be reintroduced to the breeding program, where hopefully a better one comes out. We’ve been doing that for ten years.”
You can count on a top dog from Ron Scott every year, as dependable as the tides.
So here’s the eight-hundred-thousand-dollar question: What’s in this for Ron Scott?
I had this theory that people backed dogs for the same reason they owned all or part of racehorses—for the luster this association provides. Scott said no, that’s not the case. And he would know. He also owns racehorses. “Racehorses are much less personal, for one thing,” he said, and I think he means that you can’t really cuddle or toss Frisbee with a Thoroughbred. “The second thing is, racehorses make money. You do not make money by showing dogs. It’s nothing about making money. It’s all about spending money. You do it for other reasons.”
The most important reason for Ron Scott is that he loves the dogs. He and Debbie don’t have a pet anymore—their last house dog, a Lhasa apso, passed away in 2009—and yet twenty-five to thirty weekends a year they travel by RV to visit Kaz and the poodles at show grounds around the East. “We carry them and pet them and play with them,” he said. “So there’s the cuddle factor.”
There’s also the thrill of competition and the addiction that comes with success. “My goal is pretty high every year,” he says. “My goal is to have the number-one poodle in the variety that I show”—whether that’s standard, miniature, or toy.
And to accomplish that goal, he spends a lot of money.
All told, Scott says the range of campaigning a dog over a year varies. “You’re dealing with a hundred thousand dollars to half a million.” Some people, of course, campaign multiple dogs.
And even then you don’t know.
“People have spent millions and millions to win the Garden and have never won. Lots of people,” Scott said. “The stars have to align. The year we had Vicky, we won sixty-nine Bests in Show, but the judge we had was going to put the beagle up, and he did.” That beagle was Uno, the 2008 champion who is probably the most famous Westminster winner in history. So in retrospect there’s little shame in that loss. The year they did win, with Spice Girl, “that was the year the gods lined up well.” A Kerry blue terrier named Mick was “by far the number-one dog, almost unbeatable. And we beat him that day.” Which just goes to show that “you never know.”
“It’s all about winning,” Scott says. “Most people who show dogs or have racehorses or play golf or do whatever they do in sports, they do it to win.” And certainly he has. He has won Westminster, Eukanuba, Morris & Essex, Montgomery County, and over three hundred total Bests in Show. “I’ve had multiple Winkie Award winners.* More Bests in Show than I’ve dreamed of. It’s been a wonderful journey for me. And I hope for Kaz.”
Scott will be the first to admit that it is nearly impossible for the regular show exhibitor to compete for and consistently win groups and shows. He doesn’t know Kimberly, or Jack, but they certainly fall into that category.
You have a frank conversation with Ron Scott and you start to wonder if a regular person, with a great dog, could ever have a chance at regularly competing for show wins. I always asked this question, near the end, whenever I talked to someone about backers. Pat Hastings, who knows as much about dog shows as any human does, could recall just a few recent dogs that did well despite lacking a wealthy backer. She remembered a Yorkie, owned by a family that wasn’t rich, and shown by their daughter, that won Westminster.
I looked it up. That was in 1978 when Higgens became the first and still only Yorkie to win at the Garden. Though handled by Marlene Lutovsky, Higgens’s care was a total family affair. Marlene’s mother, Barbara, reported that she was the one who got up every morning at five o’clock “to clean his teeth, brush and oil his coat, change the wrappers, and give him clean booties.”
When I posed the same question to
Scott, he thought a second and pronounced that “it would be very difficult, but not impossible.” Then he, too, recalled that family—the name escaped him as well—only his story had a telling conclusion. “There was a family that won Westminster with a Yorkie, and their daughter showed the dog,” he said. “The family went broke. Lost their house, everything. We never saw them again.”*
I think Ron Scott is generally right when he says that no one gets into dog shows for the money. And really, most breeders would tell you the same thing. But you also can’t ignore the fact that certain dogs are more valuable than others, and if you happen to own one, you can make money from breeding it.
As with all segments of the economy, more and more of the money and influence are coming from the developing world—from places like Brazil, home to Victor Malzoni, and China, a country that is absolutely bonkers for purebred dogs. The Chinese Kennel Club regularly dispatches envoys to large American shows to hand out pamphlets and recruit participants, and money from China (and Brazil and Russia) is causing an absurd run on global dog values.
This frenzy hit its peak in early 2011 when a Chinese coal baron paid $1.5 million for an eleven-month-old Tibetan mastiff* named Big Splash, whose diet included such peculiarities as abalone and sea cucumber, neither of which is exactly indigenous to Tibet. Stories reported that the price was outrageous but not idiotic, considering that Big Splash could fetch as much as $100,000 for stud services.*
Stud fees for American show dogs are far more reasonable—typically a few hundred dollars up to a couple thousand for a truly special dog.
* * *
TIBETAN MASTIFF
Midway through his first year, Jack was only beginning to attract some interest, and Kimberly and Kerry had yet to settle on a stud fee, though a thousand dollars was looking like a reasonable starting point. If your dog’s services are in constant demand, I suppose you can start to recoup your expenses, but that’s definitely the exception rather than the rule.
And in the absence of a backer or a run on his sperm, Jack’s team just scrambled.
Out in California, Kerry was patiently sending checks while hoping for a miracle. She saw great potential in Jack but knew that without a Ron Scott he had little shot at living up to it. “He needs somebody behind him,” she said. “That’s what you have to have.
“Judges have egos—they want to see their pictures,” she said, meaning in advertisements, where owners often include win photos of dog and judge together from shows. “Or they want to find the next up-and-comer.” She knew from experience that a well-executed campaign can work if you’ve got the right dog. She’d seen it firsthand in 2008, when her bitch Phoebe was neck and neck with a dog that had six owners at the top of the Aussie rankings all year. Late in the year, when it was really close, she’d enter three shows (paying three entries) and then choose the one that looked to be the biggest. “We were chasing points,” she said. Over Thanksgiving she skipped the National Dog Show in Philly and instead sent Phoebe to Chicago, hoping only to win the breed points over a deep entry of Aussies. They did that—and went on to win their one and only Best in Show.
In the end Phoebe was number one in the all-breed rankings but fell painfully short in the more important breed ranking. She missed a year-end ranking as America’s number-one Australian shepherd by a mere six points.
Jack, meanwhile, was stuck somewhere between these two worlds.
And Kerry was conflicted. “Unfortunately, a lot of big things comes with a lot of big dollars,” she said. “He’s so young he really wasn’t ready to be doing the phenomenal winning to get to Westminster and be noticed. You need a year’s worth of winning groups and being seen all over.” Beyoncé, she said, “probably hit a hundred twenty shows last year and was advertised every week. I’ve gone down that road. You either get a backer or you sell your soul or you work to death.” The lack of a true backer, she said, “would be the only thing that would hold Jack back.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Harrisonburg
* * *
That Beyoncé is one beautiful black bitch.
—OVERHEARD OUTSIDE THE AUSSIE RING
* * *
As April dragged on, the competition grew more intense. For much of the spring, Jack had been competing against the top dogs in the Northeast, but because regions tend to be fairly self-contained, the competitors from separate regions cross paths only a handful of times a year. And on the weekend of April 10, a show in Harrisonburg, Virginia, was one of those times.
Harrisonburg is smack in central Virginia, thus something of a halfway point between the Northeast and the Southeast. A day before the crew set out for the show, Kimberly sent a one-line e-mail to me and Kerry. It said, “Beyoncé is in Virginia.” She included a sad-faced emoticon for emphasis.
Beyoncé is owned by her breeder, Sharon Fontanini, who lives in Iowa, and based in North Carolina, with her handler, Jamie Clute (who is married to another handler, naturally), and tends to prowl the shows of the Southeast, which more or less orbit around Atlanta. She was in her second year as a campaigned dog and was well seasoned, not to mention utterly dominant in the breed.
Fontanini operates Myshara Aussies in Waukee, Iowa. Like Kimberly and Kerry, she comes from horses and first discovered Aussies around the barns. She bred her first litter in 1994 and has been a board member of the United States Australian Shepherd Association for six years. (She was to become president in January of 2011.) Fontanini breeds maybe once or twice a year.
Beyoncé was her first number-one Aussie, and the fact that she’s done well despite the lack of a backer—“I’m it,” Fontanini says—speaks volumes about the difference between showing Aussies and showing poodles (or even Great Danes or rottweilers or boxers). An Aussie owner, at least at this point in time, isn’t likely to be drawn into an arms race of ad spending. Which isn’t to say that Fontanini is getting off cheap; even a modest full-time campaign (with handling fees, entry fees, and travel expenses) runs her several thousand dollars a month. “It’s a very expensive dog I have out there,” she said with a sigh but no apparent regret. “I don’t know how these people have backers. I’d love to have one.” When I told her about Ron Scott, she seemed surprised. “No one’s ever approached me.”
Fontanini has been spending her own money on Beyoncé because she recognized “from the very beginning” that this was probably a once-in-a-lifetime dog. Beyoncé’s mother was a Best in Show winner, and her grandfather won multiple Bests. “Did I know she’d be this good? I never know that until they go out.” Fontanini works exclusively with Clute—a chain-smoking redhead in his mid-thirties who apprenticed under the legendary handler Jimmy Moses—on her top dogs. She admits that when the time does come to retire Beyoncé, the hardest part will be convincing Clute to part with her. “When Jamie first saw her, he fell in love. I said, ‘Take her out and see what she does.’ She just came out like gangbusters. That first year she went out and won the National Specialty.” Beyoncé was barely even two.
That beautiful black bitch hasn’t stopped winning since, and for two years running, as of late 2010, had been the number-one-ranked Australian shepherd in America by a large margin. Fontanini had plans to breed her but was considering keeping the dog out long enough to make a run at the all-time record for Best in Show by an Aussie bitch. That number is seventeen. The breed record is over thirty. “That was Bayshore’s Flapjack”—a dog that won many of those with Jimmy Moses on his lead as well as, for a period, the Grabes—“and I don’t think that will be broken for a long time.”
It was interesting to hear Fontanini explain what makes Beyoncé special; her answer, in a sense, was that she isn’t. “She has beautiful breed type. She’s a nice moderate dog. She’s not extreme in any way.” Words like “moderate” and “medium,” you might recall, are key words in the Aussie’s standard. “She has beautiful movement. On top of all that, the icing on the cake, she is just a show dog. Her heart is always in it. In her mind that’s her place in life
. To be in that ring and be showing off for people.”
The name didn’t hurt either. Fontanini didn’t have names picked out in advance for that particular litter. But she was watching Dreamgirls on TV while waiting for the puppies to arrive, and “Beyoncé was the star of that movie. And when she [the puppy] popped out, the movie was on. She was my dream girl.”
Here’s where things get perhaps a bit apocryphal (as many backstories do). “She wanted to be first from the beginning,” Fontanini said. “I could just tell. Even as a puppy, she was like, ‘Look at me.’ She would push her brother and sister aside and say, ‘Hey, it was me you came to see.’ She always had that attitude. The world revolves around Beyoncé.”
Well, the Australian shepherd world anyway—where it appeared that life was imitating art.
Nothing is impossible. Every dog show is subjective. You just never know. After all, Jack pretty much beat Beyoncé at Westminster, in the sense that when the judge was picking between the two best dogs, Beyoncé wasn’t one of them and Jack was. But that was wholly unexpected, and it certainly wasn’t the kind of result Jack could hope to repeat so early in his own campaign.
