by Josh Dean
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Bloomsburg
* * *
I have a prejudice against people, even very small children, who are afraid of dogs.
—KONRAD LORENZ, Man Meets Dog
* * *
Among the 1,011 dogs entered at Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, were sixty Dogues de Bordeaux,* which seemed likely to be all the Dogues de Bordeaux in America, plus just a single smooth fox terrier, albeit a very special one. It was Dodger, the top-ranked dog in all the land, sharing our turf for the first time.
On the show’s opening day, Jack lost the breed to a dog none of us had seen before, even though Judge Roberta Davies seemed to like him. She awarded him a Select, and the resulting point put him over the halfway point toward his grand championship. Heather, despite her growing frustrations with the situation as a whole, actually seemed satisfied for the first time in a while. “I thought he was a great show dog,” she said.
Perhaps part of this was because any drama surrounding Jack was subsumed by a larger matter: Nacho the bullmastiff had quit the team. “He wanted to be number one on the truck, and we couldn’t promise that,” Kevin explained. He and Heather, unlike some handlers, weren’t willing to allow clients to bid against each other for status, and when Nacho’s owner gave them an ultimatum—make Nacho Kevin’s number-one dog or she’d go elsewhere—they stuck to their principles. Rita had been there first.
In happier news, one of Heather’s favorite clients from the past was back. Mr. B was a flat-coated retriever (picture a thinner, shaggier black Lab) and even in a room of happy dogs his joie de vivre stood out. During the time when Heather showed him to a top five ranking in his breed, Mr. B was the team’s “pet dog” and the only animal allowed to sleep in the travel trailer. Recently he’d unretired in order to pursue his grand championship, further proof that the AKC’s marketing gimmick was working exactly as planned.
“That damn grand championship,” Kimberly said upon hearing this explanation. “Bringing everyone out of the woodwork.” She’d been attributing some of Jack’s struggles to the deluge of “retired” specials who’d reemerged to add the honor, and though I suspected there was some truth to that, I also thought that having so much success in Jack’s early days skewed Kimberly’s sense of what’s normal. Your average dog doesn’t just roar out of the gate as Jack had.
Tanner, meanwhile, was still bouncing around Europe piling up ribbons. He’d just finished his Latvian championship, according to a Facebook post, and his return to the United States kept getting pushed back.
“Why stop there?” Trader’s owner Tom said, teasing Dawn, who’d come out to a show for the first time in over a month. “Why not Estonia and Lithuania?”
“Stop making fun of my dog’s itinerary,” Dawn cracked.
What does it take to get your Latvian championship, exactly?
“Not much, probably,” Tom said. “Just show up.”
I joked that a virtual championship was next: You just e-mail photos of your dog and its title shows up a few weeks later, like a diploma-by-mail.
“It already exists,” Rita’s owner, Cindy, said. “It doesn’t mean anything, but you can do it.”
Ever the cynic, Tom picked up an issue of Dog News and waved it at me, the implication being that legitimate show dog owners were already buying ribbons. “It’s not like we’re not doing it already. This,” he said, pointing to a flashy advertisement, “is just one step away.”
If anyone needed a reminder of what greatness looked like, it was there, in plain view at Bloomsburg: Dodger, America’s top dog. Dodger was handled by Amy Booth, a thin, attractive Michigan resident in her early thirties who’d been a champion junior handler under the name Amy Rodriguez before she married the pro handler, Phil Booth, and formed yet another formidable husband-wife all-breed team. With her streaked blond hair and extremely tan skin, Amy looked superficially like an easy person to dislike. But, Heather said as we watched the smooth fox strut into the Terrier Group, Amy was actually one of the nicest handlers in the business. What’s more, she not only handled America’s top dog, she also bred him. It was hard, then, to root against her.
Or for that matter Dodger, a sprightly guy who hopped up and down, always keeping his tail erect, and then stood dead still when he needed to. Some of the terriers in attendance were lackluster—there was no pep in their step—but that wasn’t an issue with Dodger, who sparkled.
Dodger was only three and already had sixty-nine Bests in Show in his year and a half of showing. She’d put sixty-eight on his grandfather over his life, Booth told me when I approached her during a break and introduced myself. She was, she said, in a hurry, but was gracious in blowing me off. Even now, after so many wins, she seemed grateful to have her dog complimented. Because she’d also bred him, her pride was especially evident. “He’s a beautiful dog and he knows it,” she said. “That helps.”
Like Jack, Dodger is both beautiful and unique. Most smooth fox terriers have a mix of white and black on both head and body, but Dodger is fully white from tail to neck, with a black head. It looks as if someone popped the head off a white dog and replaced it with another from a black dog—like when you see a primer-red door on an old VW.
“White must predominate,” she said when I asked if this was as unusual as it seemed to me. “But for some reason my dogs keep coming out this way, with the black head.”
Does he win every time?
“Not every time,” she said, and laughed, as if I’d asked a very naïve question. “He wins Best in Show about fifty percent of the time.”
Later I watched dog and handler head into the group ring, and when her time came, Amy put Dodger on the table (like most terriers, the smooth fox is inspected on a table) and baited him, though he didn’t seem to need it. He stood as if posing for an old daguerreotype—his body didn’t so much as quiver. His head, though, was alert and engaged with the judge. Inspection completed, Amy plucked him up by the chest and plopped him on the ground, where he trotted away at her side. He was a funny mover, with a very particular gait. He listed left ever so slightly, and the legs didn’t bend in his trot. The movement reminded me of Sony’s old robot dog, AIBO.
To no one’s surprise, Dodger won the group, and when I noticed a woman at ringside looking especially proud, I sidled over, hoping it was a co-owner or backer. She was, she told me, just Amy’s best friend.
I said that I liked him. “He’s a rock star,” she said.
After the show I was curious to check the math and to see if a 50 percent win rate was as impressive as it sounded. I asked the one person who I knew would know the answer and would get it quickly. “My records show thirty-eight Bests in Show in eighty-one starts this year,” Billy Wheeler told me. This was actually “well behind previous number-one dogs,” he said, and went on. “This has been a very competitive year. The top four are quite close. I would not be surprised to see the Peke [Malachy], boxer [Scarlett], or Irish setter [Emily] overtake Dodger before the end of the year.” A facet of that is simple math, he explained. “The Sporting, Working, and Toy dogs have a built-in advantage, collecting two and a half times the number of points for a group win than the Terriers do on average.” (There are more breeds, and thus dogs, in those groups.)
Wheeler said that part of that advantage was nullified by clever strategizing on the part of Amy and her husband, Phil, who Wheeler said have been carefully seeking out shows where terriers were entered in larger numbers and where wins would pile up points for the rankings. That likely explains their sudden appearance in Bloomsburg.
Wheeler said that he was disappointed that a chorus of naysayers was coalescing against Dodger, led by a faction within the smooth fox community that felt he wasn’t even the best representation of the breed out there. Remarkably, another smooth fox—Adam, from California—was also in the top ten all-breed rankings. “There are those ‘experts’ who think Dodger is not a great smooth fox, but from where I sit, he is a great show dog,” Wheeler told me.
“He is only two shows away from breaking the breed record. Apart from number nerds like me, no one remembers who was a top dog five years ago, but every regular Joe who enters a show ring knows who the all-time winner in his breed was.”
I made a note to test this on the Aussie people, because, thanks to Tom Grabe, I knew the answer: It was Flapjack.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
August: All Is Not Lost
(Yet)
* * *
Some dogs are natural-born show dogs, and some aren’t. Some you have to pull everything out of them.
—PAT HASTINGS
* * *
I got married the first weekend in August, so I can’t be sure if I was just distracted or if Jack wasn’t showing much. In truth it hardly mattered. When he was showing, he wasn’t winning. Two more clusters came and went, and Jack was zero for both weekends. Dejection was the prevailing mood.
The final weekend of August brought twenty-six all-breed shows in ten locations over three time zones, including the three-day show in Middleburg, Pennsylvania. If ever there was a slump buster, it had to be Middleburg, which is sleepy even in dog-show terms. A mere 633 dogs had come to this remote town, whose few attractions include a lovely valley, a duck pond, and an Acme supermarket. Among the nine Aussies, only Jack was a special. Surely here was a show he could dominate.
Due to some crossed signals between my understanding of the schedule that Kimberly had sent me and an especially swift judge, I actually missed Jack’s ring time.
“Did you see that?” Heather asked when I found her back at the setup.
I did not, I answered. But I could tell by her expression that the news was bad. Jack had lost, to a class dog, and not even a good one. The slump continued.
“So that wasn’t good,” she said, and sighed. “I was pulling out clumps of hair—clumps! He’s got a lot of leg anyway, so when his coat is thin, he looks even leggier. . . .”
And the behavior?
“The behavior wasn’t great. I got more out of him than he wanted to give. Still, he should have won.” She shook her head.
It’s impossible, really, to say why a dog stops winning all of a sudden, as seemed to be happening to Jack. Certainly the very top dogs never seem to hit any prolonged rut, but I don’t think Jack had yet to get on the type of roll that top dogs get on—where winning is more a right than an expectation. It’s the difference between being the Yankees and the Tigers. For one team, the expectation of winning is so common and deep-rooted that you don’t worry about the occasional loss, or even a string of them (an unlikely occurrence, of course). For the other a streak of wins is more surprising, and still thrilling, and you’re always a little nervous for the moment when it’s going to end. Because it will. The Yankees, though, weren’t always the Yankees. (Take a look at the late 1980s and early 1990s, for instance.) And Beyoncé wasn’t always winning 80 percent of her dog shows.
Heather told me that in Tanner’s first year he went weeks sometimes without a breed win, and earlier in the summer Rita, too, was hardly winning at all. For most of the other dogs in the truck, dogs who cycled in and out—who over the long haul are the bread and butter of a handler’s business—just a few breed wins, or even achieving a championship, is a life’s work. So it’s important to keep things in perspective.
Surely the situation at Jack’s home wasn’t helping. The unplanned tie from earlier in the summer had resulted in Summer’s pregnancy, and her belly was swelling by the day. Most of Kimberly’s attention had shifted to preparing for the imminent and unexpected brood. An X-ray revealed the skeletons of six tiny dogs on board.
Whether or not he understood what was going on, Jack’s home routines had been disrupted, and suddenly he was no longer the focus of attention. Kimberly had cleaned the carpets and rearranged the furniture to turn the front room into a whelping salon. She’d ordered a whelping box and had put together a first-aid kit with all the birthing supplies recommended by Kerry. Her final preparations included a crash course in how to set up and run a live puppycam and installing a gate across the room’s entry to keep Jack from meddling.
With Tanner in Europe, Heather seemed to be hungry for a consistent winner, and Jack’s sudden tumble through the rankings had her a little discouraged. She and Kevin both made it a point to tell me they thought he wasn’t looking his best.
I told Heather I thought that he’d already been out of coat once this year.
“He was.”
Aren’t they supposed to do that just once a year?
“They are. I think she should get him checked out. Could be his thyroid.”
Could it be fatherhood?
“Could be anything. Stress. Diet. She’s also been playing Frisbee with him, and Kevin noticed his topline is off.” Kevin thought it was raised in the middle, or “roached,” which indicates a bowed spine. “It didn’t use to be that way.” She paused. “We used to get him adjusted more often.”
My day was an hour old, and it was already a bummer. I needed a boost and found it in the town’s one claim to fame I’d neglected to note. It is the home base, and show, for Dottie Davis, aka the Candy Lady. If Middleburg’s show were known for nothing else, this fact alone would make it worthy of attention in a book about dog shows.
There is a good chance that if you attend a dog show in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States, along the I-95 corridor, you will find Dottie Davis manning the table outside whichever ring is hosting the largest dog breeds. You will know her by her warm smile, her eyeglasses on a chain, her carefully tended helmet of gray hair, and especially by the two or three ever-filled plastic tubs of candy that sit on her table. A self-described “little old lady with a hearing problem,” Dottie wears hearing aids at home but never at a dog show. “There’s just too much interference,” she told me.
Before Dottie was the Candy Lady—by my estimation the most sacred and beloved individual on the dog-show circuit, East Coast edition—she was Dorothy Davis, physician’s wife, high-school English teacher, and a breeder of Great Danes.
Dottie’s official job is as ring steward, a critical position in dog-show logistics. A typical show will have eight or ten rings operating simultaneously during the Best of Breed portion of the schedule, and over the course of the morning and early afternoon, some ten to fifteen breeds will cycle through each and be judged swiftly, in segments, escorted by a rotating cast of handlers, some of whom will appear in the ring with different dogs in the same breed. The armband, then, is perhaps the most critical piece of equipment in the entire apparatus, because if, for instance, Heather Bremmer should come through with two or three Bernese mountain dogs in the course of ten minutes, the only way the judge—and by proxy the official record and the AKC—will know which is which is by the armband affixed to her bicep by a rubber band.
Dottie’s job is first to call the dogs, by class, into the ring at the assigned time and then to note which armbands are present and which have decided not to show up (scratching is very common). Once the judge has made his or her decision and marked it the judges’ book, Dottie keeps a watchful eye on both the book and the clock. She also sets up the ring a half hour before the show’s start and makes sure that the judge is consistent in his or her methods. If the first dog enters from the left and is made to run around the ring in a circle, and then on a diagonal, all dogs must follow the same pattern.
Dottie no longer exhibits dogs herself. At home she was down to a single Dane, a ten-and-a-half-year old bitch named Milano (or Ch Dee Dee’s Milano of Usonia, if we’re being formal). Milano is so named because she comes from one of the last litters Dottie bred, one in which all puppies were given cookie-themed names. Most breeders theme their litters, to help ease the stress of coming up with so many names.
“One was Snickerdoodle, another was Teddy Grahams, and so forth and so on,” Dottie explained. “I went to the grocery store and looked up and down the cookie aisle and picked the ones I liked.” Her favorite litter theme was probably the “
liquor litter.” From that batch she kept Dee Dee’s Absolut Gibson, named for a cocktail she enjoys when tippling.
If you know anything about Danes, you know that the dogs have relatively short life spans, and so ten and a half (“and going strong!”) is exceptional. Dottie attributes that in part to an improvement in the understanding of one of the breed’s most common killers: bloat. You’ll remember bloat from Jack’s scare out on Long Island, but it is a relative plague upon Danes and other massive breeds, as well as large animals like horses and cows. “We have learned what the very first signs are,” Dottie said. “If they have nonproductive vomiting, you better get that dog to a vet immediately.” Vets will typically then open the dog up and tack the stomach to the rib cage, preventing future twisting. “My last two Great Danes—the last one lived to eleven and a half—were both tacked.” And she attributes their long lives to that.
Dottie’s vet happens to be a former student of hers from Southern Columbia High, a school outside Bloomsburg where she taught English for thirty years. Before that she was a nurse for ten years, and also a mother to five children, and she didn’t actually get around to dogs until she’d raised the kids “to a degree that I could get out of the house.”
Her husband, who died five years earlier, was a family physician and then later a doctor at a renowned local hospital. One thing he wasn’t was a dog-show person. “I tell everybody he wasn’t the greatest husband, he wasn’t the greatest father, but he was one helluva good doctor. And that was his life,” Dottie said without the slightest hint of regret. “Dogs were my life. And we tried very hard not to interfere with each other. We were married fifty-four years, and he came to one dog show. But he was incredibly supportive. When I bought one motor home after another to carry the dogs, he never balked at all. And he loved the dogs. But dog shows—no.”
