by Josh Dean
It was hard for Kimberly to fret much over that. Jack showed well and got Best Opposite (again) over several other top specials. And Beyoncé was pretty much a snowball rolling downhill at this point.
For TV the groups were given extra pomp. A color guard trotted out for the National Anthem, and then the Chariots of Fire theme played as the dogs stacked. Jamie had changed into a dark suit for the occasion and was joined in the ring by both Heather—sparkly under the lights in a red sequin blouse, with a Pembroke Welsh corgi named Panda—and Kevin, who was working for the first time with a Norwegian buhund that was the only dog entered in its breed,* as well as a who’s who of top handlers, including Michelle Scott, Ernesto Lara, and Greg Strong, who seemed to find himself into at least a couple groups at every show.
Kennel Club president Wayne Ferguson worked the PA. “Herding dogs have the sole purpose of moving livestock from one place to another,” he told the crowd from a seat at the table next to the one where O’Hurley and Frei talk for TV. “There are twenty-four breeds and varieties in the Herding Group.”
You’ll hear Ferguson if you’re watching along on TV. He’s the Voice of God, intoning in a deep baritone the breed facts that precede each dog. For instance, that “the briard served during the First and Second World Wars, carrying ammunition to troops,” that the bearded collie is “a masterful escape artist that thinks fences are for climbing,” or that—as Jamie trotted out with Beyoncé—that the “Australian shepherd is not a dog of Australia at all but an American invention. This is an active, super-intelligent breed that lends itself well to training.”
Beyoncé received an enormous cheer, probably the biggest yet, as she whipped around the edge of the unusually large ring with her tongue dangling ever so slightly out of one side of her mouth. It was apparently propitious; she won the group, again, and Jamie stood smugly grinning at the center of the traditional handler scrum, where, upon the completion of every group, disingenuous handshakes and hugs are exchanged.
Three groups later the pomp began anew as the seven group winners reassembled for Best in Show. Joining Beyoncé were the Irish setter, the boxer, the Scottish deerhound, the American Staffordshire terrier, the schipperke, and the affenpinscher, the latter with the Mexican superstar Ernesto Lara on his lead. This was a new arrival from Europe, having dominated the show circuit there, and was widely expected to become one of America’s top dogs in 2011.
“Folks, a Best in Show at the Kennel Club of Philadelphia is one of dogdom’s greatest achievements,” Ferguson said as a nervous titter in the crowd filled the air while Judge Paula Hartinger mulled her options. Australian shepherds don’t win major shows often, but it wouldn’t be a total shock for Beyoncé to win either. The 2007 winner was an Aussie named Swizzle, and Beyoncé certainly had momentum on her side.
Hartinger surveyed the dogs, stacked like statues, and proclaimed, with great verve, “It’s the Irish setter!”
For Clooney, as this particular setter was named, it was his first-ever Best in Show, and it was also kind of a big surprise.
John O’Hurley, it should be noted, called it. “Every year I put my finger on which I like the best,” he told me. “I’ve been rooting every year for the Irish setter. That, for me, is the prettiest of dogs. And for the life of me, I couldn’t understand why it hasn’t won Best in Show.”
Clooney, he said, was just a “gorgeous setter. To me they represent what a dog show is about. When you watch that dog come into the ring, the hair, the strut—it flows beautifully. It’s a beautiful representation of what I feel a show dog should be.”
Kimberly and Jack probably should have quit while they were ahead. Sunday was the final day of the cluster, and it was bound to be anticlimactic anyway. Heather and Kevin found themselves with a deluge of dogs and a major scheduling snafu. Show superintendents don’t build the schedule with overtaxed handlers in mind; they try to be considerate when possible, but there’s no way for them to predict the problems of a handler who has too many dogs. And in Kevin and Heather’s cases, they had four Bernese mountain dogs—including Tanner, who’d finally returned to his old life on Dawn’s farm and to his place at the top of the pecking order—to show in the same ten-minute window that contained Jack and the Aussies.
If the show had been on schedule, there was only a seven-minute cushion between Tanner and Jack. And the show wasn’t on schedule. It looked for most of the morning as if the best-case scenario was that Kevin would show Jack, and that’s what happened.
Kevin led Jack, whom he hadn’t handled in months, out to meet his judge: Christopher Tilghman Neale—a tall, dapper, fellow in a brown suit with a copper tie and matching pocket square. He had the hair and the air of a man you’d see at the yacht club. Neale was a gawker. He stared intensely at the dogs as they stacked—and Jack was cooperating gamely—and then stared intensely again the whole time they were moving, locked on each dog like a spotlight until it reached the far side, at which point he spun around and pointed to the next one.
He pointed to Jack. Kevin began to run, and Jack followed for a few steps and then, for whatever reason, jumped straight up onto Kevin’s back. Kevin snapped the lead, but this only encouraged Jack, who then jumped on his front. Any doubt remaining that there was a magic to handling—or that Jack was still a difficult dog—vanished there. If Jack could steal a Best Opposite after that mess, it would be a miracle. And he didn’t.
This was very frustrating for Kevin, who is an excellent handler who just happens not to have the rapport with Jack that his wife does. But it wasn’t necessarily a reason to worry. Jack’s propensity to drive Heather nuts was precisely the reason she has always believed in him. Once she told me that you can have a mediocre dog with tons of personality or a phenomenal dog with no personality—“and the mediocre one will win ninety-nine percent of the time.” Jack was not mediocre, and he certainly didn’t lack personality either.
The only encouraging news of the day was that Jamie Clute wasn’t going to bring Beyoncé to Eukanuba. “We won last year, and the judges suck,” he told me when I intercepted him returning from a cigarette break to resume grooming a giant schnauzer. Instead he would chase points until the year’s end. “We’re the number-five herding, and I think we’ve got a shot at number three.” He still wasn’t sure whether he’d retire Beyoncé after Westminster “or come back and go for number-one herding dog” in 2011.
When I got home that night, I went online and pulled up Beyoncé’s record. According to InfoDog, which lists only shows produced by the superintendent organization MB-F (so maybe half of the events entered), the bitch had won the breed in sixty-six of the seventy-three shows she took part in. That’s not quite as good as the five losses Heather had guessed at, but it was a 90 percent win percentage, which seemed pretty astounding. In addition, she won the Herding Group twenty-three times (31 percent of the time) and had four Bests in Show. This information put Jack’s win earlier in the week in a bit more context. The simple act of beating Beyoncé, even once, seemed all the more impressive. It was another very fine line for his rapidly expanding résumé.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
A Quick Lesson in Poor Sportsmanship:
The Battle for (and Insanity over) Number One
* * *
Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.
—GEORGE ORWELL
* * *
Any actual tension between Jack and Beyoncé existed only in my mind. The truth is, Beyoncé was running unopposed on a platform of dominance, and once Jamie won the breed at the National Dog Show and stormed on into the Best in Show ring, he’d probably long since put the blue merle that had beaten him Thursday out of mind. Aside from the occasional ringside shit-talking, Australian shepherd people are generally a pretty genial bunch.
That certainly wasn’t the case in the smooth fox terrier community. As the show season cruised into twilight, Dodger was locked in a race for America’s number-one dog with Malachy the Pekingese, a rac
e that looked almost certain to go down to the wire. The dogs’ handlers were jetting around the country piling up points, avoiding each other whenever possible, and switching spots at the top of the rankings numerous times. But that wasn’t Dodger’s only fight. A vicious battle had erupted in his own breed, as fans and supporters of the other smooth, Adam—himself a top-ten all-breed dog (registered name GCh Slyfox Sneak’s A Peek)—barked and nipped at Dodger’s record with increasing ferocity. And one of the places they did this most loudly was in the comment section of Billy Wheeler’s Dog Show Poop.
Every time Wheeler reported on a Dodger win, anonymous commenters would commence yapping. Their argument was that Dodger wasn’t even the best smooth fox in America, so he couldn’t possibly be the best dog overall, and it was based on a couple of factors. One, that Adam had won the National Specialty, which supposedly rewards the country’s top smooth fox but in the end is, like all shows, just one judge’s opinion. And two, that depending how you did your math, Adam actually had more breed points, so that Dodger might have been the number-one smooth in all-breed rankings, by winning more big shows with higher entries, but he wasn’t the number-one smooth among smooths.
Things got so nasty that Wheeler, who had recently endured heart surgery, had seen enough. He felt the need to respond and, after reading one anti-Dodger comment too many, wrote a post titled “A Public Response to Anonymous Commenter.” Here’s what he said:
Perhaps it is my current medical state that makes me so intemperate. I think that breeders/owners who snipe at a dog of their own breed who is doing exceptionally well are doing a disservice to their own breed, the dog game at large, and, unwittingly, to themselves. There are forces all around us that would like to put an end to this sport. We should be rallying around the top winners in our respective breeds, not fighting within the family. It is probably not as damaging within the Smooth Fox community as it is in some of our rarer breeds. In a rare breed, this type of selfish behavior is genocidal.
The Smooth Fox family is lucky to have two such worthy dogs out there representing their breed. I believe both have been touted in these pages many times. BUT the dog that is your breed’s face to the public is of paramount importance to your breed. For you to claim that Dodger is not the Number One Fox Terrier is an argument that isn’t likely to be well understood or accepted by the average dog lover.
While I celebrate breed specialties as family reunions where narrow interests can be indulged for a few days once or twice a year and breed aficionados can debate the fine points of the standard, I am somewhat suspect of using breed points. One specialty win can give an owner the specious legitimacy of claiming their dog is Number One because of the opinion of one judge. In this instance we have two dogs, winners of their 2009 & 2010 National Specialties, respectively. That was the opinion of two judges. Dodger has won over 200 Terrier Groups. I’m not sure how many judges were involved, but it was way more than two. I believe both Team Dodger and Team Adam know I love the Smooth Fox breed and I love both dogs. I know that most of my readers know I love the dog show game. I would be bored silly if every Smooth Fox looked exactly alike.
So, I invite you to write enthusiastic comments celebrating every time any Smooth Fox or any other Terrier or any other breed that you fancy is mentioned in these pages, but understand if you want to tear down your own house, do it somewhere else.
Wheeler posted that on a Saturday night, and then, the next evening, posted the results of the weekend’s biggest shows, in Maryland, where Dodger won Best in Show on consecutive days, putting himself firmly back in the top spot on the rankings.
I reached out to Wheeler to dig a bit further into what was causing all this, because this level of internecine fighting was so foreign to the world I’d been inhabiting with Heather and Kevin’s dogs.
Wheeler said that for me to really understand the conflict required a quick lesson, starting with the “reality that the smooth fox is the quintessential show dog.” Westminster’s first-ever Best in Show winner, in 1907, was the smooth fox terrier* Ch Warren Remedy, a dog that also won the following two years. Smooth fox terriers, Wheeler pointed out, had won Westminster thirteen times, more than any other breed. “There have been smooth fox among the top winners for more than a century. That’s over a hundred years of jealousy, debating over the standard, and know-it-alls telling us what the perfect smooth fox should look like,” he wrote.
* * *
SMOOTH FOX TERRIER
When I was doing my research, I found and read a book called Champion of Champions, published by Random House in 1950. Its subject was Nornay Saddler, “a pert and precise smooth-haired fox terrier” who became the world’s most famous dog.
We meet Saddler on page one on the day of perhaps his greatest triumph, a win at the 1941 Morris & Essex Kennel Club show, when he defeated 3,480 dogs to win his fifty-sixth Best in Show, eight months after retiring (for the first time). “His four feet fairly twinkled as they spurned the ground, much like those of a trotting horse sailing down the straightaway,” wrote author Don Reynolds, whose pen often runs purple. “The life of this little dog had touched and influenced the lives of many humans and he had gained a measure of fame denied to all but a few of his kind.” He was, Reynolds wrote, “a dog which became the canine marvel of our age.”
Little Saddler hailed from Nottinghamshire, England, born in 1936 in the mud during a torrential rain—and Reynolds wasn’t about to pass on the chance to point out the symbolism in that event, seeing as how the word “terrier” comes from the Latin word terra, meaning “earth.” He quotes one of the most colorful and illuminating descriptions of the terrier’s function, written in 1570 by Dr. John Kays, founder of Caius College at Cambridge University. Terriers, Kays wrote in a passage that infuriates my spell-check, “creepe into the grounde, and by that meanes make afrayde, nyppe, and byte the Fox and the Badger in some wort, that either they tear them to pieces with theyr teeth beyng in the bosome of the earth or else hayle and pull them perforce out of their lurking angles, dark dongeons, and close caves, or at least through coneved fear drive them out of their hollow harbours.”
Our boy Saddler made his show debut at seven months, in front of a judge who proclaimed him “the loveliest terrier I have ever seen,” and he won his first Best in Show a week later. His English owner quickly sold him for the then-astronomical price of one hundred pounds to an American, Jim Austin of New York’s Long Island, and put the little dog on a freighter, where he came down with distemper and nearly died.
Saddler got off to a rough start in America, finishing dead last at his first show and then again at his second, but the minute Jim Austin hired a professional handler, his “luck” turned. Saddler won the breed at his first Morris & Essex, then the biggest show in the country, and never stopped winning. He went 19 for 19 in the smooth fox ring in 1937, with six Bests in Show, and just kept pouring it on in 1938. At that time the record for the most Bests in Show by any dog was thirty-two (held by an English setter) and on October 8, 1938, Saddler won his thirty-third, in Wilmington, Delaware.
Saddler became a celebrity, and a radio host created a stir by estimating his value at a hundred thousand dollars,* causing Jim Austin to hire a private security guard to accompany the dog on his travels. “Saddler was photogenic long before the word was popular,” Reynolds reported, and said the famous dog grew so accustomed to traveling in Pullman luxury rail cars that he would summon the porter by pushing the button with his nose and then order himself a roast-beef dinner. He was only the second animal ever profiled in the New Yorker (the racehorse Man o’ War was the first), and also appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, and Town & Country. When the war broke out in Europe, Austin donated Saddler’s . . . um, services, and the little dog humped his way to twelve hundred dollars for the British war effort. The money went to buy a fighter plane—named the Dog Fighter—which shot down eight Nazi planes. “I sink my teeth into Adolf with this $1200 I earned myself through stud fees,” said a promotio
nal ad featuring little Saddler.
Saddler’s story was fascinating—here I was thinking Jack was colorful!—but it also helped me, in retrospect, to understand at least a little why smooth fox people were so crazy.
I couldn’t seem to determine if either Dodger or Adam was related to Saddler, but considering that at one point during the 1950s sixteen of eighteen class winners at the National Specialty came from him, it’s not hard to imagine they’ve both got at least a little Saddler on board.
Wheeler said that it wasn’t just that half of smooth fox people preferred Dodger and half preferred Adam. “We have a third of the folks who like Dodger, a third who like Adam, and a third that don’t like either,” he explained. And the fact that any of them were using math to back their emotional arguments was only complicating matters.
“The debate over who is the number-one fox terrier is an inside-baseball argument. There are different ranking systems in the dog world. Some people only count all breed points—i.e., the number of dogs defeated regardless of breed. This system penalizes terriers and favors dogs in the Sporting, Working, & Toy groups”—which tend to have far larger numbers within each individual breed (because many terriers are quite rare).*
“Some people prefer the breed points—i.e., only the dogs of the same breed defeated are counted. This system favors those breeds which rarely get noticed in the group or BIS competitions—e.g., Canaan dog, Japanese Chin, or Tibetan spaniel.
Clearly I’d asked the right guy. The system, Wheeler pointed out, also favors volume,* and fortunately for me he had run all the math. “The number-one dog last year, the Scottie Sadie, competed at more than 150 shows. Dodger has already done more than 120 shows. Adam has done something over 80. Dodger has won BIS 42 percent of the time, Adam has won BIS 25 percent of the time. Dodger has won 89 percent of the Terrier Groups he appeared in, and Adam had won 80 percent of the groups when he won the breed. Dodger won the National Specialty at Montgomery County in 2009, Adam won an Award of Merit.” Nearly every result seemed to favor Dodger, which was a bummer for Adam, because it seemed likely that in any other year he’d easily be the uncontested number-one smooth. (Which might explain why his camp was so frustrated.)
