by Josh Dean
“Now that’s done. We gotta focus on getting him ready for tomorrow,” Kerry said. And with that he was off for his bath.
The big day broke with some fresh drama. The night before, on the walk to the arena to see Rita show in the Sporting Group, where she looked great but failed to place, Heather had asked Kimberly if she’d talked to Kerry about being ready to handle Jack, “just in case.” This was the first time this issue had been raised, and it was a shock to Kimberly, considering she’d flown three thousand miles, spending money she didn’t really have, to see her dog compete with Heather on the lead. Kimberly’s reply, she told me the next morning, was, “We may as well scratch him. And that’s the last thing anyone said about it.”
Cindy overheard the two discussing this potential crisis and, with Kimberly’s permission, later raised the issue with Dawn and Georgeann Reeve at the hotel bar. And after reviewing the logistics, they all agreed that Heather was being unnecessarily fretful. There was plenty of breathing room in the schedule for her to show Jack and still make it for Tanner’s ring time.
Heather wasn’t wrong to worry—she’s protecting her investment and best client—but the reality was still hard for Kimberly to swallow, especially since it was Heather who’d encouraged her to enter Jack in the first place, saying over and over to both of us that “it could be your only chance.” (She was technically right. It was possible that Kimberly wouldn’t show Jack in 2011, and even if she did, and was again only half committed to the cause, there was no guarantee he’d qualify.)
As the morning unfolded, however, the tension subsided, and by the time I headed to the grooming area to check up on the team, Heather was finishing up Jack before heading out to Ring 9 for the Best of Breed competition.
Ring 9 turned out to be gigantic—easily the size of one that would typically be used for groups. And the judge presiding over Ring 9 was Mrs. Roberta Davies, last seen in Bloomsburg, where she’d liked a less fit Jack but had not given him the purple Best of Breed ribbon.
Judge Davies wore a flowing blue tunic-y shirt/dress that draped amply over a set of matching pants. She was a tall, regal woman, with a short, brown, Bieber-esque coif, delicate ovoid glasses, and excellent posture.
Ten dogs had scratched from the event, so the actual number of entries at call time was twenty-two, including at least four of the top ten. Notably absent was Beyoncé, and I remembered what Jamie had told me about the judges for this event. He’d said the judges were bad, by which he didn’t mean they were actually bad at judging, but rather bad for him. Which was to say he was fairly certain that Davies wouldn’t choose Beyoncé. (This is very common handler strategy.)
Back at the ASCA Nationals in Waco, one of the country’s top breeders had told Kerry that she, too, was skipping Eukanuba because of the judging; the result, she’d said, was a foregone conclusion. At the time Kimberly and I took this to mean that Beyoncé was a lock to win, but Kerry cleared that up in the opening moments of the breed competition when she told me that another breeder who’d skipped the event had also said that the outcome was preordained. She pointed to a specific dog—a red merle named Reckon, handled by his breeder, a famous and very successful figure in Aussie circles—and said, “Watch, that’s your winner.” The judge, rumor had it, was close with that dog’s owner and was known to like this dog. And whether or not that was really true, it helped explain all the absent dogs.
The giant ring helped lift spirits. It was great for Jack, Kimberly noted, because as handsome as he might be, his greatest quality is his movement, which isn’t best displayed until he’s able to work up some speed. Heather was also thrilled.
Judge Davies went through the line, carefully watching each dog’s down-and-back and nearly its entire run around the ring. Jack was toward the end of the line, the last male before the five bitches entered, and I positioned myself so that when Heather stopped, I was there.
She was beaming. “He’s showing a-maz-ing,” she said. “Maybe the best ever. I hardly have to do anything.” This was fairly insane news, that the same dog who’d nearly humped Kerry in the ring, who’d been distracted for much of his time in Long Beach by the pull of his loins, could suddenly snap into Show-Dog Mode. But such is the mysterious method of Jack.
Once through the entire field, Judge Davies began her cut. The first dog chosen? The red merle, Reckon. She pointed to the corner of the ring. She walked on and picked out another dog, then another, and then Jack, then moved to the spot where they had assembled and began to reorder them. Reckon stayed up front. When she got to Jack, her choice was swift, and she placed him just behind Reckon, but with space for the bitch who would slot in as Best of Opposite Sex.
Tension built as Davies added two more dogs and shuffled more, still not moving Reckon or Jack, who was stacked in line as if stuffed. “Wait—it’s not over,” said a friend of Kerry’s, and yet it sure felt like it was. And then it was. “Best of Breed,” Davies said to Reckon’s handler. “Best Opposite,” she said to the bitch Pebbles. And then, “One, two, three, four, five,” to the Award of Excellence winners, number one going to our boy Jack.
“Freaking honorable mention,” Kimberly said, referencing Jack’s pedigree name. “It’s a curse!” And then she smiled. Third (and really second) was the same result as Westminster, and either of them—let alone both—was a great honor. Rowan, the dog who’d beaten Jack at the Garden, failed to get any notice here, and considering that Reckon didn’t show in New York, you can make a case that Jack was now the most successful Australian shepherd in America across the top shows, other than Beyoncé. (Throw in his Best of Opposite at the National Dog Show and the case is even stronger.)
“I can’t believe this is the same dog,” Kerry said. Heather, meanwhile, was so happy and proud of both herself and the dog that she was almost bouncing.
“Of all the dogs I’ve ever showed—ever—he’s the hardest dog I’ve ever handled,” she told me. “One day he’s phenomenal—the next day he’s a mess. If he was like this every day, I could take him to the top five easily, maybe number one.”
One mystery that will bother her forever, because it can’t be solved, is what exactly turns Jack on and off. “Something about the big shows,” she said, puzzling over some possibilities. Could it be that he’s the canine equivalent of an athlete who can motivate for only the biggest games—who, in sportscaster parlance, plays up (or down) to the level of his competition? “At big shows like this, he sees the competition and is just like, ‘I got this.’ But then at a small show—he’s like, ‘Eh.’” In her fifteen-plus years of handling, Heather said, she’d never had a dog like Jack, who snapped in and out of focus to such extremes. “We just need to figure out what we did,” she said, having no idea, of course, that the reality of what had been done (the breeding, the extra shows) was the exact opposite of what we would have done if we were really trying to optimize Jack’s performance.
She looked at Kimberly. “What did we do?”
I’d be remiss to buzz on past Eukanuba without noting that the dog that beat Jack—a dog that had recently arrived from a successful run in Italy but was basically unknown in the United States—would go on to win the Herding Group* in front of thousands in the Long Beach Arena that night. And that out of a field that included two favorites for Westminster—Malachy the Peke and Banana Joe the affenpinscher—plus Adam the smooth fox (Dodger never showed)* and two other top-ten dogs, Reckon would then go on to become the first-ever Australian shepherd to win Best in Show at Eukanuba.
This could be spun as an encouraging thing for Jack. He lost out to the dog that went on to win the second-most-important dog show in America. Would he have won it, given the same chance? We’ll never know. It was even easier to spin it as a good thing for Aussies, no matter how you feel about any politics that played into Reckon’s success. “It’s a good advertisement for our breed,” Beyoncé’s owner, Sharon Fontanini, told me later. “It breaks the glass ceiling for Eukanuba and shows that judges could and should pu
t Aussies up for big wins.” With Westminster looming, it wasn’t hard to sense the hope in her voice.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Wildwood: Once More, with Feeling
* * *
The curtain rises on a vast primitive wasteland, not unlike certain parts of New Jersey.
—WOODY ALLEN
* * *
At least for 2011, New Jersey’s most popular beach town was not expecting another wallop from a winter storm. The previous year’s historic nor’easter was still so resonant that some people actually skipped 2011’s cluster of shows in fear of the memory, and an intrepid businessman was hawking T-shirts that said I SURVIVED THE BLIZZARD OF 2010 in the lobby of the convention center.
The four-day cluster had grown to five days for 2011, and Jack was back with Heather and Kevin for his first shows since Eukanuba. He’d spent the holidays, and the month of January, putting on some pounds and also picking on Bodi, who, being a puppy, was prone to repeating the same mistakes. Foremost among them, nibbling Jack’s food. Secondly, being a subordinate unaltered male in the same roost as a female. When Summer began to exhibit signs of coming into season, Jack’s territorial instincts revved up, and Bodi was often cowering from his snarls.
Speaking of reproduction, out of California came word that Jack’s second litter had arrived, inconveniently, while Kerry was at a business conference in Phoenix, so Don was there to shepherd the always messy arrival of eight puppies (actually nine; the last was stillborn). The litter contained six boys and two girls and included three blue merles and five black tris. There were no red dogs in the litter.
I hadn’t seen Jack in weeks, and my first glimpse of him was a familiar one: his white, gray, and black form quivering atop a grooming table as an irritated Heather worked over his coat. She spied me from a distance and intercepted me in the walkway. “He’s a little excited today,” she said. “So can you go hide?”
Kimberly would be missing all five days of the Wildwood cluster while at a wedding in the Dominican Republic. Her BlackBerry wasn’t able to send e-mails, but she was able to receive them and get to the Internet (as well as make calls), so she tended to check in periodically via Facebook.
So far Jack was 0 for 2. He’d been Best Opposite on Wednesday, having beaten the two big specials—Bentley, now the country’s number-two Aussie, and Tuck, the black tri that had beaten him on several occasions in early 2010 before his owners, Steve and Kathy Ostrander, had decided to take him off the circuit—but lost to a puppy bitch out of the classes. On Thursday he took Select, to Bentley.
Tuck, by the way, was back as of January 1, and not just back—the Ostranders had hired Heather to handle him, and he was to be her top Aussie after Westminster, because Kimberly had made a decision: Rather than fret about money and blame immaturity for Jack’s inconsistency, she was going put him away for at least a year. It was, she said, a surprisingly easy decision to come to. She felt that a year of growth was good for his body and mind, and it would give her time to save some money to do it right, should she opt to consider a full campaign for him in 2012 (ideally, with some backers). Within days Tuck was signed on; slots in the truck do not stay open for long.
This being a new year, and the run-up to Westminster (which dog people pretty universally call “the Garden” in the same way the AKC National Championship is “Eukanuba”) Heather and Kevin had the complete retinue of animals in tow for Wildwood.
As the big dogs of 2010 prepared for their Garden finale, a whole new set was building steam for 2011. Close to home, Tanner was off to an excellent start. Back-to-back Working Group wins gave him two more shots at his first-ever Best in Show—one of his team’s main goals for 2011. He didn’t win either time, but his mere presence in the final seven against some of America’s top dogs—including Roy the beardie,* Walker the toy poodle, and Banana Joe the affenpinscher—was impressive.
Having been away from shows myself since before the holidays, I wondered how it would seem, but watching the Aussie ring from a semiobstructed view spot behind two women and a trash can, I still found it easy, even with weeks of distance, to pick out a bad dog from afar. I could also sense Jack’s edge; nervous electricity practically radiated off him. Heather was feeling it, too, and she ran him down and back outside the ring, giving his lead a few hard upward yanks until he settled into a textbook run. Aesthetically speaking, he was in pretty good shape—his coat was thick and shiny, and if you were to nitpick (or ask Heather), maybe his only issue was that he could stand to lose a pound or two.
Stacked first in line, Jack looked distracted, as if he were daydreaming of Halle B, but not so totally absent as to upset the judge who was giving him the hands-on inspection. Even with his ears twitching in search of trouble, Jack was laser-focused on Heather, who swiftly regained her mind meld over him, even with eight weeks of distance between them. Jack, however, is always one unexpected distraction away from a breakdown, and a burst of applause next door in the Doberman ring caused him to start to jump just as Heather was beginning the down-and-back. She sensed it immediately and with no sign of fluster stopped him, yanked his lead, turned him 360 degrees to hit reset for dog and judge, and restarted the run.
I often found myself comparing Jack’s edge with a top dog like Bentley. Granted, Ben was older—by nearly two years—and he was on a full-time campaign and thus out every week without fail, but I’m still pretty sure that, all things being equal, Ben is always going to seem more composed; in contrast to Jack, especially, he’s a wax figurine.
That’s a good thing if you’re his handler, Jessica Plourde; you never have to worry about him, say, jumping on the judge. But it’s Jack’s edge that makes him potentially very special. Terriers and poodles always (or nearly always) seem edgy, and they consequently win a ton of ribbons. If Jack could consistently harness that sparkle—and Kimberly could find someone to pay for a campaign—I think he could make a run at number one. (Ben, for instance, had never beaten Jack at a big show, like Westminster or Philly.)
But this judge preferred Ben and gave Select to Jack, again. Tuck left unrewarded, but Steve and Kathy, two of the nicest, most cheerful, salt-of-the-earth people you’ll ever meet, took it well. They had a whole year to look forward to.
One owner who wasn’t quite so accepting of her fate was Cindy, whose dog Rita had lost her spot in the truck. The plan all along had been for Rita to retire after the Garden in order to (hopefully) get pregnant and so that Cindy could begin to repair her decimated finances. But Kevin had recently broken the news to her that Nacho, the bullmastiff, was back as his number-one dog for 2011 and the number two in the truck, behind Tanner. “I had a meltdown last week,” Cindy told me. “He called to tell me there could be a conflict at the Garden. I’m in debt because of this dog. I live alone, and half my salary goes to this,” she said. “I called all my friends, and they said, ‘You know what? You need a break. Take some time off.’ They’re right.”
Tom and Anne were also in Wildwood, with Trader, plus a young Akita bitch and a pair of corgis. I asked Tom if he was going to special Trader for 2011.
“Not this year,” he said, wiping away sweat with his tie, which bore the hand-painted profile of a corgi. “They asked me if I wanted to be the number-two working dog in the truck,” a complicated and expensive proposition considering that Nacho’s owner, Emi Gonzalez, could afford not only to campaign her dog but also to commission for him custom clothing and accessories (all of it with chili-pepper accents) and hire a personal driver to transport him back and forth across states. “I don’t want to have to bid on that,” Tom said. “Nacho’s owner has more money—and Trader’s not even three yet. I’ll wait and see what happens after Tanner retires.”
His plan for now was to take it show by show; if the schedule looked friendly, he’d enter. But only then. “Because if Tanner and Nacho win”—and all three are in the Working Group—“who takes Trader into the group ring? He’s not the kind of dog you can just hand off to someone else.”
Dog shows involve many lulls, which is why all-breed handler setups tend to serve as home bases for the many owners who gather there, socializing and eating meals together while waiting for their dogs’ ring times. I had come to enjoy these gatherings, but I also liked to take advantage of lulls to walk around and observe the many other corners of the culture. By Wildwood, though, I’d long since browsed all the tinctures and treatments and potions at the holistic-products booth as well as the full line of Chris Christensen shampoos and coloring products, and the mailboxes and sweaters and pendants at Wags Incorporated, so I found myself wandering in search of some neglected corner I’d overlooked. I found it in the person of Jennifer Vawter.
Jennifer is the face behind the International Canine Semen Bank (ICSB) RV I’d been seeing around at shows but had been too shy to penetrate. (Har, har.) In Wildwood I found her seated on a stool at a booth in the building’s foyer, studying her latest sample under the microscope. Jennifer has jet-black hair and dramatic bangs and on this occasion wore black boots and a dark, lace-adorned dress under her white lab coat; the overall vibe was a little goth.
I asked her how she would sum up her job. “Breeders come by with dogs, and I collect the semen and freeze it for future use in their pedigree.” I did not ask how that semen was collected here, in this very public setting, and I didn’t need to. But her husband explained it anyway. “The running joke is that it’s a very scientific process.” Here he paused for a giant smirk that portends a punch line. “Remember high school?”
The necessity of frozen semen has already been discussed in these pages. And ICSB is a business founded by an Oregon scientist named Carrol Platz* to collect and store samples for the nation’s breeders. When a client needs a sample, ICSB will retrieve and ship it overnight in large canisters filled with liquid nitrogen. The sample itself is about the size of a ChapStick; the canister that keeps it cold looks like an old milk container and weighs thirty pounds. Once semen is unfrozen, it can live inside a bitch for up to three days, and over that period more and more of the sperm cells will awaken and resume their life’s work—swimming like hell upstream in search of the target.
