by Josh Dean
Much of this travel was possible because an executive of Midwest Airlines at that time was a dog-show enthusiast, and Uno was given special dispensation to fly in the cabin, in his own seat. He was even issued his own ticket (Frei keeps one in his desk as proof), and during one trip the computer—having no way to know that “Uno Frei” was a dog—selected him for special screening, and the TSA agents, in a rare moment of security-line levity, wanded him just for fun.
Once Uno had set a precedent of firsts, finding new ones quickly became difficult. The trailblazing of the 2010 winner, Sadie, involved both the legitimately novel (she was the first Westminster winner to “ring” the bell to open the New York Stock Exchange) and the more prosaic (she was the third dog ever to visit the Empire State Building’s observation deck). She had recently gotten pregnant—pardon, in whelp—and seemed to be, at least as far as anyone can recall, the first defending champion to get knocked up and miss the chance to come back as ambassador for promotional opportunities and morning-show drop-ins.
Some of my favorite products of the Westminster PR blitz emerge from the dog stories unearthed by David Frei and his team and printed out for distribution in the pressroom. The 2011 mix included a gluten-detecting Beauceron whose owner is so allergic to glutens that she can be ill for weeks if she even so much as eats something cut by a knife that was previously used to cut a product containing them; an American Eskimo dog that has been taught to carry out household tasks—for instance, turning down the bedsheets at night—for a former air force fuel-systems mechanic with a debilitating arm condition; and a Great Pyrenees who guards a herd of goats from coyotes and bears on the owners’ farm in Missouri’s Mark Twain National Forest.
From the category of heartwarming tales of animal survival, we had Lola the Afghan hound, born of a bitch flown from Germany to Ohio to breed. The owners were preparing to take her to the airport for her return trip when she escaped out the front door and was on the run for six days, a period in which she was both hit by a truck and run over by a car. Found injured on the porch of a stranger’s house, the dog survived—along with the puppies gestating inside her uterus, one of which became Lola. A Shetland sheepdog named Uber was also lucky to be around; bitten four times by a copperhead snake, the dog was so close to death that the vet had begun to discuss the matter of euthanasia with his owner. A last-minute blood transfusion saved his life, and, completing the made-for-TV story, the medical bills were paid by people around the country who sent donations through a Facebook page set up to raise money.
Among 2011’s more colorful human stories was an animal trainer from SeaWorld (showing a Belgian Malinois), a Florida high-school teacher who teaches a canine science program and raised money to bring some of her students (as well as her Norfolk terrier, Happy), and Brigadier General Rhonda Cornum—billed as a “war hero” on a press release—handing out the show’s first morning. It wasn’t hyperbole. Cornum was shot down over Iraq while serving as the flight surgeon on a search-and-rescue operation sent to locate a downed pilot and then captured by forces loyal to Saddam Hussein.
Cornum is now based at the Pentagon, where she oversees soldier fitness for the army, and in her spare time she shows both horses and dogs (Gordon setters, primarily). “I starting showing dogs long before I was in the army,” she told a smattering of journalists in the pressroom while petting the large black-and-tan dog that would later join her in the ring. Cornum was making her first appearance at Westminster since the 1970s. “I can’t honestly say why I like to show dogs,” she said. “I just really love them, and I’m really proud of them, and I want people to see them, and I guess that’s how you do it.”
She thought she was the army’s only moonlighting dog handler, certainly among those operating in the Pentagon’s executive suite. “I say I’m demonstrating a good balance in my life,” she said with a smirk.
It seemed inevitable that someone would ask an inane question, and indeed one writer wondered, “What’s harder, dog shows or the army?” The ex-POW, surprisingly, didn’t scoff or blanch. Rather, she considered it seriously and answered quickly. “Oh, I think dog showing is much harder,” she said, and it was obvious she wasn’t kidding.
Westminster is always nuts. As a benched show, at which all dogs and exhibitors have to be in the building from 11:00 A.M. to 8:00 P.M., cramped into the walkways underneath the stands at Madison Square Garden, it would be stuffy and crowded without the spectators. But with tens of thousands of fans sharing two-thirds of the normal space (because of ongoing renovations), it was downright claustrophobic.
Twenty-four hours before, this same building had hosted a hockey game, and less than a day after the event concluded on Tuesday, the Knicks would be back in action. In the span of four days, the surface of the “world’s most famous arena” would be transformed from ice to Astroturf to basketball court.
“How’s our boy?” I asked Heather as I saw Jack on the table being blown dry.
“He’s doing great,” she answered.
“He seems calmer.”
“That’s because I sent everybody away.”
“I can take a hint,” I said, and headed off to find Kimberly.
Kimberly showed up in New York with a deep tan and a new boyfriend. I’d met Tom Gerrard at the ASCA Nationals in Waco, where his dog Yoshi earned Premier status (a rough equivalent to Award of Merit, which helped him finish the year as the fifth-ranked ASCA Aussie in America), and I knew his name and dogs from Aussie chatter at shows and on Facebook. I recalled Kimberly telling me in Texas that because he was a single man in good shape and had recently split from his wife, he was a hot commodity among the female free agents in the Australian shepherd community. And here he was, on her arm.
I liked Tom, a friendly machinist who lived in a modern wood house on seven hilltop acres in Pennsylvania and pursued two vastly different hobbies in his free time. He played guitar in a rock band and bred and showed Australian shepherds. And sitting there with him, I appreciated his deep knowledge of the breed. Perusing the show catalog, he helped handicap the field for us, pointing out certain kennels and pedigrees that were formidable while discounting others. “I don’t even know why this dog is here,” he said about one.
A 1:00 P.M. ring time slowly bled over to 1:15 and 1:30 and then 1:45 as our scheduled judge, a Maryland veterinarian named H. Scott Kellogg, ran extremely late in a nearby ring. Dogs and handlers stood patiently at ringside, slowly withering in the heat and lights but unable to sit or lie down for fear of mussing coats that were meticulously prepped. Every few minutes Heather would spritz Jack with water.
A man walked by hawking show programs, tossing off one clever breed-specific adaptation after another: “Get your dalmatian diary! Get your directory of dachshunds! Get your Tibetan terrier Torah! Get your Labrador library!”
Finally, at 1:50, Mr. Kellogg wandered into the ring and his steward called the dogs, which he surveyed and then split into three groups—two sets of males and one for the bitches. Jack was in the first set to be judged.
“I feel just like I did last year,” Kimberly told me. “I’ll be happy to make the cut.”
As thirteen males trotted around and stacked up on the far side, a woman to my left was joyful at the sight. “Look how many, Marion! And they’re all so wonderful.”
Jack was seventh in the line, and while he wasn’t jumping on anyone (yet), he did look edgy. If you didn’t know what you were looking at, you might assume that Heather was ignoring him, but I’d been watching these two long enough so that it was hard not to pick up the signs of tension—she gave his lead a tug and bent over to hiss in his ear as she brushed along his topline. Nothing she did there was even remotely cruel, but an experienced handler will almost never openly reprimand a dog in the ring, especially not in a ring with hundreds of eyes trained on it.
“He’s a handful,” Kimberly said. “He’s hot. She’s really gotta work him.”
Jack’s movement, though, was fluid, and the only obvious sign th
at his focus was wavering came at the end of the go-round, when he leaped up into Heather’s chest, a playful moment that caused the entire section to burst out in laughter.
Aesthetically, he looked great; his coat was as full as I’d ever seen it. “He’s maturing,” Tom said, and I heard him commenting on Jack’s feet, which he said were round and compact. “That’s how feet should be. They’re just right.” The woman next to me concurred. “He looks like he has on nice soft slippers. And look at that butt! So cute.”* In the stack he was statuesque, his gaze locked on Heather, and the woman was impressed. “I don’t know anything about how this works, but he’s the only one out of all of them who knows how to stand there.”
Mr. Kellogg surveyed his options seriously, never varying from his stock pose: bolt upright with his hands clasped at his crotch. And he must have agreed, because Jack was the first dog selected for the cut, and as Heather led him out to await the second cut, Kimberly exhaled and sat back in her seat. “Now I can be happy. He made the cut.”
“Which one is yours?” a woman asked her, and, upon hearing, said, “Congratulations. He’s beautiful.”*
Six of the nine dogs in the second group were blue merles, including Bentley and Spooner, Summer’s sire. And in my opinion Jack looked better than all of them. Ben made the second cut, as did Striker, the red merle we’d run into often early in the year. He then vanished from the circuit; it turned out he’d been showing in Italy and had returned only recently as an Italian champion.
Striker made the final group, along with Jack and Bentley and all three of the bitches, one of whom was Beyoncé, so formidable at this point that only two of the twelve females that entered the show even bothered to show up.
It may have been bias at work, but at the Garden I was underwhelmed by her. She was a pretty dog, with a beautiful coat, but her movement, to me, wasn’t as elegant as some of the others’, including Jack. Mr. Kellogg barely gave her a look and spent most of his time deciding whom he liked best out of Jack, Ben, and Bodi, a black tri we’d seen in Waco and at Eukanuba. In the end he picked Beyoncé anyway—leading me to believe he’d made that decision from the outset and was really just focusing on filling out his card. In a surprise, Bodi was awarded Best Opposite, and Jack, Ben, and Striker all got Awards of Merit—meaning that Jack ended his year the way it started and also kept alive his streak of finishing thisclose to the top at every major event.*
“Can’t complain about the last five he picked,” Tom said.
Ben’s owner, Belinda Rhoads, came by and hugged Kim. “My goal was to make the cut,” she said as the two exchanged congratulations.
“Mine, too!” Kimberly squealed.
On the floor, Heather looked our way, smiled, and gave us a thumbs-up.
Westminster is a swan song for many dogs. A more natural coda to a career might seem to be at the end of a year, when the rankings restart, but Westminster is so important that it makes for a natural finale, especially if your dog can provide a joyous one. The 2011 show, for instance, was the end for Walker the toy poodle, who won his variety but did not place in the brutal Toy Group, and for a whole host of dogs that appeared on the evening telecasts, where Frei acknowledged one retirement after another. Dodger chose to retire before the show. “He retired as the number-one dog in the country,” Frei told me when I bumped into him in the media room. (The smooth fox was in town, however, to receive the Winkie for Show Dog of the Year.)
I told him I suspected this meant that his team didn’t like the judge.
Frei smiled. “You’ve learned a lot. I think they were worried Dodger wouldn’t win his breed.” And that would be a pretty bad way to end a career.
If Jack never showed again, I don’t think Kimberly would have regrets. He began 2010 unknown, a young male taking his very tentative first steps as a show dog, and despite the ups and downs—with entire months skipped for various reasons—he ended the year with more impressive ribbons than any Australian shepherd not named Beyoncé. He was—and always would be—a well-decorated show dog.
I wasn’t convinced, however, that he was done. Kimberly sometimes talked about 2012 and beyond, and she was increasingly pointing out how her dog was finally maturing. His second impressive Westminster had caught the eye of some wealthy Brazilians who’d been looking to campaign an Aussie back home. One of them, a slick cattle rancher in a cashmere scarf who also “has hotels,” had come by to pet Tanner, and later his handler also made an appearance. Heather was certain they’d agree to take Jack to Brazil for six months, finish his championship, and make him that country’s number-one Aussie, then send him home to Kimberly and pay for a full American campaign in 2012.
“This is a fantastic opportunity,” she told me. “I think she should consider it.”
Whether Rita would be joining Jack in retirement was increasingly up in the air. She’d won another Award of Merit, and Cindy, interviewed by her breed’s magazine the Morning Call, looked as proud as I’d seen her. Rita had, unfortunately, lost her status as Kevin’s top dog to Nacho, whose owner, Emi, arrived with buttons and postcards and was thrilled to see him notch an Award of Merit of his own. He was off to such a hot start in 2011 that it seemed possible that both he and Tanner would be in contention for America’s top dog in their respective breeds—meaning that Kevin and Heather would be facing off over and over in the Working Group.
The Garden, however, wasn’t Tanner’s show. When Trader took Best Opposite in the Akita ring, Tanner was the only one of the regular dogs not to leave with a ribbon.
“The only dog that didn’t win was the number-one dog,” Dawn said. “The big loser is Tanner.” She was taking it well and was in very good spirits, as always. “You know what I told Georgeann? I said, ‘Guess what—there’s another dog show, next weekend.’” She slapped me on the back and went off in pursuit of a glass of wine.
In the end the Best in Show wasn’t Malachy (though he was in the final seven) or Emily (who wasn’t) or Beckham the cocker spaniel or Adam (who added one last splash of kerosene to the smooth fox fire by winning the Terrier Group the day after Dodger picked up his Winkie) or Roy, the beardie, a dog I found myself pulling quite hard for, if for no other reason than I’d seen him win 4 bazillion Herding Groups. No, when our Italian judge, Paolo Dondina, was handed a microphone, he announced to the crowd in charmingly broken English how happy he was to be there and how humbled he was “by the quality.” He walked toward the seven dogs. “The winner of best in show is . . .”—and he held that pause and veered left toward Roy, only to say—“the deerhound!”
David Frei had told me that foreign judges were unpredictable. So in that sense this was refreshing. It seemed possible that he actually, objectively, chose the best dog in the ring. Still, the deerhound? It looked so . . . smelly.
* * *
DEERHOUND
People in tuxedos converged upon the dog, Hickory, and her handler, Angela Lloyd, and both seemed a little shell-shocked when they faced the media a half hour later in the pressroom, along with the judge. Frei introduced them and noted that Lloyd had been named Best Junior Handler here in 1998. When a reporter got things started by observing that the dog didn’t seem terribly interested in those of us assembled in this small room on the second floor of Madison Square Garden, Lloyd replied, “You guys don’t look like a bunch of squirrels and deer.”
The judge was asked what he’d seen in the dog.
“I think she was beautiful,” he said. “Not only great showmanship, in great show condition and feeling the type like we want to see. This one feel perfect with the standard, in all the ways. Is very well balanced, beautiful head, ears, everything is okay, and the handler did a marvelous job with her.” He looked at the dog the way he might at Carla Bruni. “Now she’s had enough, probably because she’s not used to the press. And probably she’s tired, usually.”
He wasn’t ready to step out of the spotlight just yet, however. It reminded me, more than a little, of Roberto Benigni accepting his Oscar for
Life Is Beautiful. “I’m a hound person, I had Afghans, whippets, Irish wolfhound. I never own deerhound, but this is my dream. Like Walter Scott said, if I remember, he say, ‘This animal, he has to be not from this world; is like to be in the heaven.’ And I feel the same way. I’m very happy and honored to have this special and super deerhound to judge and to put over other six top dogs. Was not an easy win. Because all the others were Best in Show winners in any case. If this one had to be choose, because only one can be choose, all the others please me a lot. I found the standard of the dogs and the presentation absolutely superb. And what can I say, I am in the heavens.”
Lloyd was asked what that moment felt like, to be the handler of the dog named Best in Show at Westminster. “It takes a minute to sink in,” she said. “You question whether you heard it correctly. You play it again in your head.”
And Hickory—was she also over the moon? Surely she’d been dreaming of this moment since she was just a little deerhound, frolicking in the Virginia leaves?
“Hickory is overwhelmed,” Lloyd said as the dog writers scribbled. “She showed like she’s never showed before. She was solid and steady. Even with all the lights and cameras and the noise and spotlights. She came right through it.” She gazed affectionately at the dog that seemed to be trying to hide behind her. “I thought she was worthy before.”
Lloyd said that it was difficult to prepare for an event like Westminster, held under the lights in front of a crowd of thousands. “You really can’t duplicate it. You have to have faith in the fact that the dog trusts you and knows you’re not going to put her in a situation that will hurt her in any way. This was her first time under the spotlights. She was curious—I felt it on the lead when we first began, but I think she felt I was very excited and just went with it. She handled it perfectly.”
