by Josh Dean
Adding some nice punctuation to the moment, Lloyd noted that this was to be Hickory’s last show, too. “She’s done.” The deerhound would be returning to her owners, on a Virginia horse ranch, to become a mother, producing a new generation of show candidates when she wasn’t harassing chipmunks and woodchucks.
The finality had not escaped Lloyd. She said she’d probably most miss the “nudge in the middle of the night” when Hickory would approach the bed and bump her handler’s body with her nose just to say, “Hey, I’m here.”
“I think that all dogs are easy to love,” she said wistfully. “But sometimes you find the ones where everything clicks. She is certainly one of those dogs. We’ve been through a lot together.” She swallowed hard. “That builds bonds.”
The next day I got an e-mail from Billy Wheeler, asking if I’d enjoyed Westminster as much as he had. He told me that Hickory’s win wasn’t actually a big surprise at all and that if the dog hadn’t been felled by bloat that had cost her twelve weeks of showing, she’d have been a top-ten dog. He said he was “delighted with her selection.” He was far less happy with the “Smooth Fox Terrier people.”
“I have seen more bitter campaigns, but not many,” he wrote to me. “Dodger’s Camp thought I favored Adam and Adam’s Camp thought I favored Dodger. As a journalist that kind of makes me proud.” I asked if there was at least some resolution in his mind over Dodger’s legacy. In fact, he said, the opposite was true. “Dodger ended up Show Dog of the Year and he did set a new record for Smooth Fox Terriers, no minor feat for such iconic show dogs. However, he won no marquee show, and boycotted all the major ones, Montgomery County, Eukanuba, and Westminster (he did win the Group there in 2010). As such, his place in history will be as the breed record holder, not among the great show dogs of all time.”
Dodger, then, was to be no modern-day Nornay Saddler.
Wheeler went on to say that he was disappointed, though not surprised, that Beyoncé failed to place at the Garden. “But at least she won the breed.”
He asked me if Jack would be continuing, and I said it didn’t look like it. He was surely going to be out of the picture for 2011. “I look forward to seeing your book,” he said. “I hope in the process, we have made a dog-show junkie of you.”
I closed the message and considered that. Had they? Not in the sense that I had any plans to continue stalking America’s dog shows on my own, at least not regularly, nor did I envision any future in which I would own a show dog. But I was undeniably changed by the experience. Whereas the longing for a pet dog in my life over the previous decade had been only very occasionally conscious (most often after I’d spent a weekend in the country with my brother’s yellow Lab, Zoe, a sixty-pound dose of Prozac), I noticed it growing more and more palpable, manifesting itself as a kind of restless itch whenever I departed the company of the kinds of dogs I longed for—happy, active dogs like Zoe or Jack, especially, but even when I played tennis at my local park, where I often see a guy from my neighborhood walking a Bernese mountain dog that always makes me think of Tanner.
Once they hear about this book, people inevitably ask me if I own a dog.
I’ve always thought I would, but years have gone by and I haven’t. Now I know I will, and my wife and I talk about it more and more, agreeing that the right time is probably when our son, Charlie, is old enough to shoulder at least some of the responsibility and to learn a little about life by caring for something else—like, maybe, one of Jack’s kids. Wouldn’t that be something?
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
The End. For Now. (Maybe?)
* * *
It is as if once a dog loves you, he loves you always, no matter what you do, no matter what happens, no matter how much time goes by.
—JEFFREY MOUSSAIEFF MASSON, Dogs Never Lie About Love
* * *
The last time I saw Jack at a dog show, it was in the benching area under Madison Square Garden. The team’s setup was empty, except for the dogs—Jack, Tanner, Rita, Trader, and Nacho—each one sprawled out and asleep despite the ongoing clamor of the show, which had begun its transition for the night session, for the groups and Best in Show. Heather and Kevin had gone back to the hotel to change and rest. Dawn and Georgeann were off drinking wine. And Kimberly and Tom were having a steak dinner out on Thirty-fourth Street.
Jack lifted his head when I walked past, and I stuck my fingers through the crate’s bars. He sniffed them and promptly returned to resting. I then ventured off to the media room for a couple hours, and by the time I thought to check back, the whole crew was gone—having packed up and loaded the dogs onto carts and joined the throng that lined up at the arena’s exit ramp, waiting for security guards to open the doors to the outside at eight, when the benching period was officially over. Where just an hour before there had been rows of yapping dogs, now there was only empty space.
Tom and Kimberly took Jack outside, and the three of them walked a few blocks through the buzz of Manhattan at night to the car, then loaded up and drove home to Pennsylvania, into a new year with a more uncertain schedule.
Heather and Kevin were packed up and out of the Hotel Pennsylvania by seven in the morning and would enjoy a rare succession of nights in their own bed before loading up the truck and heading out to the next shows, so numbed by the repetition and rhythm of the dog-show circuit that short of winning a Best in Show at the Garden, a show like Westminster happened and then faded into memory the same as a podunk weekend in Bloomsburg. By the following Thursday, the setup was reconstituted in Suffern, New York, and the only notable difference in the camp—other than the weekend’s new day-rate dogs—was the absence of Jack and the appearance of Tuck in his place at the end of Heather’s leash.
Within a few weeks, Tom had begun to practice handling Jack, with the goal of finishing his ASCA championship. He also capitalized on Jack’s absence from the circuit to take his own champion boy, Yoshi, back out to AKC shows, where he occasionally met—and sometimes beat—Heather and Tuck. It hadn’t even been two years since Yoshi and Jack had first met, in the ring in Bloomsburg, at Jack’s first AKC show with Heather, when Kimberly and Tom were just two Aussie owners who admired each other’s dogs.
At home in the town house and also when he and Kimberly were staying with Tom in the country, Jack struggled a little living alongside other intact males—first picking on his maturing son, Bodi, a smaller and younger dog who was easy to dominate, and then also facing off with Yoshi, who was nearly as large and four months older. That didn’t go so well, and during one spat Yoshi caught Jack by the face and tossed him aside, leaving a puncture that led to an abscess that led to “a quarter-size bald spot on his show side” that Kimberly and Tom spent a good month treating and draining.
That was the last time Jack and Yoshi were allowed to play together. Instead one would get to run with the pack of Aussies that roamed Tom’s verdant property and then be crated while the other one got his turn. Boys will always be boys.
Accepting that she couldn’t really keep two male dogs, Kimberly made the difficult decision to place Bodi with the treasurer of her agility club, Kruisin’ Kanines—where he stood a good chance of earning many performance titles*—and had come to terms with the likelihood that the unplanned pairing of Jack and Summer wasn’t going to yield top-quality dogs. Their offspring had Jack’s beautiful head and decent movement, but nearly all of them got Summer’s short legs. Kimberly also spent the spring fending off Kerry’s pleas to take one or two of the puppies from Halle B, five of which Kerry was thinking might be show quality. One, which she’d been calling Ricky, looked like a good candidate to become Jack’s first champion son—especially after he took Best Puppy in Show at two different ASCA shows. “Breeding is all a big long waiting game,” Kimberly said. “No one really told me that, but it takes so long.” Then she added a common refrain: “You just don’t know.”
Out at the AKC shows, Tanner, Nacho, and Trader were all winning so often that the situation was causi
ng a recurring problem—three dogs in the Working Group but only two handlers to show them. In those instances Trader was the odd dog out, and rather than put a substitute handler on him, Kevin and Trader’s owner, Tom, had decided to withdraw the Akita instead. By midyear Tanner and Nacho were both the country’s top dogs in their breeds, and Trader, competing in a smaller breed, was entrenched in the top five himself.
Even Tuck was doing well, but Sharon Fontanini had decided to keep Beyoncé out another year, and because of Jamie’s determination to overtake Roy as the country’s top herding dog, she was showing up more and more north of the Mason-Dixon Line, where bigger shows bring more points. And when Beyoncé wasn’t casting her shadow over the Aussie ring, Reckon—the Best in Show winner from Eukanuba—would often swoop in for a day or two and take the breed ribbons. If Beyoncé retired to be bred after 2011, as everyone expected, Reckon was likely to step in as the country’s top Aussie.
And Rita? Rita won almost every show through April and was back to being the country’s top Chessie bitch, but once she had enough points that qualification for Eukanuba and Westminster seemed certain, Cindy took her off her medication, and when she went into heat in June, Rita left Kevin. For the first time in two years, Cindy didn’t have a large bill bill to pay to her handlers every month. Her vet tested Rita’s progesterone daily and, one Thursday, gave Cindy the green light. She left work, packed a bag, and set out for Illinois, stopping only to sleep four hours at a rest area in Ohio.
Once there Rita bred to the top-ranked all-breed Chessie in America, a male named Moose who was owned by Lawrence and Diana Lentz, of Mundelein, Illinois. The Lentzes were, Cindy said, nothing like most of the other Chessie people back east. They were “absolutely lovely people” who put her up for the trip in their lake house, and the trip wasn’t just pleasant, it was fruitful. A few weeks later, a scan confirmed that Rita was pregnant and in late August, two puppies—one male, one female—were born. Despite her late start at motherhood, Rita was excellent at the job, and Cindy planned to keep whichever puppy looked most promising once they matured.
Freed from Heather’s rules, Kimberly took Jack off his supplements, temporarily gave up on his coat maintenance, and let him return to his favorite activity: Frisbee. He was, at least for a while, enjoying just being a dog, and the photos she sent me of him chasing his blue Frisbee sure were a sight. In one he is jumping so high that his upper torso has left to the top fame of the photo, and a second dog jumping below him is already high enough that you can’t see the ground. “He’s going to be great at agility,” Kimberly said, and she was already pining for titles in that discipline, a whole other realm of AKC competition that is smaller but no less fervent and competitive than conformation. She planned to reenroll him in lessons.
Kimberly made a point, however, to keep doing Heather and Kevin’s schedules, and the assembly of these meticulous Excel documents required weekly phone calls that could sometimes last up to an hour. “You talk to Heather an awful lot for someone who’s not showing your dog,” Tom told her. This was, of course, at least a little calculated. No matter what she said, Kimberly had no intention of retiring Jack, and despite the ups and downs of their relationship over the year, her respect for Heather only magnified with time. Kimberly had no doubts about who she’d want on her dog if and when the time came to return him to the ring. She found herself missing not only the competition, but also the camaraderie that came along with it. The community that formed around the setup, she realized, was as addictive as the wins.
“Jack’s kind of on the back burner a little bit right now,” she told me. But not forever. She’d even briefly considered sending him to Canada with Heather, to pick up his Canadian championship, but when Steve and Kathy decided to send Tuck, she decided to wait another year—the idea was to beat up on Canadian dogs, not compete with other quality dogs from the United States. Instead she and Tom were considering a trip north of the border themselves.
The thought of Jack’s scraps with Yoshi had even caused her to consider something radical. “Now, if those Brazilians wanted to take him for a year, I’d probably consider it.”
She had, I reminded her, dismissed that outright as recently as Westminster.
“He wasn’t being a dick.”
Very quickly she realized what she’d said.
“He’s always going to be my boy. He’s always going to be my bud.”
He’d just have to learn how to adapt to sharing his roost. Because over the Fourth of July weekend, Tom proposed and Kimberly accepted. It was only a matter of time until she sold her town house and moved to the house on the hill where her two dogs would make it seven Australian shepherds under one roof, with plenty of room to grow. Maybe, sometime soon, this would become the birthplace of Jackpot Kennels, with Jack as the founding stud dog of the line.
Kerry was thrilled to hear the news, that the woman she’d introduced to her beloved breed would be marrying a man who was already in the thrall of Australian shepherds, and that the two of them, just maybe, could make for an East Coast outpost of Wyndstar—if not officially, at least as a good base for housing and showing future show dogs in the country’s most competitive region.
Unfortunately, we learned in July, it probably wouldn’t be Ricky. Because right at the six-month mark, Jack and Halle’s star puppies’ development as show dogs stalled. The two pups that Kerry had felt quite certain would develop into contenders—Ricky and his brother Caruso—both began to exhibit dental problems within days of each other. Caruso’s was the less serious issue. He was, Kerry said, “level,” which meant that his teeth didn’t have the overlapping scissor bite required of the breed. There were finished dogs out on the circuit with the same problem doing quite well, she told me. But it was a fault, and as a judge and a breeder, she didn’t want that fault in her line.
Ricky, she said, had an even more serious issue, and her voice sank as she explained that her favorite puppy—the one she called “Squishy-Faced Ricky”—was “undershot.” What this meant was that he had begun to develop an underbite, and there was little chance of its correcting itself; if anything, the issue would probably get worse. The problem didn’t seem to come from Jack’s background, and he himself had perfect teeth, so likely it was just a bad pairing—or maybe just bad luck. In any event, it was a reminder that when it comes to breeding, you never really know.
This left only one dog with perfect structure, conformation-wise: Pavi (for Pavarotti),* the one with the ugliest mug of all. “He has a rottweiler face,” Kerry said, and it wasn’t a compliment.
Ricky, though, “he is just the prettiest. I love him.” Finding that flaw had nearly wrecked her. “I wanted to cry when I saw it, literally,” she told me. “I’m still sick about it. But this is this game.”
The line went silent for a second.
“Hey, if you want a really nice, beautiful pet, I’ve got one for you.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and foremost, in the order I met them: Heather Bremmer, Kevin Bednar, Kimberly Smith, and Kerry Kirtley. Without the willingness of these four people to open their worlds—with virtually no questions asked—to a stranger from New York with a notebook, this book would have been impossible. Next, the rest of the owners of Team Brem-Dar, especially Dawn Cox, Cindy Meyer, Tom and Anne Bavaria, Steve and Kathy Ostrander, Emi Gonzalez, and Claudette Lyons, as well as their awesome dogs Tanner, Rita, Trader, Tuck, Nacho, and Benny. Also, Karen Churchill, Sharon Fontanini, Kristin Elmini, Carla Viggiano, Doug Johnson, Anna Morgan, Marlene and Joseph Horvath, and all the other dog owners and handlers who tolerated me and my relentless badgering over the course of a year. I might not have even gotten that far if not for Kim Estlund, a music publicist I’d known for years who revealed herself at a Rolling Stone photo shoot to be a breeder and handler of cocker spaniels, and provided both enthusiasm for my concept, and some initial introductions that helped get me started.
Billy Wheeler, author of the indispensable Dog Show Poop blog, ve
ry patiently answered about three hundred question-filled e-mails, and did so promptly. He was first described to me as the “Perez Hilton of the dog-show world,” but that is wildly inaccurate; he’s more like a human Wikipedia of dog-show knowledge, only with better sourcing.
Westminster maestro David Frei invited me to his office, twice, and also responded promptly to e-mails once he determined I was not a nutjob. He even took me to watch his Cavalier King Charles spaniel Angel do her therapy dog work at the Ronald McDonald House in New York—an experience that was both wonderful and heartbreaking at once. If you’re looking for charities to support, might I recommend Angel on a Leash, the therapy-dog organization founded by Frei.
At the AKC, Lisa Peterson was a great help, even though I still get the impression that she’s suspicious of my motives, as was the new librarian, Craig Savino, who got a tour of his newly inherited stacks while searching for the dusty nineteenth-century dog-show history texts I was after last summer. If you are ever looking for a rare dog book or an issue of Komondor Komments, the AKC’s incredible library in New York City is an indispensable resource.
Dog-show personalities whose insight appears occasionally or often throughout this book include Jerry Grymek, Amy Booth, Pat Hastings, Terry DePietro, Jasa Hatcher, Tom Grabe, Ron Scott, and the poodle impresario Kaz Hosaka. Jeanne Joy Hartnagle and I played phone tag for months, but on the few occasions when we finally connected, she was a font of knowledge on the history and heritage of Australian shepherds. What she couldn’t recall, Jo Kimes helped fill in.
Harder to categorize but no less important to this project were Dottie Davis (aka the Candy Lady), Perry Phillips (the dog-show photographer), Mandy Armitage (the dog world’s chiropractor), Susan Catlin (aka Mrs. Happy Legs), Chris and Lisa Christensen (the czar and czarina of dog beauty products), Jennifer Vawter of the ICSB, Mary Stine, and John O’Hurley.
