Stud Rites

interrupted any further speculation about Casey and Best of Breed. ”Duke! Hey, Duke, come on over and take a look, man! They got your baby pictures here!”
    Startled, Betty and I turned around and stared at by far the largest group our rescue booth had ever drawn. At least thirty people were clustered around the booth. I briefly lost my mind. After all our pleas, our sob stories, our reasoned arguments, our cold presentations of fact, our appeals to conscience, finally! This overwhelming show of support. The crowd was utterly staggering.
    But Betty was not taken in. She was also not pleased. ”Gary Galvin has gone and done it again!”
    Yes, the video monitor.
    ”Don’t complain!” I whispered. ”They’re here! That’s progress.”
    When Betty and I had worked our way close enough in to get a good view of the screen, I realized that what we were watching had been converted to video from a film taken with an old home-movie camera held by an amateur hand. I couldn’t begin to guess the date of the show. When it comes to men’s clothing, I can tell a zoot suit from white tie, and I know whether Steve is wearing jeans or scrubs, but that’s about it. In some vague way, the judge’s suit—or maybe he wore a coat and tie?—looked old-fashioned. His hair was short. In contrast, by today’s standards, Duke Sylvia’s was long, and he had sideburns. But, oh my! Funny whiskers and all, the young Duke Sylvia was smooth. He was as good a handler as his knock-out dog deserved.
    ”Comet,” Betty told me, eyes on the screen.
    The dog in the grainy footage was tremendously powerful and consummately agile, as if he’d been sired by a linebacker out of a prima ballerina. Northpole’s Comet: He leaped out of the jumpy black-and-white footage with such vigor and style that you could hardly believe he was dead.
    The camera lingered on Comet. Then, as if fighting to move away, it jerked along the line of dogs in the long-ago ring.
    Even then, whenever this was, Duke had been much too skilled a handler to outdo his superlative dog. Duke moved almost as well as Comet, and that’s a compliment to Duke.
    ”Hey, Duke, when is this?” someone asked.
    ”Don’t know.”
    ”Aw, come on. Who’d you handle him for?”
    ”Elsa Van Dine,” someone said. ”Elsa would’ve loved to see this. Goddamn shame.”
    ”Duke handled him for everyone,” contributed someone else. ”Himself, among others.”
    I hadn’t known. ”Duke, you owned Comet?” I was wildly jealous.
    ”Co-owned,” Duke said. ”For a while.”
    With a whoop and holler, a man I didn’t know darted to the monitor and pressed some buttons. ”Whoo-ee! Gotcha, Duke! Texas handling! And the kid didn’t have a clue.”
    Texas handling: trying to draw the judge’s attention to your dog’s good points by running your hand over them. It’s no more common in Texas than it is anywhere else. It is my theory, however, that the term originated when the novice handler of a Dandie Dinmont tried the ploy on the Only Law West of the Pecos, the legendary Roy Bean, the Hanging Judge, a terrier man himself. Bean resented the insulting effort to manipulate his opinion and swiftly dealt with the offender in his accustomed fashion—swift hanging. When news of the barbaric incident reached New York, horrified officials at the American Kennel Club dispatched an indignant letter to Judge Bean. The power to suspend for life, they explained, was the exclusive prerogative of the board of directors of the AKC. West of the Pecos or not, Judge Bean had acted in gross excess of his authority. In a postscript, the letter pointed out that the phrase ordinarily referred not to stringing up exhibitors in their entirety, but to suspending their AKC privileges. A man of action, the judge shot back the famous two-word reply that now hangs, appropriately enough, in the AKC’s offices: ”Same difference.” Just kidding. Have I digressed?
    Anyway, even in the old days, Duke Sylvia had been much too polished to practice Texas handling in its crude form. What the old tape captured was a common twist. Here’s how it went. The dogs were lined up, and the judge was temporarily out of the picture as the dog just before Comet gaited to the far end of the ring. Comet, I should note, had an outstanding front, a strong chest and big-boned legs that contrasted with the somewhat weaker front of the dog just beyond him, a dog with a junior handler, a kid. Making sure that the junior handler beyond