How Did Bart The Old English Sheepdog, Westminster Best-In-Breed, Get So Fluffy? An Investigation

MIDTOWN MANHATTAN, NY — When Bart the Old English Sheepdog has been freshly bathed, it takes his owner and handler, Liz Fujikawa of Wellington, Florida, up to four hours to blow-dry his thick, white-and-gray coat into the poofy "chrysanthemum" shape preferred for his breed.

"It takes two blow dryers because there's so much hair," said Vicki Youngquist, a friend of Bart's owner who joined the pair at the Westminster Dog Show in Midtown Manhattan this week to help out in the pit. ("I'm the bucket b-tch," she joked.)

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Bart's particular blow dryers retail for around $500 each, Youngquist said.

"You want them to be anti-static, and you want to be able to control the speed of the blowing so that it makes the hair stand straight out," she said.

After Bart is bathed and dried, his coat must be texturized.

"We want it big on the butt and low on the shoulders," Youngquist explained in an interview Monday afternoon on the Westminster purple carpet.

It had just passed the 3 p.m. mark, and Bart was minutes away from being called into Ring 7 at Pier 94 to compete for best-in-breed against 14 other Old English Sheepdogs. Fujikawa (pictured above and below), his owner and handler, a second-generation Japanese-American woman draped in heavy gold jewelry, was using these final moments of prep time to bat furiously at Bart's under-fur with a hairbrush, in the same way one might create a 1960s-style beehive.

After each new flurry of brush strokes, she'd douse the whole scene with hairspray.

"They're supposed to be pear-shaped," Youngquist said of Bart's breed. "They should be square, pear, hair."

Some hair is actually trimmed off the back of an Old English Sheepdog's rump to create the illusion of extra roundness, she said. And on the front end, it is considered bad form, she explained, if the dog's eyes are allowed to peek through his or her dense cloud of hair.

"The breed should have a fall over their eyes," Youngquist said.

"Can Bart see?" a reporter asked, slightly concerned. "A little bit," replied the assistant for another handler standing nearby. "At home they all wear ponytails or topknots so they don't run into walls."

The 14 sheepdogs up against Bart in Monday's competition were no less fussed (and fluffed) over by their handlers.

As the start time drew nearer, Jere Marder of Valparaiso, Indiana (pictured below), a petite 72-year-old in zings of blue eyeshadow and maroon lipstick — and a longtime Old English breeder referred to by at least one passing Westminster insider as "the queen of sheepdogs" — could be seen carefully parting the white hair from the gray hair along her dog Andrew's back with a comb.

Marder would then spritz the dog with a product called Bio-Groom Anti-Stat Fly Away Hair Control, then tease at his fur again with the comb, and so on and so forth.

Marder's friend and right-hand woman for the show, 50-year-old Brenda Podetz of Fargo, North Dakota, later tried to use the same comb to try and touch up Marder's own hairdo. Podetz didn't get far, though, as the comb soon became snagged on one of Marder's hair-sprayed curls.

"Ouch!" Marder said.

"But you don't want it standing up," Podetz insisted. "You don't want to look like Alfalfa."

Once in the ring, Fujikawa, Marder and the other sheepdog handlers continued to fight for max fluffiness in the downtime between trots and poses and inspections from the judge.

"Can I have some [spray] water?" Marder called to Podetz on the sidelines. "For the dog," she added.

But in the end, it was Bart, pictured below, who had "just a hair more in the right places," said the judge, who identified himself as 62-year-old Walter Summerfelt of Lenoir City, Tennessee.

Although "it was very close," Summerfelt said, "he's just an outstanding example of the breed."

Fujikawa, his handler, lingered on the green a moment, beaming. It was her mom, she said, who had bought the family's first Old English Sheepdog in 1968 and passed down the tradition.

Marder's dog Andrew — Bart's cousin, turns out — came in second among the male dogs.

"He did a good job. I'm happy. He's been a good boy," Marder said, her words somewhat betraying the disappointment in her face.

"There was a little too much hooping and hollering [from the sidelines], though," Marder added. "Old English are very sensitive to hooping and hollering."

The Old English best-in-breed results weren't a total letdown for the Indiana breeder, though. She owns Bart's father, she said, and in fact bred Monday's winning dog. "He's family," she said of Bart. "You can't ask for more when you're a breeder."

Long after the day's dozens of best-in-breed winners and their humans had departed for the night's group finals at Madison Square Garden, fat tufts of wooly Old English fur still littered the portion of purple carpet at Pier 94 where the dogs had spent the day.

Nearby, Andrew, who's accustomed to competing in dozens of shows per year, sat patiently in his woodshed-sized crate, waiting for Marder and Podetz to finish deconstructing the day's encampment so he could be carted back to the Wyndham New Yorker Hotel with the other runners-up. (An entire bottom-floor conference room at the 8th Avenue hotel has been converted into a doggie restroom and gym complex.)

"We'll keep showing him, that's for sure," Marder said. "We're not giving up."

Around 10:30 p.m. that night, more than 12 hours after the day's grueling Midtown itinerary began, Fujikawa changed from a crimson skirt suit to a navy-blue skirt suit and showed Bart alongside 30 other breeds at Madison Square Garden. The dogs were competing for the title of "best herding dog" — one step below "best in show."

Although the Old English made no major missteps, he didn't emerge as a judge or crowd favorite, either, and eventually lost the night's big title to Rumor, a charismatic German Shepherd with a winning history at Westminster.

"It's okay. He did great," Podetz said of Bart after the show. "It's always hard for them to come out of the dark tunnel into the bright open room" at the Garden.

"If he was out herding, he would be at the top of the hill, looking down at the sheep," she said. "He wouldn't be trapped at the bottom of the valley looking up at the sheep."

Bart, for his part, appeared to be a happier camper as a backstage runner-up come midnight than he'd been as a purple-ribbon champion most of Monday, thanks to three strategically placed rubber bands.

Photos by Simone Wilson/Patch