Who would not want to award a blue ribbon to Boujee the golden retriever, with her boundless enthusiasm and ineffable talent for maintaining her dignity while clamoring for attention? One swoosh of her magnificent tail and it’s easy to see why this blond bombshell is the top-ranked golden competing at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, with judging to begin on Monday.
Although Boujee spent 2024 making friends and winning shows, she has little (or no, if history is any guide) chance of beating the other 2,500 entrants vying for Westminster’s coveted best in show award. In the 117 years that the award has been given, golden retrievers have won exactly zero times. (Wire fox terriers, for some reason, have won more often than anyone else — 15 times.)
This might seem unfair, given that goldens are, along with Labrador retrievers and French bulldogs, consistently the most popular dogs in the United States. (Neither of those breeds has ever won Westminster, either.) Even with the mysterious calculus of shows — dogs are judged not by how fabulous they are, but by how closely they adhere to the supposed Platonic ideal of their breed — it would seem to follow that sometime in the last century, there has existed a golden retriever whose golden retriever-ness exceeded, say, the Peke-iness of a Pekingese.
Apparently not. (Pekingese, who to the untrained eye look less like dogs than majestic ambulatory hairpieces, have won six times.) The logic of these things is mysterious, even to dog experts.
“I did not answer your question, because I’m not sure I or any one else can,” said Barbara Pepper, chairwoman of the judges’ education committee at the Golden Retriever Club of America. “It’s one of those questions that can’t be answered.”
Boujee, whose full name is GCHG Summit’s Bad & Boujee, after a song by the hip-hop group Migos, certainly didn’t seem fussed about the inscrutable nature of dog show judging when she welcomed a visitor recently to the home of her handlers, Ryan and Rachel Tepera, in suburban Conroe, Texas. She was golden.
Rushing to the door with her entourage — Siren, a 12-year-old long coat Chihuahua, and Weston, a 20-month-old human toddler — she greeted the arrival of a stranger as if it were the most exciting thing ever to happen in her two years of existence. She then zoomed outside to see what was up. (Nothing, it turned out.)
As everyone repaired to the sofa, a wave of humans and dogs moving in tandem, Boujee intuited that the attention was shifting away from her immediate physical needs and leaped onto Mr. Tepera’s lap, planting her front paws on his chest so that her head loomed above his, both noble and aggrieved.
Boujee had quite a year in 2024, winning four best in show awards and earning the coveted top golden title at the Golden Retriever Club of America’s competition in October. Her fiercest golden competitor, Cake (official name: GCHG Contigo’s I Like Big Bundt’s and I Cannot Lie; his litter’s names had a baked-goods theme), has amassed more points against other breeds than Boujee but is not competing at Westminster.
Being a winning golden gets you only so far, alas: Boujee is ranked just 77th in the American Kennel Club’s list of the top dogs in the country, based on overall points amassed. According to this metric, the dogs to beat are a giant schnauzer named Monty and a German shepherd named Mercedes, both of whom reached the Westminster finals last year.
Even as a tiny fluffy show-off of a puppy, the only female in a seven-dog litter, Boujee seemed destined for something more.
“She was probably only 3 weeks old, but she would stand so beautifully and pose with her tail out,” Mr. Tepera said, describing how Boujee seemed instinctively to “stack” — that is, stand with her feet, body and tail in perfect show-ring alignment. “She was always saying, ‘Look at me.’”
(Boujee’s mom, Kendoll, whose official name is Summits C’mon Barbie, Let’s Go Party) gave birth to four new puppies at the end of January. It’s unclear whether they’re bound for stardom — they can barely open their eyes — but Weston, the Teperas’ toddler, appears to believe that he is a member of their litter. “I don’t know if he thinks he’s a dog,” Mr. Tepera said, “but we have noticed that sometimes he barks.”)
While some dogs have complicated inner lives and mixed feelings about fame, Boujee relishes attention, her splendiferous feathery tail wagging with increasing velocity as her fans’ excitement grows. “She’s a very proud dog — ‘You’re looking at me?’” Mr. Tepera said. “Maybe she’s a little vain.”
Golden retrievers came into being in 19th-century Scotland when a fellow named Sir Dudley Marjoribanks — he later became the first Baron Tweedmouth, but that is another story — bred a wavy-coated retriever with a Tweed water spaniel. They were conceived as “gentlemen’s gun dogs” who could segue seamlessly from fetching birds and waterfowl to “lying by your feet at the fire,” Michael Faulkner, a longtime golden retriever breeder and veteran Westminster judge, said. (An obsession with tennis balls came later.)
“They’re bred to be calm and steadfast — never frenetic, never hyper,” Mr. Faulkner said — more Owen Wilson than Jim Carrey. This can cause confusion when judges unschooled in the ways of goldens fall into the trap of rewarding “fast, flashy movements and behavior” in the ring.
“Here’s the thing with goldens,” said Ms. Pepper from the Golden Retriever Club of America. “They are a moderate breed. The dog that flies around the ring with a lot of reach and drive and is kicking his rear end out behind him — there are a lot of people who love that, but that is not correct for the breed. A dog like that would wear himself out if he ran around in the field that way all day.”
Another potential pitfall is that unlike some dogs whose breed standards — written lists of traits — are fairly narrow, golden standards allow for a wide variation in appearance. The dogs can be large or not-so large. Their coats can be the color of a bowl of cream, the color of a light sheaf of wheat or the color of a dark piece of caramel.
“Here’s another thing with goldens,” Ms. Pepper said. “We have a huge range of styles. You can have multiple dogs that technically meet the standard and do not necessarily look the same. When you walk up to a golden ring, they won’t all look like cookie-cutter dogs.”
During her downtime, Boujee lives in Lancaster, S.C., with her co-owner, Courtney Higgins. Her busy itinerary includes swimming, fetching, hanging out, accompanying people on bicycle rides and getting her hair washed. Her favorite toy is a stuffed sloth that Ms. Higgins called “weird, nasty and zombie-looking” but that Boujee carts around with a laser-sharp intensity reflecting its nonnegotiable importance to her emotional well-being.
“She’s had it since she was a baby,” Ms. Higgins said — in the same way that a child might always have the “same” goldfish, not realizing that the one in the tank is really Goldfish.4, a simulacrum of the original. (Because overused sloths can become raggedy and drool-covered, Ms. Higgins has a collection of emergency backups.)
For Mr. Tepera, 33, Boujee is the pinnacle of a journey that began in his early years on a Texas livestock ranch managed by his father. As a boy, he showed goats at 4-H events, his pockets stuffed with goat chow.
The family moved to Arkansas and left the goats behind. But then Mr. Tepera turned on the TV, saw a broadcast of Westminster and told his parents that it was now his life’s dream to become a dog handler. He made his case in a PowerPoint presentation accompanied by a lot of pleading. “They thought I was crazy,” he recalled.
With money earned washing cars and mowing lawns, Mr. Tepera bought a retired show beagle named Mary Kate and practiced show-walking in a fake competition ring he constructed from hoses in the backyard. Soon, they were competing in junior showmanship classes, and Mr. Tepera was working as an apprentice to professional handlers. “There’s no dog-show college, so that’s the only way to learn,” he said.
Even majoring in political science at Texas A&M, where his roommate was also a junior dog handler, did not deter him from his goal. “My parents were very supportive, though their mind boggled,” he said. “They still don’t entirely get it.”
He shows many breeds of dogs on behalf of their owners, but goldens are his favorite. “They’re the best breed,” he said. “They’re friendly, they’re reliable, they’re trustworthy and they’re playful. You can run with them, hike with them and swim with them. They’re affectionate and they’re beautiful. I love their golden hair.”
Maybe that contributes to the perennial golden problem in dog shows. Are they perceived as Everydogs, too popular, too versatile, too biddable, too goofy — even kind of basic? On social-media dating forums, “golden retriever energy” seems to refer to friendly, low-maintenance men who, while they’ll happily go along with your plans, perhaps suffer from having no plans of their own.
Don’t tell that to Boujee, who, possibly exhausted from all these hypotheticals, was taking a nap under the table. Maybe she will make history at Westminster. “She’s a once-in-a-lifetime dog,” Ms. Higgins said. “Maybe this is the year.”
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