Tag: Quail Championship Invitational

A Misunderstanding

November 29, 2024 | Ben Reach, Short Stories | Comments
Misunderstandings destroy understandings, parent-child bonds, sibling affections, business deals. Among the most fragile of business relationships is bird dog field trial handler partnerships, known as ‘helpin’ each other.”  With the wisdom only age brings, Ben and Sam often worked to heal misunderstandings among their acquaintances.  Misunderstandings often arose during pointing dog field trials, an arcane world Ben had long inhabited and Sam viewed from afar through Ben’s eyes and stories Read more

More Field Trial Friends Remembered ~ Marshall Loftin

July 7, 2023 | Remembrances | Comments
Like Ed Mack Farrior, Marshall was a link to a glorious period for field trials and a consummate raconteur. He had also seen his share of hard times. He was not an admirer of The National Bird Dog Champion Association, for a very personal reason—its rigidity had cost him his best customer and field trials its most avid English setter sponsor, Dr. J. U. Morrison.  Read more

Andy

March 17, 2023 | Great All-Age Dogs, Joe Hicks, Joe Hicks | Comments
It is not hard to find joy and sorrow joined close together in our game. In fact, they are a recurring theme in the human-canine dramas that tie together men and women and great field trial bird dogs.  As I reflect on the dramas surrounding the Florida Open All-Age Championship over the twenty-seven years I reported it, none is so poignant as that of Chinquapin Andy, Florida Champion in  2009 and 2010, his trainer-handler, Joe Hicks, and his owners, Ted Baker and T. Jack Robinson.  Read more

Four Men Two Dogs One Spare Tire

January 25, 2023 | Quail Championship Invitational, Short Stories | Comments
They were two-man teams of rivals. Some thought enemies, but they were not. They were famous, in a very small, obscure world. Each was a trainer-handler or a scout of all-age pointing dogs.  Each handler worked with a scout, usually a black man, who traveled with him in a two-ton stock-bed truck they drove from trial to trial hauling the horses they rode to handle and scout off of and the dogs in the string of pointers (and occasionally a setter) they entered in the trials.  Read more

The End

February 23, 2022 | Ben Reach, Short Stories | Comments
It was at the Quail Championship Invitational, at the West Kentucky Wildlife Management Area, that lonely expanse of gently rolling neglected agricultural land surrounding a scary nuclear energy gaseous diffusion refinery and a coal-powered TVA electric energy generating plant on the bank of the Tennessee River, on the outskirts of Paducah, Kentucky. Read more

Paducah 1977

August 12, 2018 | Book Reviews | Comments
In his marvelous new book, The Invitational Champions, John Russell alludes thus to mysterious events: “The 1977 edition is one likely to be long remembered by those in attendance as events occurred both during the running and after hours that elicited plenty of conversation. Descriptions of all of the happenings vary with the telling and re-telling but suffice it to say that there were some memorable characters involved and not all of the events were suitable for this account.” In this John is a master of the understatement. Read more

Remembering the Quail Championship Invitational (1996 – 2006)

August 5, 2018 | Field Trials, Remembrances | Comments
Reading John Russell’s splendid new book, The Invitational Champions, has brought back precious memories of the eleven years it was my privilege to report the trial at Paducah. My invitation to report came from John after my first report of the Florida Championship in 1995. I had attended the trial at Paducah as a spectator briefly in 1993 when Silver Bullett won his second crown, no Runner-Up. Judging in 1996 were Marshall Loftin, Bill Perry and Dr. Dorwin Hawthorne, and they shared with me generously their impressions of performances, which I sorely needed in light of my limited experiences watching all-age dogs. Read more