"DOGGED PURSUIT: My Year of Competing Dusty, the World's Least Likely Agility Dog" by Robert Rodi, Hudson Street Press, $24.95 (nf)
Robert Rodi's smart and successful and — somewhat to his own surprise — more competitive than he'd ever have dreamed possible. And that's the basis of this delightful and unusual book.
Rodi wanted to help his dog, Carmen, get some much-needed exercise, and that was when he decided to give her some agility training. Agility, with its weird obstacle course of teeter-totters and jumps and A-frames, is called the "cousin" to best-of-show dog competitions.
But Rodi gets the competitive bug and Carmen has a hip injury, so he ends up looking for dog specifically for the competition, settling on a Sheltie named Dusty who, it turns out, has some ideas of his own. The dust jacket really does describe the dog exactly right: "a scrawny, scruffy rescue who alternates between Cujo-like aggression at home and possum-like paralysis in the ring."
Thus begins a yearlong tour of the Midwest's agility-competition circuit, where the two encounter characters and situations that will make you laugh out loud and wish you had a Dusty of your own.
Initially, as a competitor, Dusty doesn't just fail. He's a spectacular failure. And somewhere in the middle of the frustration and even humiliation, Rodi figures out that the problem may not be the dog. What follows is a journey that goes deeper than the laughs and crazy situations, into the reshuffling of a man.
You don't have to be a dog lover to enjoy this journey. This is a charming, surprisingly action-packed book that's as much about the complexity of relationships as it is about the dog sport of agility competition. It's a world into which most of us will never venture ourselves — and a terrific read.
e-mail: lois@desnews.com