RAMSEY, Minn. — For the moment at least, Norman was destined for the podium.
Last Friday morning, the 4-year-old wirehaired pointing griffon, a hunting breed of dog, sat in third place on the leaderboard of “Splash for Cash,” a watery long jump competition for dogs at Game Fair.
The annual event, held last weekend and this upcoming in the city of Ramsey in Anoka County, is an outdoor summer festival geared for hunters. And their dogs.
At its heart, past the corn dogs and the booths selling gear, along the shores of Eddy Lake are what amount to an Olympics of hunting dog events: the Scurry, the Goose Hunt and Swim to Win, to name a few.
To be clear, this is not the national field trials that are shown on ESPN each year, and the dog owners are not the humorless human breeds from the film “Best in Show.”
Take Norman’s owners, Dave and Katie Grote of Prior Lake, who seemed surprised to see their dog’s name in the bronze medal position for his leap of 19 feet from a dock into the water in pursuit of a hurled foam duck.
“There aren’t as many people here today as usual,” Dave Grote said, noting that morning storms put a damper on attendance. “So, yeah, maybe he can stay in the top 10?”
The prospect pleased Harper, their 9-year-old granddaughter. A short while earlier, she had watched as Norman dutifully, albeit not rapidly, completed another favorite event down the shore: a water retrieve competition known as the Dan Hove Fetch-a-Cure. The charitable event is named after a member of the Four Points Retriever Club who died of cancer. The statewide dog training club sponsors the fetch event.
Onlookers sitting on plastic lawn chairs watched dog after dog attempt the event, displaying a spectrum of skills.
Some dogs show a level of precision only gained through regular training: Sitting patiently until their owner tells them it’s OK to fetch, then leaping from shore into the lake, swimming strong with shoulders above the water, grabbing the dummy and returning it to the hand of its master in less than 15 seconds.
Others are comical, especially the young dogs whose owners brought them out with a why-not attitude.
That was the case with Leona, a gangly but athletic year-old Malinois who likes to jump off the dock at the lake. So, owner Nikki Enstad of Scandia figured, maybe she’d like to fetch a dummy. She did, but she wasn’t that interested in returning it, creating an endearing spectacle of an owner trying to coax a playful dog to do something new.
Enstad said she wasn’t surprised, since the breed isn’t known primarily as a water retriever, but she would look for other pursuits that might cater toward Leona’s leaping ability.
The welcoming, no-pressure culture of the series of events is crucial to its enduring success, according to Terry Strege, a co-founder of the Four Points Retriever Club.
“We’ve had everything from Great Danes to wiener dogs come out here,” he said. “Last year, we had a French bulldog do a successful retrieve. Wasn’t very fast, but everyone cheered for that. We also have people who train their dogs for this event.”
Why would a dog owner train a dog for an event with no ribbon, no money — all the proceeds go toward a cancer patient — and little recognition (beyond ubiquitous outdoors personality Ron Schara announcing the day’s winner over the PA system)?
Phil Hines, president of the North American Hunting Retriever Association and a volunteer who staffs the water retrieve, has a theory:
“There’s something about walking your dog to the line, and you’re thinking, ‘OK maybe this time he’s gonna do it so fast and so perfectly, and maybe I’ll get my dog on that leaderboard.’ ”
For Riley Drew of Richfield, that hope-springs-eternal vibe of Game Fair’s competitions infected him even before he owned a dog.
“I’ve been coming here for years,” he said as he gave rubs of encouragement to his year-old black Lab, Nelli. “Actually, that’s kind of why I wanted a dog. Coming here made me want a dog. I’ve done all the training myself, so we’ll see how it works. Today, she’s just been having so much fun. I think she was exhausted before we even got through the front gate.”
At 2 p.m., with just over an hour and a half left in the day’s competition, the dry-erase board for the Splash for Cash still listed Norman’s 19-foot jump as the third longest of the day, although he was now tied with Leona, the dock jumping Malinois.