Adrian Woodfork – “It’s All Joy”

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130 – April, 2022

By Joan Harrigan

“I hope you are going to ask me why more minorities, and African-Americans especially, aren’t showing dogs,” Adrian Woodfork said early in the interview for this profile. He’s very willing to discuss the subject. “It’s all about visibility,” he says. “Others have said that black people excel in sports that don’t require money, but that’s not right. A lot of blacks are middle class, upper middle class, or even millionaires.” However, if you don’t see other minorities in a sport, it may not occur to you that you could succeed in it yourself. Woodfork points to other sports that had been traditionally dominated by whites—before the Williams sisters, you didn’t see African-American women in tennis, and before Tiger Woods, you seldom saw a black professional golfer.

Viewers of the televised coverage of Westminster and the National Dog Show have seen a few black handlers, but never an African-American as a group or Best In Show judge. Woodfork is glad that this will change with this year’s Westminster. “Eugene Blake will be judging the Hound Group,” Woodfork says. “That’s great—if there were more visibility like that, there would be more African-Americans entering the sport. It was seeing Gene Blake in Dog World years ago that tweaked my curiosity and made me believe that I could show dogs.”

Adrian Woodfork spent his earliest years with his grandparents in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. “My mother was only 16 when I was born,” he says. “My grandmother, Virginia Thornton, picked me up from the hospital and raised me as her child until I was 9.” Thornton, a teacher and civil rights activist, lavished unconditional love on her grandson, and took him everywhere with her. “She was ‘the lady with the little boy,’” he recalls. She was protective of her grandchild, and Woodfork says that he didn’t have many friends his own age—his pals were the family’s mixed breed dogs. His uncle introduced him to purebreds—dogs were always around during his early years.

When he was 9, Woodfork’s parents, Isaac and Virginia Woodfork, came to get him; knowing that leaving his grandmother might be a hard sell, they told him, “we’re going to Disneyland!” Woodfork joined his parents and siblings in California, where his father was stationed at Travis Air Force Base. Normally, military families relocate often, but his father remained at Travis and Woodfork attended the local schools until he graduated from high school at age 16.

Always An Animal Lover

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130 – April, 2022

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