The AKC National Championship – From the Beginning…
114 – March 2017
by Amy Fernandez
The history of the AKC National Championship show can be likened to a long identity crisis framed by continual ethical bickering about AKC running its own special show. The 1984 blockbuster Centennial show in Philadelphia is the best remembered milestone of this saga. And until recently it was the largest dog show ever held in America. That venerable record toppled in December when the combined total entries for 2016 National Championship events topped 7000. Those numbers alone seem to confirm that this sort of event has a valid role in our sport.
However, AKC dabbled with the idea on and off for quite awhile and the Centennial wasn’t its first venture into this realm. That honor goes to the awkwardly named Sesquicentennial Show that ran from September 30 through October 2 way back in 1926, also in Philadelphia. By all accounts, both of these experiments in AKC self-promotion were resoundingly successful. Even so, they didn’t give it another go until April 1992, when they staged an invitational event in Baltimore. That was the first one actually billed as an AKC National Show. No less successful than its predecessors, it also was the first with televised coverage, which presented the event to a far wider audience and also amplified those longstanding questions about the propriety of working both sides of the deal. So that was the end of AKC producing shows until the AKC/Eukanuba National Cham-pionship made its debut in December 2001.
It’s been here ever since, along with that same old grumbly downbeat about morals, ethics, and the good of the sport. It’s impossible to please everyone, although AKC certainly deserves credit for trying in this case. Almost everything about the show has changed drastically over the past 16 years. For instance, the invitational format was very quickly expanded far beyond each breed’s top 20 and conformation became just one of several competitive events on the roster. Likewise, the bicoastal rotation between California and Florida ended quite a few years back. Of course, its defining feature has endured every rewrite and move, namely those game show-worthy whopping cash prizes– along with all the raised eyebrows about the potentially corrupting influence of that amount of cash.
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