Tucker and I got our start in Dock Jumping back April of 2001. Just like most people, we saw some jumping dogs on T.V. and said to ourselves “Hey, We can do that”. So, I got on the phone and started making a few calls. I got in touch with Melanie Field and had a great conversation. Mel explained to me that I needed to get Tucker to a competition if I wanted to get him to compete at the 2001 Great Outdoor Games. So, that’s exactly what I did. I convinced my lovely wife Janeil to load up her 7lb Shitzu named Bailey because Tucker and I are headed to the Sporting Dog Challenge in Little Rock, AR. That’s right, my first event ever. I had no idea what I was doing and I loaded up the wife and dogs and drove 13 hours to give the sport a try.
The SDC was a wonderful experience. Tucker jumped in the mid 16’s all weekend with huge jump of 18’01” which was the second longest jump of the competition behind Mike Martin and his big jumping dog A.J. Tucker’s performance was good enough to earn him 4th place overall. Unfortunately they only took the top 3 to GOG. Tucker didn’t make it.
About a week later I got a call from Melanie. She explained to me that one of the dogs from the top 3 in AR could not make the trip to Lake Placid for the ’01 games and that Tucker was in. After getting up off the floor, I was very excited about the opportunity to compete Tucker on ESPN.
I began thinking about the games and how cool it was to be competing in them. Then I got to thinking about the competitors. There was A.J. and Mike Martin who was consistently jumping 20’ in AR. Their was this power house female on the east coast named Heidi handled by Beth Gutteridge who was known to hit 22’s and had a Gold Medal in her pocket from the year before. Boy, I got to thinking about all that and figured I better get working with Tucker and find a way to get him to jump farther. 18’ just isn’t going to cut it at the Big Show… I’ll be darned if I’m going on national T.V. and jump 16’ all day.
So, Tucker and I began our very first venture in to a training program. As I worked with Tucker I began to realize that he had speed off the end of the dock but that wasn’t enough. He needed to get some height. It dawned on me that it’s the perfect combination of speed and height that gets the distance. So, we started working our height. We invented a great tool and called it the “Vertical Hurdle”. This was an excellent tool and Tucker took to it like a master. His height was improving and so were his distances.
As Tucker became more seasoned to the game, he became a bit smarter to the game. He began to realize that no matter how hard, how fast, or how high he jumped, the object would still be in the water and he’d get it every time. This allowed him to slow down or jump some what flat. No matter what he’d get his reward, the object.
I had to do something quick. The games were just a month away. I thought to myself “if I can only find a way to keep Tucker from getting the object if he doesn’t jump hard enough”. Then I thought, “if I could some how suspend the object out of the water and make him jump for it, this would work the height too. That way if he didn’t run hard enough and jump hard enough, he would get his reward, the object”.
So, the concept of Extreme Vertical was born. I purchased a roof rake (used to remove snow off of roofs) from the local Home Depot and attached a coat hanger on the end. I was able to construct a dummy with strings on both sided and clipped the dummy to the coat hanger. I could hold this pole 18 – 20 feet out and hold it so the dummy was about 3 – 4 feet off the surface of the water. It worked wonders.
From there it became an invaluable tool in our training program. We began redesigning the tool and started calling it the “Vertical Extender”. We began traveling with the new Vertical Extender and started putting demonstrations on around the country. The reaction from the audience was incredible. Finally, Shadd and I consulted and Shadd was able to bring this concept to ESPN and made it in to a competitive sport called “The Launch”
There you have it. By the way, Tucker won the Bronze Medal that year…
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