Diane Young McCormack has judged dog shows in South Africa, Ireland and China since qualifying as an AKC judge in 2002 — but her newly published memoir My Life in the SPORT of Purebred Dogs begins long before she ever stood behind the judge’s table.
It begins at the start. The very beginning.
Published in 2025 by Jack Bacon & Company, the book traces McCormack’s full arc through what practitioners call “the fancy” — the insider term for the purebred dog community, a world most people glimpse only during the Westminster broadcast in February and understand far less well than they imagine. McCormack’s arc runs from New York City through Houston to the Sierra, paralleling a career that moved from early show days and ringside competition to national-level handling and, ultimately, the judging assignments that have taken her across four continents.
That is a long way to travel for a sport most people do not recognise as one.
The book makes the case for that word — sport — through lived experience rather than argument. McCormack documents the long drives to weekend shows, the early mornings before the ring opens, the relationships built over years of competition among people who share an obsession with breed standards and the dogs who embody them. She writes as a breeder-owner-handler who later crossed to the other side of the ring, which gives the memoir a perspective that neither a pure competitor nor a pure judge could provide. She has been both. She knows what each is looking for — and what each is missing.
“Dogs Are Not a Part of My Life. They Are My Whole Life,” McCormack writes.
Yet that line is not simply a declaration of affection — it is the structural logic of the entire memoir. McCormack graduated from the University of Maryland and built a career in corporate roles before moving into advertising and public relations. Those skills did not replace the dogs; they eventually served them, supporting decades of advocacy and education within the sport. The thread running through the geographic moves and the career pivots is the same one running through the book: Standard Longhaired Dachshunds, and the sport built around them.
Since receiving AKC approval in 2002, McCormack has expanded her judging eligibility to include the Hound Group, Best in Show, Miscellaneous Classes and Junior Showmanship. The international assignments — South Africa, Ireland, China — reflect a reputation built over more than two decades of consistent work within a community that does not confer that kind of reach lightly. She currently lives in Reno, Nevada.
This is McCormack’s second published book. Dachshund breeder Sarah Hill offered a direct assessment from inside the community: “In her second published book, Diane has captured the flavor of dog shows and the participants that make up this crazy sport of ours.”
The word “crazy” is affectionate rather than dismissive — and any reader who has spent a weekend at a dog show will understand why. The culture McCormack describes is demanding, tribal, occasionally maddening, and sustained entirely by people who chose it freely and would not choose otherwise. The book captures that texture with the authority of someone who has lived every stage of it.
My Life in the SPORT of Purebred Dogs is available now through Amazon in various formats.
For readers already inside the fancy, it is a mirror held up to a world they know. For readers curious about what actually happens behind the scenes of a sport that Westminster makes look effortless — the breeding decisions, the ringside politics, the decades of accumulated expertise required to judge a single class — it is the most informed guide currently available.
The judge’s table is where McCormack’s career arrived. The memoir is how she got there.
