The interviews are never as tart as, say, Floyd Mayweather’s testy exchanges with Larry Merchant after a bout. But they can be more interesting than some of the postgame chats with players too careful to offer anything but the most banal of clichés.  “This bitch had it all,” said Patricia Laurans, the judge who picked Cinders, a wire-haired dachshund, the winner in the hound group. “She has a wonderful temperament, she’s energetic and in control. This is a wonderful dachshund.”  The rituals, of course, are ritualized. The winning dog must, by definition, embody its breed standard at least a whisker more than the its two dozen or so rivals in its group. So there is little else for a judge to do but defend a choice that in Cinders’s case gave her a victory over 29 other breeds as varied as a whippet and a bloodhound.  After Tim Catterson pronounced Malachy, a Pekingese, the best in the toy group, he extolled his head, his gait and just about everything else about a dog whose mane is so pronounced that the darkness of its face lightens from afar only if it sticks out its tongue.  “I can put my hands on him and know everything is there,” he said. “He was on tonight. He moved exquisitely.” Of course, a Pekingese ambles, at best, in the show ring. It cannot lope. It cannot race. It cannot be a high-stepper, like an Ibizan hound. Yet, Catterson said he once witnessed a Pekingese keeping up with a speedy Rottweiler.  “He has that certain movement, a small rolling gait in the rear,” Catterson said.  And, he added, “He had a destination to reach, and he got there.”  It just took him longer than the other toys.  Handlers tend to be humble. But they’re also excited. They spend months and years with the dogs. They often live with them, acting as both coach and surrogate parent. So winning a group at Westminster is a big moment in their lives.  Cheri Koppenhaver, Cinders’s handler, was so meek-voiced in victory that you could barely hear her. She was the very model of the humble handler.  “She’s wonderful in the house,” Koppenhaver said of Cinders. “She loves life. She thinks she’s it. She’s a clown. She’s very funny.” While the dachshund, in victory, chose not to tell any dirty stories, she did lick a reporter so furiously that he needed a slobber rag.  David Fitzpatrick, Malachy’s handler, was more effusive. He did not give Malachy his name, but figured that his demeanor suggests a kingly or saintly namesake.  “He’s regal, he’s imperial, but very loving,” Fitzpatrick said. “Typical for a Pekingese.”  He revealed that while Malachy appeared to be weighed down by his mane, his hair accounted for perhaps half a pound on his 12-pound body.  A Dalmatian named Ian, with spots around his eyes that look like spectacles, won the nonsporting group. The victory evoked little but technical praise from the judge about Ian’s movement and markings but nothing about his joyful personality.  Ian’s handler, Michael Scott, said that he occasionally shouted to Ian during the group judging to calm down.  “I was telling him to behave,” Scott said. “He’s full of himself. He’s not always easy to show.”  But as Ian jumped on nearly everyone near him after he posed for the winner’s photograph (always in profile), Scott said, “He’s silly, crazy and full of life.”  (That’s another theme in the Westminster postgame interviews: the looniness and occasional diva attitudes of dogs who are usually so well behaved they rarely bark.)  Babheim’s Captain Crunch, a Mexican-born German shepherd also known as Capi, whose owners said that he plays soccer, took the herding group crown. Afterward, the judge, Houston Clark, dispensed with a discussion about Capi’s angulation and started sounding like a smitten handler or owner.  “He could be a Rin Tin Tin dog, with his intelligence and ability,” Clark said, a sentiment that must please the author Susan Orlean, Rin Tin Tin’s new biographer. “He’s easy to work with. I’ve watched him over a year. He’s come to grow on me.”  Jim Moses, Capi’s handler, offered little beyond how the crowd excited his charge.  But he did say that Capi liked the carpet that covered the Garden floor.
At the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show at Madison Square Garden, the winners get their own equivalent of the jubilant locker room celebration.