So we’d failed fostering with Echo. We’d been told by the adoption group that all the Champ pups were awesome, and they were spot on! Echo was a great addition to the family. And that got me to thinking….If sharing our lives with ONE Champ pup was awesome, how great would TWO Champ pups be?! So I hopped on Greyhound-Data and pulled a list of Champ’s offspring. Several had already been retired and adopted out. Of the few remaining, one name stuck out to me: Tame Rocky. First, I just thought that was a really neat racing name. Secondly, he was the only parti-color Champ pup in the same litter as Echo (hey, why not get a littermate at the same time) and I thought that was kinda cool. Tame Rocky…it just had a vibe to it.

I mentioned to Ken that I would love to have another Grandpa pup and there was one that I was really interested in if the adoption group could manage to get him. Ken contacted the group and they said it would be no problem to contact the trainer at the track and put ‘dibs’ on him. And then the waiting game began……

Following his career was my new hobby. Several times I was sure the trainer would retire him, but she kept schooling him and racing him thinking he would find his racing groove. In the meantime, we bought a house and moved to South Carolina. Our new house had a kennel building on the property so we started donating kennel space to Greyhound Crossroads to foster dogs from the track until the group had room in their foster program. The haul coordinator would occasionally touch base with the trainer at JCKC to see if Rocky was going to be retired soon and the answer was always: Not yet.

After several months the trainer finally contacted the group to tell them that she was giving up on Rocky. He’d bounced around in grades C and D, but he just wasn’t hitting the boards. Within a few days, Ken was on his way to Florida to pick up our new baby boy! While waiting for his vetting appointment, he stayed in the kennel building with the other hounds Ken brought up from the track, sleeping in the crate right next to his littermate Tame Ziggy. Once he recovered from his neuter, we integrated him into his new pack. As usually happened, he came right into the house and gelled with his new family. Our lucky number 12 hound.

And we learned that, yes, life IS twice as awesome with two Champ pups!

Rocky’s Adoption Photo from Greyhound Crossroads

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