9101090699 DETROIT FREE PRESS 910302 Saturday, March 02, 1991 METRO FINAL

SPT

1B Photo Associated Press;Map ROGER HICKS : Four-time Iditarod winner Susan Butcher relaxes with her husband, Dave Molson, and Sluggo, one of her champion sled dogs. "There's been a lot of talk about my retiring, but that's not true," Butcher said. "I just may not run the Iditarod again for a while. . . . If I should win this Iditarod -- and I will -- I'll have five, and that may be enough for a while." MITCH ALBOM Copyright (c) 1991, Detroit Free Press IDITAROD QUEEN PUTS DOGS BEFORE PEOPLE BUTCHER WINS WITHOUT GETTING ALL MUSHY IDITAROD DIARY, CHAPTER 2: In which we meet the champion, talk basketball, and learn that even mushers get jealous. ANCHORAGE, Alaska -- "Ha! You don't have enough fur." That's what one local told me as I sought to find the champion of the dogsled world. "Unless you got a cold nose and four paws," he said, sneering, "you ain't gonna get much from Susan Butcher. She don't much like people." Butcher is Mush Master of the Universe right now, the reigning queen of the Iditarod, the 1,163-mile trans-Alaska dogsled race that begins today. Butcher has won it four of the last five years, lowering her time with each victory. She has more sponsors, more notoriety, and more resources than most mushers. She is the inspiration for T-shirts here that read "ALASKA -- WHERE MEN ARE MEN AND WOMEN WIN THE IDITAROD." But she hasn't exactly gone Hollywood. She still lives in a cabin way up north, in a town of 11 people, a place called Eureka. That's a gold miner's way of saying, "I found it! Gold!" In Butcher's case, the locals warn, it means "I found it! A place with no humans!" But, what the heck? Sometimes, I'm not so crazy about people either. So as I park my car outside the veterinarian's office on a small, snowy, back road on the outskirts of Anchorage -- someone tipped me that Butcher would be there -- I do what any good reporter would do when hoping to interview a woman who lives with 150 dogs: I practice barking. To most Americans, Butcher, 36, is a parka-clad mystery, a hard-featured, no-makeup, rugged and weird adventurer. She's "the dog lady who wins that race every year," people say. They shrug. Any woman who takes a pack of canines, by herself, out in the frozen wilderness for 11 or 12 grueling, stormy days, and thinks this is fun -- well, we are not dealing with Cher here. This is a woman who wants to be alone. Surprisingly, I learn, her fellow mushers will gladly grant her wish. Not everyone is in love with Susan Butcher. Many of the male mushers, whom she has beaten over and over, quietly resent the attention she has gotten: the "Tonight Show" appearances, the articles in Sports Illustrated, those T- shirts. They mumble, "She just got lucky with some great dogs." Or, "It's the dogs who win the race,but in her case, because she's a woman, she gets all the credit." Butcher's closest rival, Rick Swenson, the only other musher to win the Iditarod four times, had a falling out with her a few years back, and now they're like Ali and Frazier. Swenson fiercly wants to beat her this year, and keep her from surpassing his win total. Before Butcher defeated him for the first time, in 1986, Swenson reportedly boasted he "would walk from Nome to Anchorage if a woman ever beats me in this race." In which case he needs a whole lot of boots. But Butcher doesn't seem to care. Or does she? She was not the first woman to win an Iditarod. In 1985, she was in the lead but had to drop out of the race after a moose attacked her dogs, killing two of them. First place was eventually captured by another woman, Libby Riddles, who received enormous attention for breaking the male barrier. Riddles, blonde and easy-going, became a mini-celebrity; she wrote a book; she picked up precious sponsors. Butcher stopped talking to her. "I don't think she ever forgave me for winning," Riddles told me the other night. "She's real competitive. Part of the reason people have a hard time with her is because she really does prefer dogs to people." Great, I figure. Where's my leash? I enter the vet's office, prepared to be snarled at, and who should be sitting there but Butcher's husband, Dave Monson, a lawyer by training, a part-time dog musher, and now, pretty much, the man in charge of Butcher's small empire. Long-haired, bearded, smart and sarcastic, Monson met his wife in the early 80's, when he sold her some fishhead scraps for dogfood. (Hey, you do what you can to make money in Alaska.) Now he is reportedly the buffer between Butcher and the outside world. So I tell him I'm from Detroit, and he says "Detroit! All the way up here, huh?" And next thing I know, Susan Butcher comes pushing through the office door, wearing a T-shirt and blue sweat pants. She ignores me and approaches her husband. "Hi, honey. Would you braid my hair?" Now, this is not the opening I expected, given all the warnings. I sort of figured Butcher would say: "Grrrrrrrrrr, yip, yip, rrrrufff!" So, what the hell? I clear my throat and tell her, too, that I have come from Detroit. And she looks at the floor and says: "Were you with Isiah?" "Huh?" Again, she looks away, batting her eyelashes in rapid-fire. "Were you with Isiah before coming here?" Well, yeah, I answer. Actually, I saw Isiah at the Lakers game. "He's my favorite. Isiah. We should name a dog after him, Dave." "Yeah," says Dave. "Isiah and maybe Joe Dumars." "Oh, yeah, I like Dumars, too." "And who's that big mean white guy you got?" "Bill Laimbeer?" I say. "Yeah. We've got a few dogs like him. Don't we, Sue?" "Oh, yeah," she says. "We've got a couple nasty ones." "Uh, great," I say. So right off the bat we learn several important lessons about Susan Butcher: 1) She is a basketball fan. 2) She needs help braiding her hair. 3) She names all her dogs. Personally. And we are talking hundreds here. She picks a theme for every litter -- such as Russian novelists, Olympic athletes, names of rocks, even the stars of the "Tonight Show." (Yes, there is a Johnny Carson dog and a Doc Severinsen dog and even a Tommy Newsom dog.) And she remembers every one. This she proves in the parking lot, when she introduces me to the 20 dogs she will run in this year's Iditarod. "Here's Sluggo," she says, still not looking at me, "and here's Hermit. And here's Stoney. But we call him Tooooooneeee! . . . Hi boy, yeah, Toneee. . . . " Her voice is suddenly light and free and she pushes her face against the dog's muzzle, and he licks her all over. And, I figure, what Libby Riddles said is just about right. Dogs over people. Which is probably what makes Susan Butcher such a great musher. The art of sled-dog racing, more than anything else, is getting maximum performance from the animals. And Butcher's dogs -- well-bred and extremely well-conditioned -- are special. They seem willing to go though a frozen hell for her. Not only does she run with them through miles of long distance training; not only does she work them on ropes around a huge training wheel; not only does she feed them, massage their feet, and take them on solo treks to get a better feel for their personalities; but she supposedly talks to them like humans. And I don't doubt it. Butcher bonds with these dogs from the moment they are born. They drop from the womb and land in her hands. The trust begins. It is what makes them trudge on through gulleys and mountains and 80 m.p.h. winds near the Bering Sea. Sometimes, this invisible connection they have with Butcher means the difference between life and death. Once, she was out on a long training run, and her lead dog kept disobeying, trying to leave the trail. Butcher, annoyed, nonetheless trusted the dog's instincts. Just as they pulled to the side, the trail collapsed into the river. She missed death by two seconds. "This is what I love to do," says Butcher, who, when she was 12 years old and living in Cambridge, Mass., wrote an essay for school titled: "I Hate The City." "After this year's race, I want to get the phone out of Eureka. I want to get back to concentrating just on the dogs. There's been a lot of talk about my retiring, but that's not true. I just may not run the Iditarod again for a while. I want to have a child, and I won't race when I'm pregnant, obviously. "There are some other races I want to try. Some other challenges. If I should win this Iditarod -- and I will -- I'll have five titles, and that may be enough for a while." The part that catches my attention is the "and I will." She says it as if there is no doubt. I look at the dogs, as they parade in and are lifted to the vet's table. I see the way they look at her, ignoring other humans, just as she does for them. And I figure I'd put my money on her to win, too, even if she doesn't want to look at me. I go to tell her, but she is back with the dogs and doesn't want to be disturbed. I leave without a good-bye, and without the chance to make a suggestion: When the Pistons litter arrives, name one of the dogs John Salley. She'll never have to do an interview again. TOMORROW: The race begins. DOG; RACING; ALASKA; SUSAN BUTCHER