Friday's foaming rant: Gobble, gobble, gobble
(K)nowing Nicely-Nicely Jones, I am prepared to wager all the money I can possibly raise that he can outeat anything that walks on two legs. In fact, I will take a chance on Nicely-Nicely against anything on four legs, except maybe an elephant, and at that he may give the elephant a photo finish.
–Damon Runyon in his short story A Piece of Pie,
describing an eating contest on Broadway
Bicycle racing? Fuhgeddaboudit. It’s so last century. I have seen the future of sport, and it is professional competitive eating.
While sprawled in the living room rocker, recovering from my annual turkey-and-trimmings overdose and idly trolling the Internet for news items that might set me to foaming and ranting for fun and profit, I stumbled across a story in Newsday’s sports section about pro eating, and I can tell you that it makes pro cycling look like very small potatoes indeed.
According to staff writer Michael Dobie, pro eating has a 70-stop circuit with brand-name sponsors, prize money in the thousands of dollars, and championship titles in foods “ranging from chicken wings to chili, cannoli to cheesecake.” The world title in meatballs is on the menu December 4 in Atlantic City, New Jersey – first prize is $2500, or $900 more than Chris Horner got for winning Redlands this year. I’d love to see the championship belt, but I don’t have a wide-screen TV.
And the scary thing is, you can actually see these porkers battling jowl-to-jowl on the tube – because unlike pro cycling, pro eating is on ESPN.
“They wouldn't put it on ESPN if it wasn't a sport,” says Ed “Cookie” Jarvis, a 6-6, 409-pound real-estate agent from Nesconset, New York, who holds 11 world records, one of which may or may not involve sweating gravy. Earlier this year, Cookie scarfed down more than five pounds of corned beef and cabbage in 10 minutes to win an eating contest at Mo’s Irish Pub in Milwaukee, and I can’t tell you how delighted I am that I didn’t have to share a cab with the man after he’d had a half-hour or so to let that meal settle.
According to Dobie, the guys who cooked up this whole mess are brothers George and Richard Shea of Manhattan, who once handled public relations for Nathan's decades-old hot-dog-eating contest on Coney Island. The Sheas formed the International Federation for Competitive Eating in 1997, and seven years later gluttons are gobbling for glory, greenbacks – and even groupies.
Last summer, Dobie writes, a pair of IFCE stars from New York – Copiague’s Eric “Badlands” Booker (6-foot-5, 395 pounds) and Brooklyn’s “Hungry” Charles Hardy (6-0, 320) – were signing autographs at an event when one excited woman raised her blouse and asked the pair to scribble their names on her breasts.
How often you think that happens to Horner? But then again, he can’t eat 21 baseball-sized matzo balls in five minutes and 25 seconds the way Badlands does.
Then again, maybe he can. Anyone who’s ever dined with a bicycle racer learns quickly to keep his hands in his lap lest he lose a finger or three to the ravenous jaws champing across the table. And a guy wouldn’t have to log any more of those 500-mile weeks in conditions that would have a postal worker filing a grievance in order to transform himself from lithe piranha to ponderous whale. You’d just have to eat a ton, and there’d be plenty of time for that once you’d hung the bike on the hook and the bib around your neck.
There’s a downside, of course, and it will be all too familiar to professional cyclists. While world No. 1 Takeru Kobayashi earns something like $150,000 a year – the four-time Nathan's wiener-wolfing champ is the Lance Armstrong of gluttony, having inhaled 53.5 hot dogs and buns in 12 minutes – the pickin’s get slim once the top dog lurches away from the table. Second-ranked Sonya Thomas, a native of South Korea who once devoured 432 oysters in 10 minutes, only pulls in some $30K per annum. Punters like Badlands and Cookie pocket between $5000 and $10,000 a year.
Still, it’s a living. Especially when you consider how much money you’d save on food.
Is he cookin', or does he just eat it? Send your Michelin Guide reviews to webletters@insideinc.com.
Most Recent Articles
- Columbia's Tony Martin will face a mountain battle to retain his white jersey
- Arcalis will answer many questions
- John Wilcockson: A change of pace for the Tour
- Near their European base, the Garmin-Slipstream men go on the attack
- A Casey B. Gibson Gallery - Into Barcelona
- Hushovd win gives Cervélo a boost
- Menchov's woes continue
- Columbia's Michael Rogers has no broken bones, will start Friday, his team says.
