Gurgitators, start your engines
Share with others:
In our game, you can play well into your golden years," Richard Shea said. "It's not unlike golf that way."
That is, if golf involved shoving mass quantities of organic matter down your gullet in 12-minute stretches.
Mr. Shea is president of Major League Eating, "the governing body of all stomach-centric sport worldwide." He promotes the annual Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest at Coney Island on the Fourth of July, and was calling to tell me of a qualifying event just down the road. Fifteen hot dog eaters will assemble noon Saturday in that storied arena, the parking lot of Sam's Club on Route 30 in Greensburg.
At least one of these gurgitators -- including Johnstown's own Brian Subich -- should devour more than 20 hot dogs in 12 minutes. Oh, the pageantry.
I confess I'm fascinated by competitive eating. Not so much that I want to sprint-gorge again, as I finished at least nine cakes behind the winner in the Gullifty's Cake Fest in 2003 yet can still taste the whipped cream. (Mark O'Donnell of Brackenridge ate 14 cakes in 15 minutes, still the record.) I nonetheless admire the Barnum-like ability of the promoters to make eating a "sport."
Some years ago, I saw the documentary "Gut Busters" on the Discovery Channel, and I became hooked when I heard one semi-delusional competitor saying, "Tiger Woods is the best golfer, and Michael Jordan is the best basketball player. They're champions in their fields, but I'm a champion in my field. I can't do what they do, but they can't do what I do."
Mr. Shea said the early pioneers I'd seen in that documentary "are the pillars upon which our sport stands."
Now, "the big guys are dinosaurs." The best eaters are fit and quite slim. It's not uncommon for some confident, novice gurgitator -- "the biggest eater in my frat" -- to amble to the table only to "get crushed by a lady who weighs a third of what they do."
Ever since the legendary Takeru Kobayashi blew away the fat boys at Coney Island in 2001, eating 50 hot dogs in 12 minutes, a theory has been advanced that slim gorgers have an advantage because they have no "belt of fat" to block the tummy's expansion.
Thus far, said Mr. Shea, the New England Journal of Medicine has been uninterested in publishing this theory.
He defended the activity as a sport, as it is a "physical activity governed by a set of rules." That doesn't mean he lacks a sense of humor about his game. He compares, for instance, a plate of wings to the comic actress Tina Fey: "They don't seem that hot at first, but the more time you spend with them, the hotter they get."
Mr. Subich, a standout football player for Johnstown High in the early 1990s who now coaches its freshman team, seemed a good man to judge whether competitive eating is a sport. He goes 6-foot-6 and about 325 pounds, and he ate 27 hot dogs in 12 minutes in a qualifying round last May in Philadelphia -- and finished third. The winner was Sonya "The Black Widow" Thomas, who ate 36 dogs and "weighs about 95 pounds soaking wet."
Mr. Subich didn't chew long when I asked if these contests constituted sport.
"I absolutely think it is. It's a test of physical and mental endurance. You're pushing your body to an extreme."
"I feel the same way after an eating contest as I did after playing football. You're forcing your body to do things it doesn't want to do, the same way as in the fourth quarter, when your legs are cramped but the game's on the line."
Mr. Subich, 33, says he doesn't train but takes something of a Zen approach -- mentally relaxing his body, focusing on breathing. Almost every eater now uses Kobayashi's method: separating hot dog from bun, dunking the bread in water, breaking the wiener in half, making it all disappear.
Zen takes you only so far. He expects about 30 or 40 screaming fans, including his cousin, Craig Fitzpatrick of Patton, who will bring a megaphone so the competition will feel like they're "playing the Steelers at Heinz Field."
"I'm thrilled to be eating pretty much in my own backyard."
I used this excuse to call Mr. O'Donnell, the guy who badly out-ate me at Gullifty's five years ago, and get his take.
He said he hasn't participated in the charity event since. He has run 10 marathons, and said "the last three minutes [of eating] was similar to hitting the wall at the 20-mile mark of the marathon. I didn't eat normally for a week.
"It's definitely a sport, man. If what they do at PNC Park is a sport, then cake-eating is a sport."
First Published May 18, 2008 12:00 am
