Eat This Book: A Year of Gorging and Glory on the Competitive Eating Circuit

by Ryan Nerz

  This reckless strategy proves, time and again, to be Dale Boone’s undoing. When it goes his way, he is capable of stunning upsets, such as his consecutive upsets in 2004 of Cookie Jarvis, Badlands Booker, and Sonya Thomas in the 84 Lumber World Baked Bean–Eating Championships. (In fact, one might assert that Dale’s legacy on the circuit can be summed up in five words: best baked bean eater ever.) But when it goes the other way for Boone, it quite literally goes the other way.

  As for the belt-snatching incident, Dale remembers a different version from Sonya. He claims she left the belt unattended in the stands when she went up to pick up her check. Dale says he grabbed the belt, not to steal it, but to hold it for safekeeping and see how long it would take for Sonya to miss it. “What I did was grabbed it for all of us. You know I’m part of the group. Just imagine had I not’ve grabbed it!”

  5

  A Not-So-Brief History of Competitive Eating

  Every investigation which is guided by principles of nature fixes its ultimate aim entirely on gratifying the stomach.

  —Athenaeus, circa A.D. 200

  Before the crowd in Mississippi, I had claimed that the history of competitive eating had started with cavemen battling over their prey. Afterward, a history buff who’d watched the contest interrogated me about the sport’s real origins over an ice-cold Bud. I fumbled for words and spewed unconvincing half-truths. As a self-styled expert and amateur historian of competitive eating, I was troubled by my own ignorance. It was time to hit the history books.

  Though there’s scant record of timed events in early history, the pastime of eating to excess has been around since the ancient Romans. Perhaps the most memorable written description of a feast comes from the first-century Roman satire Satyricon. The author, Petronius, describes a banquet held by a former slave turned millionaire named Trimalchio, which featured wave after wave of such dishes as beefsteak, testicles and kidneys, sow’s udder, lobster, bulls’ eyes, and pastry eggs stuffed with garden warblers. At any point in the meal, stuffed guests were encouraged to use the vomitorium to make room for the next course.

  Several hundred years later, a few notable British monarchs stepped up to the plate in a big way. In the late fourteenth century, Richard II threw a banquet for over ten thousand guests. The provisions included 14 oxen, 120 sheep, 12 boars, 3 tons of salted venison, 14 calves, 140 pigs, 50 swans, 210 geese, 1,200 pigeons, 720 hens, 100 gallons of milk, and 11,000 eggs. In Tudor times, the more a man weighed, the richer and more heroic he was perceived to be. By 1547, Henry VIII, a colorful chap with a penchant for beheading his wives, had grown so rich and heroic that he had to be carried from room to room by his servants.

  But eating competitions as we now know them started in America. From its inception, America lured settlers with its vast landscape of near endless natural resources. Immigrants escaping poverty, religious oppression, or scourges like a potato famine in the mother country were soon celebrating freedom and plentitude in the brave new world. The new Americans zealously gobbled up land, food, and opportunity, but tried not to forget what they’d escaped. Thanksgiving, that annual day of showing gratitude for America’s abundance, is arguably nothing more than a family-oriented, untimed, unsanctioned nationwide eating contest.

  For over a hundred years, pie-eating contests have been as American as apple pie. By the beginning of the twentieth century, pie-eating contests had become as commonplace at fairs and carnivals as tugs-of-war, three-legged races, dunking tanks, judging livestock, potato-sack races, and the beloved challenge of climbing a greased pole. During World War I, regiments threw pie-eating contests to maintain morale and revel momentarily in their American-ness. As documented in the newspaper Stars and Stripes, these contests were held in bold defiance of the act of June 3, 1916, that said, “Enlisted men, Army bands and members thereof are forbidden from engaging in any competitive civilian employment.” The contests resumed during World War II. A captivating photo in the Library of Congress shows a mountainside pie-eating contest held on July 4, 1945, by the Eighty-seventh Regiment of the Tenth Mountain Division in Caporetto, Italy. One of the contestants is a woman in a Red Cross uniform.

  Early pie-eating contests emphasized fun over competition. The main point was to laugh at messy faces. Contestants were often required to keep their hands behind their backs to minimize cheating and maximize messiness. The contests were usually composed of kids, such as this description of a contest held during the seventh annual outing for the nine hundred employees of the Broadway Department Store of Los Angeles: “A dozen small boys entered the guzzling match, and when the signal was given, they buried themselves in blackberry pies. As pains began to gnaw at them, the young hopefuls gave up. But one lad, pluckier than his fellows, ate on and on. At last the $5 reward was flung to him.”

  An equal opportunity sport. Five Broadway show girls compete in an unsanctioned, no-hands “Spaghetti Swooshing” contest in 1948. (Courtesy of Bettmann/CORBIS

  The culinary spark that would ultimately set the competitive-eating world aflame would not be pies, but hot dogs. In 1874, a German immigrant named Charles Feltman invented the frankfurter-and-bun combo we know today as the hot dog. By the end of 1880, Feltman owned the most successful German beer garden in Coney Island, the popularity of which was due largely to his ten-cent hot dogs. In the early 1900s, Jimmy Durante and Eddie Cantor, both entertainers at Feltman’s Famous Restaurant, encouraged Nathan Handwerker, a Feltman’s employee, to undersell his employer.

  Thanks in part to his ability to eat hot dogs for free while on the job, Handwerker saved $300 and invested it into the rental of a building at the corner of Surf and Stillwell Avenues. He opened his own stand, Nathan’s Famous, where he sold garlic-tinged sausages for five cents apiece. At first, customers, already dubious about what went into hot dogs, were suspicious of the low price. To counter this, Handwerker invited interns from Coney Island Hospital to eat for free, as long as they came dressed in their hospital whites. Some historians claim Handwerker even paid homeless men to shave, dress up in doctor’s uniforms, and hang out around his stand. With the onset of Prohibition (which felled Feltman’s) as well as the opening of the Stillwell Avenue subway stop in 1921, Nathan’s Famous soon became known as Coney Island’s Nickel Empire.

  The history of the Nathan’s Famous hot-dog-eating contest is stored inside the brain of George Shea, a gifted huckster, so some facts are difficult to verify. It is known, however, that Nathan Handwerker started the contest on July 4, 1916, as a vehicle to drum up publicity for his hot dog stand in the tradition of Coney Island sideshows. The format of the contest—a twelve-minute contest at noon on the Fourth of July—has remained largely unchanged over nearly a century. According to Shea, this format was meant to evoke “the patriotic epicenter of the year, in the patriotic geographical center of the nation, Coney Island, which is the seat of immigration and of course the location where the hot dog was created.”

  Legend has it that the world’s first hot-dog-eating champion was a Brooklyn construction worker named Jim Mullin. On July 4, 1916, he ate ten hot dogs and buns in twelve minutes. Afterward he complained to Handwerker that he would have eaten more had the buns not been stale. “Make no mistake, Mullin was a titanic figure,” says George Shea. “To do what he did in the so-called Dead Dog Era was amazing. In the 1920s, people would say, ‘I swear on the teeth of Jim Mullin,’ when they wanted to make a vow.”

  The Handwerker family poses in front of the historic Nathan’s Famous hot dog stand at the corner of Surf and Stilwell on Coney Island, circa 1922. Notice the price of a frankfurter in the upper right corner: five cents. (Courtesy of Nathan’s Famous, Inc.)

  Just weeks before the 2005 Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Competition, a sideshow promoter named Dick Zigun found Jim Mullin’s teeth on a construction site, preserved in an old seltzer bottle. The Shea brothers took the teeth—which were preserved in pickle juice—to forensic dentist Stephen Tympanick for analysis. Tympanick noticed that Mullin’s inc
isor was lost early in his life and that his premolars were rotted to the core. Regardless, the Shea brothers intend to keep the teeth on exhibit at IFOCE headquarters. They hope that future competitive eaters will make pilgrimages and pay homage to the teeth, the competitive-eating equivalent of the Shroud of Turin.

  The names of the contest’s other early winners have been covered up by the sands of time. But in the 1930s, a prolonged grudge match between America’s two most accomplished eaters—Stan Libnitz, from Flushing, Queens, and Andrew Rudman, from Brighton Beach, Brooklyn—began making national headlines. By 1938, sworn enemies Libnitz and Rudman had alternated victories at the Nathan’s Famous contest for eight consecutive years. Before the 1938 contest, Rudman told the press it would be his last and would thus settle who was champion once and for all.

  At the start of the contest, Libnitz, a sprinter, was characteristically quick out of the gate. Six minutes into the contest, he was two dogs ahead. Two minutes later, he was up three and a half. Then, just as the Coney Island crowd had all but conceded the title to Libnitz, he mysteriously stopped eating. As Rudman rallied to win by half of a dog, Libnitz could only manage to point—repeatedly and cryptically—at Rudman’s elbow. After the contest, Libnitz complained that Rudman had elbowed him in the gut. But this being before the days of instant replay, the public discourse over the contest raged on unresolved. Libnitz demanded a rematch. Rudman agreed. But soon thereafter, Libnitz claimed his doctor told him he could not compete again without running the risk of a severe and chronic gastrointestinal disorder.

  For years afterward, Libnitz claimed that this event was a turning point in his life. Eventually, he wrote about the fateful day in his autobiography, Stan Libnitz: My Way (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1949). The opening lines of this now out-of-print memoir convey just how important the Nathan’s title was to Libnitz: “It was a black day for Coney Island, friends, and for this country. There are thousands of people in this city who know the truth, who know that on July Fourth, a most sacred day in this country, a horrible black deed was done, a horrible black deed against one countryman and one country’s honor.” Rudman denied any wrongdoing unto his death.

  In the 1950s, a German woman named Gerta Hasselhoff—considered by some genealogists to be a distant relative of David Hasselhoff, the former Baywatch star—stunned the world by winning the Nathan’s Famous title. Gerta’s enemies soon demanded that her training method, which consisted largely of gorging on bratwurst and beer, be deemed illegal. Ultimately, the judges from Nathan’s Famous ruled that her bratwurst/beer cross-training method was perfectly legal, and she is still hailed as the sport’s first female champion.

  For the first forty years of the contest, the thirteen-dog barrier remained unsurpassable. Some even speculated that thirteen Nathan’s Famous hot dogs and buns marked the precise limit of the human stomach’s storage capacity. But in 1959, a one-armed Brooklyn carnival worker named Peter Washburn ate eighteen and a half hot dogs and buns (or HDBs), shocking the world and silencing proponents of the thirteen-dog capacity theory.

  From the mid-1960s into the 1970s, competitive eating, like the country’s sociopolitical climate, became tainted by those who refused to play by the rules. Instead of using legitimate training techniques, unethical eaters began experimenting with illegal shortcuts. Cheating became so rampant that some techniques were given names. Dropping the mule became the term for placing a hot dog on the plate of either an accomplice or a rival. The sleeper method involved adding an extra paper plate to the stack (since the hot dogs are served five to a plate, and total dogs eaten are tallied in terms of empty plates).

  Perhaps the most significant breakthrough for the organization of the sport came in 1972, when Nathan’s Famous hired Coney Island press agent Max Rosey to represent the hot-dog-eating contest. Max Rosey had made his name in PR by pulling inventive stunts to gain media attention for his clients. He once put an elephant on a giant water ski in the Hudson River to promote an amusement park. Armed only with a dream of what competitive eating could be, he drew up an intricate set of rules and did not hesitate to punish eaters for minor infractions.

  The 1990s, under the leadership of Rosey’s protégé George Shea, became the watershed decade for competitive eating. In late May of 1990, while commuting from his New Jersey home to his job on Wall Street, a man named Mike DeVito saw an ad “twice the size of a postage stamp” in the Daily News. The ad sought out big eaters with an open schedule on July Fourth. It said that the previous year’s champ, Jay Green, had eaten fourteen hot dogs, and if any eaters thought they could challenge that, they should call George Shea at the number listed.

  DeVito called George. He said that, though he felt his prime eating years were behind him—he had been kicked out of a Ground Round for downing thirty-five chicken breasts during an all-you-can-eat special in college—fourteen hot dogs seemed manageable. On the Fourth, DeVito showed up at Schweikert’s Alley in Coney Island and was stunned by the packed crowd and TV cameras. When he won the contest with fifteen HDBs, DeVito found the cameras focused on him. “You’re just thrown into the limelight,” DeVito remembers. “You’re on the news. You’re in Letterman’s monologue. You’re like, ‘Oh my God. What did I do?’ And then you become, like, obsessed. Now you want to win everything. You want to be in the limelight.”

  The next year, in 1991, DeVito returned to Coney Island wearing his game face, poised to break Peter Washburn’s thirty-two-year-old record of seventeen dogs. But out of nowhere, Frank “Large” Dellarossa, a part-time Hofstra University football coach endowed with the girth typically associated with eating talent, put down twenty-one and a half dogs to shatter the record and rewrite the history books. To this day, “Twenty-one in ’91!” is a commonly heard rallying cry by Coney Island diehards in search of a new American champ.

  In ’92, Dellarossa came back and beat DeVito again, nineteen HDBs to seventeen. DeVito left the contest convinced he would return to the winner’s circle the following year. He was right. Dellarossa showed up at the 1993 contest, but only to announce his retirement from competitive eating and his decision to move to Hollywood to become an actor. Though he landed only a smattering of bit parts, the legend of Frank “Hollywood” Dellarossa has lived on.

  DeVito won at Coney Island again in 1994. His closest competitor was a gargantuan up-and-comer who’d earned his chops on the White Castle circuit in Queens, Ed Krachie. DeVito “did the deuce”—twenty dogs and buns—while Krachie finished with eighteen. After the contest, DeVito donned the Mustard Yellow International Belt for the first time. The introduction of such a beautiful and exalted trophy gave gurgitators something tangible to set their sights on. Competitive eaters worldwide would soon covet the belt in much the same way that pro hockey players salivate for the Stanley Cup, or professional golfers for the cherished green jacket.

  According to DeVito, 1994 also marked the year that dunking first occurred at Coney Island. Dunking started not as a speed-eating technique, but for a much more practical reason. “The hot dogs came out burning hot, and we couldn’t eat them,” DeVito remembers. After a few frantic seconds of pain, contestants started dunking the dogs to cool them down. But when the footage of the event showed up on the evening news, everyone assumed DeVito and the boys had discovered a new technique.

  The next year, the DeVito-Krachie rivalry was built up in the New York press. “It was like the Holyfield-Tyson fight,” DeVito remembers. This time, Ed Krachie beat DeVito by the slim margin of nineteen and a half to nineteen. The following year, Ed “the Animal” Krachie, noted for his wolflike style of mauling weenies, broke the American record by downing twenty-two. The new victor drew even more media interest, and TV Tokyo called George Shea again. They wanted to arrange a one-on-one showdown between Krachie and a Japanese eater named Hirofumi Nakajima.

  The contest occurred on December 4, 1996, at a Nathan’s Famous restaurant in midtown Manhattan. When Krachie, a 360-pound machismo-fueled guy’s guy, saw the tiny Nakajima, he got
cocky. Krachie berated his opponent to the press, poking fun at Nakajima’s floral-pattern shirt and requesting a copy of the Daily News to read during the contest. As the contest got under way, a derisive chant of “Noo-dle boy! Noo-dle boy!” rose up in the restaurant. Krachie pulled ahead early, but at the nine-minute mark, Nakajima blew past him. Though Krachie achieved a personal best and set a new American record of twenty-two and a half dogs, Nakajima took the $2,000 first prize and the belt with twenty-three and a quarter.

  The press gobbled up both the story and its symbolism—little guy beats big guy, little Japan beats bloated America in a battle between two ravenously consumerist nations. On the next three Independence Days, Nakajima defended his title, the belt annually slipping off his tiny waist. Krachie protested that Nakajima was taking muscle relaxants to aid his swallowing, but the Shea brothers shrugged off the allegation. In 1997, Nakajima upped the world record to twenty-four and a half.

  Hirofumi Nakajima, flanked by then New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, raises the Mustard Yellow Belt at a weigh-in before the 1997 Nathan’s Famous competition.

  In early 1998, Krazy Kevin Lipsitz, fed up with losing to the Japanese, began pushing for a cross-species league. Having trained with his two dogs for years, Krazy Kevin thought he had found a way to shatter the Japanese stranglehold. “And in a way you can under stand,” Rich Shea explains. “Because Lipsitz never really had much success in the traditional contest. But his dogs were great eaters.” The Shea brothers finally relented to Krazy Kevin’s requests and approached the Nathan’s Famous brass with his idea. “They wanted to move forward with it,” George Shea remembers. “But with a man-cat contest instead. It broke Kevin’s heart. He was very disappointed.”