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

by Ryan Nerz

  The fact is, there’s no way of knowing for sure what eaters do after contests. Purging is frowned upon, so eaters are unlikely to confess. As long as a reversal doesn’t occur within the contest, it is beyond the domain of the officials. The only way to know for sure is to follow eaters to the bathroom after contests, which I am unwilling to do. I suspect that it’s more common than most eaters will publicly admit. After watching a meatball-eating competition in Atlantic City, I overheard one midranked competitive eater announcing his plans for the day, “I’m gonna go puke and play blackjack.”

  One eater, Jed Donahue, the seven-time winner of the jalapeño-eating contest in Laredo, Texas, freely admits that he taught himself to purge as a necessary means of survival. After his first few wins, Jed learned the hard way that jalapeño-eating was an endurance event that lasted for hours after the contest ended. “The day after the competition, my colon was basically the seventh circle of hell,” he explains.

  By his fourth victory, his postcontest ritual became so rote that it bore about as much significance as a businessman’s daily routine after a long day at the office. “I puke it all up and go to Dairy Queen,” he explains. He’s got it down to a science and claims that he could, at any moment, throw down a hundred jalapeños, bring them back up, and “go hit the town.” The process is almost like a volcano erupting from within the body. It still hurts, he says, but “it hurts a lot less than letting it pass naturally.” After the contest, he’s not coy about slipping away from the press. “I’m almost like, ‘Excuse me. I need to go puke,’ ” he says. In fact, he has found that people are intrigued by the thought of him vomiting up six pounds of peppers. “I like looking at it, quite honestly. It’s a strange sight. It’s just a bunch of seeds there.”

  After listening to Jed’s candor about the subject, I wonder, Why are we so squeamish about vomit anyway? It’s just the process of disgorging the contents of one’s stomach, another bodily function like coughing or peeing. What’s the big deal? In truth, culturally, we seem to have embraced vomit as almost mainstream. If we are so sensitive about the subject, why would we tolerate a Web site like www.ratemyvomit.com?

  Besides, puking has been used to great effect in dozens of movies. The 1986 movie Stand by Me, which contains arguably the most famous cinematic competitive-eating scene of all time, focuses on vomit as its centerpiece. In it, an overweight character named Davey “Lardass” Hogan uses castor oil as an emetic to make himself hurl in the pie-eating contest, exacting revenge on his tormentors by causing the whole crowd to follow suit. There’s also the famous scene in The Exorcist, where darling little possessed Regan vomits a pea-green stream onto Father Karras’s face and shirt.

  In recent films, booting has become so common that it’s almost a cliché. Tom Hanks blows chunks in Road to Perdition after he finds out his wife and son have been murdered. Denzel Washington barfs in He Got Game and in Remember the Titans. Jamie Foxx does it in Any Given Sunday. In fact, Puke has almost become its own character, making guest appearances in Memento, The Virgin Suicides, The Sixth Sense, Almost Famous, Clueless, 10 Things I Hate About You, The Rock, and The Matrix. Perhaps the two most unabashed puke scenes in cinematic history occur in the Trey Parker-Matt Stone satire, Team America, and Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, in which the character Monsieur Creosote vomits nine times and then explodes.

  In a slightly more extreme way, that unforgettable scene captures the effect that Kevin Carr’s dramatic reversal of fortune has on the audience at Zyng Asian Grill. It is at once funny and gross and slightly tragic. In the waning seconds, Kevin spurts forth a sea of slimy worms, relinquishing his imminent victory. The audience is united under the common bond of having witnessed a man’s body cruelly betray him. We feel sympathy and disgust in equal measure. I am so touched that I don’t even have the heart to shout out the go-to IFOCE response, “Elvis has left the building!”

  After disqualifying Carr, I naïvely assume the default winner will be Buffalo Jim Reeves—but the scales never lie. The remains are weighed, and we have an upset on our hands. Nineteen-year-old Brett Barna, a Worthington, Ohio, native whose only prior competitive-eating experience was his victory in a nonsanctioned collegiate Mongolian-beef-eating competition, has upset Buffalo Jim Reeves by a mere two ounces. He has eaten nearly two and a half pounds—no staggering sum, but impressive considering the adverse conditions and hearty wheat-based noodles.

  Kevin “the Carburetor” Carr sucks down noodles with reckless abandon before suffering one of the more stunning reversals of fortune in competitive eating history. (Courtesy of Kelly Carr)

  Another competitive-eating dream fulfilled, another champion revealed. The crowd gasps at the upset by the blond, boyish-faced upstart. It’s always exciting to watch a newcomer discover a previously unknown talent like this, a treasured moment that is more common in competitive eating than most sports. The press flocks to Barna, and he answers their questions with a wide-eyed expression like Macauley Culkin’s post-aftershave look in Home Alone. “I was just doing this for a free meal,” Barna says, seemingly shocked by his own performance.

  In the end, though, the most compelling man of the day is Kevin Carr. Something about his carpe diem attitude and relentless noodle-attacking method makes you want to give him a hug. George Shea captures the essence of the thirty-two-year old father of two when he says, “I knew that I had met a man who was more than simply a man. He was a champion—a leader of men and women and athletes. He’s an eater’s eater.” Kevin, for his part, is gracious in his postmatch press conference. “I just hit capacity. When your body says no more, you just kind of have to listen to it. If you’re going down, you might as well go down in flames.”

  16

  The First Couple of Competitive Eating

  Those who break bread together, stay together.

  —Ancient proverb

  MAY 1, 2004

  Twenty minutes till go time, and the Bacci World Pizza Eating Championship has all the makings of a complete fiasco. Dozens of locals have qualified by eating three jumbo cheese slices in twenty minutes at their local Bacci Pizzeria. Around forty eaters have signed up for the contest, and at least a dozen more are waiting in line to register. Over two hundred jumbo slices in boxes have been placed on four thirty-foot-long rows of tables. The tented area shading the tables from the blazing heat is choked with eaters, fans, and reporters. I’ve been assigned a crew of ten Bacci employees to help judge the event. It isn’t nearly enough to ensure a fair contest, especially since I don’t know who they are. My entire family, along with my girlfriend, is in attendance. Running my hands through my hair obsessively, I feel as if I’m on the verge of hyperventilating.

  The publicity leading up to the event has been sensational. There was a huge front-page spread in the Chicago Tribune, and another article in the Chicago Sun-Times. I spent the day prior driving around to news shows with an eighteen-year-old recent graduate from Downer’s Grove High School named Mark Skiba, who won last year’s contest and the $1,000 prize. Mark and his father are proud of his victory and have predicted he’ll take the $2,500 prize again this year. Beyond giving Mark vague warnings about a small Asian woman known as the Black Widow, I don’t have the heart to tell him how slim his chances are.

  Three angry-looking young men approach me. They’re wearing official contest T-shirts, which read GOT PIZZA? I ask if I can be of assistance. They lay a paper filled with signatures in front of me. “This is a petition signed by thirty contestants claiming that Ed Jarvis, Sonya Thomas, and Rich and Carlene LeFevre are all ineligible for today’s contest. It says on the Bacci Web site that all contestants must complete the pizza challenge in order to be eligible for this event. None of these eaters have completed the challenge.”

  I stare blankly at the signatures. My mind reels. This is the last thing I need, to have IFOCE eaters who have flown in from New York, Washington, D.C., and Las Vegas knocked out of the contest on a last-minute technicality. Competing with this concern is th
e thought of some Chicago-mobster type brutalizing me with a crowbar as I walk through the parking lot after the contest. I represent the IFOCE, however, so I have to stand my ground. “Listen, guys. I’m sorry if you feel betrayed that these professional eaters haven’t completed the pizza challenge. But this is an IFOCE event, and that means the eaters you just mentioned will be competing in it. Period. If you still want to protest, then go talk to the owner, Bobby Didiana. He’s the little Italian dude over there smoking a cigarette.”

  While seemingly a nice guy, Bobby is the brains behind the fiasco. The year before, he had organized a similar contest, an hour-long endurance match that turned into a highly amusing pukefest. It had gained the Didiana family business some nice publicity, so he decided to up the ante this year. I have urged him strongly to shorten the contest and organize it into qualifying heats. In return, Bobby has reluctantly offered a compromise of one contest divided into fifteen-, twenty-, and thirty-minute time limits. Prizes will be offered for first, second, and third in the fifteen-minute round, and for first place in the next two rounds. Bobby has also made it clear that his decision to import ranked professionals has been controversial, and that he’d love to see a local pull off an upset.

  Time to address the crowd. I put on the carnival barker’s hat and stand up on a chair. I explain that it’s only appropriate that the first ever pizza-eating record should be held here, in Chicago, the city widely regarded as having America’s best pizza. I tell the crowd to get behind their locals, who will have an uphill battle against four of the top competitive eaters in the world. I introduce Mark Skiba, the defending champ, and a college buddy of mine, Bob Greenlee, who I say has eaten nothing but pizza for forty days and forty nights in preparation for the contest. I then introduce the IFOCE eaters, and it’s game on.

  The contest is an orgiastic frenzy of pizza consumption. Eaters chomp and gnaw while I spout the usual fun facts peppered with play-by-play. Unlimited pizza—it’s every kid’s dream come true! When the fifteen minutes are up, Sonya is the clear winner with six and a half jumbo slices; Cookie takes second with five and a half. Just as I’m about to announce Rich LeFevre in third place with five and a quarter, Bobby Didiana comes up and says that, actually, a college student named Patrick Bertoletti has nosed out LeFevre.

  Unconvinced, I walk over, grab Bertoletti’s final slice and bring it over to LeFevre. I juxtapose the leftovers and stroke my chin. Overruling the restaurant’s owner, I call it a tie and opt to use the next five-minute interval as a tiebreaker. Rich LeFevre handily wins the overtime period. His wife, Carlene, sticks with it into the thirty-minute round, only to succumb by one-quarter of a slice to a local rookie twice her size.

  After the contest, Rich and Carlene LeFevre, the first couple of competitive eating, thank me profusely for my fairness. I’ve been looking forward to meeting them for months and can’t help but swell slightly at their approval. They don’t look the part of competitive eaters. Rich is over sixty years old, stands five feet seven, and weighs 145 pounds. A retired accountant, he looks exactly as I’ve seen him in countless photos, a small, gray-haired gentleman with thick, round glasses, wearing a Hawaiian print shirt. I have heard him described as a Mr. Magoo look-alike, and the analogy is fairly apt. His wife, Carlene, a retired teacher, won’t disclose her age or weight, but she is allegedly older than Rich and svelte with an athletic build. She looks as feminine as a woman can look after an eating contest, with curly, feathered hair and freshly applied lipstick. “We just wanted to thank you for taking control of that situation,” Rich says. “We’re proud of you for sticking to your guns.”

  Sandwiched between Carlene and Rich LeFevre during the 2004 Bacci World Pizza Eating Championship, the author mugs a cheesy game-show-host smile. (Courtesy of Amy Esposito)

  NOVEMBER 23, 2004

  “I just wanted you to know that, after the contest, I went around and looked, and you can’t know how many people didn’t eat their crust,” says Carlene LeFevre. “And you know that kid that beat me out for the last prize? Afterwards, he told me that in the qualifier, they didn’t have to eat the crust.”

  Her husband agrees. “Yeah, we saw lots of crusts in boxes. You know when you have the boxes, they throw the crust inside, and nobody checks the boxes.”

  I thank Rich for the insight. It’s nearly seven months after the Chicago pizza mayhem, and I’m talking with the LeFevres by phone from their home in Henderson, Nevada, which they call the Pink Palace. I have heard that Rich’s success on the circuit is due in part to his obsessively meticulous nature, and his tone reflects this. It seems that, with twenty-twenty hindsight, I wasn’t quite as effective a judge as I’d hoped. This crust issue remains a permanent scar on my official IFOCE record. Not that the LeFevres blame me. They understand it was an impossible contest to judge, totally understaffed and all, but the fact remains that those crusts were the hardest part to get down. “That crust, that rim,” Carlene says. “I swear to God, it was like putting a leather belt in your mouth. It would not masticate at all.”

  If there were one thing the LeFevres could change about the circuit, they are quick to point out, it would be the quality of competition food. Carlene understands that it’s hard to prepare food in such mass quantities, but still, it’s a pity. “As much as I love to eat, and Rich, too, in a way I’m kind of sorry that I have to waste my calories on food that’s not really high quality.” The subject is particularly touchy now, because at a contest that Carlene recently won, the food was so repugnant she found herself sighing out loud. The foodstuff was posole, a type of spicy, fried hominy. “You know what it reminded me of? You know when the radiator in your car boils dry, and there’s that smell? To me, it tasted like that smell.”

  They’ve earned the right to be finicky. Rich and Carlene LeFevre are now ranked third and seventh in the world, respectively, and are regarded by some as the most dominant married couple in professional sports. They also have a rather unique relationship to food, because outside of competitive eating, they are health and exercise nuts. Their go-to meal includes a combination of wheat germ, flaxseed, and oatmeal. Carlene was a Richard Simmons aerobics instructor for eight years, and Rich routinely competes in a spate of sports. Our last interview was cut short because they had to take off for Tuesday-night table tennis. By all accounts, the LeFevres are not your average couple. Even within the competitive-eating community, their story is unique.

  If not for Willie Mays, Carlene LeFevre might never have met her husband. In the late sixties, Rich passed his navy written exam with such flying colors that he was given carte blanche to choose where he would be stationed. Out of abiding love for his favorite baseball player, Rich chose a naval base just south of San Francisco so he could go watch Mays play for the Giants.

  In the fall of 1970, Carlene had just broken up with her boyfriend and was staying at home with her parents in San Francisco. A self-described daddy’s girl, she didn’t mind living at home, but her mother insisted she go hang out with people her own age. In the paper, they spotted an ad for square dancing. Carlene started going, and one evening in October, she saw Rich at the entrance. “Rich would peek in before he’d pay his entrance fee to see if there’s anything other than old ladies and young girls to dance with.”

  What happened next remains the source of some debate. Rich claims that Carlene shot him come-hither looks and motioned him toward her. Carlene says it’s a lie. “No, it isn’t,” Rich says. “She said, ‘Why don’t you come in? We’ll have some fun.’ ” Rich paid his entrance fee and they’ve been square dancing ever since. They started out as pals, dancing and going to the movies, and before long became best friends.

  From day one, Rich was attracted to Carlene’s eating prowess. He had found that, when he took a girl out to dinner, she’d usually leave food on her plate—not Carlene. “With Carlene, I mean, we would eat, and I’d be interested in talking, and she’d be interested in eating. She’d be done, and I’d be half-finished.” They grew ever closer, but Ca
rlene had never seen herself as the marrying type. One day while talking on her front porch, Carlene misspelled Rich’s last name. “You’d better learn how to spell it,” Rich warned. “Someday it might be your last name.”

  Like many competitive eaters, Rich and Carlene shared interests not just in food, but in travel as well. Early on in their marriage, they began taking road trips. In 1985, while traveling through Amarillo, Texas, the LeFevres successfully completed the Big Texas Steak Ranch challenge for the first time. The challenge states that if you can eat the Big Texan, a seventy-two-ounce steak that now costs over $60, you get it for free. If you don’t, you pay. The LeFevres both knocked it down, then topped it off with triple-decker ice cream cones. They enjoyed it so much that they came back to do the challenge annually for fifteen years.

  In January of 2000, when Rich and Carlene returned from their annual New Year’s trip to Reno, a message was waiting for them on their answering machine. It was from the producers of Ripley’s Believe It or Not offering to televise them completing the Big Texan challenge as a couple. Carlene was reluctant at first. A steadfastly feminine woman, she worried that the show would make her look masculine and undignified, but Rich finally talked her into it. Three months after their Ripley’s appearance, producers of the Donny and Marie Show came calling. This time, Rich ate a mind-blowing two seventy-two-ounce steaks—nine pounds total—in one sitting.