by Ryan Nerz
The contest itself doesn’t merit a fleshed-out description. I’ve emceed so many contests at this point that it feels like déjà vu. That said, it’s always fun to hear the George Show, which blends pure absurdity with the standard play-by-play. “In every compression of the jaw, in every drop of saliva, in every twitch of the epiglottis, I see the human struggle, Ryan,” George says. Badlands Booker, he claims, has created a sort of Powell Doctrine for competitive eating, using overwhelming force against chicken wings. He describes Sonya as an alien who hovers above the stage as if on the wings of the very chicken wings she is eating. After each comment, the Wingy Dingys belt out another “George sucks!” until he is finally forced to respond. “The Wingy Dingys follow these eaters on the road,” he says, “as if they were a revival of Bachman-Turner Overdrive, going to venues across the nation.”
Shocking no one, Sonya wins by eating nearly five pounds of wing meat. I congratulate her afterward and ask if this makes all that training on the Wing Tour seem worthwhile. She just giggles and nods. A big group of eaters gather around the front of the stage afterward to chat and plan our meeting later at a rock concert nearby. Though the Nathan’s Famous contest is clearly the mother of all competitions, the Buffalo Wing Festival contest is where the American eaters go to get together and have a good time. Looking around at the smiling faces of Badlands, Hungry Charles, Don Lerman, Jammin’ Joe, Crazy Legs, Cookie, Buffalo Reeves, Brian Subich, and Tim Janus, I can’t help but feel a pang of sentimentality for the sincere camaraderie fostered by the competitive-eating circuit.
Hungry Charles Hardy (seated, left) and Crazy Legs Conti (standing, in the EAT THE WORLD T-shirt) are spurred on by the crowd at the 2004 Buffalo Wing-Eating Championship. The two fans standing in the front row between Hardy and Crazy Legs are members of the notorious Wingy Dingy clan, a band of rabid competitive eating groupies. (Courtesy of Joe Casio)
But my momentary reverie is broken by the frowning face of an older woman who I recognize from the Wing Tour as Nate Matusiak’s mother. “Why was Nate pushed off to the side like that so no one could see him?” she asks. I explain that it’s customary for veteran eaters to receive the prime real estate. While Nate rolls his eyes and tells his mother to shut up, she presses me further, clearly pissed. Exhausted and delirious, I quote a lyric from one of Badlands’ songs about eating your way to the middle of the table, but that, too, falls on deaf ears. “If you want respect on the circuit,” I finally say, looking over at Hungry Charles, “You’ve gotta pay your dues first.”
21
The Godfather
And if by chance an honest man like yourself should make enemies, then they would become my enemies. And then they would fear you.
—Don Corleone, a.k.a. the Godfather
Hungry Charles Hardy exhibits his superhuman hand-eye-mouth coordination while Cookie Jarvis sneaks a glance at his progress. (Courtesy of Matt Roberts/IFOCE)
SEPTEMBER 10, 2004
A week after the Buffalo competition, I met up with the IFOCE’s most esteemed veteran, Hungry Charles Hardy, at an Austrian restaurant in Park Slope, Brooklyn. He pulled out a scrapbook filled with newspaper articles and pictures that chronicled his six years on the circuit. Over a lunch of bratwurst and Wiener schnitzel served by a Teutonic transvestite waiter/waitress, he told me his story. It was the fascinating story of a man—a police officer, a father, and a gurgitator—whose experiences captured the essence of competitive eating, in both America and Japan, and how that sport has evolved over the last half decade.
Before he was the Godfather he was Hungry Charles.
Hungry Charles came into being on June 25, 1998, on the observation deck of the World Trade Center. He didn’t even want to be there; his union president, Norman Seabrook of the Correction Officers Benevolent Association, had cajoled him into signing up. Seabrook knew that Hardy had worked for ten years in a Rikers Island mess hall as a cook, and that his appetite was champion status, but Hardy was worried about getting laughed at by the guys in the crowd. He was thinking about just not showing up, and he told his wife so. “Just go down there and have some fun with it,” she advised.
So he showed up for the Nathan’s Civil Service qualifier. He checked out the trophy and liked the looks of it, then watched amazed as Ed Krachie did a hot-dog-eating exhibition—sixteen in six minutes. Afterward a man with a sly grin in a straw hat walked up to Charles.
“How are you doin’, sir?”
“Hey. What’s happenin’?” Charles said.
“I’m George Shea. What’s your name?”
“Charles Hardy.”
“Are you hungry?”
“Yeah, I’m real hungry.”
“Okay then. You’re Hungry Charles.”
And he really was. He ate sixteen and a half that day, beating out two sanitation workers, two court officers, two policemen, and a fireman. His dog dominance wasn’t entirely by choice—President Seabrook was literally shoving frankfurters into Charles’s mouth, repeatedly chanting, “Where my dogs at?” Hungry Charles was a natural, and the press took notice. He woke up the next morning and found his name “in every damn newspaper in the city. They were calling me America’s next hopeful.” The buzz around the competitive-eating campfire was that Hungry Charles had the best natural game since Peter Washburn’s record-setting performance back in ’59. A few weeks later, Hungry Charles stunned the Coney Island faithful with seventeen and a half HDBs. He took second place, finishing behind Hirofumi Nakajima.
Going into the 1999 contest, Hungry Charles could fairly smell victory. At the Civil Service qualifier on July 1 in the lobby of the World Trade Center, he did the deuce. Though he would still have to take Nakajima and a Floridian upstart named Andrew Becker, who had eaten twenty-two in his qualifier, Hardy knew this was his chance. Even Mayor Giuliani went on record as a Hardy supporter. “I’m with the guy from Brooklyn,” Giuliani told the New York Daily News. “If he doesn’t win, we’ll have an inquiry.”
Giuliani had no idea how portentous those words would be. The 1999 Fourth of July finals were dubbed “The Great Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Scandal” by New York City newspapers. The official victory went to Steve Keiner, a 325-pound electrical inspector from Atlantic City, who downed twenty and a quarter. Hardy tied fellow Brooklynite Bartoszek Tadeusz with twenty even, but several observers claimed that Keiner started eating a few seconds before the opening countdown finished. Hardy complained, and a local news station aired a replay that seemed to confirm his position. In a July 5 article entitled “Nathan’s Champ Called Cheat,” the Daily News printed a video still that clearly showed an illegal head start.
Though George Shea conceded after the contest that footage showed Keiner jumping the gun by “half a dog,” the contest rules did not allow replays. Mike DeVito defended Keiner, claiming that one of his dogs wasn’t even counted. Hardy demanded a rematch and doled out more accusations. He claimed that Nakajima stashed a hot dog in his towel. “Nakajima did some sleight-of-hand shit. It was like a three-card Molly.”
Though Hardy’s best shot at a title was cruelly stripped from him, he got some good publicity out of it. Jay Leno invited Hardy and Keiner out to Los Angeles, but Keiner declined unless he was paid several thousand dollars. So Hungry Charles went alone. At first, the idea was to bring him out in a pair of skimpy Speedo swim trunks. “I was like, ‘I’m not fuckin’ going out onstage in no damn Speedos,’ ” Hardy says. Instead, Leno sat him down and they had a civilized chat about the mental strain of speed-eating. “Your body is saying, ‘No, I can’t take no more,’ ” Hardy told Leno. “But you’re saying, ‘Yes, you are,’ and you just keep ramming them in there.” Later, Leno challenged Hardy to a contest. While Hardy ate, Leno threw dog after dog over his shoulder. Afterward, the tally was seven to two in Leno’s favor. “Charles,” Leno said, “you got screwed again.”
In February of 2000, Harry Solomon, who was working as a stateside producer for TV Tokyo, called Hungry Charles. “You like sushi?” Solomon as
ked. When he heard the word sushi, Hardy immediately suspected that this implied a potential trip to Japan. “Yeah, I love sushi,” he answered, even though he had never tried it. Hardy went to see Solomon the next morning. “You think you can eat a thirty-foot sushi roll in thirty minutes?” Solomon asked. “Hell, yeah,” Hungry Charles said. “No problem.”
Solomon suggested that they go eat some sushi. Hungry Charles said he had just eaten and wasn’t hungry. “No, I wanna watch you eat sushi,” Solomon snapped. He then sent out a courier, who came back with two enormous platters of sushi. Hardy stared at it, panic-stricken. “So which one is your favorite?” Solomon asked. Hardy said he liked them all. After Hardy popped a few pieces of sushi into his mouth with his fingers like popcorn, Solomon asked, “Don’t you like wasabi?” Hardy said he loved wasabi. “I didn’t know what wasabi was,” Hardy admits. “I didn’t know how to mix it with the soy sauce or none of that.” But whatever suspicions Solomon might have had dissolved when Hardy finished off two heaping platters of sushi in less than an hour. The next day, Hardy went to pick up a passport. He was told he’d earn $12,500 for his participation.
On March 6, 2000, Hardy flew with his mother to Japan to compete in the sushi challenge. “As soon as I got off the plane, you would’ve thought Michael Jackson had landed.” Japanese fans had made signs and had Hungry Charles pictures for him to sign. A TV Tokyo producer explained that a commercial featuring him had been playing there for over a month.
Charles stayed at the Century Hyatt Tokyo. He recalls looking out his window at hordes of Japanese commuters swarming like preprogrammed bees around Shinjuku train station, the world’s busiest. His mother suggested they go out for something to eat. “I’m not going out there,” Charles said. “I’m waiting for the fuckin’ interpreter.”
Not wanting to insult his hosts, Charles decided to refuse nothing offered. Strange drinks and foods kept coming in waves. Some of it tasted good; some of it didn’t. The most memorable dish was the platter of chicken breastbones. “And I’m sittin’ there crunchin’ and crunchin’. It wasn’t good. Eatin’ cartilage. That’s all it was, was cartilage.”
When Hungry Charles saw the sushi chef making the thirty-foot sushi roll, he knew he was in trouble. I know I can’t eat this damn thing, he thought. Though he wasn’t competing against anyone, Hungry Charles’s goal was to beat the record recently set by a Japanese rock star, who had eaten twelve and a half feet. Hardy had been studying footage of the feat for a month.
From the mock contests that Hardy had shot in New York for the commercial, the TV producers knew his weaknesses—salmon roe and sea urchin. The thirty-foot roll was double-wrapped with seaweed, so Hungry Charles couldn’t see what he was eating. It was the “little egg bursts” of the salmon roe popping that really got to him. “Those eggs were just spurtin’ in my mouth. I almost heaved it up.” There were several close calls in which Mount St. Hardy seemed poised to erupt. “They were screaming and shit, because they thought I was going to let it all out. I thought, I’ll be damned if I’m gonna come this far to embarrass myself like that.”
By this point, Hungry Charles had actually taken a liking to sushi, but thirty feet in thirty minutes seemed absurd. As he completed each section, Hardy won a prize, as did select members of the audience. In the end, he ate fifteen feet of sushi to set the new world record. It was a particularly satisfying feat because of the nausea Hungry Charles endured and because the Japanese rock star had been cocky beforehand. “In the commercial, he talks a lot of shit about how I’m going to fail.”
Soaring on the wings of a world title, Hardy returned home to New York with inflated confidence. He e-mailed the organizer of the Ben’s Deli Matzo Ball Eating Contest. “I’m gonna be your next matzo-ball-eating champ,” he wrote. At the contest, he showed up in ghetto-fabulous attire—a Puff Daddy T-shirt and a shiny gold necklace. He didn’t much look the part of a Jewish matzo-ball fresser, so the Ben’s Deli mainstays scoffed at his bravado. “You know, I was the only black guy there,” Hardy remembers. “And when it was my turn to qualify, they were in awe. They were like, ‘Oy vey! Look at him go!”
In the finals, using a ravaging no-utensils technique, Hardy ate thirteen matzo balls in five minutes, twenty-five seconds. When the tallies came back, he was tied with an up-and-comer named Ed Jarvis. Contest host Curtis Sliwa said they’d have to do a one-minute-and-twenty-five-second eat-off. Hardy looked over at Jarvis and saw matzo meal coming out his nose. “I’m cool with that,” Hardy said. “All I need is five minutes to smoke me a cigarette.” The contest officials sent Gersh Kuntzman outside with Hardy to make sure he didn’t throw up. “Went out there for a couple minutes, came back in, got that burp out, and it was on,” Hungry Charles remembers. He ate two and a half more in the overtime period to become the first non-Jewish Ben’s Deli matzo-ball-eating champ. The prize was a trophy and a $2,500 gift certificate.
Though he was making a name for himself on the circuit, Charles wasn’t exactly making allies. Don Lerman, who considered matzo balls his specialty discipline as a New York Jew, wasn’t pleased. “Don was pissed,” Hardy remembers. “He hated the fuckin’ ground I walked on. He even made a T-shirt that said BEAT HARDY.” Ed Jarvis wasn’t a big fan either, taking particular exception to Hungry Charles’s swagger and his comment to a reporter that he was the “Michael Jordan of competitive eating.”
Competitive eating, however has a way of punishing its practitioners for such hubris. Hungry Charles received his comeuppance back in the land of the rising bun. His sushi challenge had been a big hit with Japanese audiences, so TV Tokyo invited him back for a stunt called the Superman Dash in January of 2001. He first flew to Tokyo for a quick sushi exhibition, then was flown to a Japanese town so rural it “was like being in Siberia,” Hardy remembers. The production crew drove Hungry Charles and Kazutoyo Arai to a warehouse in a remote area, where an elaborate conveyor belt was set up. “What the hell’s going on here?” Hardy asked. The conveyor belt, they said, was there to transport nearly two hundred bento boxes from all over Japan toward the gaping maws of Hardy and Arai.
A bento box is, in essence, a single-portion take-out meal that is popular among commuters, travelers, and schoolchildren in Japan. Its origins date back to the late twelfth century, and one could make a case for bento being the first societally sanctioned fast food. The proportions of a bento meal tend to be as follows—four parts rice, three parts meat or fish, two parts vegetables, and one part pickled veggies or dessert. Bento boxes come in many different varieties—from aluminum trays to elaborately decorated wooden, lacquered boxes. After World War I, there was a movement to abolish bento in schools because the boxes were such overt indicators of a child’s social status.
Outside of Ed Krachie’s experience several years before, the Superman Dash was among the most grueling competitive-eating situations an American had ever faced. Hungry Charles and Kazutoyo Arai were supposed to eat bento boxes nonstop for twelve straight hours. They ate for forty minutes each hour, and then were granted a twenty-minute break. After four or five hours, the impossibility of the task overwhelmed Hardy. Arai, on the other hand, seemed neither stuffed nor dyspeptic. Where was he putting all that food? As the challenge dragged on, Hardy noticed that Arai made hourly trips to the Porta Pottie, from which he returned spry and unencumbered. Hardy soon realized that Arai was only storing his food temporarily. “It made Arai look like a fuckin’ superhero. And it looks like this American guy can’t hang with him.”
Finally, Hardy decided that he’d had enough. He is diabetic and is always careful about maintaining his glucose levels before, during, and after competitions. But during an extreme stunt like the Superman Dash, maintenance is near impossible. His glucose levels surged to the 300s. “These people are killing me,” Charles remembers thinking. “I can’t do this no more.” At the apex of his misery, Hungry Charles lay on the stage and passed out.
After that, Arai took Hardy to the Porta Pottie to show him a technique he calle
d purging (though some might call it puking). Arai took a liter of water and drank it all at once. Without putting a finger down his throat, he simply leaned over the toilet and bento came out in a variegated stream. “He was so quiet, you could hear a pin drop,” Hardy explains. “He wiped his face, wiped away the tears, wiped his mouth off, and went back out.” Realizing that purging would be instrumental in continuing—and surviving—this diabolical stunt, Hardy decided to follow suit.
When the stunt finally ended, Hardy and Arai had downed 180 bento boxes, or the equivalent of ninety lunches apiece. Even by the standards of Japanese sadomasochism, it was an unnecessary amount of consumption. Or in the words of Badlands Booker, who watched a videotape of the show on Hardy’s plasma TV, “That Superman Dash was gangster.”
Jokes aside, it was a traumatic and eye-opening event for Hungry Charles, and he earned every cent of his $7,000 appearance fee. But on a positive note, he became friends with Kazutoyo Arai. (He considers Arai a wise man, but suspects that he may have been anorexic.) Arai showed Hardy around Tokyo, and Hardy became familiar with the labyrinthine Japanese subway system. He even befriended a group of young ladies whom he calls “extreme tanners.” The women were young, attractive, extravagantly dressed, and had darker skin than Hardy. They recognized him, and one of them addressed him in English. “How do y’all get the money to buy all this shit?” Hungry Charles asked the girl. “We have—how do you Americans say?—sugar daddies,” the girl answered.