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

by Ryan Nerz

  “This next eater came by foot from Brooklyn, New York. He got his start on the circuit devouring live game over a period of thirty years. Please welcome, the Wolf!”

  I run out and give my liveliest entrance, high-fiving all my fellow eaters. When I get to my spot at the table, I stare at my pack of kid admirers and growl. Interestingly, they seem much more terrified by a bearded man in a fuzzy suit growling than by the Wolf.

  The eater known as “the Wolf” takes his place at the table next to circuit veteran Stu Birdy. Note the intimidating stare-down and salivating tongue. (Courtesy of Kevin Caldwell/Krystal)

  “Research has shown that when clowns and Mickey Mouse mascots reveal their true identity, the resulting trauma can scar children for life,” Dave says. “I apologize in advance if the Wolf has inflicted any psychological damage on the children of Birmingham.”

  Dave explains the rules and does the countdown. I start dunking and eating at a reasonable clip. I’ve only eaten a bagel in the last twelve hours so I’m pretty hungry, but when I look over at the Bottomless Pit, he’s going twice as fast. It is a strange, helpless feeling, like a flat-footed runner trying his hand at the hundred-meter dash. Effort has little to do with it—I’m chewing and swallowing as fast as I can. I’m just not good. This comes as no shock, so I compensate by enjoying it anyway. I do a little Kobayashi shake and let out a little belch. The kids who were just attacking the Wolf are now staring at me. They appear genuinely confused at how slowly I’m eating, after all that hype. I don’t care. I can see that the Bottomless Pit’s got this one, but the Wolf is doing his thing. At the six-minute mark, I roll my head back and howl at the moon.

  I finish with thirteen burgers, another personal best. Later, Dave and I pay the ten bucks for a tour of the Sloss Fright Furnace. As we walk in groups through the maze of tunnels and staircases, goblins pop out of nowhere and ghoulish men with open head wounds grind chain saws against metal, shooting off sparks. I’m not as full as expected, but my stomach is angry and the pain shoots up from there into my chest. My head buzzes and my thoughts come through fuzzy, as if transmitted by a cheap transistor radio. I don’t want to keep walking, but sitting down doesn’t sound much better. When a pale-faced specter suddenly screams into my ear, it is as close as I will ever come to literally having the shit scared out of me.

  NOVEMBER 7, 2004

  I make the seven-hour drive from Fort Myers Beach to Jacksonville, Florida, on no sleep, fueled by coffee, Red Bull, and carrots. At one point, I narrowly avert a snooze-and-drift accident when an urgent honk awakens me at the wheel. Upon my arrival, I put on my lucky Allen Iverson jersey and my lucky BAD ASS hat. While waiting in line to get into the Greater Jacksonville Agricultural Fair, my neck crisping in the hot sun, I see an IFOCE hat. It’s Badlands with Dave Baer, Kobayashi, his girlfriend, and Robert Ikeda. I flag them down. Badlands gives me a hug. I’m flattered when Kobayashi recognizes me, stroking his chin to acknowledge the goatee I’ve grown since last we met.

  We walk in and say hello to the Krystal people—Kitty and Keith, Kevin Caldwell, and Brad Wahl. Brad makes a joke about the Wolf’s unspectacular performance in Birmingham. We check out the stage, which is big, situated next to a 4-H barn, a fried-Twinkies stand, and a giant Ferris wheel. Badlands says he and Kobayashi ate some Krystals the night before and adds that, in training, he put down a Crave Case in six minutes. I say that I could train for a year and I’d never eat more than twenty sliders in eight minutes. Badlands doesn’t buy it. I notice that Kobayashi keeps taking spoonfuls from a bag labeled WHEY PEPTIDES and, thinking that maybe this is his secret training powder, ask him what it’s for. He gestures at his biceps—it’s for building muscle.

  Dave Baer and Brad Wahl start warming up the crowd. Brad asks the crowd when Krystal was founded, and after a long pause, I shout it out: “Nineteen thirty-two!” He wads up a T-shirt and throws a long ball into the crowd. Dave tells the crowd that the number one and number four eaters in the world are here, as well as an unknown rookie known as the Wolf. He calls me up onstage.

  “I understand that you’ve been training very hard, and you have your sights set on taking down the great Kobayashi. How many delicious Krystal burgers do you predict you’ll eat today?”

  The truth is unspectacular, so I go with a lie. “My goal is to eat fifty-two.”

  “Wow. That would be something. Now, I know you competed last week in Birmingham. How many did you eat there?”

  “Well, I ate thirteen there, but I had a debilitating calf injury at the time.”

  “So how is it that you expect to up your numbers?”

  “I’ve been doing a lot of training, and the calf injury’s feeling much better. I ate fifty-two Krystals this week in training.”

  “But that was over the course of a week. You do realize that this is an eight-minute contest?”

  “I do.”

  “Ladies and gentlemen, the Wolf has vowed that, if he loses to Kobayashi today, he will hang his undies on the flagpole and drive back to Birmingham in the nude.”

  The crowd cheers and I step off the stage. Brad Wahl gathers all the eaters to the side of the stage and gives us a pep talk. He tells us to make big entrances to hype up the crowd. A local guy confides that he thinks Kobayashi is beatable. I just nod. He says maybe the intense heat will be a chink in Kobayashi’s armor. I tell him his only shot is if Kobayashi suffers a reversal. “What’s a reversal?” he asks. Dave starts calling out the eaters. When my name is called, I run up the stairs, jump up in the air, and do a fake karate move. When Badlands is called, he gives me a monster belly-bump and looks me in the eye. “Come on, Ryan, let’s do this Brooklyn style.”

  Dave does the countdown and we start putting them down. When I finish my third, Kobayashi’s on fifteen. When Kobayashi hits thirty-six, I’m on six. But it doesn’t bother me a bit. I’m living every amateur gurgitator’s dream—eating alongside Kobayashi. It’s like playing one-on-one with Jordan or eighteen holes with Tiger. I’m just basking in the sun, wearing my BAD ASS hat, eating my free lunch as fast as I can. This is my shining moment, and it’s worth all the training. I let out a wolf howl, smile at the crowd through stuffed cheeks, and keep chewing. I will never forget this day.

  At the six-minute mark, Kobayashi reaches fifty and stops eating. I look at him and am shocked to see that he looks a bit dyspeptic. Is it possible? Will the great Kobayashi blow? Of course not. He shakes it off and holds it down. As Dave does the countdown, I stuff one last Krystal in and it stretches my cheeks to their limit. I finish with fourteen, my season high. If I keep improving at this rate, I’ll be up to twenty-two by the year 2012. When the competition ends, I stick around onstage, not wanting to let the moment go. I get some pictures with Kobayashi and listen to reporters ask Ikeda questions. “Why do you think the fans like competitive eating?” a journalist from Philadelphia asks. “Why don’t you ask them?” he answers without bothering to translate the question to Kobayashi.

  A kid walks up to me, a teenager with tattooed arms and a T-shirt that says DRUG-FREE ALL-STARS. He holds out one of the red trays that just held a stack of competition burgers in one hand, and a Sharpie marker in the other. “Will you sign this?”

  My first competitive-eating autograph! This is huge. I don’t even attempt to hide my excitement. I hand my camera to Dave Baer and tell him to get a snapshot of this, my one shining moment. After a quick identity crisis, I sign “the Wolf” in my best signature script. Underneath it, I write my new motto: EAT LOTS FAST.

  As he walks away, I think about this and realize it’s not really my motto. I can’t eat lots fast. That’s not really where my eating strength lies. Maybe I’m like a super-long-distance man, and I don’t mean minutes, or hours, more like days. I may not be fast, but I’m persistent. Give me twenty pounds of steak and a month, and I’ll show you some destruction. I could be like the good little girl from that Shel Silverstein poem “Melinda Mae,” who ate small, well-chewed bites, exactly like she should, so even thou
gh it took her eighty-nine years to eat a whale, she did it—“because she said she would!”

  Epilogue

  Wing Bowl XIII: The End of the Line

  You can put wings on a pig, but you don’t make it an eagle.

  —William Jefferson Clinton

  FEBRUARY 4, 2005

  It’s 2:30 A.M., and already the Wachovia Center parking lot is packed. A soft blanket of fat snowflakes is drifting down, and it’s actually quite beautiful out. Trunks are open, U-Hauls are packed with kegs, and kids are gathered in circles around bonfires. The crowd is even younger than I thought—there are as many high school sophomores as college freshman. One factor remains constant, though: They’re all wasted. But then I shouldn’t talk shit, because I’m not exactly sober myself.

  Nine of us, four eaters and five civilians, have driven here from New York in a rented Econoline van. Crazy Legs has qualified by eating twenty-five Twinkies in five minutes, and I’ve been invited as part of his entourage. The drive was a highly entertaining testosteronefest. We drank whiskey out of bottles that Crazy Legs brought from his new job at the Penthouse Executive Club and watched plot-driven soft porn from the eighties with titles like “Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-o-Rama” on “Wet” Levi Nayman’s portable DVD player. While talking to Tim “Eater X” Janus in the way back seat, I picked up random tidbits of lewd conversation from the front of the van. “May I take your temperature rectally with my meat thermometer?” someone asked. Good times, but now that the weigh-in at a local bar has ended and the buzz has faded, the frigid weather and fatigue is wearing us down. I’m beginning to wonder if this is another case of the journey being better than the destination.

  The problem is, we’re in foreign territory. Because the Philadelphia Eagles will be playing in the Super Bowl in two days, the parking lot is a sea of green jerseys. Nobody in our crew is wearing Eagles jerseys, so we are regarded with suspicion. I naively expect to hear shouts of “Wing Bowl!” or see signs, anything related to the upcoming competition. But this party has nothing to do with Wing Bowl and everything to do with the Eagles and getting plastered. We hear the Eagles fight song no less than a dozen times in a half-hour. “Fly Eagles fly, on the road to victory…Fight, Eagles fight, score a touchdown one, two, three…”

  The enthusiasm is appreciated, but there is an undercurrent of blind patriotism that’s a bit scary. At one point, Wet Levi and I, feeling indignant that no one is here for the right reason, start our own cheer, “W-I-N-G-S, wings wings wings! W-I-N-G-S, wings wings wings!” But within seconds, we are drowned out by a crooning band of Eagles fans. “Fly, Eagles, fly…”

  We spot a teenage kid sitting on the bed of a truck, staring down with bloodshot eyes at the puddle of puke in front of him. Another pubescent girl walks up to us. When she finds out that Crazy Legs is competing today, she gives him a kiss on the cheek. It’s almost touching, in a somewhat creepy way, the first sign that someone actually cares about Wing Bowl. A truck full of girls drives by, and a mob surrounds them and starts shoving it until it rocks back and forth. “Tip it over!” someone yells. “Tip it over!” An explosion rings out somewhere in a distant section of the parking lot, and people cheer and run toward it like a herd of lobotomized mules.

  Crazy Legs and his merry band of Smurfs mentally prepare themselves for the onslaught while waiting backstage in the bowels of the Wachovia Center.

  Crazy Legs’s roommate, Johnny C, is videotaping the festivities. He walks up to a girl who looks no older than fifteen and asks her a reporterly question, “What does Wing Bowl mean to you?”

  “Wing Bowl is like the biggest event…” She thinks for a second. “…ever.”

  A guy walks up behind her, lifts up his shirt and shows off his nipple. “Show us your tits!” he yells. A kid with a doughy face wearing a Super Bowl T-shirt pushes past them both, in search of some camera time. “I’ve been to five Wing Bowls,” he says proudly to the camera. “Since my freshman year in high school, I’ve missed one year. One fucking year! Wing Bowl means everything to me. It’s all about the girls, titties, and drinking.”

  “Oh yeah?” says Crazy Legs. “You see a lot of titties out here, in weather like this?”

  The kid, who looks like he may someday compete in Wing Bowl himself, thinks about this. “I’ve seen titties here, but not as many as you’d think,” he says thoughtfully. “All I’m sayin’ is that we should see more titties.” On cue, another kid with glazed-over eyes walks up and knocks over the kid’s beer. “You just knocked over my fucking beer, Chris!” the pudgy kid says, pushing the intruder away. “I’m on fuckin’ camera! You can’t be doin’ that shit on camera!”

  Once inside the Wachovia Center, we wait an interminable two hours in the bowels of the arena before our grand entrance into the stadium. We are all wearing blue fuzzy hats and T-shirts designed by Crazy Legs that say BIG NATE APPAREL: NON-ACTIVE WEAR FOR THE NON-ACTIVE. Crazy Legs is wearing a powder blue jacket with matching shorts. We look like an exhausted tribe of Smurfs.

  A parade of eaters walk by, flanked by curvy female flesh. I snap pictures. Obi Wing Kenobi, a Villanova physics student who qualified by eating eight live Madagascar roaches, comes by with his crew of Jedis. Hank the Tank rolls by in his tank, and another guy is thrashing about in a wire cage like an animal. I’m disappointed to see that Wingo Starr, a wing-eating version of the Beatles drummer, isn’t competing this year. Just before our turn comes around, Crazy Legs is appointed two near-naked Wingettes in cowboy hats as arm candy. Before we exit the tunnel into the arena, we do a final hands-in. “Eat all you can on three,” Crazy Legs says. “One two three…EAT ALL YOU CAN!”

  When Crazy Legs is introduced, the crowd goes silent. They look rapaciously at the Wingettes and then contemptuously at us. Then the downpour begins. Some of the thrown drinks come from high enough up that you can spot them in time to bat them away. I watch helplessly as the Wingette directly in front of me gets pelted in the head with what looks like a Slurpee. As we turn the corner, I exchange the middle finger with a couple of seething fans in Donovan McNabb jerseys. Just as we are about to finish up, Crazy Legs’s buddy Mike Sandwich leaves our delegation, runs over, and hurls himself at the Plexiglas.

  On the other side of the glass, a bald, bearded man in a black leather trenchcoat takes this as a personal affront. People around him are laughing, but not this guy. He pounds his fist against the glass, his veins visible on a reddened forehead, then he flips Sandwich the double bird. As security pulls Sandwich away, the guy pulls up his pants and tries to compose himself, only to start bugging out again like a rabid dog.

  Still yet, our reception is mild in comparison to Sonya Thomas’s. The defending champ rides out on a float with a black spider web, waving an Eagles flag. The crowd starts chanting, “U-S-A! U-S-A!” and you can see it coming a mile away. They pelt her so mercilessly with drinks that it knocks her off the float. Security steps in to pull her away, but they keep hurling drinks and racial slurs. The guy behind me grabs my blue fuzzy hat and throws it behind him, laughing diabolically. The mood has shifted gears toward outright aggression and I can’t help but think to myself: Is this fun?

  Waiting patiently for the results of the second round and still angry that Badlands has been disqualified for a controversial upchuck, I feel like an old codger who won’t stop talking about how the sport was better in the good old days. Out of twenty thousand people in this arena, I sense that I am one of a few hundred who is actually into the eating contest. Why is that? Have I lost all perspective, or is this actually a sport worth watching? It occurs to me that, though I’ve got a decent capacity for ogling tits and ass, I’ve actually seen enough for one morning. So then, who’s crazier—me, or all these drunk high school kids leering at the strippers onstage?

  The moment of silence for Rufino “Chili Dog” Cachola, a perennial Wing Bowl contestant who passed away a month before the competition at the age of thirty-six, does little to improve my darkening mood. Angelo Cataldi brings Ch
ili Dog’s family up on stage and the moment is all the more somber in contrast to the party atmosphere. And then, just as I’m convinced things can only get better, they don’t. The final one-on-one two-minute battle is between El Wingador and Sonya Thomas. Wingador wins by one wing, despite the fact that Sonya appears to be eating much faster. I’m pissed. The Wing Bowl method of counting consumption, which is not sanctioned by the IFOCE, involves arbitrary rulings of whether or not the wing has been “completely cleaned of meat.” I feel there’s a solid chance the competition is rigged, and I’m doubly pissed that it’s rigged in a way that reinforces the dominance of both white men and the city of Philadelphia. Sickened, and in need of a hot shower, I forego an afternoon of more boozing at a local strip club and catch a ride back to Brooklyn.

  When I first got involved with the circuit, I thought that Wing Bowl was the end-all, be-all of competitive eating. Sure, the Nathan’s contest was more visible, but it wasn’t held in a stadium, with over twenty thousand fans watching, and with a car offered as the prize. Wing Bowl seemed to me a modern American version of ancient Rome—flesh and gluttony and gladiators in a huge coliseum, all for the entertainment of the commonfolk. I was right, actually, but not necessarily in a good way.

  But now a year has passed since that sobering ride home from Philly, and the disillusionment with the competitive eating circuit that I felt on that day has disappeared. I now understand that Wing Bowl is not competitive eating; Wing Bowl is just Wing Bowl. It’s a promotional event started by a couple of radio deejays that took on a life of its own and turned into an annual large-scale carnival act. Even Angelo Cataldi, one of Wing Bowl’s founders, admitted to me that “it has outgrown us.” To his credit, certain eaters have reviewed the tape and determined that perhaps Wingador’s win was legit.