Getting into Guinness

by Larry Olmsted

  Joining Bibby as one of the most revered and iconic characters in the book’s history is Sridhar Chillal, who let his oft-photographed and freakishly curling fingernails grow unfettered for half a century, the entire existence of the book itself. His five remarkable nails (Chillal grew one hand only, permitting him to pursue a career as a professional photographer) have graced the pages of the book regularly since about 1980, with the longest being his thumbnail at nearly 5' (57"), while each of the other nails exceed a yard. While Chillal’s lifelong dedication to a task begun at age fourteen has ensconced the senior citizen in the highest tier of Guinness lore, this “fame” has come at a high price and with little reward. He told England’s Guardian newspaper that the anguish of keeping his record nails intact has greatly affected his life, as he lives in constant fear of cars, children, and even gusts of wind (“I have so much tension as a result of the worry that my nails are going to break, that with every heartbeat I’m tense”). The physical anguish is even worse, from problems sleeping (“I can’t move, can’t turn sides, can’t pull over the covers”) to pain and injuries from the weight of his nails, which have not only ruined his left hand, now permanently disfigured, but also cause chronic pain in his wrist, elbow, and shoulder. The appendages have even destroyed nerves, leaving him deaf in one ear. This may seem an extreme price to pay for carnival sideshow fingernails, even ones that hold a longtime world record, but not to Chillal, who in 2000 dismissed his injuries with the simple explanation, “What does man not do for fame? He jumps from boats, dives from planes and does stunts on motorcycles. This is also done for fame. Were I to have another life I would do it again.”

  While Chillal accepts his injuries as part of the price for fame, upon reaching his sixties, the physical ramifications of his nails became harder to bear. In 2000, when Chillal realized he could not go on forever, he did what any self-respecting owner of valuable objects would do: he put them up for sale on the Internet, offering to cut off and sell all five nails, with an asking price of nearly a quarter of a million dollars. To date, there appears to have been no takers. Interestingly, if Chillal succeeds, he may move into uncharted Guinness territory. Even a modest six-figure payday probably does not compensate for a lifetime of discomfort and irreversible damage, but if it works, at least he will get some substantial reward besides intangible “glory.” Wealth is perhaps the one great feat that consistently evades Guinness World Record holders.

  While there are certainly exceptions, the typical Guinness record breaker or setter is not pursuing the limits of human achievement but is in search of the perceived celebrity a verified record brings. The irony of this motivation is that the “fame,” the “celebrity,” the “immortality,” record holders discuss is virtually nonexistent. No one, not even Jackie Bibby, Sridhar Chillal, or Ashrita Furman, the most famous record holders, has ever been able to parlay Guinness records, into riches or even a career. A one-hit wonder pop band that is quickly forgotten may still experience, at least for a little while, the rewards of exotic sports cars, luxury hotels, and eager groupies, but the vast majority of record holders take away nothing more than a certificate and bragging rights. Only a tiny fraction of all official records get printed in the annual book. You can break half a dozen records and still never be able to point to your name on a library shelf. The lucky ones that make the cut can add to their haul a half-inch entry among thousands of others in what is basically a children’s book—a children’s book with a one-year shelf life. In the rarest cases, record holders also take home a video clip of a television appearance. Yet the title of world record holder is more than enough motivation for most. Again, I ask why?

  Jake Halpern is the author of Fame Junkies, a comprehensive look at the importance of fame in our society. The book attempts to answer the questions of why so many people seem to worship celebrity, and why are people so attracted to the limelight and the possibility of obtaining fame for themselves? To Halpern, the Guinness World Records is a near-perfect vehicle for the fame obsessed and fame challenged, because it is so democratic and its records are more attainable than other kinds of fame. “I think the idea of setting records is one of the oldest forms of pursuing fame. Think about the earliest Greek Olympics where they kept detailed records, the first person to sail around the world, whatever it was. I guess that’s all history really is, in some ways, is the setting of these records.

  There’s a real neurological rush that comes from getting attention from other people, a high like any other high, not unlike hitting a jackpot when you gamble or eating chocolate or watching pornography. All these things activate something in the reward/aversion system. Getting attention has probably always had this affect of making people feel good, but in a society like the United States, where there is such a premium put on individual accomplishment, and the rugged individual and laying claim to everything you possibly can, whether you are a robber baron or movie star, I think the idea of getting that recognition and attention is especially attractive. But the reality is that most people reach some point in their life when they say “I’m not attractive or talented enough to be a movie star and I’m not wealthy enough or have enough business savvy to become Andrew Carnegie, but I could stand on someone’s front porch and bounce a Ping-Pong ball 5,000 times. It may not be winning an Oscar but it’s something and it will immortalize me. I will get some momentary recognition and that will feel good. I’ll probably be written up in the local paper, I might even get on TV, and people who don’t pay attention to me at work will take notice of me for a day, the pretty secretary who never looks twice at me might ask me how I did it.”

  Joachim Suresh, the closest thing there is to a rival of Ashrita Furman and the holder of about thirty records (many of them quite impressive physically), was drawn to the book directly as a vehicle for the kind of Hollywood fame Halpern describes. Born in war-torn Sri Lanka, Suresh emigrated to Canada in 2003 and began a charity to raise awareness about the plight of suffering children, something that had been a goal of his for more than a decade. Back in Sri Lanka, his original plan was to go into show business and use his ensuing fame to promote his cause. As he recalled, “I started thinking I could be Michael Jackson, a singer, a Hollywood star.” But after someone gave him a copy of Guinness World Records, he went for Plan B. “I turned all the pages. I see all the stars are there. This is my goal. I have to be number one in the world.”

  “Everybody in their humdrum ordinary lives aspires to a little bit of immortality. A tiny moment of greatness in all of our routine, everyday lives of working three jobs and scrambling for health insurance. The opportunity the book of records affords each person, even in the most obscure and esoteric ways, is to have their names included with all the other people in the world who have done the greatest, the most, the best,” said Ben Sherwood, former executive producer of Good Morning America and author of the novel The Man Who Ate the 747.

  I’ve met enough record holders to understand this, and not to get too existential about it, but in a world where most people are living lives of quiet desperation, it’s something fun to talk about it, and it’s often something fun to do. As you drive across America, as I have done several times in my work as a journalist, you pass through little towns where you will see a sign in the street that says “Home of so and so, Minnesota Twins right fielder 1972.” I think that across this great country and across the world people like to put up little signs in their towns or on their streets or on their lawns that say “Home of” and then I’d ask you to fill in the blank, maybe someone who is the fastest yo-yoer in the world. It’s a corollary to the little bit of immortality that you can be a local celebrity. All the celebrities don’t have to be in Hollywood. You can be at your local bar and they can say, “Oh yeah, we’ve got the guy who did X,” and you can have your picture over the Pabst Blue Ribbon tap and you can be that guy.

  In my case, Sherwood is right. It was cool to be a Top 10 Play of the Day on ESPN’s SportsCenter, cool to be featured in my local pape
r, and even though I am no longer in current circulation, relegated to the 90 percent of records found only in the book’s private database, it is still cool to be a record holder and to have twice been in “The Book.” But why? No one except people I tell about it remembers. No financial reward, lasting recognition, sponsorship, or career advancement came of it. I didn’t even get a free DVD of the show. The fact that I was on SportsCenter and other television shows and in print should not matter, but it does, for the same reason why my first Guinness World Records certificate is ensconced in an ornate gold-colored custom frame, behind matting and conservation glass, packaged with the same care and expense as my college diplomas. Perhaps Guinness records matter for the same reason why so many other framed diplomas hang on walls around the world. Finishing college is an accomplishment that most people are proud of, but in and of itself means little. Even in the cases of the most impressive graduates, the diploma itself does not convey its value. Why then do we ostentatiously put them on our walls for ourselves and others to see? Does being proud of holding a world record in something, anything, differ that much from holding a degree in economics, mathematics, or sociology from an Ivy League school?

  In fact, even Ivy League colleges are not immune to the allure recognition by the book brings. In Hanover, New Hampshire, at Dartmouth College’s Rauner Library, home to its special collections and most valuable historical objects, visitors can view a pair of socks that once belonged to esteemed alumnus Daniel Webster, a collection of historic college canes, and an empty plastic bag. A plastic bag? Dartmouth cannot part with it, because it once held a handful of snow from the world’s largest snowman, constructed by students to a height of 47'6" and recognized by The Guinness Book of World Records in 1988. The snow has since melted, along with the record, and the vial inside the plastic bag that once contained the historic water eventually leaked. All that remains of the college’s prized relic is the lingering fame of a broken record that lives on, at least in the bag’s label. This may be a case of taking what Newsweek dubbed “Guinnessitis” a bit too far. The pessimist sees the glass as half empty, while the optimist sees it as half full, but anybody can see that Dartmouth is cataloguing and storing a plastic bag that is fully empty, and tied only tenuously to a record that does not even stand.

  In Sports Illustrated’s landmark 1979 magazine feature article on the book, in which the term “Guinnessport” was coined, one record holder interviewed was Arron Marshall. A fisherman from Western Australia, Marshall stood under a shower in a shopping mall for 224 hours to claim the longest showering record. As Sports Illustrated described, “Marshall’s feet ballooned and his body became as wrinkled as a prune, but he said, ‘I’ll be yahooing around the countryside when I see my name in the record book.’” Even more direct was Salt Lake City gymnastics instructor Rick Murphy, who briefly held the record for covering fifty yards walking in a handstand position, getting into just one volume, the 1975 edition, before his record was eclipsed. That one year was apparently enough, since Murphy stated, “deep down, I was proud to make that book. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done.” He is not alone. Numerous record breakers, even those whose tenure was so short they never got into the book itself but hang on to their certificates, describe the feats as the greatest moment of their lives.

  “Why do people break Guinness World Records? There’s something about being a Guinness World Record holder which will separate you from the rest of your friends, or the population,” claimed company spokesman Stuart Claxton in a promotion for an episode of a Guinness World Records–based television show. Without their accomplishments, no matter how bizarre, record holders would be just like everyone else, since despite the popularity of the book and the broadening of the way in which records can be achieved, the vast majority of people will still never set or break one, never know how it feels to be a real live Guinness World Record holder. The Times of London even coined a term for this pitiful state of affairs most of us live in: “Guinless.”

  “For the last decade I have been heavily involved in covering outdoor sports news, and record breaking is a huge part of that. Over the past seven to eight years I have probably averaged an hour a day online reading about all these attempts,” said columnist Jason Daley. “If you’re not first you’re last, there’s that perception that life is all about high achievement and if people can do something like that, even if it’s as seemingly pointless as pogo sticking for forty-eight hours, we as a society are fascinated with that. But it’s not like they’re superheroes. They often just have compulsions we can’t understand.”

  Take Lucky Diamond Rich. The most tattooed person alive, Rich chose a hard way to get into the book, spending more than 1,000 hours under the needle, just for his first coat, tattooing his entire body jet black, including eyelids, gums, and genitals. The most painful part of the inking process was the inside of his ears. Then, after all the scabs healed, he started over, covering his body with intricate white lines and designs in assorted colors. It was this attention to detail that let Rich slip into the book past rival Tom “Leopard Man” Leppard, who even filed his teeth into fangs to match his orange body covered with black spots, but only managed to ink 99 percent of his skin. His reward? Rich now has a gimmick none of his fellow street performers in London’s Covent Garden can claim. “For me it was a dream come true. I remember being a little kid and thinking that all I want to do is be in the Guinness World Records book for something,” Rich said in a newspaper interview. “Guinness World Records is a celebration of, in a sense, a form of mental illness. It is obsessive-compulsive behavior, it is addiction. People have to have a certain personality or a certain type of mental trait to be in that book and it celebrates that.”

  Jez Edwards, an acclaimed host of children’s television and radio programs in Britain, was the last presenter on Record Breakers, hosting the program for its final four years on BBC, 1997–2001. Dealing with record breakers and would-be record breakers day in and day out, he garnered an enormous respect for the practice and effort they put into even the zaniest feats, but he also saw the appeal of simply being in the book—or in his own case, for being associated with the book. “You can have a world record in anything. My advice if you want to get in the book is to look through it and try something no one’s done, like hanging upside down. Then you will have something that people all around the world will recognize,” and as if to clarify this point, Edwards adds the obvious: “There aren’t many people who haven’t heard of the book. The show is still on my bio, and the one thing people look at and say ‘Oh, you did Record Breakers? Brilliant.’”

  For self-proclaimed fame seekers like Jackie Bibby, television is the brass ring of world-record setting. Bibby told me that one of the highlights of his entire life was getting recognized by a visiting English tourist on the observation deck of the Empire State Building in New York the day after he was a guest on a talk show there. It did not matter that the tourist was an anonymous stranger; what mattered was the recognition of himself and his achievements. “I like the attention,” says Bibby. “I’m an egomaniac with an inferiority complex. I love being noticed and recognized. People know me as the Texas Snakeman, that’s my handle. I’m pretty well known and I got a little notoriety from the Guinness thing. You get recognized. I mean I got recognized on top of the Empire State Building by a guy from England last time I was in New York. It’s from being on TV. I’ve been on TV almost sixty times. I get calls from broadcasters and writers and people like you several times a week, year round. I’ve done two or three radio interviews this week and got probably two or three e-mails about interviews. This goes on all the time. I love it and enjoy talking about it.”

  It has been this way for Bibby since he won his first rattlesnake roundup, one sponsored by the Brownwood Texas Jaycees, fresh out of high school four decades ago. “I won two trophies and thirty dollars and got my name in the paper. Thirty-nine years later I hold several world records and have been all around the world and was featured in
magazines like Playboy, Newsweek, Time, Parade, and Texas magazine, so I guess it’s been pretty good for an old country boy.”

  Bibby loves to travel and uses his fame to leverage free trips around the world; he will go on virtually any television show or participate in any live performance that will pay his way. He has been flown all around the United States, most frequently to New York and Los Angeles, and has traveled (at the expense of others) to Europe nine times to set snake handling records or do demonstrations. When I spoke to him he was in the midst of heated negotiations to perform a snake stunt in Hong Kong. “The money is never much, I don’t make anything. If I break even and get the trips, that’s the main thing. That and the prestige and the press.” It seems that if anyone could cash in on Guinness World Record fame it would be Bibby, a tireless self-promoter, who, to his credit, undertakes astonishing—and dangerous—stunts with poisonous snakes. Yet he makes it clear that he is still financially dependent on his full-time day job, and is supplemented by nonrecord-related snake wrangling and sales. Ironically, he has worked in the field of chemical dependency for eighteen years and runs the Dublin Outreach Center in Dublin, Texas, a boardinghouse for recovering addicts. But Bibby clearly would rather talk about records than rehabilitation, quickly reminding me that in addition to all his other accolades and appearances, “I’m a Trivial Pursuit question in the twentieth-century edition of Trivial Pursuit.” According to Fame Junkies author Jake Halpern’s hypothesis, serial record setters like Bibby, Furman, and others could perhaps use some professional help with addictive disorders themselves.