We Don’t Want No Stinkin’ Goji Berries

Liam Day was on the Coney Island boardwalk last week to capture all the goofy glory that is Nathan’s International Hot Dog Eating Contest.

There were two great champions competing last weekend, both 7-time winners of their respective events, both considered by many the best of all time in their respective sports.

I’m sure many of you know who one of the champions to whom I refer is: Roger Federer, whose 5-set loss in the Wimbledon finals on Sunday was gut-wrenching for fans of a man who, had he won, would have been the tournament’s oldest champion during the Open era, which dates to 1968.

Just as many of you probably don’t know who the other is, but, for fans of one of the more bizarre competitive series in the world, Joey Chestnut needs no introduction. The 7-time winner of Nathan’s International Hot Dog Eating Contest, held every July 4th at Coney Island, home of the original Nathan’s, is, surely, the greatest consumer of hot dogs this world has ever known, surpassing even the great Takeru Kobayashi, whose reign of six consecutive championships immediately preceded Chestnut’s streak. As impressive as the domination of the Big Four in men’s tennis has been, Monsieurs Federer, Nadal, Djokovic, and Murray have nothing on the two hot dog eaters, who have won every Nathan’s Contest since 2001.

What drama there was on that overcast day last week lay in the anticipation of learning whether the great champion would be dethroned. Now, I have no idea if age works as perniciously on the esophagus as it does on the legs. So I cannot tell you whether a hot dog eater’s prime mirrors that of a tennis player, whether Chestnut faces the same diminution in his hot-dog eating ability, now that he has turned 30, as Federer has endured in his ability to cover the courts he once dominated.

But challenging Chestnut that day was Matt Stonie, a 22-year old up-and-comer from San Jose, which also happens to be Chestnut’s home town. One wonders what’s in the South Bay Area water that it has produced the #1 and #2 ranked hot dog eaters in the world. Are there little leagues for competitive eating strewn across the Valley, kids growing up dreaming of being the next Joey Chestnut? Should we be concerned about a competitive eating bubble?

In all honesty I ask, what is the process by which one becomes a professional competitive eater? It’s essentially the same question I always had about jai alai: what is the career path one follows to grow up and become a jai alai player?

What I also didn’t know, but learned standing on Surf Ave. in a light rain that did nothing to quell the crowd’s enthusiasm, was that there are world rankings for hot dog eating. Turns out there’s a whole competitive eating circuit sanctioned by various organizations, including All Pro Eating, the International Federation of Competitive Eating, and Major League Eating.

I suppose this only makes sense. Otherwise, Nathan’s annual contest would be overrun with your average Kings of Queens who would think nothing of heading south to their neighboring borough for an afternoon to see how many hot dogs they can eat in 10 minutes. There needs to be some criteria for entering.

Every year a series of qualifying events is held in the spring to determine the line up of 16 competitors, who are introduced to the crowd gathered along the Coney Island boardwalk with all of the subtlety of a carnival barker’s pitch. There is an ironic consciousness, right down to the straw boater hat he dons, in George Shea, the contest’s emcee. His is a presentation delivered with a wink and a nod, fit for a borough that, as it’s been hipsterized, has become equally ironized.

The introduction of each competitor comes complete with a list of the protean eating feats he has performed elsewhere: 20 hard boiled eggs in a minute and 24 seconds, 300 oysters. The thought of what these men (and women who compete in the women’s competition) have ingested is enough to make one queazy.

But knowing his audience, Shea peppers his introductions with asides that would be guaranteed to offend any health nut or vegan. “The closest he’s come to a goji berry is cheetos,” Shea said of one competitor. And of another, “He believes processed food is better than something you just dug out of the dirt.” Shea is flanked the whole time by two dancing hot dogs straight out of a Justin Timberlake skit on Saturday Night Live.

Once the competition began, the whole focus turned to Chestnut and Stonie, who for nine of the contest’s ten minutes, went hot dog for hot dog. In fact, with a little more than four minutes left, Stonie held a three-dog advantage and it seemed we were on the verge of witnessing an historic upset. Within 30 seconds, however, Chestnut had closed the gap.

For the next three minutes neither man forged a lead larger than a single dog, but Chestnut’s finishing kick—six dogs in the last minute—was too much for Stonie, who fell off his pace with only two dogs over the same final stretch.

To watch Matt Stonie eat hot dogs is to wonder how he can eat so much without throwing it up. He looks like he weighs all of a buck thirty sopping wet. To offset his small size, Stonie uses his whole body to help him eat. He wiggles and dances as if a snake attempting to swallow an animal too fat for its gullet.

After the awards ceremony, at which Chestnut was presented with the champion’s belt for the eighth time, and he proposed marriage and his proposal was accepted by his girlfriend, the crowd dispersed and the clock on Nathan’s brick facade started counting down all over again to next year’s competition.

Perhaps more than any other event—more than the Super Bowl, more than the Kentucky Derby, more than baseball’s World Series—Nathan’s International Hot Dog Eating Contest is the quintessential American sporting event. It is no coincidence it is held every year on Independence Day.

Shea’s non-stop spiel between the women’s and men’s events contained direct references to this link and the event certainly combines the material gluttony of the United States with the sense of freedom to eat what one wants and how much one wants in equal proportion. It is even more ironic that this event, which celebrates the freedom to eat how one chooses, should be held in a city where Mayor Bloomberg was deadset on proscribing that which he deemed bad for us—including large sodas and trans fats.

There is an obesity crisis in this country and perhaps it is wrong to celebrate overeating at a time when two-thirds of American adults are overweight or obese, and perhaps even morally so when hunger effects so many people both here and abroad, but there is a recognition—conscious or not—in George Shea and the whole loony atmosphere that surrounds this freak show that telling people what they can and cannot eat is hardly the best way to get people to lose weight, no more than telling couples how many babies they can have has served as an effective means to curbing China’s population. We will become a society that simply hides our collective candy bars under our mattresses.

Yes, watching 16 men engorge enough hot dogs to feed a high school gymnasium full of people raises serious questions—both moral and cullinary. But, as every member of the crowd that day recognized, the answers to those questions don’t lie in stripping all of the fun out of our diets. We should have both the freedom to eat what we want and the personal responsibility to moderate what we eat, and, in the meantime, sit back, relax, and enjoy the whole freakin’ goofy spectacle that is Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest.

AP Photo