Where For Art Thou, Kobayashi?

If you do nothing else on the Fourth of July, Independence Day, make sure that you at least tune into ESPN around noon EST for the 95th (Yes! 95th!) annual Nathan's Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog-Eating Contest at Coney Island. I swear. But I don't recommend it for most reasons that you'd probably think of.

Watching a bunch of grown men and a few grown women shove dog after dog after dog down their gullet in an attempt to be proclaimed the champion and take possession of the coveted award, the Mustard Yellow Belt. Oh, it's quite a sight. The belt. The eating. The whole deal. Behold!
As a seasoned veteran spectator of this spectacle, I'll give you a crash course primer on the things to pay the most attention to. (Trust me. It's such a disgusting mess at times, you really don't know where to look and your only instinct is to look AWAY! But if you do that, you'll miss some real good eatin'!) Usually, there are really only two names that you need to know. One of those names is Takeru Kobayashi from Japan. Kobayashi came onto the scene in 2001 when the record from the year before was 25 hot dogs in 12 minutes. Kobayashi (pardon the pun) devoured that record by downing FIFTY dogs AND buns in 12 minutes. Why, yes, that's about one dog every 14.4 seconds, that is correct! He uses a technique I've dubbed the "Snap n'Cram" where he snaps the hot dog in half and as that's being crammed into his mouth, he's dunking the bun in water and then sucking that up. It could also be called the "Watch and Vomit", as that's how I feel every year when I view this eating spectacle.

But there might be a problem with Kobayashi competing this year...as in, he might not compete. It seems that the governing body that sanctions these eating competitions, the International Federation of Competitive Eating (of course) has some sort of a contract that these guys have to sign in order to compete. Kobayashi doesn't want to sign the contract because he feels that it will "limit" his choices in eating competitions. The IFOCE claims that they always have to sign the contract and he's never had a problem with it before. They also liken his not signing to a quarterback wanting to play in the Super Bowl, but not join the NFL. That's a pretty good analogy. I don't know if it's accurate, but it's still pretty darn good. Now, they had the weigh-in yesterday and Kobayashi wasn't there. (I have no idea why they're weighing these folks. It's not like they're separated into weigh categories. They have one category. The Gluttonous. That's it. No need for weighing. But if it makes them feel better, then have at it, I guess.) But I'm still holding out hope that he will be there. You should hold out hope, too. It can't hurt.

So if he's there, he's the first guy you're going to want to pay attention to. (With any luck, there will be a shot of him lifting up his shirt at some point. You wouldn't know it to look at the guy, as he looks a bit scrawny, but he is incredibly muscular. Six pack abs and all! He puts The Situation to shame. Behold!)

Then there's reigning champion Joey Chestnut who hails from practically right down the road from my walled compound here in San Jose, CA (otherwise known as "The Valley"). If Kobayashi's technique is the "Snap n'Cram" Joey's technique is "The Cram n'Jump". And it's executed just like it sounds. He crams the hot dog and bun into his mouth and then kind of jumps up and down a little bit. It's sort of like how you shake a bottle of ketchup when the ketchup is all stuck in the neck, only it's in reverse and it's with a hell of a lot of hot dogs. Joey first beat Kobayashi in 2007 by eating an absolutely sickening 66 hot dogs and buns in 12 minutes. If you think that's amazing, in 2008, after someone discovered some handwritten notes dating back to 1918 that had to contest as being for only 10 minutes, the International Federation OF Competitive Eating (I swear) wanted to be true to the roots of the contest and shortened the time by two minutes. So what happened? Joey and Kobayashi tied at 59 hot dogs and buns each and they had to go to a five dog eat off. Whoever could eat the five dogs the fastest wins.

While 5 hot dogs might not sound like much, you have to keep in mind that at this point, these guys just ATE 59 hot dogs. And they've stopped eating for at least five minutes before the dog-off starts. By then, I'm thinking that the chances for a, um, a reversal of fortune, shall we say, are more and more likely. I can't imagine you'd even want to look at another hot dog again for the rest of your life, let alone try and shove five more in your food hole. By the way, an eight pack of Nathan's dogs weighs 1 pound. Thus, not figuring in the weight of the buns, 64 hot dogs would weigh eight pounds! Add the buns and the water and you're easily cramming close to ten extra pounds INTO your body in ten minutes. That's a pound a minute for you folks out there too busy trying not to vomit to do the math. Gross.

So those are your two main players. But wait. There's more! You can't have an event such as this without someone calling the shots. You need an announcer. No, you need a color commentary guy. No, you need a guy with a love for literature. No, you need a wordsmith of the ages. A man who can take individual words and phrases and put them all in a proverbial hat, mix them up, pull them out and match 'em up as if they were Garanimals to construct and form the most utterly amazing sentences in the English language that you will ever hear in your entire life. You need George Shea.

George Shea is a national treasure. The man is brilliant. George Shea is the co-founder, along with his brother Richard, of the IFOCE and they both make the rounds on the competitive eating circuit announcing various events each year. And while I can't vouch for Richard's talents (and I have no reason to doubt that they're any less than formidable), I can vouch for George's skills and they are phenomenal. It's a combination between his love for language and love for watching and orchestrating competitive eating. The words that come out of his mouth are PURE poetry! A few examples from our national treasure, George Shea:

• They say that competitive eating is the battleground upon which God and Lucifer wage war for men's souls. (Um, WHO says that? WHEN do they say that?)
  
  
• For this is a battle of the ages. It's a battle of the titans. That man this is half God and half man and comes to earth only once!
  
  
• We arrive at this moment by the unswerving punctuality of chance! (I don't even know what in the hell that means, but I DO know that it's hilarious!)

• He is eating in an arena of pure emotion! This is about the triumph of the human spirit. It is nothing short of the triumph of the human spirit. As I said.
  
  
• It's like that song by David Bowie. Major Tom. You're enjoying it and then you realize how sad it is. Major Tom's not coming back. He's up in that tin can. He tells his wife he loves her very much! She knoooows. But it's very sad. Major Tom's not coming back. But the belt may be coming back to Brooklyn!
  

Finally. A wordsmith our country can be proud of! So, Sunday. 12 noon EST. ESPN. A bunch of guys and a couple of chicks eating hot dogs really fast with a guy doing beautiful and nutty commentary. It's sure to make you proud to be an American! But if you're still not convinced, there's an added bonus this year! Yes, an added incentive for you to tune in and feel your body awash from head to toe in American pride. According to the folks over there at CNN "As a lead-in to the main event, Major League Eating will hold a "cross-species" eating contest between three competitive eaters and three Asian elephants. Shea described it as the realization of one of his two lifelong dreams, the other being a scenario in which a dozen competitive eaters eat the entire contents of a convenience store."

God bless America! Land of the free! Home of the brave! And the place for eating competitions pitting humans against pachyderms! Two outta three ain't bad!

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Hot Dogs and Asian Elephants to Celebrate the 4th

If you do nothing else tomorrow on the Fourth of July, Independence Day, make sure that you at least tune into ESPN around noon EST for the 94th (Yes! 94!) annual Nathan's Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog-Eating Contest at Coney Island. I swear. But I don't recommend it for most reasons that you'd probably think of.

Watching a bunch of grown men and a few grown women shove dog after dog after dog down their gullet in an attempt to be proclaimed the champion and take possession of the coveted award, the Mustard Yellow Belt. Oh, it's quite a sight. The belt. The eating. The whole deal. Behold!
As a seasoned veteran spectator of this spectacle, I'll give you a crash course primer on the things to pay the most attention to. (Trust me. It's such a disgusting mess at times, you really don't know where to look and your only instinct is to look AWAY! But if you do that, you'll miss some real good eatin'!) There are really only two names that you need to know. There's Takeru Kobayashi from Japan. Kobayashi came onto the scene in 2001 when the record from the year before was 25 hot dogs in 12 minutes. Kobayashi (pardon the pun) devoured that record by downing FIFTY dogs AND buns in 12 minutes. Why, yes, that's about one dog every 14.4 seconds, that is correct! He uses a technique I've dubbed the "Snap n'Cram" where he snaps the hot dog in half and as that's being crammed into his mouth, he's dunking the bun in water and then sucking that up.

He's the first guy you're going to want to pay attention to. (With any luck, there will be a shot of him lifting up his shirt at some point. You wouldn't know it to look at the guy, as he looks a bit scrawny, but he is incredibly muscular. Six pack abs and all! Behold!

Then there's reigning champion Joey Chestnut who hails from practically right down the road from my walled compound here in San Jose, CA (otherwise known as "The Valley"). If Kobayashi's technique is the "Snap n'Cram" Joey's technique is "The Cram n'Jump". And it's executed just like it sounds. He crams the hot dog and bun into his mouth and then kind of jumps up and down a little bit. It's sort of like how you shake a bottle of ketchup when the ketchup is all stuck in the neck, only it's in reverse and it's with a hell of a lot of hot dogs. Joey first beat Kobayashi in 2007 by eating an absolutely sickening 66 hot dogs and buns in 12 minutes. If you think that's amazing, in 2008, after someone discovered some handwritten notes dating back to 1918 that had to contest as being for only 10 minutes, the International Federation OF Competitive Eating (I swear) wanted to be true to the roots of the contest and shortened the time by two minutes. So what happened? Joey and Kobayashi tied at 59 hot dogs and buns each and they had to go to a five dog eat off. Whoever could eat the five dogs the fastest wins.

While 5 hot dogs might not sound like much, you have to keep in mind that at this point, these guys just ATE 59 hot dogs. And they've stopped eating for at least five minutes before the dog-off starts. By then, I'm thinking that the chances for a, um, a reversal of fortune, shall we say, are more and more likely. I can't imagine you'd even want to look at another hot dog again for the rest of your life, let alone try and shove five more in your food hole. By the way, an eight pack of Nathan's dogs weighs 1 pound. Thus, not figuring in the weight of the buns, 64 hot dogs would weigh eight pounds! Add the buns and the water and you're easily cramming close to ten extra pounds INTO your body in ten minutes. That's a pound a minute for you folks out there too busy trying not to vomit to do the math. Gross

So those are your two main players. But wait. There's more! You can't have an event such as this without someone calling the shots. You need an announcer. No, you need a color commentary guy. No, you need a guy with a love for literature. No, you need a wordsmith of the ages. A man who can take individual words and phrases and put them all in a proverbial hat, mix them up, pull them out and match 'em up as if they were Garanimals to construct and form the most utterly amazing sentences in the English language that you will ever hear in your entire life. You need George Shea.

George Shea is a national treasure. The man is brilliant. George Shea is the co-founder, along with his brother Richard, of the IFOCE and they both make the rounds on the competitive eating circuit announcing various events each year. And while I can't vouch for Richard's talents (and I have no reason to doubt that they're any less than formidable), I can vouch for George's skills and they are phenomenal. It's a combination between his love for language and love for watching and orchestrating competitive eating. The words that come out of his mouth are PURE poetry! A few examples from our national treasure, George Shea:

• They say that competitive eating is the battleground upon which God and Lucifer wage war for men's souls. (Um, WHO says that? WHEN do they say that?)
  
  
• For this is a battle of the ages. It's a battle of the titans. That man this is half God and half man and comes to earth only once!
  
  
• We arrive at this moment by the unswerving punctuality of chance! (I don't even know what in the hell that means, but I DO know that it's hilarious!)

• He is eating in an arena of pure emotion! This is about the triumph of the human spirit. It is nothing short of the triumph of the human spirit. As I said.
  
  
• It's like that song by David Bowie. Major Tom. You're enjoying it and then you realize how sad it is. Major Tom's not coming back. He's up in that tin can. He tells his wife he loves her very much she knows. But it's very sad. Major Tom's not coming back. But the belt may be coming back to Brooklyn!
  

Finally. A wordsmith our country can be proud of! So, Saturday. 12 noon EST. ESPN. A bunch of guys and a couple of chicks eating hot dogs really fast with a guy doing beautiful and nutty commentary. It's sure to make you proud to be an American! But if you're still not convinced, there's an added bonus this year! Yes, an added incentive for you to tune in and feel your body awash from head to toe in American pride. According to the folks over there at CNN (who really screwed up the story about the Michael Jackson funeral, so I hope and pray that they got this story right) "As a lead-in to the main event, Major League Eating on Friday will hold a first-of-its-kind "cross-species" eating contest between three competitive eaters and three Asian elephants. Shea described it as the realization of one of his two lifelong dreams, the other being a scenario in which a dozen competitive eaters eat the entire contents of a convenience store."

God bless America! Land of the free! Home of the brave! And the place for eating competitions pitting humans against pachyderms! Two outta three ain't bad!

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George Shea Did Not Disappoint

Well how was that for a Fourth of July hot dog eating contest? It had everything you could want (in an event where grown adults try to cram an un-godly amount of food down their pipe in whatever fashion they choose in a very short amount of time)! It had drama! It had controversy! It had noise and crowds! It had euphemisms and hot dogs! But most importantly, it had George Shea.

George Shea is the co-founder of the International Federation of Competitive Eating (the IFCE), which changed its name recently to Major League Eating (forget the IFCE. Now it's MLE.) The change being due to the "rapid rise" of competitive eating " into the ranks of major American sports." Or, at least, so says the Rocky Mountain News. The man is an orator of competitive eating commentary like no other now or before him (as if there was one, and I really hope there wasn't). He takes phrases and words from here and there and then mixes them all up like they're Garanimals and somehow, by some miracle of the Word Gods, somehow they come out in a beautifully worded, slightly bizarre, somewhat confusing phrase that fits the moment and sets the scene perfectly.

As it turns out, George Shea is no slouch. The man's pretty smart. (He'd have to be to make a career and to make on heck of a living by turning competitive eating into a freaking sport.) At the very least, he's definitely well read. My favorite George Shea utterance has to be, "We arrive at this moment by the unswerving punctuality of chance!" Turns out, that phrase, according to George, is in reference to the works of William Gaddis, in which the phrase appears in every one of his five novels. (Gaddis got it from Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel, published in 1929, as it reads, "Inevitable catharsis by the threads of chaos. Unswerving punctuality of chance. Apexical summation, from the billion deaths of possibility, of things done." Um, OK. I think.) OK, I wasn't even sure who William Gaddis was when I heard George explain that this is where that phrase originated. I'm still not sure who he is, other than an author who wrote very long, very difficult to understand novels that I'm sure George Shea and about five other people really enjoyed. I think that the point I'm trying to make is that George Shea is no idiot. Or something like that.

At the Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest at Coney Island yesterday, defending champion, the holder of the Yellow Mustard Belt, Joey Chestnut, of San Jose,CA, was defending his title against his arch enemy in the hot dog eating world, Takeru Kobayashi, of Japan. And George Shea was there to hold our hand and guide us through the most disgusting, vomitous, gag-inducing ten minutes that you will ever have the extreme displeasure of watching. (Whenever I watch this thing, as soon as it's over, I always feel like I need to take a shower.)

ESPN, for some reason, felt the need to have it's own commentators for this event. WHY they felt the need to do that is beyond me. Have they never listened to George Shea? They must not have. The guys that were doing the ESPN coverage had clearly not done their homework. They seemed to assume that the things that George says were just a bunch of wacky words all thrown together that sounded funny and they figured they could do the same. That is the only explanation for some of the crap that I heard the ESPN guys churn out. Things such as:

• "They attack those hot dogs like Lindsay Lohan attacks a mini bar. It is completely reckless." (Lohan's too busy being a closeted lesbian these days to go after a mini bar, fellas. Try to keep up. May I suggest 'People' or 'Us' magazines?)
  
  
• "These guys are absolute magicians. Look, hybrid Yukon, Drillbit Taylor, bleach alternative. I don't have all the answers. But what I do know is Takeru Kobayashi and Joey Chestnut, they can eat." (Too many references to too many things that don't make sense. You're trying too hard guys. The hilarity must flow.)
  
  
• "There are certainties in sports. Tiger WILL win another Masters. Brady WILL win another Super Bowl. Lance Armstrong will, perhaps, start dating Jennifer Aniston. It's gotta be in the cards, right? And Kobayashi will win another mustard belt." (Note to self: Before rattling off the names of a bunch of sports guys who have won championships as the basis for your analogy, always make sure that they are STILL competing in the sport so you don't have to fall back on who they may or may not date at some point in the future.)


• "If you put all the hot dogs that Kobayashi and Joey Chestnut ate end to end it would be about the equivalent of the 1st and ten marker at an NFL game." (Hmm..so what's that? Oh, I know. TEN yards?! You can't just SAY 'TEN yards'? Morons.)


• "The passion is raw but the hot dogs are cooked." (OK, that one is actually pretty good.)

Thank God that some red blooded American was actually at Coney Island to witness this prime example of classic Americana take place and uploaded the video to that YouTube thing. It is because of that patriot that we are able to hear the great George Shea operate in an arena of pure emotion as he takes us through the competition, bit by bit.

A few of the highlights from George:

• "You can see the human struggle in every compression of the jaw. In every drop of saliva." (If you're wondering how much saliva was actually dropping, trust me. You don't want to know.)
  

• "It is the daughter of Cain versus the son of Abel." (In reference to the iconic Sonya Thomas, aka The Black Widow of competitive eating.)
  
  
• "This is Sosa-McGwire! This is Ali-Frazier! These two warriors! They are warriors! Spartans! Spar-Tans!" (Right. Just like Sosa-McGwire. Only not quite so 'roid-y.)


• "We are approaching the three minute mark. There will be 7 minutes! 7 seas! 7 shores! 7 heavens! 7 days! 7 minutes left in this contest!"
  
  
• "We stand here among the ghosts of the past! We have nothing left but to witness this history!"
  
  
• "Kobayashi is an injured animal. But his skeleton is titanium!" (Huh?)

And my two personal favorite George Shea utterances from Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest at Coney Island, 2008:

• "And Joey Chestnut is at fifty hot dogs. One hot dog for every state in this nation. One hot dog for every way to leave your lover. One hot dog for every hot dog for every hot dog in fifty hot dogs!" (Well, I guess if you're ever thinking of things to compare a certain number of things to and you run out of comparisons, you can always fall back on the thing itself to compare itself to. It worked for George, it can work for you!)
  
  
• "Like a city under seige, I know not which way to turn! I am at a loss. I am like an island whose trees have been snapped by a hurricane and the trees now lie scattered like the broken letters of a long forgotten language. I know not which way to turn!" (Well, you can't argue with that. Mainly because you don't know what in the hell it means.)
  

Below is the video with the George Shea commentary. And while the video isn't much to watch, it's definitely worth listening to.

And in what is sort of seeming like an afterthought that I'm just throwing in, (spoiler alert!) Joey Chestnut successfully defended the Yellow Mustard Belt and won the contest. but he had to do so in OT. Joey and Kobayashi were tied at the end of the regulatory 10 minutes, so they went to a 5-dog eat off and Joey Chestnut easily crushed his opponent, Takeru Kobayashi.

Congratulations, Joey!

And thank you, George Shea!

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