The wing nuts

A writer eats to win – and lives to tell.

By Duncan Scott Davidson

EATING AS A sport, and gluttony in general, seems to be an American, specifically Ugly American, kind of thing. You know, the whole idea that as a nation we're addicted to our diversions and sensual pleasures; that we're paradoxically food wasters and piggy at the same time. A constant stream of Super Size Me-style news reports features anonymous and enormous dimpled asses surreptitiously filmed as they waddle from the funnel cake to the pork-chop-on-a-stick stands at state fairs: "America's Weight Epidemic!" When I visited the Cu Chi tunnels, in Vietnam, the tour guide thought the reason America didn't win the war was because all US soldiers wanted to do was eat cheeseburgers and drink Tiger beer.

But peek behind the grease-streaked headlines of competitive eating, and you'll find people like Takero "the Tsunami" Kobayashi, a 27-year-old Japanese man, ranked number one in the world through such seemingly incomprehensible gastronomic feats as eating 17.7 pounds of cow brains in 15 minutes, or 53 1/2 Nathan's hot dogs in 12 minutes. In addition to not being American, or particularly ugly, Kobayashi only weighs 132 pounds. Intrigued by the prospect of face-stuffing as a sport, I arrived just before 11 in the morning on a recent Saturday at Knuckles Sports Bar, in North Point, for a buffalo wing-eating contest. Not only was I going to get to interview top American eaters "Cookie" Jarvis and Rich "the Locust" LeFevre, but I would also, by participating, be entering the cloistered world of gurgitators, a word that, if you inspect it closely, is syllabically similar to gladiator but appropriately more guttural.

Actually, I was already semipro: Years before I'd bilked my roommate for $5 by eating a sandwich that consisted of a pork steak and sautéed onions, tomatoes, and mushrooms crammed into half a loaf of hollowed-out French bread. "There is no way in hell you're going to eat all that," he said. He was right: I'd been planning on eating half and saving the rest for later. Not being one to back down from a challenge, however, I told him to lay a fiver on it and we'd see what was what. Now, as I ran out in front of the crowd of dazed onlookers in shirts with the Golden Gate Bridge, wondering why they could no longer hear the 'Bama game, I thrust my fist in the air, stared defiantly at the paramedics, did a couple quick Ali-style shuffle steps and vowed that I was in it to win it.

I sat down in front of a Saran-wrapped aluminum tub of wings – actually, for ease of gurgitation, just the "drumette" part of the wing – and began filling plastic cups with lubricant ... er, water. I don't eat breakfast as a rule, and I'd missed dinner the night before. As the crowd counted down from 10, I tried to block out the idiocy of the whole thing and focus on attaining the meditative state of a competitor. I was, after all, both a BMX- and downhill-mountain-bike racer, and jamming myself with chicken bits was no stupider than hucking myself down the side of mountain on a bicycle.

One! For the first few seconds, it was a relief to get some food in my stomach. I jammed the wings into my mouth and ate around them, corn-on-the-cob style, a technique I'd cribbed from the Locust during my interview with him. They weren't all that hot, either in terms of temperature or spiciness, and sauce-wise, they were nearly dry. I've had many a conversation with my homeboy Ben as to the difference between a hot wing and a buffalo wing, which he claims lies in the fact that a hot wing is spicy to the edge of pain whereas a buffalo wing focuses on tanginess. The Knuckles wings were neither hot wings nor buffalo wings. What they were was as salty as Spam and just deep-fried enough to make my jaw ache like I'd been giving the gift of cunnilingus for hours. Half a minute in, I was decidedly not hungry. A minute and a half in, the rhythm of the bare bones hitting my empty tray was becoming increasingly staccato. Two minutes in, and I was sure the people all the way toward the door could hear me mentally cursing myself.

My goal became to clear one tray. I focused on this. A quarter of the way through, I heard the MC announce that Cookie and the Locust had already moved on to their second. As I heard the last 30 seconds being counted down, I finally saw the greasy bottom of my tray, wingless. I grabbed a drumette or two from the next pan and did the "chipmunk," the famous technique of stuffing one's mouth at the final seconds with food to be swallowed later. Truthfully, though, I no longer thought of the chicken as food in any way. I may has well have been chipmunking away fiberglass insulation like a Conehead. "Never again," I told myself as the buzzer rang and two UC Berkeley math nerds ran about weighing tins of chicken carnage to subtract from the initial, bones-and-all weight of three pounds a tray.

The result? Jarvis and LeFevre tied with 4.92 pounds of chicken meat each. It's no 17 pounds of cow brains, but there's some chewing involved here. (Kobayashi, Cookie tells me later, "doesn't do bones. Soft items only.") Which brought about a sudden-death, one-minute overtime, wherein they tied – again – with about a pound of wing meat each. Which brought on, you guessed it, double sudden-death overtime! Having ingested less than half of what these guys ate in the first 10 minutes, a mere 1.97 pounds, I felt for them. I mean, don't cry for me, Argentina – I felt worse for myself. I'm six feet tall and weigh 200 and change, and stuffing down two pounds of salty, jaw-straining poultry in 10 minutes made me feel pretty miserable. I couldn't see how the $1,500 for first place was worth suffering through a third round.

Competitive eating takes something sensually pleasurable and makes it painful. It's like men who claim they'd love to be porn stars. When you've got 20 guys with cameras and lights around you and someone's telling you to ejaculate on command, well, it might be different. Competitive eating is a sport on par with gang-bang competitions. On Dec. 28, 1999, Sabrina Johnson had sex with 2,000 men. Certainly a more athletic record than eating a tenth of your body weight in chili, but nonetheless, a similar confusion of aesthetics. It's not about enjoying the moment anymore, but about the relief of getting through it, coupled with the pride, verging on hubris, of making your body do something against its better judgment.

"Master, why do you keep hitting yourself in the head?"

"Because it feels so good when I stop."

Just one more wing. One more rice ball, one more cannoli, one more Spam loaf or cow brain.... William Blake said, "The path of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." From my angle, the path of excess leads to the barren salt flats of anhedonia: "the absence of pleasure or the ability to experience it." It's like when your dad catches you smoking and makes you smoke the whole pack. Somewhere after butt number 10 and before vomiting, Marlboro just doesn't seem like flavor country anymore. After taking pleasure to the point of pain, after turning sensuality into a contest, the meaning is changed.

"Everybody eats every day, and we know to stop before we're full," triathlete Chris Coble tells me after the contest. He placed third. "And in this, you're full a minute and a half into it. You push yourself past what's reasonable. It's ingrained in society that we should push past the pain to be our best." Coble makes a crucial point: In sports, we're taught that overcoming pain is honorable. If American gluttony and wastefulness is the red herring issue in competitive eating, the real issue might be admiration of an unhealthy masochism in the name of competition. Perhaps it is this tendency to take pain and soldier ahead in the face of abdominal agony, the possibility of stomach rupture, and the two paramedics in the front row, that makes competitive eating a true sport. (And, based on the same somewhat disturbing criterion, with different rupture risks, the same could be said for gang-bang competitions.)

"But are competitive eaters athletes?" I ask Coble, who himself clearly identifies as an athlete, but based on swimming, running, and bike racing, not speed eating. He pauses, squints into the sunny courtyard outside the window of Knuckles.

"I'd say they're gurgitators."