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| Japanese Sputnik | |||||||
| On July 4, Americans again watched a foreign entrant grabbed the hot dog-eating title. Why can’t we compete? | |||||||
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| July 5 — Is this going to finally be America’s Sputnik moment? Technically, that moment should’ve come last year, when Takeru Kobayashi ate 50 hot dogs and buns in 12 minutes at the annual July 4 hot dog-eating contest at Coney Island. Sure, the Japanese had beaten the Americans at their own game many times before, but Kobayashi’s 50 doubled the existing record set just a year before by his countryman Kazatoyo Arai. |
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| IT WAS A
stunning athletic achievement. And then, lightning struck again. This year, on our national holiday, Kobayashi did the impossible. In saunalike conditions, the man they call “The Tsunami” downed 50½ hot dogs and buns to break his own record. |
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The nearest American competitor, Eric “Badlands” Booker, ate a mere
26. When people ask me—and they always ask me—”How does a tiny guy like that eat 13 pounds of hot dogs and buns in 12 minutes?”, I respond with a mixture of awe, surprise, horror and resignation. Kobayashi, I say, is simply the greatest eater in the history of the world. But yesterday, it hit me: The question shouldn’t be, “How does he do it?” but “Why can’t we do it?” In other words, it’s not Kobayashi’s achievement that is so stunning, but America’s failure. I admit, it was probably my own patriotic hubris that blinded me to this for so many years, years when the Japanese—beginning with two-time champ Hirofumi Nakajima, then Arai, and now two-time winner Kobayashi—have consistently carried the Mustard Yellow International Belt back to the land of the rising bun. In my desire to see an American reclaim the title, I just assumed that America was putting up its best competitors to tackle the Japanese invasion. I figured that America was responding to this threat like it responded in 1957, when the Soviets terrified us into action by putting a La-Z-Boy-sized piece of junk into orbit. But this time, we’re not seeing a Sputnik moment. We’re not responding at all. See, in Japan, eating contests are not just the stuff of state fairs, kitsch or public-relations schemes; they’re serious, serious business. In Japan, in fact, some of these eaters turn pro, earning thousands of dollars competing in events that make the Fox network’s “Glutton Bowl,” which aired in February and was, of course, won by Kobayashi, look so outdated that it might just have well have been filmed in black and white. “In Japan, this a professional sport, where top eaters get prize money and appearance fees,” says George Shea, president of the International Federation of Competitive Eating, the sport’s governing body. “At Nathan’s, which is America’s flagship event, you get a year’s supply of hot dogs and possession of the Mustard Yellow belt. And you have to give the belt back.” When I asked Kobayashi about this, he confirmed that his nation makes celebrities out of the big eaters. In fact, he said, he had recently been beaten in an eating contest in Japan where the winner ate 21 pounds of noodles and soup in 15 minutes. When I heard that Kobayashi had been beaten in Japan, it dawned on me: We’re sending weekend duffers out there to compete against Tiger Woods. It’s not that the Japanese eaters are better than us, it’s just that we’re not finding our best eaters. In a country of 270 million people, you’re telling me that we can’t find one person who can eat 51 hot dogs and buns in 12 minutes? |
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Shea—who spends
most of the year running regional qualifiers for the Nathan’s contest, as
well as running other competitive eating events around the world—is
certain that there’s an American eater out there who can beat the Japanese
at what has become their game. But that eater will never reveal himself unless America starts treating eating contests like a sport. “The popularity of competitive eating is rising, but the sport needs to mature—and when I say ‘mature,’ I’m obviously talking about money,” Shea said. “A Japanese eater can make $5,000 for an appearance. With that much money on the line, you develop an entire class of professional eaters who do this for a living.” Case in point: Shea is working out final negotiations for an eating contest at the annual motorcycle rally in Sturgis, S.D. (preliminary reports indicate it will involve eating an entire hog). He’s hopeful that some great eater will emerge, but he knows he’ll just get the same old weekend athlete rather than a gustatory gladiator. “The winner will get a trophy,” Shea said. “With all due respect to the rally, that’s not enough to draw a professional eater all the way out to South Dakota.” So it’s a Catch-22: We need to make competitive eating a professional sport in order to develop a team of world-class eaters, but it can’t become a professional sport because we’ve failed to find those very eaters. I mean, as America’s hot dog glory has faded like an ImClone stock tip, the very foundation of the sport of competitive eating has been undermined. Much as the American Sports Establishment marginalized the globally popular World Cup because our country still doesn’t dominate soccer, that same establishment has seen America fail at competitive eating and has turned away from a sport that is inarguably the purest of sporting endeavors. |
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“They’re gluttons, not athletes,” chimed in Red Sox pitcher John Burkett. “Where’s the athleticism?” added Yankee reliever Mike Stanton. “Just thinking about it makes me want to barf,” said golfer-”athlete” Danielle Ammaccapane in SI’s June 26 issue. All of these so-called professional athletes obviously haven’t been to the Nathan’s contest. Watching a guy eat 50½ hot dogs and buns in 12 minutes ranks up there with the greatest achievements in sports history—and I say that having seen the 1969 Mets, Super Bowl III, the American hockey team’s “Miracle on Ice” at the 1980 Olympics, the Michael Jordan era and even the New York Yankees’ championship runs. But we’re not going to produce an American Kobayashi until we start taking this sport seriously. “He’s out there, somewhere,” Shea said. “Maybe on some farm, hundreds of miles away from the nearest city, occupied with the mundane chores of the agrarian life. Or maybe he’s some kid in the middle of Bed-Stuy or South Central who doesn’t even realize that he has the gift. But I know he’s out there. The trick is to find him.” Gersh Kuntzman is also a columnist for The New York Post. His website is at http://www.gersh.tv/. Full coverage of last year’s contest is at gershkuntzman.homestead.com/files/Dogging_It.htm © 2002 Newsweek, Inc. |
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