Joey "Jaws" Chestnut, at left, and his closest competitors
It was long before high noon, but the sun was blisteringly hot, the smell of cheap beer and vomit was already in the air, and I was watching Olympic gold medalist Greg Louganis as he dove into a fifteen-foot-wide apple pie. I was back at Coney Island, awaiting my very first Fourth of July Hot Dog Eating Contest. The original competition at Nathan’s was supposedly held in 1916, but the annual spectacle as we know it today didn’t really take shape until the 1970s.
Spectacle is really the only way to describe it. Long ago, ESPN decided that hotdog eating alone does not a televised special make, so it is now embellished with trampoline artists, Brooklyn Cyclones cheerleaders, men in hot dog costumes, and pie-diving events while college-aged boys in sequined Uncle Sam hats and Captain America suits look on and yell obscenities at anyone Canadian. And Greg Louganis? Even if he was doing it to raise money for the ASPCA, I really didn’t want to see a sports star from my childhood reduced to wiping globs of caramel and nuts from his eyes. We live in a very strange nation, one in which eating food is not enough; rather it must be gorged upon…or dived into.
“Why are you here?” I asked a middle-aged man standing next to me. (The younger gentleman on the other side of me was too busy opening a can of Coors with his teeth to be bothered with my existential crisis.)
