The following is excerpted from Horsemen of the Esophagus by Jason Fagone, and takes place at Coney Island on July 4th, 2001 when then-unknown Takeru Kobayashi first entered The Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog-Eating Contest. Reigning champion Kazutoyo "The Rabbit" Arai had set a record in '00 with 25 1/8 hot dogs and buns.
The Fifty-Dog Day
* In eating circles, a veteran is someone who has been competing since 2000.
Lerman, calling upon his years of experience, was able to focus and continue eating, but most of the other eaters weren’t so cool-headed. Perhaps the next eater to notice was Steve “the Appetite” Addicks, a locomotive mechanic from Baltimore. Addicks was stationed directly to Koby’s left. In photos from that day, Addicks was pictured with his mouth open, spilling half-chewed dog meat, head cranked toward Kobayashi with a look of pure confusion. Koby was eating his hot dogs with an inhuman ease. While the Rabbit kept the dog and bun together as an intact unit, dunking the whole thing and stuffing it, Koby was separating the dog from the bun. What’s more, he was breaking each dog in half, then eating both halves at the same time, after which he dunked and ate the bun. Koby’s judge was Gersh Kuntzman, a New York Post scribe and the original competitive-eating beat reporter. Gersh and other reporters would later dub Koby’s eating style “the Solomon Method.”
“I was in awe,” says Steve Addicks. “It was amazing. I was standing next to something that—it’s like, ah, I don’t know—it was almost a religious experience, you know? Something that I was so close to see, that very few people will ever be able to witness, as far as the magnitude of what it meant to me as an eater. It was just like”—he makes a whooshing sound—“whoa. . . I’m sitting there watching a miracle.”
It didn’t take long for recognition to filter down the table in both directions, sped by the increasingly panicked statements of head judge Mike Devito, who kept looking imploringly at judge Gersh Kuntzman, who was squatting in front of the table with a pack of numbers printed on yellow sheets of paper. His numbers went to thirty. The Bunnettes’ flippable cards only went to twenty-five. The yellow sheets were just in case. When he was handed the pack earlier that day, he thought it was a joke; you’d never need that many. Now, as Devito looked to Gersh for verification—was this for real?—Gersh gave him the thumbs-up, and worried that he would run out ofnumbers.
After three minutes and twenty-four seconds, Koby had finished his twenty-second hot dog.
“Oh my God, ladies and gentlemen,” said George Shea, “twenty-two hot dogs and buns!”
Some perspective: the key benchmark of greatness in competitive eating, akin to rolling a 300 game in bowling or scoring under par in golf, is to eat 20 hot dogs in 12 minutes. This is called “doing the deuce.” By the time an eater has “done the deuce,” he has consumed 4.4 pounds of solid food and perhaps 2 pounds of water; he has eaten 6,180 calories, 403 grams of fat, and almost 14 grams of sodium. By the time an eater has “done the deuce,” he is ready to lie down someplace air-conditioned, close to a toilet. But Koby, already at twenty-two, wasn’t flagging. The Rabbit was in a distant second with fourteen hot dogs, and the rest ofthe eaters were in single digits.
“We need more hot dogs over here!”
“Ladies and gentlemen,” said Shea, “Kobayashi, Takeru Kobayashi of Japan, has broken the American record—”
“—and the world record,” interrupted someone else—
“—in under five minutes in this contest.”
On the right end of the table, Coondog was well on his way to 20 hot dogs. He thought he was doing great. He thought all the cheering was for him. Then his counter told him, “The little Japanese kid just finished twenty-seven.”
“No f***in’ way,” said Coondog.
“Way,” said the counter.
Coondog looked out into the audience and found Adam, his son. Adam was waving his hands wildly, gesturing for Coondog to hurry up. His eyes were wide. Coondog finally looked over at Koby, watched him for a few seconds, threw one of his hot dogs into the crowd, and put down his buns. So did Steve Addicks. “Gentleman” Joe Menchetti took off his shirt and executed what he would later call “a combination throwing in the towel and waving the white flag,” exposing his ample belly. Someone yelled for him to put his shirt back on. The Japanese host screamed:
“KOOOBAYYYAAASHIIIIIII!!!!!!!”
“KOOOBAYYYAAASHIIIIIII!!!!!!!”
“KOOOBAYYYAAASHIIIIIII!!!!!!!”
“Twenty-nine!”
“Twenty-nine hot dogs and buns!”
And on the face of George Shea—this man who could quote Virgil in the original Latin and often worked Shakespeare references into his mono- logues, which had become, through long practice, these great loquacious jets of ballyhoo that he could spray into audiences for twenty minutes at a time without breaking a sweat or dangling a participle—on the face of George Shea, a public man, a carny barker as cynical and wised-up as they come, you could see that the muscles had gone slack. Shea looked at Kobayashi, opened his mouth, and faintly shook his head. The man who invented the modern “sport” of competitive eating had just witnessed its remaking. George Shea, for maybe two seconds, was speechless.
He turned away from Koby and looked into the crowd. “One away,” he said. One away from the magic number.
The Bunnette, having run out of flippable cards, held up a yellow sheet that said thirty.
There was a roar. In the pit, Gersh Kuntzman ran out of numbers. He started furiously writing Koby’s totals on the backs of yellow sheets with a ballpoint pen.
Thirty-four. Thirty-six.
The crowd chanted, “For-ty! For-ty! For-ty!”
Gersh kept scribbling. Forty-six. Forty-seven.
“Forty-seven hot dogs and buns in twelve minutes!”
“KOOOBAYYYAAASHIIIIIII!!!!!!!”
“KOOOBAYYYAAASHIIIIIII!!!!!!!”
“KOOOBAYYYAAASHIIIIIII!!!!!!!”
“Ladies and gentlemen, count down with me if you will! Ten! Nine! Eight! Seven! Six!”
“KOBAYAAAASHIIIIIII!!!!!”
“Five! Four! Three! Two!”
“KOBAYAHSIIIIII!”
“One!”
And on the back of a yellow piece of paper, held high above the head of the victorious Takeru Kobayashi, was a Sharpie’d number representing his final total:
50
“Yo sha!” yelled Koby. (“All right!”)
Buy the book: Horsemen of the Esophagus
Excerpted from Horsemen of the Esophagus by Jason Fagone Copyright © 2007 by Jason Fagone. Excerpted by permission of Three Rivers Press, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
