Every Dog Has His Day

66 hot dogs. 66 hot dogs. 66 FREAKING hot dogs. In 12 minutes. That's 5 and a half dogs, every minute. Approximately a hot dog downed every 11 seconds. That's a lot of hot dogs. Also it requires some sort of unnatural ability to eat that many hot dogs in 12 minutes. Give me 12 days, and I could maybe do it, but after eating 5 hot dogs a day for almost two weeks I probably wouldn't want to see another one for a good year or so. And that's coming from a guy who loves hot dogs. I used to eat hot dogs in the dugout during baseball games. I would tell my coach I needed something because of my diabetes, but really I just wanted a hot dog from the ball park, delicious stuff. But back to the point, Joey Chestnutate consumed 66 hot dogs in 12 minutes to defeat 6-time defending champ Takeru Kobayashi who downed only a meager 63 hot dogs, to bring the Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Championship and the coveted Yellow Mustard Belt, back to the U.S.A.; a very fitting American triumph on the 4th of July. Doesn't it just fill you with a sense of patriotism? . . . And nausea?

I am not about to defend competitive eating as a sport, I'm still trying to decided whether or not the Bible speaks out against it, but there is no doubt in my mind that it takes a special kind of human being to be involved in this sort of thing. And feel free to take the word special to mean whatever you'd like in this context. I am just saying this isn't one of those things where if you practiced for long enough and committed yourself enough to it that you could make it one ESPN one day, the way trick shot pool or darts or poker might be. Normal people cannot under any circumstances eat that much food. I believe I saw a graphic that said between the hot dogs and the buns the winner would be consuming somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000 calories. So basically that'd be the equivalent of eating everything you would normally eat over a 10 day period, in the matter of 12 minutes. This would not end well for you. It also probably wouldn't go well for your carpet or whatever type of flooring was in the room where you tried this.

The absolutely crazy thing about competitive eating is the best eaters in the world, aren't even fat. Kobayashi weighed in at 154 pounds this year after tipping the scales at a ripped 170 last year. And I'm not even kidding about that, Kobayashi is jacked. This year's winner, Joey Chestnut weighs 230 pounds but he's 6'1'' and a construction worker, and he's built like a construction worker. Pretty built guy, not what anyone would consider fat. One of the top 5 or 10 eaters in the world is literally a 100 pound girl. The old school of the big fat champions in eating is apparently over. Which makes it a sad for for my favorite competitive eater Eric "Badlands" Booker whose day job is being a rapper from New York, and whose weight probably rivals the combined weights of the 3 previously mentioned eaters. Badlands is a big dude, but it appears his time to shine in the world of competitive eating is coming to and end. Luckily he's got the rap career and his stable of young rappers to fall back on. Hopefully that stable includes about a 1000 rappers because if Booker is falling back on them, they're probably in danger of becoming pavement pizza. I'm sorry, I had to.

So I guess what I'm really getting at is if your stomach can handle it (it takes almost as much intestinal fortitude to watch the competition as it does to participate in it) you should definitely take in a competitive eating event sometime. While it may not be a sport, and while it may be an unholy exhibition, it really is fascinating stuff that deserves to be checked out sometime.


That's all folks.