So I finished fourth. Tied with Crazy Legs.
It was like a kung-fu movie in which the hero is ambushed by a horde of combatants. I stood earnestly, taking stock of the long odds I was up against. Looking up at me, dressed only with malice and a splash of pepper sauce, was a tray of raw oysters, a scouting party of 12, with tray after tray still waiting in the wings.
I squeezed a three-tong spear in each hand, ready for action. I crouched slightly. My mouth watered. Crowd noise faded.
And when the starter gave the signal, I pounced, jabbing at one oyster after another, alternating right hand and left, and tossing them into my maw. They didn’t know what hit them, since they barely flinched, as I kept going like a mad one-man assembly line, five oysters, six oysters, seven, eight, my jaw scissoring up and down, up and down, and the oysters were all plunging into the abyss, screaming, no doubt, and never to be seen again. Bring on the next round!
“One fork!” called out an official. “You can use only one fork!”
What? There are rules in this death match?
I took a swish of Abita Amber to wash the oysters down, uttered a heavy sigh and glanced toward the competition. Seven minutes and 45 seconds to go.
I was making my professional eating debut at the ACME World Oyster Eating Championships, an event held under the auspices of the International Federation of Competitive Eating. League impresario Richard Shea had invited me to fill out the roster of pros on the basis of my strong showing several months earlier in the World Crawfish Eating Contest’s media division, at which I ran away from the rest of the field and threatened to out-eat the professionals.
The heaving crowd gathered in front of the stage with a mixture of amusement and bemusement, or perhaps even, as some friends later confided, an expectation that they would see some actual heaving. Some fans were there to support their heroes – eating superstars with nicknames like Crazy Legs or the Black Widow or the Rabbit. Others seemed to have arrived by happenstance, stopping to see why the crowd had gathered in the midst of the annual New Orleans Oyster Festival.
I had my own entourage – my wife and my three sons, 5 years old, 3 years old and a mere 7 months. They were ready for what was about to transpire, and so was I, or so I thought.
I had a trial run with a dozen oysters at a top-secret location (my kitchen) several days before, and I had figured I could eat three or four dozen per minute for as long as my stomach could contain them. My two older sons, meanwhile, were there for moral support. They are still learning about what foods they like and dislike, and are enjoying verbalizing their opinions. “We hate oysters,” they said as I slurped down the dozen in less than 30 seconds. “Yuck!” (I’ve been working with them on this, telling them that just because they don’t like something doesn’t mean they have to hate it.)
Competitive eating has been a thing for a very long time, gaining widespread fame in recent years with the annual Nathan’s hot dog battle royal at Coney Island at which world-famous eaters have rewritten the record books on a regular basis. These are names that cause big eaters’ hearts to stir (or stomachs to rumble), men like “Badlands” Booker, Joey “Jaws” Chestnut. And behind this renaissance has been the big league of competitive eating, the IFOCE, led by showman brothers George and Richard Shea.
You need a great nickname to be a great eater, but as I considered the oysters piling up in front of me at the oyster eating contest last month, I figured that would come in due time.
The front-eater at this event figured to be Sonya Thomas, the Black Widow, who has the world record in a vast number of eating disciplines. She has eaten 10 percent of her body weight in cheesecake, please note.
I had studied her style beforehand by watching videos available online. Thomas has an advantage of many other eaters – at 5 feet, 2 inches, she’s relatively short, effectively reducing the distance her food has to travel from plate to mouth. This may seem like a trivial matter, but when you are trying to stuff as much food as possible into your stomach in a short amount of time, it adds up.
But I was aware of this advantage, and when I practice eating for speed, which is something I do now, I bend the knees like the ergonomics people at work suggest and turn my head down so it’s just inches away from the food. It’s not finishing school stuff, sure.
I’m also from New Orleans. I live in a city where eating large is the stuff of legend. Thomas is from Virginia, competitor Crazy Legs Conti is a New Yorker who does not pronounce his name like the French Quarter street, and Adrian “the Rabbit” Morgan is from upriver, Baton Rouge. I felt it was my destiny to bring the oyster eating championship to the city where it belongs.
Please resist the urge to say I bit off more than I could chew.
In the thick of the competition, as it were, my perception grew a bit hazy as I focused on the task at hand, so I don’t have the precise details of my stumble. But at some point fairly early on, perhaps two or three minutes in, I heard Richard Shea, who serves as play-by-play man as well as emcee, call out the running totals for each eater. “James Karst, eight dozen,” he said. “Sonya Thomas, 20 dozen.”
I am not a quitter. But at that point it was clear I was not going to win. I didn’t stop – to the contrary, I plowed through another seven dozen. But it was no longer a furious sprint. I could sense that I was nearing capacity anyway. Live to eat another day.
So I finished fourth. Tied with Crazy Legs. Fifteen dozen oysters in 8 minutes, enough to get my name on the wall at the Acme Oyster House on a regular day. A respectable finish, but out of the money. And note that while I ate 180 oysters, the Black Widow had polished off 40 dozen. Three hundred oysters more than me!
In retrospect, it’s ludicrous that I legitimately believed I had a shot at the belt. (Yes, there’s a belt, featuring three giant oysters on the half shell surrounded by a row of miniature Tabasco bottles.) My wife later told me she was actually glad I didn’t win; in her opinion, eating 40 dozen oysters in one (8-minute) sitting is “just gross.” And I am blessed to have the unfailing support of my biggest fans, my sons.
In fact, as we made our way home from the oyster contest, my 3-year-old became a little grumpy. Perhaps he was tired. Perhaps he was hungry. Perhaps a little bit of both. But as we drove from the French Quarter back into Mid-City, he decided to share his feelings out of the blue.
“We hate the Black Widow!” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“We don’t like the Black Widow!”
Comments are closed.