People like to debate greatness. Greatest boxer of all time, greatest basketball player of all time, golf, tennis, and so on. The same names come up over and over. I think people strangely forget about Kareem (dominated at all levels, 5 rings, 6 MVPs, most professional points ever) and Americans don't care about Formula 1 or Lewis Hamilton (most titles (7), most wins (98), most pole positions (100), most podium finishes (171)). The Federer/Nadal/Djokovic debate carries on but everyone forgets about Rod Laver. Someday I'll remedy that with a post. But not today.
Instead, I'm here to sing the glory of fat men and their gluttony. Joey Chestnut won his 14th Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest on July 4th taking down 76 hot dogs and buns (or "HDB" as the cognoscenti say) in 10 minutes. That's one HDB every 7.89 seconds. Insane.
Even more insane are his statistics. Click on that link and tell me it doesn't make you gag. Here are a few of my favorites:
- 30 8-oz Gyros 10 Minutes
- 12 lbs 8.75 oz Deep Fried Asparagus Spears 10 minutes
- 81 4oz Mutton Sandwiches 10 minutes
- 165 Pierogi 8 minutes
- 141 Hard Boiled Eggs 8 Minutes
What Chestnut does is as physically difficult, and possibly harmful, as almost anything any other athlete tries to do. He even eats in hail storms.
I won't embed his record-setting gyro performance because it's painful to watch but here's the link. He's in second place behind Matt Stonie (a badass in his own right who only weighs 130 pounds?!) for much of the competition but he kicks it into a higher gear around the 10 minute mark of the video. It's stunning. Also stunning: two young women finished in the top six with 13.6 and 18 gyros.
I realize this is wildly different from traditional sports but you have to agree that it's much more physically taxing than darts or bowling or curling or archery. And yet no one mentions Chestnut when discussing great athletes.
It wasn't always this way. Fat men were celebrated 100 years ago. Perhaps the best thing I've read online this year was a New York Times article from 1885 describing a baseball game between the Brooklyn Fat Men's Club and the Fat Men's Club of Flushing. Click on the little "CONTINUE READING: PDF" link on the left to see it larger. Here are a few of my favorite gems if you're too lazy to click around:
They were all baseball men of the days of the Mutuals and Eckfords, since grown obese on beer and politics, but they were a lusty set of athletes, and they declared that they could run their own bases and only wanted two small boys to assist the catcher.
His general appearance, which he claimed was the result of good nature pure and simple, was that of the man in the moon in the gibbous state.
A full-blown Dickens's fat boy rested indolently on third base.
The Brooklynites were highly indignant and so were the spectators, and their rage was with difficulty modified by frequent potations of the amber flood, but the great match of the season was postponed.
What bombast! There were other Fat Men's clubs too, like the New England Fat Men's Club. I think Vince Wilfork was a member. There was a Connecticut Fat Men's Club and a guy named Philetus Dorlon was its President in 1884. He was really really fat. I know this because in 1884 the New York Times wrote:
Philetus Dorlon would not be happy without clams, and no self-respecting clam swims to the bottom of the [Long Island] Sound that would not die happy and sing triumphantly while he steamed his young life away if he knew he were to be sepulchered in Philetus Dorlon .... Mr. Dorlon is huge, he is ponderous, his obesity borders on the infinite; and the most hardened lean man cannot gaze upon his magnificent proportions without being unconsciously made purer and holier.
Magnificent prose. Texas had a Fat Men's Club too, of course. "The clubs’ purpose? According to an address by the president of the budding Fat Men’s Association of Texas, W.A, Disborough, the goal was 'to draw the fat men into closer fraternal relations.'" A frat for fat guys, or fat guy frat guys, if you will.
Gluttons were feted all over the country. The Mineola Monitor ran an op-ed in 1899 about why women should like fat men: "It may be observed, without intentional offence [sic] to any young lady who might be enamored of some skeleton-like young man that, as a rule, fat men, besides being the most jolly and convivial of the male species, are also apt to be the most considerate of and charitable to others .... The fact still remains that seven out of ten fat men make excellent husbands."
The German Fat Men's Club made friends with the New York Fat Men's Club and then they shared a clambake. Five thousand people attended fat men's footraces. Fat men held eating contests emceed by the man I assume founded White Manna. Many police were fat men--some things will never change. Fat men were lauded for being honest, good surety risks, and graceful dancers. The turn of the 20th century was peak phatness for fatness.
It wasn't all fun and games though, as you can see from this blurb in the Brownwood Bulletin in 1909:
The point of this rant? Every once in a while you need to indulge your inner glutton. It will make you happy and jolly and generally fun to be around. Whether you are preparing to hunker down in a surf shack with 15-20 other guys to suck down caseloads of yellow beer with platefuls of conch fritters and coco loco chicken, or just looking forward to pizza night with a dozen buffalo wings, I encourage you to go forth and eat. With gusto.
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