Fattening Up On The Competition

This week, as Fat Tuesday feasting yields to Ash Wednesday fasting, let us pause for a moment in defense of gluttony, because sports and unhealthy ingestibles are nearly inseparable. (Literally so, if you ever tried to peel that pink rectangle of gum from a baseball card.)

As the Mardi Gras of baseball's off-season makes way for the Lent of spring training, Barry Bonds is calling himself "fat." When Curt Schilling showed up at Red Sox camp, teammate Mike Timlin told the Boston Herald, "He's a big fat guy." Bonds and Schilling are future Hall of Famers whose Cooperstown busts might best be captured by butter sculptors.

After he reported for spring training 17 1/2 pounds overweight, pitcher Josh Hancock was released by the Reds--punishment for a glutton--but he quickly signed with a better team, the Cardinals, who'll let him fly his french-fried freak flag.

Real Madrid's superstar striker, Ronaldo, lamented last week that the club's abusive fans might yet drive him out of Spain ("They call me fat," he said), and the toast of Super Bowl week--the garlic toast of Super Bowl week--was Jerome Bettis, a Bus whose single air bag long ago deployed above his beltline.

Since these are world-class athletes, it's time the rest of us embraced gluttony. (It will take very long arms.) No fan should have to choose between a cheeseburger and a bratwurst. And now no fan has to: The Bradley Burger (named for the Milwaukee Bucks' arena) has a hamburger patty beneath a bratwurst patty beneath American cheese and caramelized onions.

Every day new ballpark foods are invented by culinary mad scientists, Dr. Frankensteins of the frankfurter. The Class A West Michigan Whitecaps last week held their annual "TestKitchen," in which mad scientists tried to sell the team on new snack items. (The longtime fan favorite at Whitecaps games is the Swimmin' Pig, a sauce-smothered pork chop on a bun that inspired the team's mascot: a pig in a life preserver.) At their test kitchen in Grand Rapids team executives weighed in, as it were, on sundry new delicacies. "Turns out you can deep-fry just about anything," says Whitecaps spokesman Brian Oropallo. "We ate deep-fried brownies, deep-fried chocolate-chip cookie dough, plus gyros and lots of fried-chicken-flavored things. A stadium is one place you can eat this stuff and it's O.K." The other place is the movie theater, where it remains socially acceptable to eat a grocery sack of popcorn under cover of darkness, a 64-ounce Mountain Dew holstered in the armrest.

Jason (Crazy Legs) Conti is a self-described "gustatory gladiator" who puts the eat in athlete as a superstar of competitive eating. Conti, who was a three-sport letterman at Johns Hopkins, once buried himself inside an eight-foot-tall plexiglass sarcophagus beneath 60 cubic feet of popcorn and endeavored to eat his way out. An EMT stood at the ready, which is why Conti wore one red wristband ("To signal 'Danger,'" he says) and one yellow wristband ("To signal 'More Butter'"). When at last he emerged, buttered but unbowed, Conti had earned his other nickname, the Houdini of Cuisini.

"When it comes to food," says Conti, who is 6'3" and lean, "there's a thin line between joy and disgust." He once ate a different Shea Stadium offering every inning for nine innings, closing out his perfect game with a knish in the seventh, an Italian sausage in the eighth and a box of Cracker Jacks in the ninth. "If eating a hot dog is bad for you but makes you feel good," says Conti, "imagine how good you'll feel after eating 20 of them."

Paradoxically, the best eaters are the leanest and most athletic. World No. 1 Takeru Kobayashi, who ate 67 hamburgers in eight terrible minutes in November, is 132 pounds of chiseled muscle. He dominates dinosaurs like Ed (Cookie) Jarvis, who weighs 419 pounds, or more than one pound for each degree of a Lazy Susan.

Eating has never been more lucrative. Last July there was $40,000 in prize money on the table at the Alka-Seltzer U.S. Open of Competitive Eating, where nothing stays on the table for long. ( Kobayashi ate 13 pounds of spaghetti in 14 minutes to win.) There are two forthcoming books on competitive eating--Ryan Nerz's Eat This Book and Jason Fagone's Horsemen of the Esophagus--that will no doubt appeal to voracious readers.