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The Superbowl of Swine
by Rick Murphy
A little over a year ago, a young employee of mine had the bright idea to enter a team in a barbeque contest in May in Memphis. I would soon find out that it was the World Barbeque Championship. The Super Bowl of Swine. He promised to organize everything if I would put up the entry fee, and I agreed. He had graduated from Rhodes College in Memphis two years before, and he planned to enlist the help of his college buddies in putting a team together. Another person from our office who is from Memphis agreed to help. I enlisted some fraternity brothers in Mandeville who were serious about barbequing. We were set. The event started on a Wednesday. As usually happens, work got crazy and I was unable to get to Memphis until Thursday night.
The phone calls begin coming in on my drive up Interstate 55. The old guys aren’t getting along with the young guys. It probably doesn’t help that they don’t know each other and that they’ve been drinking Stoli all day in 85-degree heat. I’m thinking that I had made a big mistake, but there was no turning back at this point. I arrive in Memphis at 11 that night and check into the hotel in Midtown near Rhodes. The young guys all want to take me out to Zinnis, which was their favorite college hangout. It’s about a block from my hotel, so I figure I can make it back with no problem. They stumble into the bar and sit down next to me.
“Can’t believe ya’ made it, dude.”
“Those friends of yours are jerks.”
I try to explain that when they are sleeping at 4 a.m. the jerks will be firing up the smoker in Tom Lee Park, but all I get is blank stares. I hear someone ordering a redheaded something or other, and then a shot glass is put in front of me with an odd-colored liquid in it. No! No! No! I stopped doing shots 15 years ago. My protest is unheeded. My manhood is called into question, and the next thing you know it’s 2 o’clock and the hotel room is spinning.
I’m supposed to be at the park bright and early. I get there at 10:30. The young guys are staring at the old guys and vice versa. All appear hungover. The old-guy cooks have retreated to the rear of the site with the smokers and the young guys are up in the front with the beer keg and the music. This is how it stayed for the rest of the weekend.
It also appears that this is how the big operators make it work. All of the cooking equipment is in the back of the site, along with the cooks. The fronts of many of the tents have elaborate bars and landscaping to shmooze the clients of the company sponsors. Keeping the cooks in the rear is probably a good idea. It’s kinda’ like the coal room at the bottom of the Titanic. Big guys with shovels tossing hot coals from oven to oven. Personal hygiene tends to go by the wayside. It’s a lot of hard work.
We find out early on that we are completely overmatched in the smoker department. Even the small guys next to us have $1,200 smokers that look brand new. Some of the bigger tents have $50,000 units that are as big as a small house. We have a couple of units that have no doubt seen better days. They appear a bit rusty, and the wheels are coming off one of them. Our neighbors have a device that measures the internal temperature of the smoker and automatically turns on a fan to heat up the coals if the temperature drops below 200 degrees. Ugh. I’m thinking, “Stick a fork in us. We have no chance.”
The items that are judged the first day are the T-shirts, the sauce and a barbequed seafood dish. Ken cooks up a sauce for the redfish that is really good. All he can say is, “Just don’t ask me to do it again.” Everyone is optimistic. The beer is flowing, and all the guys seem to be getting along better. The results come back and Ken’s dish places seventh overall out of over 100 entries. Most of the entrants are actually commercial restaurant operations that use the awards as a testimony to the food they serve. These guys are true cooking professionals. Everyone agrees that Ken’s dish is quite an accomplishment.
Our neighbors are impressed. They came in second to last their first year. They are four guys from Chicago who are right out of a “Da’ Bears” skit from “Saturday Night Live.” One guy is the “minister of heat,” the other is the “wing nut.” They are veterans of this shindig, and are nice enough to show us the ropes. The team on the other side of us is very nice. However, they are Baptists from central Tennessee who, by the luck of the draw, ended up next to Sodom and Gomorrah. They pretty much just cook for the judging and then shake their heads and leave. I’m not sure anyone was worshiping golden calves, but it was close.
Chris and Ken run into Butch, the guy who looks like Santa Claus and is always barbequing on the Food Network. Butch gives their first rib effort 8 out of 10. Things are looking good.
Day turns into night and the partying and cooking continues. The amount of beer consumed is impressive. There are at least three eighteen wheelers full of kegs, and you can get new kegs anytime you want. We drink “Natty Light” the first day until I tell the young guys that I will pay the additional $25 to upgrade to Bud Light. I also notice a couple of empty bottles of Early Times lying around. We get into a whole philosophical discussion on at what age everyone decides to stop drinking cheap booze. I say, “Three days of draft beer and pork spare ribs is tough on an old guy like me.” The young guys just can’t understand it. They pop back up on three hours’ sleep.
Saturday is judgment day. (The judges actually have to go to school to earn a place in a competition of this magnitude.) The guys are up at 4 a.m. A number of different rubs are used, and the best slab is chosen just before the judging at 11. Chris is a bit disappointed when his knife slips while cutting the best slab. They turn in the second-best slab and hope for the best.
No one realizes that the judges actually come to your tent if you place in the top three. More ribs are put on the smoker just in case. We start noticing nice tables being brought out in the adjoining tents, with tablecloths and candelabra. All of the equipment is being wiped down and cleaned. (Cleanliness of your cooking area is of the utmost importance. Raw pork products in 85-degree heat can be a bit of a problem. There are strict rules that include having three different buckets for disinfecting. There are also meat inspections. Off-color jokes always ensue after the meat inspector leaves.)
We don’t even have a table, and if we wiped down our smoker, pieces would probably fall off. The frame on the tent is held together with duct tape from a drunken mishap the night before, and the canopy that is secured with zip ties is billowing in the wind. We decide that we will offer the judges cocktails and graciously accept the third place trophy if they come our way.
Unfortunately, we never get the call, but we hear that the judges are on the way to a team two doors down. We commit a barbeque faux pas by leaving our music turned up when the judges arrive. The guys from Chicago save us again, and somebody immediately turns off Jimmy Buffet.
The cooks are tired and go home for a nap and a night out on Beale Street with the wives. We end up placing 25th out of 39 teams. Very respectable for first timers. The party continues into the night, and the police arrive exactly at the witching hour of 11 o’clock. These guys could take some lessons from New Orleans’ finest. Not very understanding and a bit rude. It’s probably a good idea for everyone to call it a night anyway. We say goodbye to all of our neighbors and head home.
Fast forward to March of this year. The young guys want their own team and don’t need my sponsorship any more. They get accepted, and we are going back to Memphis, sans the old guys. I am a bit disappointed that Chris and Ken won’t be a part of it. By chance, I happen to call Chris on a work-related subject. Lo and behold, he and Ken are cooking in the Hammond Smokin’ Blues and BBQ Challenge at the end of March. I meet them on a Friday afternoon, and it’s déjà vu all over again. Lots of beer, music and fun and weird guys from New Jersey. They inform me that they have been accepted in Memphis as well and will be cooking again in May. It will be interesting if the two tents are close together. Independently of each other, the old guys have come up with “Hogfathers” as their name and the young guys are “Hogweiser.” Funny how that works out.
The Hammond festival is a blast. It’s free to get in, and they actually have tents selling good Q, so you don’t have to be a participant to eat. A lot smaller than Memphis, but dare I say better? Anyway, I go back Saturday morning for the judging and the food smells great. Once again, though, the alcohol has taken its toll, and Chris is mumbling something about needing a new “fireman.” Everyone went to the wet T-shirt contest at 10 p.m., and it got ugly. The 4 a.m. lighting of the smoker didn’t go quite as planned, and nobody kept the heat even throughout the cooking. The chefs seem to be a bit hard on themselves, though, as the ribs taste great to me.
The game is on for Memphis in May. Who will win? Stay tuned.
