fight news
A short history of the American tradition of competitive eating – ideastream
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Today is one of the top American holidays for eating. There’s Thanksgiving, of course, but the Fourth of July features some serious cookouts and the event that is the de facto Super Bowl of competitive eating – the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest. Miki Sudo won the women’s contest for the ninth time this morning, and this afternoon, after a rain and lightning delay…
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
GEORGE SHEA: With 62 hot dogs and buns in 10 minutes, for his 16th win, I give you the No. 1 ranked eater in the world, Joey Chestnut.
(CHEERING)
SUMMERS: Why these two do it – well, they’ve got their reasons. But why we, as a society, celebrate all of this on U.S. Independence Day – well, our producer, Matt Ozug, spoke to some experts on the subject of competitive eating.
JASON FAGONE: Sometimes I wake up in the morning and I remember that I spent two years in the 2000s following competitive eating around the country and the world.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
FAGONE: You know, I saw some things that I can never forget even if I wanted to.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
FAGONE: My name is Jason Fagone, and I’m the author of “Horsemen Of The Esophagus: Competitive Eating And The Big Fat American Dream.”
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
FAGONE: Most people are familiar with the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest. That’s the one that’s broadcast every year on ESPN. But there’s all kinds of other eating contests…
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER #1: Cheeseburger eating champion of…
FAGONE: …For burgers, for cakes, for cannolis…
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED JOURNALIST: Twenty-three cannoli during last year’s faceoff.
FAGONE: …French fries…
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER #2: French fry eating championship of the world.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
FAGONE: …Just the craziest kind of wildest, most grotesque, nonsensical, you know, and kind of fun pageants that I’d ever had a chance to witness.
One of the most intense experiences in my life was attending the Philadelphia Wing Bowl, the country’s premier chicken wing eating contest – fifteen to twenty thousand actual fans packed into a sports arena in Philadelphia at 7 a.m. Then there’s this whole other aspect of eating contests in Japan.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER #3: Food fight club…
FAGONE: They come with greatly expanded production values. There are, you know, lasers and explosions and, you know, dramatic music. There’s a lot more ingenuity in the – kind of the structuring of the contest itself, whereas in America, the contests tend to be more just about sort of sheer volume. Competitive eating goes back centuries. It’s not only an American thing.
ERIC GRUNDHAUSER: We have record of a famous competitive eater going back to the 17th century.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
GRUNDHAUSER: My name is Eric Grundhauser, and I am a writer and journalist. There was a farmer by the name of Nicholas Wood. Some of the impressive meals that Wood was known to have consumed included eating seven dozen rabbits in one sitting, entire pigs, 12 loaves of bread that had been soaked in ale. He passed out afterwards, but he made it.
Wood earned a number of pretty incredible nicknames – The Most Exorbitant Paunchmonger, Duke All Paunch, and the Kentish Tenter Belly. Unfortunately, his body was pretty well-destroyed from all the eating. He had lost all but one of his teeth after trying to eat an entire mutton shoulder. Wood finally threw in the towel and said, I can’t do this any longer.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
FAGONE: There are a lot of different cultures that have kind of invented eating contests independently at different points in history. And for the first few hundred years after the American Revolution, eating contests were a regular feature at Fourth of July celebrations. And then this started to change a little in the 1970s when Nathan’s Famous hot dogs created a hot dog contest on the Fourth of July. You know, the eaters in that era were mostly big guys from Long Island, right? These are, like, classic kings at the backyard barbecue. And in the 1990s, these two brothers from New York took over the Nathan’s Famous accounts – George and Richard Shea. And in that age, everyone who was competing in the contest was kind of in on the joke. The eaters had silly nicknames. There was a guy named Frank “Large” De La Rosa.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DOMINIC CARDO: Dominic “The Doginator” Cardo.
FAGONE: Ed “Cookie” Jarvis.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
CHARLES HARDY: “Hungry” Charles Hardy, Brooklyn, N.Y.
FAGONE: Eric “Badlands” Booker.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ERIC BOOKER: (Rapping) Quench my thirst to my heart’s content and do it in record time.
FAGONE: …Who is also a rapper and records competitive eating-themed rap songs.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BOOKER: Somebody saying chug that drink.
FAGONE: I have a CD somewhere in my box of recordings here.
And then in 2001, everything changed in an instant…
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
FAGONE: …When this young Japanese guy named Takeru Kobayashi came to America and competed in the Nathan’s Hot Dog Contest. Kobayashi was different from everyone who had come before him. You know, he wasn’t a big man. He looked very healthy. He didn’t have any kind of a jokey nickname, right? And it turned out that he had been training for the contest as if it were a real sport.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
FAGONE: Part of Kobayashi’s innovation was that he came up with a completely new way to eat the hot dogs. He separated the hot dog from the bun, and then he snapped the hot dogs in half. And then he would snap the bun in half, dunk the bun in water and eat it.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
FAGONE: This was an innovation akin to, you know, the Fosbury flop in the high jump.
The record at that point was 25 hot dogs in 12 minutes, which everybody thought was an enormous quantity. The contest starts. Everything is going like normal. And then about three minutes in, everything kind of stops. And not only the other contestants, but the announcer – they just start looking at Kobayashi with kind of their jaws open. Kobayashi had almost broken the world record, and there was still nine minutes left to go.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Kid is incredible. A total beating of the Americans. He was like a conveyor belt. He was just putting them in two at a time.
FAGONE: And then he proceeded to double the world record by the end of the 12 minutes.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: …Started waving the white flag.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: I can’t believe it. The record – new record – 50.
FAGONE: And then after that, everything changed because there started to be real money. Pretty soon, you know, ESPN was broadcasting the hot dog contest live.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER #4: What a crowd out here. Americans of all stripes. There are visitors from abroad celebrating the dream of independence once again on the corner of Surf & Stillwell.
FAGONE: And with that money came a whole new wave of competitors who, you know, like Kobayashi, were training. They were taking it seriously as a sport, and they weren’t necessarily in on the joke anymore. They were really trying to win.
Eating is one of the great psychic preoccupations of our species. It’s right up there with sex and death. I mean, eating is this animal act that we all participate in to some degree, and this is the most animal version of it, but it’s happening in an environment where there are safety rules. So in a sense, it’s, like, this display of gluttony that has been kind of made safe for you to look at and think about. There’s, like, this pane of safety glass between you and the danger.
If you sort of zoom out and you think about, you know, what an eating contest symbolizes more broadly maybe, it does seem symbolic of the outsized American appetite for everything – and not just for food but for resources, power, money – you name it. It’s kind of a Rorschach test for how people see us.
(SOUNDBITE OF U.S. MILITARY BAND’S “MY COUNTRY ‘TIS OF THEE”)
SUMMERS: Jason Fagone is the author of “Horsemen Of The Esophagus: Competitive Eating And The Big Fat American Dream.”
(SOUNDBITE OF U.S. MILITARY BAND’S “MY COUNTRY ‘TIS OF THEE”) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
fight news
5 Fights We Need to See After UFC Fight Night 233 – Bleacher Report
fight news
Bleacher Report Boxing Pound-For-Pound Rankings: Feb 2009 – Bleacher Report
fight news
What time is Floyd Mayweather vs. John Gotti III today? Schedule, main card start time for 2023 exhibition boxing fight – Sporting News
Floyd Mayweather once again steps inside the ring to compete in an exhibition fight. This time, he faces someone with legit combat sports experience and a last name nobody will ever forget. Mayweather faces John Gotti III, the grandson of infamous gangster John Gotti, on June 11.
The fight is inside the FLA Live Arena in Florida and airs on the Zeus Network.
Gotti turned pro in 2017. Winning five in a row to start his MMA career, Gotti lost his last fight in 2020 against Nick Alley. The 30-year-old has since competed in boxing bouts, winning two contests in the past eight months.
Calling this fight a “pinch-me moment,” Gotti has nothing but respect for Mayweather. However, he will not let his fandom get in the way of what he needs to do.
MORE: Boxing vs. MMA history: Mayweather vs UFC’s McGregor and more
“I’ve been following him since I was eight years old,” Gotti said via Boxing Scene. “This was my idol. This was a guy I did school projects on. It was a guy I looked up to. The fact that I’m in a position to stand across the ring from Floyd is a tremendous honor. But make no mistake, June 11, I’m bringing bad intentions to that man. I don’t care if it’s an exhibition or not. You signed to fight me, there’s no quarter. It’s kill or be killed.”
This is the latest exhibition for Mayweather, who retired in 2017 at 50-0. In 2018 he teamed with RIZIN and beat young kickboxing star Tenshin Nasukawa via TKO. Mayweather fought Logan Paul and former training partner Don Moore in non-scored bouts. He beat Mikuru Asakura and YouTuber Deji in 2022 via TKO. In February, Mayweather went the distance against MMA fighter Aaron Chalmers.
Here is all you need to know regarding Mayweather vs. Gotti, from the time, channel, and card.
Mayweather vs. Gotti begins at 6:30 p.m ET | 3:30 p.m. PT. Ringwalks are scheduled for 10 p.m. ET | 7 p.m. PT, depending on how long the undercard fights last.
MORE: How to bet on combat sports
Floyd Mayweather vs. John Gotti III can be streamed on Zeus Network.
Fans in the U.S. can pre-order the fight for $15.99. They can also sign up for the network at the annual rate of $59.99 per year. In the U.K., the pre-order price is about £13, $21 in Canada, and $23 in Australia.
MORE: History of boxing video games
Daniel Yanofsky is a combat sports editor at The Sporting News.
-
fight news3 months ago
10 Facts You Probably Didn't Know About “Fight Club” (1999) – High On Films
-
fight news Canada6 months ago
Fight News 2023: Exciting Matchups
-
fight news4 weeks ago
woodbury minnesota, woodbury schools, woodbury,East Ridge High School, racist attack, racist school attack, racism, South Washington County Schools,Principal Jim Smokrovich, Shanka Gessod – CBS Minnesota
-
fight news3 months ago
Movies in North Texas theaters on Sept. 1 and coming soon – The Dallas Morning News
-
fight news5 months ago
2023 Detroit Lions Name Bracket Tournament: Round 1, Part 3 – Pride Of Detroit
-
fight news5 months ago
Kota Miura vs. Joker Fight Club: Date, start time, TV channel and live … – dazn.com
-
fight news5 months ago
Frank Warren drops 'game-changer' Tyson Fury next fight hint after Oleksandr Usyk update – Manchester Evening News
-
fight news5 months ago
Boxing News, Results, Schedule, Rankings » Fightnews.com™ – Fight News