It was ten o’clock on a Saturday morning in May and Pat Bertoletti was in the tiny bathroom of an airplane, spiking his hair into a Mohawk with Got2B styling glue. Normally he’d wait to do this in the men’s room at the destination airport, but his flight had been delayed and he was getting nervous. Upon landing in Houston, he’d be shuttled to a Berryhill Baja Grill northwest of downtown, where he would almost immediately have to begin shoving as many beef tamales as possible down his throat.
As Nerz counted down the final ten seconds, Bertoletti smushed two more tamales into his mouth, bringing his provisional total to 48. But as the clock ran out he stood with his cheeks bulging, unable to swallow. Minutes passed. Spectators chanted his name as he sat down and sipped water. Finally he looked at Nerz, shook his head, and then grabbed the rim of the nearest trash can, letting loose a putrid stream of barely digested food. The crowd let out a collective sigh.
Bertoletti is one of competitive eating’s young guns, a rising star in the new generation of athletic eaters whose flair and record-breaking feats have vastly improved the commercial appeal of the pursuit. The events he and his peers compete in are sanctioned and regulated by the International Federation of Competitive Eating, a circuit started in 1997 by New York City publicists George and Rich Shea. The Sheas also run the Super Bowl of competitive eating, the Nathan’s Fourth of July hot dog eating contest at Coney Island. The brothers had taken over the long-running event in 1991, and hoping to raise its profile they set up a series of qualifiers across the country. Then they added a string of one-offs at restaurant chains, festivals, and casinos. “It kept getting good results in the media,” says George Shea, “and we got more and more calls from sponsors, eaters, and TV producers.” Over the next few years the IFOCE began to give its eaters quarterly rankings.
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Foods like tamales that are soft, pliable, and easy to get down are considered “fast” in the competitive eating world; others, like chicken wings and asparagus, are “slow,” and their shape and texture require strategy. “You gotta practice,” Bertoletti says. “You’ll try different techniques, because there’s a bunch of different ways to eat stuff. Like, am I going to dunk the grilled cheese in the water and then eat it, or am I going to just take a huge bite and take a drink of water after it? You gotta kind of figure it out.”
Competitive eating has also helped the normally shy Bertoletti become more outgoing, and his family has noticed the change. “He has a lot of fun with all the other eaters he’s met,” Susan Bertoletti says. “I think it’s opened him up to a lot of new things and he’s become a lot more independent, traveling a lot on his own.”
Between last summer and this spring, he shed more than 30 pounds.
