Feast and Furious

Written By:  Anne Neville  

August 17, 2003

Jim Reeves is hungry.  

You can tell by the way he rotates the chicken wing drumstick between his fingers as his teeth strip it to the bone in seconds, by the way he cleans the front of a flat wing section with one bite, then smoothly flicks the two small bones open and bends to extract the shred of meat between them. But he's not hungry for wings, although he will admit he likes them "as much as the next guy."  Reeves is hungry to keep the chicken-wing-eating title -- up for grabs and gulps at the National Buffalo Wing Festival -- in his hometown, where the chicken wing took flight.  

The 34-year-old who now lives south of Buffalo, in Boston, is known as "Buffalo Jim Reeves" around the International Federation of Competitive Eating -- whose members stuff in and swallow hot dogs, matzo balls, bowls of mayonnaise, sticks of butter, oysters, pickles, peppers, conch fritters, burritos and beef tongue.  

Every Sunday, after Mass at St. Louis Roman Catholic Church, Reeves eats wings at the Anchor Bar "for psychological preparation."  

"I'll probably have to eat 100 wings to win this year," he says. "There is nothing like being in the birthplace of the chicken wing to focus your mind on what you're trying to accomplish."  Although he refers to his Anchor Bar visits as "training," Reeves will only eat for speed during public contests.  

George Shea, chairman of the International Federation of Competitive Eating, would be glad to hear that. The federation stresses safety, barring contestants under 18 and having an emergency medical technician present at every contest or demonstration.  Shea says, "We just don't endorse training with food unless it's in a controlled environment and we're there."  

Ivano Toscani, general manager of the Anchor Bar, where millions of pounds of wings have been served since the night in 1964 when they were invented there by Teressa Bellissimo, gives Reeves a tip. "Do it like this," he says, hoisting a total of four hefty drumsticks, two in each hand, and aiming them for his mouth. Reeves laughs.

The fierce but friendly quest for the chicken-wing-eating title will culminate in the world faceoff over a groaning board of wings at 4 p.m. Aug. 31 at the National Buffalo Wing Festival in Dunn Tire Park.  Reeves isn't not alone in his hunger for the Buffalo title. Other big eaters, including Oleg Zhornitsky, who took the title last year, will be in town, too.  

Will Reeves' determination, strategy and hunger help him against his seasoned competitors?  'I could compete'  Reeves first dug into competitive eating last year in Buffalo.  He and his wife, Terri, brought some out-of-town relatives to the first National Buffalo Wing Festival. On Saturday, Reeves entered the the wing-eating qualifier and did surprisingly well for a first-timer, finishing fourth out of 10.  That gave him a spot in the finals the next day, where he finished sixth out of 12.  "It probably would have just ended there, except that I was close to the winners through eight and nine minutes," says the former Army Reserve officer, who still wears his hair short, with shaved sides.  "So it bothered me, and I thought, 'I could compete with these guys.' "  

Competition comes naturally to Reeves. A standout offensive lineman for West Seneca East in the 1985 season, he's also held all-star status in ice hockey and baseball, and has played softball with the same group of buddies for 12 years.  

"I have no competitive eating history prior to this," says Reeves, "besides just having a Polish grandmother." That grandmother, Helen Eisenbeis, encouraged him to eat until he started doing it competitively, in public, says Reeves with a laugh. "Now she just says, 'Make sure you don't embarrass the family.' "  The family has deep Buffalo roots. His great-grandparents owned Sordel's bar and restaurant at Seneca and Bailey for years. His mother, Donna, teaches calculus at Villa Maria Academy; his father, Bill, is a state corrections officer. Terri, who works in education, and Jim, an electrical engineer, have two daughters, Emily, 61/2, and Cloe, born July 11.  

"The whole family came down to see me eat" last year, he says, adding that they are proud of him "in a weird sort of way."  

Reeves was not the first of his siblings to chow down competitively. His younger brother Ed, 29, a ceramic engineer in St. Louis, competes in a bike race there called the "Tour de Doughnut." For each doughnut eaten during stops in the 30-mile race, competitors get five minutes shaved off their time. Ed Reeves has won the race the past two years; last time he ate 32 doughnuts "and finished in negative time," his brother says.  

Older brother Bill, 35, is a doctor in Atlanta. Sister Jennifer, 24, is finishing a master's degree in dance choreography at Temple University.  

"So we're not just a bunch of bozos," says Reeves. "My mother wanted me to be sure and tell you that."  Little Emily is extremely proud of her dad's achievements. She brings his trophies to school and has memorized his standing on the international list of federation competitors, which is published on the group's Web site, www.ifoce.com. He's now 19th in the world, she points out.  

When he did so well last year, Reeves made a plan for this year. Rather than eat on Saturday to qualify and then have to do the same thing the next day in the finals, he planned to qualify in one of the regional contests.  

So far, he's fallen short of qualifying, sometimes by the skin of his teeth. In Memphis, Reeves chewed his way to second place. In Chicago he placed third, and in Pittsburgh he came in fifth behind some heavyweight competition.  

Swallowing his pride, Reeves is determined to compete in the Saturday qualifier in Buffalo if he has to, to earn a shot at the title and some of the $2,000 in prize money that Drew Cerza, organizer of the National Buffalo Wing Festival, will distribute to the top finishers. But most important to Reeves is bragging rights for the area -- Reeves feels strongly that the chicken-wing-eating championship should stay in Western New York.  

Weights and measures  Shea, who, along with his brother Richard, formed the International Federation of Competitive Eating seven years ago, grows effusive in a phone conversation from his Manhattan office when Buffalo -- "the mecca of chicken wings" -- is mentioned.  

"The event in Buffalo is a gathering of the nation's greatest eaters that would certainly rival the Nathan's Famous (hot-dog eating contest July 4) event in terms of U.S. participation," Shea says.  

"Chicken-wing eating requires more strategy and more skill than almost any other discipline in our sport," Shea says. "It's not like a matzo ball, which in my opinion is kind of a one-note game. Chicken wings rank with hot dogs, and some would say even greater, calling for a variety of skills."  Unlike matzo balls or even hot dogs, chicken-wing-eating is tricky to judge.  

As every Western New Yorker who's old enough to sample solid food quickly learns, wings come in two basic designs -- flats and drumsticks -- and all different sizes. "Some are bigger, and some are way bigger," says Shea.  

Some people, like Reeves, clean a wing to the bone. Others might make do with a few bites around the outside, if judging were done on the sheer number of semi-cleaned wings they could toss into a bone pile.  "The best way to judge was a conundrum last year, when we first started talking to Drew Cerza," says Shea. "We came up with a propriety judging method," he says. "You simply weigh everything before, and you weigh everything after. You can determine the exact quantity of chicken wing meat consumed, and then you run that backward to get a total of chicken wings eaten."  A pound of meat eaten works out to be just short of 28 wings.  

Last Year's winner, Zhornitsky, ate exactly 2.65 pounds of meat -- off an estimated 74 chicken wings -- in 12 minutes.  

All federation contests are timed, and most last from 10 to 15 minutes, with 12 minutes being the "sweet spot," says Shea.  "You don't want someone eating too fast. You don't want to have a one-minute contest, where people are trying to put five hot dogs in their gullet; it's just not safe," says Shea.  

'Meat umbrella'  

One competitor, Carson "Collard Green" Hughes of Virginia, intends to test his "meat umbrella" technique in Buffalo, says Shea. "You put the whole chicken wing drum in your mouth and then you pull it out, using your teeth to open the umbrella of the meat," he says.  

Reeves shakes his head. Not only is that technique extremely difficult with oversized drumsticks, like the ones he eats at the Anchor Bar, but the ability to strip the meat from the wings the fastest is no guarantee of success, he says.  

"When you exercise a muscle, it starts to get bigger as the blood flows into it," says Reeves. "When you're chewing fast, the same thing happens to your jaw and your throat. The more you chew, the more your face and throat swell up, and it's harder and harder to swallow. So you wind up with a big wad of meat in your mouth that you can't swallow."  

Swallowing, of course, is critical.  But in the heat of competition, some eaters have, as Shea describes it, "suffered urges contrary to swallowing" or "suffered a reversal of fortune" -- when the food they've consumed makes a return appearance.  

"Sometimes in the normal course of swallowing, food can become confused as to the proper direction it should go," Shea explains.  For that to happen during a contest "is really quite rare because these eaters know their limits, but also because they would consider that a black eye," he says.  

But ingesting the calories is unavoidable, and most of the top eaters watch their diets when they aren't chowing down competitively.  Reeves, who tipped the scales at 305 a couple of years ago, has dropped 30 pounds and plans to lose 10 or 15 more before the wing-eating contest.  

"I am eating a lot healthier than I was," says Reeves. "You know, you can't train to eat chicken wings by eating nothing but chicken wings; that's pretty gross. So mostly I eat a lot of cabbage, celery, cauliflower, broccoli. I drink a lot more water than I used to," he says.  

"We urge our guys to consider the caloric intake, and understand this is not a sport like basketball, that you cannot do this every day," says Shea. "Perhaps once a month at most. Most of our eaters are doing it twice a year, three times a year. Obviously, you don't want to be consuming an enormous number of calories on a regular basis, and the truth is they don't."  

In fact, a research paper by mechanical engineer and former competitive eater Edward Krachie, who himself once weighed 430 pounds, advances the "Belt of Fat" theory -- that heavier people's stomach capacity is restricted by the fat in their abdominal cavities.  

Krachie concludes, based on performance of eaters ranging from 101 pounds to over 400, that the slimmer competitors were capable of eating an average of two full hot dogs, with buns, more than heavier eaters.  After being submitted to (and rejected by) the New England Journal of Medicine, the study was published in the federation's newsletter, the colorfully named "The Gurgitator."  

The success of slim competitors -- including women -- tends to support the theory. Sonja Thomas, now ranked eighth by the federation, "a slender, absolutely beautiful woman, goes to Coney Island, eats 25 hot dogs in 12 minutes, and beats the majority of men throughout the nation," says Shea.  Women compete bite for bite with the men, says Shea: "There's No Title IX. They compete at the same table, cheek to jowl."  

Despite the worldwide success of slim people in eating contests, Reeves is aware of the popular view of competitive eaters. The federation's T-shirts, featuring the slogan, "Nothing in moderation," are sold in sizes up to XXXXL, after all.  

"The easy story is to say, 'Oh, that's really gross!' " says Reeves. "I've read 100 articles, if I've read two, and every single one of them interviews the nutritionist at Harvard University, and he says what a bunch of gluttons we are, and he's not saying anything my mom didn't tell me when I was 5: If you eat too much, you get fat.  

"Like anything else in life, you find balance between work and your family and the things you do for yourself. This just happens to be a neat hobby and a nice diversion. If I ever start doing stupid things, then I'll get out of it."  Terri Reeves says, "Jim really enjoys it, and I want him to be happy. There are worse hobbies a husband could have."  

'An athlete and a warrior'  While competitors employ many strategies, it's a myth that fasting before a contest helps, Reeves says. "Only rookies think that fasting helps, because your stomach is shrinking up (when you fast). I've heard people say, 'I don't eat for three days before a contest.' I don't know what good that does."  

To prepare for a contest on a Saturday, Reeves will have his last big meal on Thursday night, eat only carbohydrates on Friday, and have just a bowl of cereal for breakfast on the day of the competition.  Given the elite level of competition, has Reeves bitten off more than he can chew?  

"He's by far and away the strongest IFOCE eater in Buffalo," says Shea. "Jim Reeves is very, very good, and he's earned a lot of respect from the other guys. He has the character of an athlete and a warrior."  Cerza says of Reeves, "What a class act he is. What a gentleman."  

e-mail: aneville@buffnews.com