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I know mature adults who pretend they won't watch Nathan's Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog Eating Contest today.
The way they'll tell it is they happened to be walking past the TV, heard the kids scream and the dachshund howl, and in the interest of family unity reluctantly paused to watch. Two hours later they finally moved, and it wasn't to put a hot dog on the grill.
I don't pretend. I love this stuff. ESPN will televise the event from noon until 2 p.m., and I will watch all of it.
Last year the top two competitive eaters in the world, Joey Chestnut and Takeru Kobayashi, each consumed 59 dogs in 12 minutes. They went to overtime, and the tension was such you could have cut it with a bun. Chestnut won his second straight title.
Kobayashi has won six. If you're keeping score, Kobayashi has had more success in his sport than Kobe has in his.
Purists, of course, contend that eating is not a sport. I like to write about competitive eating, and not simply to irritate the purists. Purists wake up irritated.
Consuming mass quantities of food in a limited period of time is athletic. But it's more than that. For guys like me, it's inspiring.
I pour low-fat milk on my cereal and no-fat milk into my latte. I eat red meat at most twice a week. I rarely eat dessert. I like salads.
Don't look at me that way. I love boxing. And I work out.
All right, I did work out. If you read this column, you know that my regimen has changed. A recent byproduct of the cancer treatments I'm wrapping up is that I hate food. I hate the taste, the texture, the smell and the concept. I get by almost exclusively on whole milk, six to eight glasses a day.
I went to Five Guys Famous Burgers and Fries Thursday, however, and bought a burger for my brother and for my wife's son. The smell was so unexpectedly and overpoweringly joyous that I bought one for me, too. I couldn't wait to get home and rip the cover off and be me again.
The dogs loved it.
I've lost my way. My forefathers killed dinosaurs and buffalo. Or, knowing my family, they went to the store and bought dinosaur and buffalo. If stores had not been invented, they bartered. We'll give you a sports section for a moose. Newspapers were big then.
As a kid, it seems as if all I ate was meat. Alas, we make concessions as we age, each year giving up more of what we like until we forget how much we liked it.
For more than a decade my summer cuisine has included gazpacho, grilled squash and zucchini, corn, peas and tomatoes. But some nights a steak or burger will appear on my plate, and life will be good.
I don't know what I'll eat when I can appreciate food again. But I suspect that meat will be involved.
Hope everybody has a great Fourth, and hope you enjoy Coney Island's consuming carnivores whether you intend to or not.
It will be strange to watch Chestnut and the fellows with a glass of 3.5%-fat milk in my right hand. But instead of my usual two glasses for lunch, maybe I'll drink 59.
