Here Come The Judge

In 2005, I traveled to Kansas City to learn to become a barbecue judge and then judged barbecue at the Jack Daniel’s World Championship Invitational Barbecue cook-off. In February, I published a story in Sky magazine on how one goes about becoming a Kansas City Barbecue Society certified judge.

Here’s my story:

Please send us a short bio of your work or connection to barbecue,” reads the application form on my desk from the Jack Daniel’s World Championship Invitational Barbecue cook-off, my first step toward becoming a bona-fide barbecue judge.

“If having a dad who slathered sauce on everything from snapping turtles to turtledoves counts as an apprenticeship, if living within scent of Short Sugar’s Bar-B-Q counts for anything,” I write back to The Jack, as the contest is affectionately known, “then I’ve been in training to become a barbecue judge since my teeth cut their way through my gums.”
An e-mail arrives from the Kansas City Barbeque Society’s Ardie Davis. His advice? “Purge yourself of any remnants of hogmatism that may have branded your palate while growing up within smelling distance of Short Sugar’s.”
I know exactly what Davis, the society’s poet laureate of ’cue, is worried about: How some people actually believe—and will argue until they’re blue in the face—that their hometown barbecue is the best in the world. I assure Davis that although pork cooked low and slow over Carolina hickory, accented with vinegar-based red-pepper sauce, can be ethereal, I’ve spent countless hours searching out everything from Caribbean goat ’cue to Jamaican jerk pork. I’ve driven miles and miles down remote back roads, I tell him, ready to slam on the brakes at the first whiff of sizzling fat over smoldering hardwood. In fact, the primary reason that I’m interested in The Jack is that it’s been my lifelong ambition to find and taste the best barbecue on Earth—and what better place to do it than at the world championship of ’cue contests?
Seeing that I’m educable and willing to sacrifice my waistline to broaden my horizons, Davis explains that a Master of Barbecue or a Doctor of Barbecue Philosophy can be attained only through extensive oral exams at Greasehouse University, which is not a campus but an extensive set of classes.
Such study is why I find myself, in late September, walking over a long, high bridge from downtown Kansas City, Missouri, to Kemper Arena, where the “World Series of Barbecue,” the American Royal BBQ, is under way. Here, obscured by a haze of blue smoke, almost 500 barbecue teams are preparing my lunch. My destination is a classroom where, in preparation for the upcoming Jack in Lynchburg, Tennessee, and with 21 other men and women, I will tuck into and learn to judge four categories of ’cue: savory pulled pork, sizzling ribs, sassily spiced chicken and juicy beef brisket—all in the name of self-improvement, mind you.
Pace yourself and take your time, Ed Roith, Kansas City Barbeque Society’s grand authority on grilling, advises us. “So often judges come to eat, not to judge. If you consume everything that’s put on your plate today, you’ll eat 21/2 pounds of meat,” Roith says. “Now, how many of you can do that?” We look around at each other and exchange knowing glances of anticipation. (KCBS T-shirts, I later find out, come in no smaller size than L and are available in XXXXL.)
Soon we’re hearing Roith’s recitation on ribs. “When you bite into that rib, the meat shouldn’t come clean off the bone,” Roith says. “You might like it that way, but that’s not good competition barbecue.”

Competition barbecue is judged by awarding grades from one to nine, with one being the basis for immediate disqualification. The numeric grades are based on three criteria—appearance, taste and tenderness, each of which is strictly defined. If we have any lingering doubts on the texture of ribs, we can consult page 20, category two, sentence five of the judge’s handbook: “If the meat falls off the entire bone while biting, it is a good indication it is overcooked. . . . Any questions should be directed to the Contest Official,” the good book says.
Pulled pork that dissolves in your mouth is overcooked, says Roith: “You don’t want it to melt in your mouth, no matter how good it sounds.” Chicken may be pink or reddish around the bone, as sometimes happens, Roith explains. If so, blot the meat with a napkin, and if the juice is pink or, worse yet, red, contact your Contest Official immediately. And so on.
Taste, though, is the ultimate test, and points awarded for taste are multiplied several times over. “So how do you decide whether to give a sample a two or a nine?” someone asks. “Nine is the best you ever had,” Roith tells the class. “Two or 3 is something you can’t eat.”
With Ardie Davis, a bowler hat tipped jauntily back on his head, as my guide, I get some extracurricular instruction over a massive tub of already-judged pulled pork. Davis pulls out a big hank. “From appearances, my expectations are high, but I’ve been disappointed many times,” he says. “I can taste a little bit of smoke, a little bit of salt. I wouldn’t throw stones at it.”
He picks up another batch, “Yuck, undercooked,” he says, dropping it into a garbage can like a dead mouse. Another is sticky with sauce. “When it’s overseasoned and buried in sauce, you can’t tell it’s barbecue,” Davis says. He finds some with lots of “bark” on it, what we call “crunch” in the Carolinas. A hint of hickory tickles my nostrils before the ’cue passes through my lips. An ever-so-salty sweet-and-sour, competing with a hint of red and black pepper, telegraphs a message to a primitive point way in the back of my brain. I close my eyes in pleasure and smile. When I open my eyes, Davis is smiling back and smacking his lips. “Teams think they can compete with spices and rubs and injections and finishing sauces and glazes,” he says. “What you don’t see often enough is plain old primal fire and smoke, no-frills barbecue—like this.”

“Barbecuing is the art form of taking a cheaper cut of meat, putting your spices and sauces on it and slow-cooking it for hours and hours, and coming out with a product that people will drive 90 miles to eat,” explains Ron Harwell during a refresher class at The Jack.
Me, I’ve driven nearly 500, and I’m ravenous, having made my way to the judge’s table through an intoxicating mixture of sweet-smelling smoke and sizzling fat rolling off 3,900 pounds of meat. Fifty domestic and 17 international teams had spent all night rubbing, basting and roasting, all in an effort to please my by now highly educated palate. With one hand atop my growling tummy, I raise the other one, swearing “to objectively and subjectively evaluate each Barbecue meat that is presented to my eyes, my nose, my hands and my palate . . . so that truth, justice, excellence in Barbecue and the American way of life may be strengthened and preserved forever.”
I warm up by judging six servings of sauce (all of them so-so) and seven servings of Home Cookin’ From the Homeland (yum, lobster potpie), then wade into the whole hog category with both hands, tucking into three samples from each of seven hogs for a total of 21 servings. One of the hogs stands out from all the others—garnering a nine, nine, nine from me on every sample—a score other judges at my table give it, too.
Each of the contestants’ entries arrives “blind,” identified only by a number on the exterior of a plastic-foam takeout box. After judging how the sample looks, we pick up a small amount from each of the boxes and give it a grade on tenderness and taste. Don’t look for a fork. “Judging barbecue is a hands-on experience,” Harwell says. “We ask you to pull it and poke it and look at it.”
While judging the second sample of chicken, I come to a rude realization: There is such a thing as bad ’cue. Clinging to the skin of a boned chicken thigh is a slab of blackened brown sugar as thick as a piece of bread. A tug of the teeth, and the skin and “bark” slide onto the table to reveal a tepid piece of meat tasting of chemicals from some sort of injection.
The pork ribs, though, are marvelous, one of them besting the ribs I’d had at Fiorella’s Jack Stack in Kansas City, another sample as good as Arthur Bryant’s. It’s during a break between the ribs and the pork shoulder that I meet Clark “Smoky” Hale, who stokes verbal coals at the Barbecue’n on the Internet Web site (barbecuen.com), which he saw go from an estimated 40,000 hits in 1996 to more than 22 million hits in 2005. Barbecue’s popularity continues to grow, Hale says, because it taps into something elemental—sharing. “Barbecue is not just about food. It’s how you share your time, your most finite resource,” he reflects as I loosen my belt buckle. “But instead of sharing just an hour with someone, you’re sharing 12 hours, the time it took to cook your pulled pork or beef brisket.”
Pork and beef are what’s waiting for me back at the table. Although I’ve got something of a reputation as a big eater, as I judge six portions of pork shoulder and six more of brisket, a simple mathematical calculation reveals I’ve downed 44 samples of food. That’s when they bring out the desserts for judging.
As I force a spoonful of Jack Daniel’s–tinted crème brûlée between my lips, I recall my game plan. It had already dawned on me that quite probably I wouldn’t get to taste the best barbecue at The Jack (and potentially on the planet) since, for each category, I tasted only six out of more than 50 samples. What I’d hoped to do once the winners were announced was to ask each of them for a sample. But the very thought of putting anything else into my mouth is hard to contemplate.
Then again, it occurs to me that the winning team will be at the next contest. And competition being what it is, maybe the best will just get better by the time I get to try it.

A love of barbecue is not the only thing Sky Executive Editor David Bailey inherited from his father. Family metabolism enabled him to lose 2 pounds while in training to become a barbecue judge.

[Side bar]
Know Your ’Cue?
With hundreds of barbecue events in just about every state each year, the Kansas City Barbeque Society is hungry for judges. The society offers classes anywhere, any time there is a request, providing there is no date or time conflict. Classes, which are designed to last about four hours (but can go as long as five) and feature 24 servings of first-rate ’cue, cost $60. Included is a one-year membership in the society and a subscription to the KCBS newsletter, the highly entertaining Kansas City Bullsheet. Info: 800-963-5227, 816-765-5891 or http://www.kcbs.us.—D.B.

The People’s Olympics

Wearing togas and running on bare feet, just as it was thousands of years ago in ancient Greece, in June of 2000, I joined a group of people from all over the world to compete in the people’s version of the Olympic Games — the Nemean Games.

As I entered the 120-foot-long vaulted entrance tunnel to the Nemean stadium—the same passageway trod 2,300 years ago by the ancients—I felt the way I always feel in Greece: that the glaring eye of the Greek sun made the steep mountains seem sharper than anywhere else, that it made the marble ruins all around me seem whiter than white, and that it somehow made life feel, well, realer than real. Something deep inside me said that this was where I was meant to be.
That confidence was shaken as I faced a crowd of literally thousands in Nemea’s arena. (As someone who once taught Greek and Latin, I staved off my stage fright by thinking how many times I’d told my students that “arena” was cognate with “harena,” the Latin word for “sand,” which I could feel on the tender soles of my bare feet and between my toes.) The audience had gathered in early June for the Second Modern Nemead, a modest, people’s version of what’s unfolding this month at the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia.
Ahead stretched a racetrack, and at its end waved the flags of 45 nations. To my left, on the slopes of the stadium (from the Greek “stadion,” a racetrack), I could see my own family and my best friend, who had come thousands of miles to see whether I had the “arete” (excellence or valor) to outrun 11 other men, all of us wearing spotless white chitons (knee-length togas).
Maybe I should have stopped by the oracle at Delphi first to ask the Pythian priestess the question I suddenly faced: Why was I running in a race against athletes who obviously knew what they were doing and had trained for this event? Here I was, a 52-year-old man who, though he has endeavored over the years to stay in good shape, hates jogging and competitive athletics. I was that guy in school who was inevitably the very last one picked whenever teams were chosen. What on earth was I doing here?
The answer is a long and involved one. It goes back 573 years before Christ, back to when the original inhabitants of Nemea, a town southeast of Athens, instituted a competition very similar to those that already existed in Olympia, Delphi and Isthmia. Eventually, the Panhellenic games—bringing competitors from all over Hellas (the name for Greece in ancient times)—were held regularly in Nemea, as well as in Olympia, Delphi and Isthmia.
“Hostilities were suspended, even if the truce was limited to a few days each year,” explains Dr. Stephen G. Miller, who has been excavating the stadium and sanctuary of Zeus at Nemea for more than 25 years, “and all the Greeks—Spartans and Athenians, Corinthians and Argives, Macedonians and Cretans—gathered in what was the first regular, organized, international sports competition in the history of man.” (They also, Miller has found, took a few moments to inscribe on the walls some of the world’s oldest locker-room graffiti.)
In 1996, the people of modern Nemea, along with Miller, who is a professor of Classical archaeology at the University of California, Berkeley, instituted the new Nemean games. The response was so overwhelming that they held a second round of games in June, with 762 participants and a crowd of 8,000. Plans are to hold a third round in 2004—as in antiquity, at the second full moon after the summer solstice.
The aim from the beginning was to make the Modern Nemeads as similar to the original Panhellenic games as possible. Admittedly, no one runs in the buff as the ancients would have, but chitons are donned and feet go bare and the announcer relies on the excellent acoustics of the stadium instead of a PA system. And, as Miller puts it, “Participants are rewarded only by feet made sore from the same stone starting line and the same earth where ancient feet ran more than 2,000 years ago.”
That’s only a slight exaggeration. The winners of the main event—sprinting half a stadion (100 yards or 89 meters) to the finish line—receive a simple palm branch and a ribbon to festoon their heads.
“I’m running a race in the footsteps of Heracles,” said LaGrand Nielsen, who at 93 came all the way from Hemet, California, to compete, for the second time, in Nemea. “If I finish the race, I feel happy with myself.” Finish he did. Not only that, Nielsen went on the next day to finish—by no means in last place—a 7,500-meter (8,250-yard) race that traces the path that Heracles (Hercules) took to Kleonai after he slew the Nemean lion.
“This is an event that makes people happy,” said Theodore Pangalos, Greece’s minister of culture, as he watched from the shade of one of the many olive trees that grow around the stadium. “The idea behind these games is that sports can be practiced in public places with some recognition, but without great expense and advertising and elaborate record-keeping. Simple people of both sexes and all ages can compete and try to win, and if they don’t win, they’re happy to have participated.”
That’s what I kept telling myself as I tried to assume the proper starting stance, only to be whipped on the ankles by the long cane of one of the austere judges wearing black tunics—a historical echo I could have done without.
“Poda para poda,” said the starter, which I easily translated, despite my rusty Greek, as “foot by foot.”
“Ettime!” (Hmmm. Sounds more like Modern Greek. Something about “ready”?)
“Apite!!!” (Yes, from the verb “to go forth” . . . definitely imperative . . . second-person plural. . . .)
I looked up and already a length ahead of me was Roy Woolsey, a slim, handsome American I’d chatted with briefly while donning my chiton. An engineer from Altos Hills, California, he plays racquetball regularly and won in his heat four years earlier. And no wonder. He obviously had translated the Greek before running and gained a distinct advantage.
I dug in and ran like the Nemean lion was after me. Despite the language barrier and my distaste for jogging, I came in second.
Now maybe you expect a noble forbearance in the face of my modest victory. But remember your Homer. Didn’t Achilles drag Hector in the dust behind his chariot in triumphant revenge after he slew him? So take that, all you guys from my hometown who now have enormous beer guts and debilitating gout! You know who you are, you who never picked me to play on your team. Listen up: Second in my heat at the international Second Modern Nemead, no less, cheered on by a throng of thousands. Got that? Made all the sweeter by the embrace of my daughter and wife, and the triumphant congratulations of my high school friend Walter, whom you also slighted.
And when U.S. Olympian Michael Johnson streaks across your TV screen this month in Sydney, bear in mind that he doesn’t have to wear a chiton and has the distinct advantage of a pair of special running shoes (free, I bet).
As I stood very nearly in the winner’s circle, surrounded by a landscape that I love, in sight of ruins whose beauty made my heart skip a beat each time I saw them, I remembered what it was about ancient Greek culture that led me to spend five years of my life studying it: The Greeks lived by a democratically inspired belief that every man possesses the capacity to stand up to his fellow man, irrespective of birth and wealth, and compete for the honor of being the best, the brightest, the strongest.
So what if it took me 35 years to do it? a

David Bailey is executive editor of Sky.

[info box]
Following in Greek Footsteps
The Society for the Revival of the Nemean Games can furnish complete details about June’s Second Modern Nemead—or the Third, planned for June 2004. Info: 30-746-24125 (in Greece), 510-642-4218 or socrates.berkeley.edu/~clscs275/Games%20folder/society.htm. E-mail: nemeaucb@socrates.berkeley.edu.
Ancient Nemea, which is a short drive from Corinth, Mycenae and Epidaurus, is well worth visiting. Besides the stadium and its dramatic entrance tunnel, the site features an excellent museum detailing the sanctuary and the Nemean games. Nearby is the Temple of Zeus, as well as a field packed with other ruins. Info: 30-746-22739 or http://www.nemea.org.—D.B.