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In Vienna barbecue is a rough-and-tumble sport
By Jim Auchmutey

It was the night before the Big Pig Jig, the Vienna, Ga., barbecue cook-off, and the two-time defending champions, the Sporty Porkers, were gearing up for a threepeat. The pig was on the coals, the brew was on the ice, and the Porkers, looking like a bowling team in their matching yellow monogrammed shirts, were settling in for a long night of hog swabbing and beer swilling.

"We know what it takes to win," said Danny Cape, a lighting engineer from Cochran, sounding as serious as a game-day coach as he reviewed a clipboard of cooking assignments. "It takes teamwork, and we've got it down to a science. When those judges come through here tomorrow, every man will know his job. We'll be in the zone."

A couple of Porkers nodded confidently in agreement. It was gut- check time, and these guys had come to 'cue. Vince Lombardi couldn't have said it better than the T-shirt they printed: "Let's cook some butt!" A few years ago, covering a barbecue contest for The New Yorker magazine, the noted eater Calvin Trillin worried that barbecue might be crossing what he called the Chili Line. Chili, you'll recall, was just a tasty dish until Texans got carried away with cook-offs and turned it into an overblown, disputatious excuse for bragging rights.

Guess what happened? Barbecue, that happy communion of smoke and meat, has become yet another arena for big, sweaty men to take their measure against each other. And they don't even have to put down their drinks.

Every weekend, teams of men - and occasionally women - fan out across this great, carnivorous country and lock in smoky combat to determine who among them best puts hog to log. They haul fancy cookers around like land yachts. They plaster them like stock cars with the logos of their sponsors. And, judges willing, they win prizes as high as $25,000 and trophies as tall as anything Richard Petty ever hoisted on Victory Lane.

"We feel barbecue is the up-and-coming sport of the '90s," says Donald "Doc" Gillis, editor of the National Barbecue News, a Douglas, Ga., newspaper dedicated to the world of tournament cooking. He covers it like a sport, too, team standings and all.

There are at least seven barbecue cook-off circuits. Texas alone has three. But the biggest leagues operate out of Tennessee and Missouri. The Kansas City Barbecue Society runs the dominant Midwestern circuit, sanctioning 49 beef and pork contests that culminate each autumn in the American Royal, which it bills as the world's largest barbecue contest.

Funny, but that's what Memphis in May calls its championship, which has drawn the likes of Vice President Al Gore and his cooking team, the Washington Pigskinners. Memphis in May sanctions 45 pork-only contests across the South, beginning in February with the Prestigious Palmetto Pig- Pick'n in Charleston, S.C. and ending in December with the Central Florida Pig Festival in Sebring. More than 900 teams compete, almost double the number of three years ago. The crew with the most points by year's end wins an oak butcher block table with a plaque inlaid on top, the barbecue equivalent of NASCAR's Winston Cup.

If they gave a prize for best cook-off name, the winner would have to be Georgia's Big Pig Jig. One of the biggest contests -- probably third, after Kansas City and Memphis -- it draws more than 30,000 people every October to Vienna, a town of 2,500 on I-75 south of Macon. (By the way, it's pronounced VIE-enna). Part cook-off, part tailgate party, the event was nicely described by a sign one team hung out this year welcoming everyone to the "Redneck Mardi Gras."

Pig Jig Village, as locals call the site, is indeed a sort of town, with 15 square blocks of permanent structures rising three and four stories above the cotton fields. Teams lease lots from the Dooly County Chamber of Commerce and build kitchens, bathrooms, decks and anything else that will facilitate the social ramble. It all comes to life for exactly four days a year. With hardwood smoke drifting from scores of fires and more than a few Rebel flags flapping in the breeze, you'd think it was the last encampment of Stonewall Jackson's lost brigade.

Booze gets cooks through long nights

"I try to describe it to people up North, and they don't believe it," said Dean Colovos of Orange, Conn., who attended his second Pig Jig this year as a guest of the WGAS team from Cordele. "I love it. They don't let you carry beer in the open like this in Connecticut."

Beer? These guys had a jar of "white lightning" in the cooler.

There's no denying that alcohol is almost as prevalent as pork on the barbecue circuit. While things rarely get rowdy, and families seem to feel at home, there's always an exception. They still talk about the team that buried a pig in smoldering coals, Hawaiian-style, then got so slathered in sauce they couldn't find it the next morning.

There were no reports of lost hogs at this year's Pig Jig.

In all, 110 teams from four states competed in Vienna - doctors, lawyers, farmers, retirees, all manner of Southerners united only by their willingness to devote free time to smoking pork. All manner of Southerners, that is, except one. Only a few black teams registered, an imbalance that's typical of the cook-off circuit. "They don't feel comfortable in this atmosphere," said Jim Tabb, a visiting judge who's been frustrated in his efforts to draw black teams to a contest he runs in Tryon, N.C. "They think it's a Caucasian block party."

The party began Thursday when teams started arriving, but the competition didn't begin in earnest until Friday, when the coals were low and the hogs were laid out.

There was the Vienna Volunteer Fire Department, real-life firefighters who've won three Pig Jigs and one year earned $28,000 at barbecue cook-offs. They haul their rig, a long, red thing that's as shiny as a fire engine, to a dozen contests a year. "We don't use direct fire on the meat," team captain Kenny Calhoun explained as he pulled pliers out of a hip holster and lifted the hot lid of the whole-hog cooker. The sow inside was swaddled in cloth like a baby. Looked kind of cute. "I raised that little blue butt myself," Calhoun said, with fatherly affection.

A few blocks over, on Lot 179, was Chances Are, a husband-and-wife team from Tullahoma, Tenn., competing for the sixth straight weekend. "My husband retired from the Air Force, and then we discovered barbecue," said Mimi Richison, her hands glistening with fat from the ribs she was cutting. Their space looked like a used car lot, festooned with strings of pig lights. In the middle sat a $16,000 cooking rig with "Certified Hawgology Lab" painted on the side. "This is just a hobby," Richison said, wiping her hand and offering a business card.

Nearby, on Lot 13, was Outhouse Bar-B-Que, four old hunting buddies from Middle Georgia whose team name is more than a joke; it's a way of cooking. They actually built barbecue pits inside faux outhouses, a one- holer for ribs and shoulders, a two-holer for whole hogs. On the doors it read (surprise) "Sows" and "Boars."

"There's some real competition going on here," said Tom Gunnels, the chief cook, "and everyone has a secret. Want to see mine?" His voice fell to a hush as he pulled back a table skirt and revealed a stack of special- reserve firewood. "Green hickory from Monticello, Georgia. Around 2 o'clock tonight, when the crowd has cleared out, I'll put some of this on the fire. It makes some fine smoke."

And so the struggle was joined -- man against man, meat against meat, an all-night war of attrition for pork supremacy.

As judge appears, good manners do, too

There were other contests within the contest. Judges chose the best Brunswick stew, the tastiest sauce, the highest level of showmanship. (No kidding: The loopiest teams compete to put on the best pig-related skits; the Volunteer Fire Department took the prize by rescuing a man in a hog get-up from a burning balcony.) But the most prestigious awards are for three categories of meat: ribs, shoulder and whole hog. Three judges in each category visit a team to inspect cooking conditions and sample the barbecue. It's an opportunity to do some championship buttering up. When the first judge arrived Saturday morning, the Sporty Porkers came on like the defending champs they were.

They fell into two lines, like cheerleaders ushering a team onto a field, and welcomed judge Louise Dodd, a Macon food writer. For 10 minutes, Danny Cape, their whole-hog man, led her around the lot, discoursing on meat, wood, temperature and cooking time. Finally he ceremoniously lifted the cooker door, revealing a bronzed beauty of a hog, and inquired as to which part of the pig she preferred.

"Louise," as they called her, was seated at a crescent table stylishly decked out in black plates and black-and-white awning stripes.

As she thoughtfully chewed her meat, scribbling notes on a clipboard, half a dozen Porkers stood facing her in a semicircle, hands neatly folded, like deacons preparing to take up a collection. One poured barbecue sauce from a silver creamer, another replenished the water goblet, while another discreetly dabbed his smoke-shot eyes with Murine.

(After all, most of the nine team members had stayed up all night with a pig.) When Dodd signaled she was done, a bowl with a moistened hand cloth materialized.

"You boys take this very seriously, don't you?" she said as they showed her out, politely inviting her back for seconds later.

Alas, it was not to be. For all their well-practiced efforts, the Porkers did not win their third Pig Jig. When the judges' scorecards were tallied, a new team took the $2,000 grand prize: the L&L Cooking Crew from Jonesboro.

That night, when their leader took the stage to accept a trophy that was taller than any hog that ever wallowed, his first words came as no surprise: "I'd like to thank our sponsor ..."

It was almost enough to make you forget about all the great barbecue. Almost.

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