A hot dog amongst hot dogs.
There isn’t enough mustard in the world to cover Reggie Jackson.” –Darold Knowles, Oakland A’s, 1973
Once a year on the 4th of July weekend, the world focuses its curious attention to the freak-show known as Coney Island for the formerly Japanese-dominated, highly anticipated athletic event known as Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest. Half drunk crowds watch with glee as contestants literally stuff voluminous amounts of the mystery food down their throats like a starving 2-year-old child to the tune of a 10,000 dollar prize and accolades that only a B movie actor or 3rd rate hip hop artist could receive.
I attended this event with my bikini-clad girlfriend in the summer of 2006. She had short blond hair akin to Communist-loving Brigitte Nielsen of Rocky 3 fame and turned her nose up to the event. And I, like much of the crowd, was pleasantly buzzed and was absolutely tranquilized by the spectacle. It was a much more desirable choice than loitering on a dusty and windy East Coast beach while Eastern European chess players eyeballed the thin, blonde California girl who had been turning heads since she was a pre-teen growing up in a small town in Northern California.
And in my hazy state on that sunny New York day, I started to wonder how eating hot dogs was a gluttonous spectacle, and “being” one in the baseball world was to be the same: an all-encompassing, excessive personality who craved attention and Reggie Jackson certainly was emblematic of this. The parallels were astounding. Like the hot dog eating affair, New Yorkers, who voraciously consumed gossip newspapers, had some sort of love/hate affair with NY Yankee Jackson: the “grotesque” that lovingly had a sprinkle of S&M around the edges. Pure, unadulterated spectacle display for a culture of ostentatious citizens that prides itself on having a vulgar personality and shoving mass quantities down its own throat for the sake of a story.
Pass the mustard.
