The Grill and the Glory

The Jack, he says, is different. This trophy he would keep.

"I came here to win that damn barrel," he says. "We'll worry about money again next weekend."

But as I stand talking to Mixon on the wet Thursday before the competition, as 65 teams gather from around the world, and before the expected 30,000 spectators arrive for a day devoted solely to the arts and customs of slow-cooking meat over hardwood fires, I become aware of an uncomfortable truth. One thing more than any other stands between Mixon and his fierce desire to win the Jack: judges. In particular, those unpredictable, capricious and amateur ones known as "celebrity" judges.

Like me.

BARBECUE HAS ALWAYS BEEN ABOUT MORE THAN PUTTING FOOD ON THE TABLE. Since the first Neanderthal in a leopard-skin bowling shirt held the first hunk of mastodon over backyard embers, barbecue has been tightly bound to primal guyhood. There's something powerfully atavistic about searing the evening meat over a flame of your own making, a skill that predates such modern innovations as the electric oven, agriculture and civilization.

Over the centuries, barbecuing has only become more of a Y-chromosome pursuit. What other mode of cooking requires dismembered beasts, special tools, bulk fuel, protective gear, open flame and lots of standing around outdoors drinking beer? It's really more construction than cuisine.

"It's like a bonfire; men love that," says Linda Gould from Belvidere, Tenn., one of the relatively few women active in serious competitive barbecue. Her team, Chicks in Charge, has never qualified for the Jack ("It's our goal"), but she has signed on this weekend as a volunteer. "The guys are always very friendly to us, probably because they aren't threatened." With a smile, she fingers the small crystal pig dangling from her necklace. "But it kills them whenever we beat them."

As with all male-dominated endeavors, it was inevitable that barbecue would become a mano a mano competition (a blood sport in the truest sense). Just as the morning commute eventually led to NASCAR, cooking out now comes with prize money, corporate sponsorships and trash-talking rivalries.

"It's just exploded in the last couple of years," says Ed Roith, vice president of the Kansas City Barbecue Society, the governing body of one of the major national barbecue circuits. There were more than 250 KCBS-sanctioned events in 2006, Roith says, up from about 70 a decade ago. Roith himself started barbecuing competitively in the 1980s, when 20 or so entrants would vie for a purse of a few hundred dollars. Now, driven by barbecue industry promoters and cable channels that are gaga for reality cuisine, prizes of $10,000 or more are routine, and KCBS's signature event, the American Royal, drew more than 400 cookers last year. The World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest, held as part of the Memphis in May festival each year, boasts a grand prize of $8,000. In 2004, Mixon won $22,000 at Memphis.

"That ain't chump change," Mixon says. "I won that one twice."

As the contests grew, lots of fiddly rules grew up around them. The two main circuits, KCBS and Memphis in May, are like the National and American leagues of the barbecue world; the fundamentals are the same, but the customs are distinct. Both divide the universe into rib, chicken, pork, brisket and sauce categories. But MiM adds the most masculine division of all: the whole hog. And most important, it allows judges to visit and taste the barbecue at each competitor's tent. Cooks set a fancy table, describe their technique and present their "product" with a 15-minute spiel. Showmanship is central at MiM events. (Mixon, a whole hog specialist, is known as a master in this arena. "He's part politician, part Southern Baptist preacher," says Mary Jo Bateman, an Atlanta real estate developer and certified barbecue judge.)

But he also wins more than his share of KCBS contests, which are all about the meat. They are judged blind, with the food delivered in numbered Styrofoam cartons to a stern tribunal. Working KCBS judges are forbidden from the following: talking; wearing sunglasses; making "faces of rapture or disgust"; smoking; fraternizing with the contestants; using cellphones, pagers, cameras or moist towelettes (lest your scented fingers taint the food). And judges never know just who trimmed, seasoned, basted, injected, babysat, carved, garnished and dispatched that glistening, steaming pound of excellence in front of them.