The Grill and the Glory

This is where I come in.

The Jack is run on KCBS rules, using KCBS-certified judges. But it's also a big-deal marketing event for the Jack Daniel's company, and it invites a lot of what it calls "celebrity" judges to pique public and media interest. Out of the 60 folks on this year's panel, about 20 amateurs will pin on the black judge's badge, including regional bigwigs, local news weather-creatures, college football coaches and cable channel chefs.

And the odd travel writer. Now I am, in fact, an avowed barbecue fan. And I have opined in print about the irrefutable superiority of mustard- and vinegar-based sauces over the sugary red syrup that passes for sauce in some misguided parts of the country. But I'm pretty sure the Jack Daniel's folks didn't invite me for my barbecue point of view so much as for what nice things I might write about their beloved home town of Lynchburg. (And, hey, who wouldn't be proud of the friendliest, most enchanting little burg of less than 400 people in these United States, where the mountain sun is outshone only by the dazzle in a local girl's smile, and where the best sippin' whiskey this side of Aberdeen is made in the local distillery, which is open daily for public tours from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.)

Thing is, serious cooks hate celebrity judges. Not personally, but because they are maddening wildcards in the sacred judging process.

"You just cannot tell what's going to happen when you've got a bunch of amateur judges up there," Mixon says. "I wouldn't try to predict this one if God Himself came down to tell me who would win."

It turns out that barbecue tournaments are like dog shows. Rather than cook the tastiest food they can, competitors cook to a set of meticulously described objective criteria. Just as the American Kennel Club says the perfect Cardigan Welsh corgi ear has tips that are "slightly wide of a straight line drawn from the tip of the nose through the center of the eye," the perfect KCBS pork rib has meat "that comes off the bone only where you bite it, and the bone beneath it should dry almost immediately."

The cooks get that. The experienced judges get that. But the celebrity judges?

They don't always get that.

"When you're cooking for real judges, you go for very concentrated, very extreme flavors," Mixon says. "They're only going to take one bite, and you need the wow factor. When you're cooking for folks who aren't trained judges, you need to aim for the middle of the road. The competitive stuff is much richer than they're used to."

In other words, you've got to dumb it down.

THE ORGANIZERS DO WANT US BEGINNERS TO KNOW AS MUCH AS WE CAN, so they assign us the judge's training seminar that Ed Roith holds on the day before the Jack. It's one of several he conducts around the country each year, a campaign that has trained more than 12,000 KCBS barbecue judges to date. About 70 of us gather in the auditorium of a state park campground on the outskirts of Lynchburg. Some are here for the Jack; others want to be certified for future contests. There are plenty of men in overalls, flannel shirts and stock car caps, but also a few in urban shades and black leather coats. Roith, preaching from a lectern, starts with the basics.

"When the general public says 'barbecue,' they probably mean, 'Hey, I'm going to cook a hot dog on the grill,'" he says. "But 'barbecue' as we mean it in competition is the slow-cooking of meat over the indirect dry heat of burning wood or charcoal."