The Grill and the Glory
A hard-core competitor on the professional barbecue circuit attempts to persuade a bunch of amateurs to award him the prize he covets most

By Steve Hendrix
Sunday, April 1, 2007

MEAT KEEPS MYRON MIXON VERY BUSY.

Almost every week, usually on a Wednesday, Mixon stows several hundred pounds of raw ribs, pork, beef brisket and chicken in a couple of coffin-size coolers attached to a 30-foot, $40,000 custom trailer. The rig also houses an electric chest freezer and three enormous smoking "pits," huge sheet-metal contraptions of chimneys and gauges and doors. The largest can hold three 200-pound butchered hogs, one of Mixon's specialties. He throws aboard gnarled peach tree branches gathered from the orchards near his home in Vienna, Ga., along with several bags of ice, a wide array of condiments, sauces and spices (some obvious, some secret), brown sugar, chicken broth, vinegar, fresh parsley, beer, beer cozies, blenders, bourbon, rum, tequila, a worn boombox holding an exhausted Guns N' Roses cassette, a half-dozen folding armchairs, a portable fire basket and various party tents and canopies. And then, early the next day, Mixon and his longtime aide-de-camp, David "Doby" Hair, pull away for some distant fairground or state park or convention center parking lot, wherever the national barbecue circuit is convening that weekend. The calendar is concentrated in the South, barbecue's ancestral homeland. But Mixon logs more than 50,000 miles a year driving as far as Vancouver and Vermont.

"My whole life revolves around barbecue," says Mixon, who also cooks as a caterer and for his family's two barbecue restaurants. "We stay gone most weekends. Sometimes I get mixed up about where I'm at."

This particular weekend is a cool, wet autumn one, and the town of the week is Lynchburg, Tenn. The burg is tiny, but the event is one of pro barbecuing's most celebrated, the Jack Daniel's World Championship Invitational Barbecue. To serious cookers, it's known simply as "the Jack." No one competes at the Jack unless he has won a state championship or other major competition in the previous year. And while the top award of $2,500 is far from one of barbecuing's biggest purses, the whiskey-barrel-shaped trophy is definitely one of its most coveted.

"The Jack is the most prestigious, and it's the one big event I have never won," says Mixon, who has competed here eight times. In 2004, he missed first place by a 10th of a point. "Here, you're not competing with anybody but champions. I am very serious about it this year."

And when Mixon gets serious, the other competitors take note. There is no cooker on the circuit hotter than Mixon, who has won more than 1,200 barbecue titles, more than 130 grand championships, 24 state championships and six barbecue-team-of-the-year banners. One of the few full-time professional barbecue competitors, he has made, by his own account, between $75,000 and $100,000 in prize money each of the past five years on the circuit. I heard one rival introduce Mixon to his sponsor as the Babe Ruth of barbecue.

"There is nobody on the planet who has won more barbecue contests than Myron," says James Britt, a Birmingham, Ala., engineer and competitive cooker. "He's a very bad dude. He's won everything."

Not everything. Not the Jack.

It's Thursday night, and Mixon is set up in the small park behind Lynchburg's tiny town square. As more teams pull in, the air is filled with the loose diesel rattle of F-350s and Ram Chargers and the beeeep-beeeep-beeep of stretch RVs being backed into place. Some of the barbecue rigs are heavy on bling, like the custom pimp-my-grill smoker with the hot-rod paint job that preens in front of a 50-foot bus with Texas plates. But most are homey, with tiki lights shining on the trophies and banners of previous barbecue triumphs. Two little blond girls wrestle like puppies before the tent of the team emblazoned with a huge Cancer Sucks banner (the team was formed by Chicagoan Scottie Johnson as a fundraising project after his wife, Corliss, died of cancer in 2003).

Mixon's rig sits among the rest like a death star, black and unadorned. The master himself stands in a green camo windbreaker, accepting visits and tributes from his many admirers in barbecuedom. He's tall and commanding, with brushed-back preacher-man hair, a tight beard and a belly built on barbecue and long drives.

Known for his curt intensity when the coals are hot, Mixon is every bit the beguiling good old boy in these pre-game hours. I only have to pause in front of his trailer for him to invite me over for a generous splash of Jack Daniel's in a red plastic cup. The mood is festive. Mixon's wife, Faye, is with him. And supporters from Georgia and Alabama have driven to root him through the Jack. Mixon and Hair, as they ready some pork chops to throw on the grill, break regularly into ragged Axl Rose lyrics: Take me down to the paradise city where the grass is green and the girls are pretty.

But when talk turns to the approaching contest, Mixon's eyes go as hard and dark as the black steel smoker behind him. Normally, he's a confessed barbecue mercenary, driven less by passion than by payoff. He endures the endless miles, the dive motels and the sleepless nights amid the smoke not from a love of cooking, but to make as much money as he can. He doesn't even keep the trophies anymore.

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.

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."

And then off we go on a sort of coroner's tour of America's national food. That blotch of red at the chicken bone, we learn, may or may not be the blood of an undercooked bird (a dab with a paper towel can tell you). Beef brisket is the cow's pectoral muscle (some of nature's toughest flesh). That membrane behind the pork rib can be cut away or left in place at the discretion of the cook (a good judge won't take points away based on his own preference).

"You have to train yourself to judge the meat as it is cooked, not as you prefer it," Roith thunders. "I don't care if you don't like chicken skin. If that cook leaves the skin on, you have to try it and evaluate just how well that skin is cooked."

We learn to ignore our regional biases; we learn that barbecue judges are blind to the furious sectarian divides between vinegar partisans and brown sugar fetishists and mustard outliers. We learn to judge on the holy trinity of texture, moisture and flavor. We learn that on the KCBS circuit, contestants are allowed to dress up their entries only with sanctioned greenery. Parsley is okay, but only curly. No Italian flat-leaf. No red tip lettuce, endive or kale. We learn that a prohibited garnish is an instant disqualifier (as are skewers and toothpicks) but that finding a bristle from a basting brush is not. We learn to test brisket by pulling it apart, looking for fibers that separate easily but not too easily. You want a little modesty in the meat.

They throw some traps at us, too. No one at my table picks up on the forbidden toothpick in the sliced pork that should be an instant blackball. But I'm proud to have flagged the illicit kale on one of the brisket entries.

We practice marking our placemat ballots on a scale of 1 (disqualified) to 9 (perfection). Roith makes us go round and round, comparing scores and challenging us to defend anything too extreme. Eventually, we all begin to fall within an acceptably narrow range. We all, basically, come to agree on what constitutes a perfect 9 rib and a middling 5 pork shoulder.

Five hours cramming on the tensile strength of brisket and downing a pound of demo meat may not make you an expert, but it does qualify you to take the oath as a certified KCBS judge. And so, we wipe our mouths, get to our feet, raise our sticky right hands and murmur in unison:

"I do solemnly swear to objectively and subjectively evaluate each barbeque meat that is presented to my eyes, my nose and my palate. I accept my duty to be an official KCBS judge so that truth, justice, excellence in barbeque and the American way of life may be strengthened and preserved forever."

I am duly deputized.

THE MORNING OF THE JACK DAWNS WITH THE SCENT OF SMOKE and fat and cumin heavy on the land. The dawn stars shine clear and sharp, promising improved weather. Not that a storm would make much difference to a bunch of barbecue extremists; Mixon once defied a tornado to keep company with his roasting meat. It was the stormy Friday night before the 2003 national championships in Memphis, and the local police swept through ordering contestants to evacuate. Mixon left, but immediately sneaked back in. He wasn't alone; other competitors hid in portable toilets until the authorities left. The diehards spent the night with their smoking wards as the wind plucked tents from all sides and the twister itself touched down just across the river.

"It got rocking there for about five minutes where I thought, 'What the hell have I done?'" Mixon recalls. "But I made out all right. Won first place in hog."

Now, under a half-pink sky, this barbecue camp is serene. Thousands of pounds of flesh bask in the searing hickory breath of a hundred smokers. Only the occasional creak of a metal hinge breaks the quiet and, somewhere, the low timpani of someone chopping onions. A snore comes from behind a tarp; most of the competitors had been up late at the whiskey-soaked hoot-enanny thrown by the Jack Daniel's folks.

At the Philly Pigs tent, Jim Boggs climbs out of his cot to squint at his heat gauges. Inside are the five eight-pound pork butts he bought three weeks ago from a New Jersey butcher (who orders them special from Sandusky, Ohio). Boggs is a financial consultant. Among his still-sleeping teammates are a contractor, a lawyer and two mortgage brokers. His brother, Mike, walks by drowsily with a basting brush in his hand. Their strategy for the Jack? Middle of the road.

"We're sweet and tangy," Boggs says. "We're going for perfectly cooked mainstream. Some guys get desperate, cloves and stuff like that. That's not us."

Mixon, meanwhile, has his own daredevil cooking style. While most teams cook "low and slow" (15 hours at 220 degrees for a 10-pound beef brisket), the Madman of South Georgia is famous for going "hot and fast" (his brisket will take less than four hours at 325 degrees). The taste is unchanged, and it lets Myron sleep in a motel bed. But the risk of incineration is huge. Most pitmasters don't have the nerve.

By 10 a.m., the sun is bright, and the judges' pavilion is crowded. I sign in and find my table. There are 10 paper-covered tables, each equipped with pencils, water, paper towels, saltines (for palate cleansing) and chairs for six judges. The 60 judges will taste and evaluate more than 455 entries in seven categories (chicken, ribs, pork shoulder, brisket, as well as side categories in sauce, dessert and "cooking from the homeland," a non-barbecue regional entree).

It's finally time to don my knee-length judge's apron and the old-fashioned, oversize black ribbon that marks me as one of the day's jurists. In the minutes before the

contest begins, we mill around signing one

another's aprons. My table is all celebrity judges. They include former University of Tennessee football coach Johnny Majors, the state's commissioner of tourism, an Air Force brigadier general and a Food Network host named Guy Fieri, who blatantly ignores the no-sunglasses rule until our table captain insists firmly that he remove the shades.

With five minutes to go before the first meat deadline, I can only imagine how crazy the teams must be, preparing their chicken entries even as the ribs and other cuts come out of the smokers.

And then I see, past bleachers filled with spectators, a fully outfitted Canadian Mountie clearing a path through the crowd. Behind him, a man walks carefully to the check-in table with a closed Styrofoam box. Many of the teams use blockers like this, although not always costumed; at a contest in which every fraction of a point counts, getting jostled and dropping an entry would mean game over.

Soon a stack of cartons arrives at our table. We grow silent as our table captain, a well-known barbecue chef named Tony Stone, opens the first box and passes it under our solemn faces for a visual inspection. It's a nest of six glistening chunks of perfection. It's barbecued chicken as Leonardo da Vinci would have painted it, the Mona Lisa of chicken. It's chicken so flawless, so exquisitely primped and brushed and turned out that it should be walking up the red carpet at the Academy Awards. It's a Playgrill centerfold.

I inhale deeply, and the fragrance makes my eyelids droop.

We each take a piece and put it on square No. 1 of our cardboard tasting mat. Stone passes around the next entry and the next, until we each have five pieces in front of us. Only then do we begin to taste.

I start with No. 1.

Pinch. Sniff. Squint. Nibble. Chew.

Ponder.

It's transcendent. The flesh surrenders gracefully but not wantonly to my bite; there's a winning humility in the clear glistening juice of the meat, and just a whisper of sass -- a flirtation, really -- in the moist red char of the skin.

I give it a 9.

Time for No. 2.

Nibble, nibble.

It's transcendent. The flesh surrenders gracefully but not wantonly to my bite; there's a winning humility in the clear glistening juice of the meat, and just a whisper of sass -- a flirtation, really -- in the moist red char of the skin. I give this one a 9, too.

Uh-oh. It turns out that my amateur palate can't tell much difference between one nearly perfect piece of barbecue and another nearly perfect piece of barbecue. They're both just really, really good.

I'm in a mild panic as we continue. I can't give them all perfect scores. I pray to bite into a piece of kale or a toothpick. Anything that will let me flunk someone.

It's a huge relief when I run into an actual clunker. A piece of dry chicken breast that has been hammered flat like a cutlet. After the ballots are collected and we stand for a stretch (and Coach Majors signs autographs along the crowd barrier), we surmise that the cutlet must have come from one of the European teams.

Things settle down after that. After a dozen or so samples, the distinctions among them begin to stand out more clearly. This brisket is just a leeeeetle too eager to pull apart. This chopped pork doesn't quite engage the nose as much as one might hope. And is that a tiny afterburn of chili left by an otherwise unimpeachable rib?

Idiots!

Trust me, there's a little Simon Cowell in all of us.

I wonder, as the meat parades by, whether I'm tasting any of Mixon's.

And then it is over. Four hours and a pound of world-class meat later, I'm allowed to waddle down off my pedestal and return to civilian life. It feels good, and a little gassy, to be back to judge-not status.

It is going to take a couple of hours to tally the ballots, so I make a few turns around the park. While I was chained to the judges' table, a whole festival has sprung up. Thousands of day-trippers mill among booths selling roasted corn and lemonade and country crafts. Teams, free now from the pressure of the contest, hawk their rubs and sauces. A whole midway of barbecue vendors, some of them serious competitors at other contests, do a huge business in ribs and pulled pork. I pass.

At Mixon's tent, the mood was confident but wary.

"I'm not worried about the product we cooked," says Mixon's assistant, Doby. A restless, wiry man, Doby works four 10-hour days at a Georgia greeting cards printing plant to leave his weekends free for barbecue tournaments. "What we cooked was good. But I am worried about who's back there judging it."

I shuffle nervously.

At five o'clock, with the now-smokeless chimneys casting skinny shadows, I walk with Mixon and his entourage back to the judges' pavilion, where they linger at the edge of the crowd as the emcee begins to read out the results.

The dessert ribbon goes to a team from Pueblo, Colo. "Doesn't that just burn your ass," Mixon growls. "We stayed up all night cooking that damn cheesecake." His wife, Faye, chews the nail on her middle finger.

Chicken goes to Dirty Dick and the Legless Wonders from Norwell, Mass. They come screaming and shouting down the aisle to get their plaques and take their bows.

Beef brisket goes to Blazen BBQ from Hillsboro, Tex.

More hallelujahs.

Pork shoulder goes to Jumpin Joe's BarBQ, Leavenworth, Kan.

Doby clears his throat and jams his hands into the pocket of his Old Navy sweatshirt

Ribs go to Pork-n-Bones from Castor, La.

"It's going to be a long night drinkin'," Mixon says.

Technically, he's still in it. Because of the point system, a team can just miss on all the individual categories and still bag the grand prize. It's happened. But not often.

And, finally, here it is. The Grand Champion of the 2006 Jack Daniel's World Championship Invitational Barbecue, as decreed by me and my fellow judges, is . . .

Cancer Sucks Chicago.

Mixon claps twice, turns and walks back to camp.

HE ISN'T MAD.

When I show up at his trailer a half-hour later, after watching Scottie Johnson and his two little girls pose with that big whiskey-barrel trophy, Mixon has the Guns N' Roses going and the blender drinks flowing. There's a fire in the wire basket, and Doby is marinating steaks. The usual crowd is gathered around Mixon, and he accepts their baffled sympathy with grace. A few winners drop by -- they don't beat Mixon often -- and he's quick to shake their hands.

"You done good, my brother," he says to one. "You walk up on that stage, and you've done very well."

Later, standing away from the growing crowd, he shakes his head.

"This is some of the best [expletive] I've cooked this year," he says.

But that's as close to remorse as he comes.

"Hell, it's just one contest," he says in a firmer voice. "It won't break me."

He takes another sip and heads back to his people. "And I will be back next year," he says. "I've already qualified."

Steve Hendrix is a former travel writer and current Metro reporter for The Post.