Memphis in May

Well.......we're here at Memphis in May for the world BBQ championship. I'm with Carey Bringle on the Peg Leg Porkers. I am hoping to blog quite a bit this week.....in diary mode. There may be a couple of posts per day with pictures (if I can figure out how to load them on this computer). Yesterday Me, Carey, Dave, Terry & John all met about 5:00 to set up our tent and space. Got Careys cooker loaded in. I havent cooked here since 1998 when I was with John Willingham. I swore then I would'nt do this again......for several reasons. MIM has an almost "Mardis Gras" type feel to it. 95% of the people that make up all the teams are here to party and get wasted. Now I said most people, NOT all! When I was on Johns team there were a lot of guys on the team that just did not want to work. You look around and there is 20-30 men standing around and only 4-5 doing any work. After about 3-4 days of that you can get pissed off real fast! That year I stayed up with the hog all night.....so I got no sleep....which is fine because I expected that. I also expected to be able to get a few hours that saturday morning, but that didnt happen. After a breakfast at the "Green Beetle" off Beale St. I saw that John and the 2-3 other guys needed all the hands they could get because the other 25 were just going to drink, so I stayed to work. No sleep, 98* degrees, 95% humidity, 25 lazy fat ticks sitting around doing nothing but farting and drinking screwdrivers & beer........then to make it worse we got docked sanitary points from the judges because John didnt have his gloves on when serving. We came in 4th!!! Boy I was pissed, then to make it worse a couple of judges came by to tell us we would have won whole hog had we not lost those points. Then I was really pissed! All that combined and I said no more! At the end of the afternoon my buddy Bryan Chandler was helping John clean up......he wasnt even a team member! It was pathetic! John is a pretty good guy and I hope to see him this week but the rest of the team that year as a whole was lazy and it got really frustrating. Careys team is not like that. He has guys who want to work! You either pay to be a working member or you pay a higher fee to be on the team but not work, a social member. Careys team is sponsored by Lobels, Jack Daniels Black Label and a few others. I'm really looking forward to this and hope we win! Unlike the Kansas City BBQ Society, which is the other sanctioning body for bbq competitions MIM can be a little political........I'll get into that later this week. Stay posted......this will be fun!