DEACS SHOW CRUST

The success of this season’s Wake Forest Demon Deacon basketball squad with a team laden with eight freshmen and sophomores reminds me of another Deacon team of days gone by. It was a team of only two people, a freshman and a sophomore. I was the sophomore. The team had only one competition which they won. It was a pizza eating team!

Tryouts for the team were rough. About 20 applicants showed up at the Farmer’s Dairy, a Winston-Salem ice cream store. Farmer’s Dairy had a special promotion with the “kitchen sink,” a tremendous bowl of all their varieties of ice cream. If you could eat the whole bowl by yourself, it was free. Most people could not eat the whole bowl; some did after throwing up. The two fastest times to consume the “kitchen sink” would be the team members for the pizza eating team. I made the team.

Today I pulled out several yellowed clippings from area papers of the pizza competition from over 40 years ago. I liked best the way Roy Thompson of the Winston-Salem Journal told the story.

Wake Forest College found a sport of its liking last night, and two stout-hearted, iron-stomached young Deacons covered themselves with glory, pizza sauce, cheese, sausages, mushrooms, onions and other things.

The first and (one hopes) last intercollegiate pizza-eating contest was won in a walk-away by the Baptists’ two-man team.

The winnahs … and new champeens … are Rich (Slim Man) Curd, a freshman biology major from Boonton, N.J. and Phill (The Pit) Ellington, a sophomore from Hickory. Coach and manager of the victorious duo: Steve Poston of Boiling Springs. Wake Forest out-ate teams from Guildford College, Greensboro College and UNC-Greensboro.

This historic event was held in the shadowy depths of Deno’s Pizza Den in Greensboro. The idea was fairly simple. The teams sat down at tables, and waitresses brought pizzas. The pizzas were roughly the size of sports car wheels, and each came laden with the works. The idea: eat it in five minutes. They took it in relays. One man eating. One man offering encouragement. Except in the case of UNC-G, when it was one GIRL eating, and it was one GIRL offering encouragement.

The girls tired to pull a sneaky. Betty Campbell of Fayetteville and Susan MacDonald of Atlanta removed their belts before the contest. The men all competed in full attire.

At a signal, it began, and “Slim Man” Curd led off for the Deacons. He finished his pizza in four minutes and 30 seconds to give the Baptists a lead from which the other competitors never recovered.

Phill the Pit breezed through his pizza in the second round, and Susan MacDonald downed hers. Guildford and Greensboro College faded.

Rich Curd did it again in the third round, and the other contestants apparently went along with Betty Campbell, who quit early and announced: “I’ll never eat another pizza.” Phill the Pit, after hearing that the others were turning a pale green, and couldn’t make it either, quit in the fourth quarter.

Rich Curd tore into his third pizza as if he hadn’t eaten since a week ago Friday, but word came that the others were giving up. He quit … to save his strength for another day. The man running the contest killed it. He announced that if anybody tied Wake Forest, they’d have a sudden death eat-off. Everybody quit.

The Wake Forest team got Deno’s $50 prize check. Slim Man and The Pit didn’t say what they planned to spend it on. It won’t be pizzas.

I still love to eat a good pizza. Yet I prefer NOT to have one with everything on it, especially anchovies, that were so hard to get down in that collegiate competition. I have not kept up with my teammate Rich and coach/manager Steve over the years. However, I do know Steve further developed his talents. He is a university vice president and director of athletics.