Bob Cook

Forget whether a sport can really be a sport if it resembles your uncle at a wedding buffet. In the history of classic individual rivalries — Magic-Bird, Ali-Frazier, Borg-McEnroe, Russell-Chamberlain, Louis-Schmeling, Balboa-Creed — no rivalry in any sport is bigger right now than the extremely competitive eating duo of Kobayashi-Chestnut.

On Wednesday, Takeru Kobayashi of Nagano, Japan, and Joey Chestnut of San Jose, Calif., will meet on New York’s Coney Island to determine who can stuff the most hot dogs down his throat in 12 minutes. It’s the most anticipated matchup in sports since Palmer-Nicklaus at the 1962 U.S. Open, which featured another veteran who brought his sport to the masses against a young buck trying to topple his reign of dominance.

Why would a competition between two flapping jaws be so eagerly awaited? Part of it is the gruesome spectacle of watching people cram massive amounts of terrible food down their gullets without puking — or, as the International Federation of Competitive Eating’s rules call it, a "reversal of fortune."

A bigger part of it is also the lack of compelling rivalries in any sport right now. The San Antonio Spurs, Tiger Woods and Roger Federer are dominating without a consistent rival to measure their greatness. Red Sox-Yankees is in a lull because New York is struggling. The participants get chippy and intense in U.S.-Mexico soccer, but most of America hasn’t noticed, because it’s soccer.

And really, looking at the way the American obesity rate is heading, it’s easy to conclude eating, not baseball, is the national pastime. That puts the Kobayashi-Chestnut rivalry beyond just sport to international incident, which hasn’t been a big part of U.S. sports since the Berlin Wall fell.

Kobayashi, 29, has won this Nathan’s hot dog eating contest six straight years, obliterating all previous records and winning by at least 12 hot dogs in his first five victories while turning competitive eating from a curiosity into a name-brand sport. Kobayashi was the Toyota to competitive eating’s usual El Dorados, with his small, chiseled body (5-foot-7, 144 pounds when he won his first Nathan’s contest) zipping efficiently past the sport’s usual lumbering fat guys.

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Kobayashi passes the "your mom" test. As in, has your mom, who never follows sports, heard of him? At the least, she knows him, as alluded to in a recent radio ad for power-flushing toilets, as "that Japanese guy in the eating contests."

Chestnut, 23, is treating the event as if he’s one the Marines trying to raise the flag at Iwo Jima. The 6-foot-1, 230-pound civil engineering student is built more like an SUV, but he has the technique and speed to match Kobayashi. In last year’s Nathan’s contest, Chestnut, the 2005 Rookie of the Year, ate 52 HDBs (in competitive eating parlance, hot dogs with buns), finishing only 1.75 HDBs behind Kobayashi’s new record of 53.75.

In subsequent contests, Chestnut continued to nip (no pun intended) at Kobayashi’s heels. In the world bratwurst championships last August, it was Kobayashi 58, Chestnut 45 (both crushing the previous record of 34.5), and in the Krystal hamburgers competition last October, Chestnut led seven out of eight minutes before falling to Kobayashi 97-92.

Kobayashi holds the current records for speed-consuming brats, cow brains, Krystal hamburgers, lobster rolls and rice balls. But in Tempe, Ariz., last month, Chestnut crushed Kobayashi’s hot dog record, swallowing 59.5 in 12 minutes, his third record in three months (Chestnut set an asparagus record in April and a buffalo wings record in May) and his 11th record category overall, including such delights as grilled cheese sandwiches, pot stickers, pork ribs and waffles.

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