SATURDAY MORNING: COMPETITION DAY
Pit team arrive bright and early. The rest of the team trickles in between 9 and 11am to clean the booth, decorate for judging, etc. Keep in mind this place has served a thousand pounds of mean and 7-8000 drinks in the previous 48 hours or so.... it's trashed. Our team is remarkably good at whipping the place into shape though, and after a couple hours it's transformed from a full on nightclub into the closest approximation of a fine dining establishment you can create on the river.
Comp Ribs on the smoker
Taking them off for assembling blind box
Trimming sections of the slabs for inclusion in the blind box
Box is in our heat bag and ready to be run to the judging booth by Bash
Now we have about 15 mins to prepare 3 more slabs for onsite judging... we will have 3 judges come through the booth, one at a time, for 15 minutes each, with a 5 minute reset window between each. The team lines up inside the booth as our pitmaster greets him or her, we introduce ourselves, then most of the team disperses except for out pitmaster (who handles presentation), Myself (carries the slab from smoker to table, and keeps time, indicating to the pitmaster how much time we have left, our "Door man" who helps them into the booth, then ensures nobody walks in during judging.
Our first judge enters the booth
He's rather quiet... but seems to enjoy the ribs immensely. Otherwise it's an uneventful visit.
Another shot of him eating with our door guy in place holding the "Hush Ya'll" paddles from the FedEx St Jude Classic course workers. They're not for sale to the public, but my old employer, True Temper Golf Shafts, sponsors them and they use Dynamic Gold golf shafts for the handles. The CEO is a good buddy and brought 2 down for my on my request for use on Saturday judging (the park is very quiet but some folks don't know that). They are somewhat of a "signature thing" for the City of memphis.
Memphis in May photographers onsite noticed them and used photos of them on
Instagram and
Twitter as the "Remember to be quiet today" posts, which was pretty cool.
The judge leaves and the team rushes back into the booth to replace plates, water glasses, top off the carafe, replace origami napkin, wipe down the 1000 year old custom engraved mesquite cutting board we present on, and to glaze and load the next slab into the smoker. It's a surprisingly well-oiled process and we can usually reset in 90 seconds to 2 mins....
Here's a shot of the view our judges have while they eat, btw. Many teams try to enclose the judges in small spaces to hide distractions. We like to have them facing out looking at the Mississippi for a calming/scenic view. We feel it enhances the experience.
Second Judge In. A bit more vocal. Raves about the ribs.
Third Judge comes In. A bit more experienced judge. We run into a potential hiccup.. our pitmaster will tear the end two bones off the slab in front of the judge and hand them the heart of the slab. It's intended to show confidence that our slab will tear perfectly. A bad tear and you're in trouble so it's a gamble.
Well, they tear well, but the judge interprets that as us attempting to hide overdone ends, and proceeds to ignore the heart of the slab and start eating the end bones from the cutting board. Pitmaster keeps his cool but nobody wants to be judged on bones 9 and 10 of a slab. Thankfully they are perfectly done and judge raves about how hard that is to do... then proceeds to get into the heart of the slab, and continues to rave about how good they are. Saying things like "These are perfect", "You should win it all", etc. He stays almost 10 minutes over his 15 min alotted time which is a no-no but his handler is having so much fun with our guys outside he doesnt come crack down on us.
He finally leaves and we immediately begin
resetting the table for finals judging (top 3 teams are re-judged onsite by 4 judges instead of one). Our guests who have been sitting outside for an hour file into the tent and begin drinking and socializing. We protect the finals table with chairs and try to remind everyone to not make a mess, as we will have 10 minutes notice of potential judges.
Judges come back one by one to inform us they "Gave us our ten" which means we got perfect scores, which they can only give to one of the three teams they judge. The team begins getting excited. Then we hear no finals (top 3). Damn.. well we're sure we're getting top 10 (walk on stage).... but they announce there will be a 90 minute delay to announce top 10. Why does it take an extra 90 mins to do the math on the last 7? Dunno. Odd.
We eventually find out we're not top 10. WTF. Only possible explaination is hitting a bad table in blind box judging. ####.
So we skip awards, get food out for our guests,
snap our annual team photo, and begin to party.
Tommy dons the pig suit and re-opens the driving range.
Then the plates come out for the annual rating of the barbe-cuties (women walking by)
Tommy can't resist a camera
Low key party continues and we enjoy a remarkable sunset
Bonus sunset flag pic
Once the sun is about down, things start getting a little rowdier.
Usually we leave around sunset, but having went home early Friday night I felt horrible not closing down the booth Saturday. Well, the DJ team decides they don't want to fire up the big lighting setup... so I get an idea. We had about 50 of the customized LED Foam wands left.... so I give them to team members to hand out, and
we were going to have a blackout party.
It ended up being pretty damn cool. and was a great contrast to the massive lighting setup from the previous nights. A great way to end the festival I think. We finally shut down the booth around 10:30 or so and headed home.
Sunday from 11am-2pm we tore down the booth.
Another year in the books.
Until May 2018...
![[icon]](/data/avatars/m/5/5167.jpg?1660313464){kind=avatar}
. Then he opens the back door to let us out, laughing, and says "Don't worry it's just the usual saucepects" as we got out. 
