"Thank you, William Brohaugh. Thank you for writing this book. Barbecue is the better for it." --Doug Mosley in The National Barbecue News "The blend of travel, social and culinary history is exceptional and fun in this highly recommended pick." --Midwest Book Review "A must read for aspiring pit masters and great for armchair cooks, too." --Steven Raichlen, author of The Barbecue Bible and host of PBS's Barbecue University		This excerpt from Chapter 13 of The Grill of Victory talks about the "dangers" of playing with fire and heavy objects on the BBQ circuit. (For other excerpts, see also "Sing a Song of Pig Puns, Pocket Full of Wry" and "Happy Hawg Gets His Rude Awakening"): Starring Hog-Eye Pierce "Men will cook if there's danger involved." --Comedian Rita Rudner "It's all part of barbecue," says Brad Cheatham, head cook of the Carbondale Eagles barbecue team, as he returns to his hog prep at the Meat on the Mississippi competition in Caruthersville Missouri. "Clean your hog. Sew up your neighbor." Next door, Sweet Swine o' Mine's Pat Rooney is walking it off. Sweet Swine in the interval between Galax and Caruthersville has purchased a new box smoker, which moments ago was laying across Pat's leg. As he and teammate Mark Lambert maneuvered the grill to a spot at the back of their site, Pat backed into an packed-up tent, tripped backwards. The cooker toppled with him, onto him. Mark reached him first, but Brad Cheatham was there only a few moments later, himself. Though Pat's knee was hurting, after a minute or two, he was able to get up and start walking it off. "Didn't that cooker do that to you one time before?" Brad says. Pat explains that this is a new unit. "It's broke in now," Brad says. When it's clear that Pat hasn't been seriously injured, Brad regards the cooker, shakes his finger at it. "Bad cooker! Bad cooker!" Someone later jokes that it's good that the smoker landed on Pat's knee instead of his head. Would've been a shame to dent the smoker. Later, as Pat works in front of the hog cooker, someone asks him, "How you feeling?" "I'm not feeling today," Pat says. "I got a job to do. I got plenty of time to whine later." Three weeks earlier in Galax, Jim Davis is sitting in a golf cart directing his wife and son in laying down yellow duct tape on the curbs, designating spaces for both teams and the vendors on the cross of Main and Grayson. He shouldn't be there at all. Jim had--no pun intended--first crack at one of the competition carts, because he broke his leg prepping for the competition. Returning to the street after inspecting the unoccupied bank building where the blind room and the hospitality rooms were going to be set up, Jim hit a slippery spot. "The next thing I knew, I was looking up." Broke his leg. Left his toes purple. His doctor recommended surgery. Watching his family work, he pats the paperwork in his hand--team lists, vendor lists, hand-drawn street maps and site layouts. "I got this to do." He then gestures toward the cast over his right leg. "I don't have time for that. I've spent the time pretending that my leg isn't broken." He's not even supposed to be driving the golf cart. He and his walker are supposed to be passengers. Even so, after his son works his way down Grayson with tape measure and duct tape, Jim puts his good foot, his left foot, on the gas and carts down to supervise. Plenty of time to whine later. At a later whine time, on Friday, John David Wheeler of Natural Born Grillers sits in another commandeered golf cart, watching Myron Mixon and Jack's Old South set up, and exchanging friendly smart talk with Myron and fellow Jack's Old Southerner David Hair. John David, like Jim, is using the cart as a motorized gurney replacing the surgical gurneys the both of them should by all rights be on. John David was scheduled to have surgery the week of Galax--for a herniated disk in his back--but he, like Jim, postponed the knife to complete his barbecue obligation. David Hair is fetching a tool for the hog prep--a hacksaw that teammate Nick "Flash" Cochran will use in a few moments to cut off the hog's feet. "I'll fix you right up," David says to John David as he brandishes the hacksaw (blade length, about two feet). "Cut that right out." Clean your hog. Sew up your neighbor. "If I thought it'd feel better," John David says. "I'd do it, brother, I swear." John David's injury isn't barbecue-related but it is barbecue-aggravated. Heavy items, awkward items, and, in the case of John David as presenter to onsite judges, a lot of time standing up and sitting down and standing up again during the presentations. Nine presentations during preliminaries. Potentially as many as three more if you make it into finals. Though not a dangerous sport, barbecuing does involve occasional appearances of fire, knives, heavy objects, and the law of the famous Mr. Murphy. "It ain't a cook," says Pigs in Paradise's Craig Lester, "unless I get something pinched, poked or cut." Back in 2003, Mr. Murphy showed up in a competition that most on the competition circuit refer to, ironically, as "Murphy" (the Annual Murphysboro Barbecue Cookoff, Murphysboro Illinois). The competition was winding down. The Da-Nite Outback cooking team was presenting its ribs to the finals judges, and the Carbondale Eagles were prepping to receive the finals judges when they finished at Da-Nite. Next door to the Eagles' cooksite, M&M Cookers' Mark Arnold and his son Josh were hooking up their cooker trailer to their pickup. They had not made finals, though they were confident they were "in the money"--that is, a fourth or a fifth in rib. The team had gotten the pickup positioned in front of the trailer, but they'd misaligned the ball of the hitch and the trailer tongue. A half inch. Mark leaned over to try to bring hitch and tongue into alignment while Josh pulled the pickup back the half inch by the tailgate. "When he did," Mark says, "the tailgate come down, cracked me in the head, knocked me out. Josh fell backwards into the grill. We were both basically in trouble." Doug Boyd was helping Da-Nite with the ribs presentation when he heard the commotion. Mark says, "When he heard somebody was hurt, he just jumped up--you know, a volunteer firefighter, that's what he was--he ran down there and took care of us until the ambulances got there. "He really thought my neck was broken. When I dropped, they told me I just went limp, and was in an awkward position anyway. My face hit first on the ground. When I came to, he was there. I had no clue who he was. He got some rags and slipped them around my neck to hold me steady. Everybody was wanting to help me up and get me up, and I was saying "I'm all right." Doug said then, "No you're not, Mark. Trust me, I know what I'm doing, you're not all right. You're bleeding, and you need to just lay here." Clean your hog. Sew up your neighbor. "When it happened," Mark says, "Brad and them guys from Carbondale Eagles seen us, they were right beside us and they jumped over there, as quick as Doug got there. And they stood there and kept everybody away, the crowd and whatever, and were trying to calm Joshua down" until Doug was able to attend to him. "He took care of Josh, and made him lay still. Josh ended up with three cracked ribs, and beat up big time on his back. He had bruises from his hip to his head." After Mark and Josh were taken away to the emergency room, the cookoff participants didn't receive any status reports. "No one knew how bad we were hurt, they just knew that we were hurt." As the awards ceremony was about to start, the status report came in the best way possible: in the form of Mark and Josh walking up the middle of blocked-off Pine Street toward the stage. The assembled crowd broke into applause. "I ended up with some stitches on the top of my head, and a real good knot." And a fifth place rib that day. "And the tailgate had a big dent in it. Big dent." Clean your hog. Sew up your neighbor. Smoke on the Mountain, once underway, remains accident-free. Though the Tango-encroached bench in the Farmer's Market might give slight argument to that observation. And down on Grayson Street, the vending contingent of Natural Born Grillers on Thursday evening got something of a jumpstart to their hearts when they jacked up one side of their vending trailer, the side along the curb, trying to level the unit, and it slipped off the jack with a creak and a bump. No one hurt. Just a little unexpected movement. A good thing, since Brad and Doug were a few hundred miles away. (Check out "Sing a Song of Pig Puns, Pocket Full of Wry" for discussion of fun team names and "Happy Hog Gets His Rude Awakening" for discussion of fun team names. And read the book's Foreword, too.) (Copyright 2006 by William Brohaugh)