Getting into Guinness

by Larry Olmsted

  “HOW ARE YOU DOING?”

  “OKAYIGUESS.”

  “DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOU ARE?”

  “NO.”

  “WHAT IS YOUR NAME?”

  “IDON’TKNOW.”

  My responses did little to curb her growing discomfort with my condition, and she threatened to pull the plug at the next designated “safety break,” laying down a “shape up or ship out” ultimatum to my friends, who themselves were nearly at wit’s end. It was James, the dealer, who came to the rescue. James, of whom I also have no recollection whatsoever, had emigrated from Haiti, where he had been an amateur boxer. He explained to my friends that my eyelids had swollen from staying open too long, and it was the swelling that was severely affecting my vision. He suggested a curative treatment of Visine, very strong iced coffee laced with as many sugars as could be dissolved in it, a good dunking of my head in ice water, cold compresses laid across my eyes, a cold wet towel wrapped around my neck, and more Visine.

  At this point Joe and JP, both of whom happen to be attorneys, decided to consult my logbook, the notebook diary I was required to keep for Guinness purposes, detailing my hourly activities and safety breaks. The entries for this period are written in an increasingly maniacal and jagged hand that becomes almost indecipherable by four AM on day three, but amazingly, none of the seventy-two required hourly entries was missed. With just over eight hours remaining, I was due another fifteen-minute break very soon. Joe and JP and Matt organized a military-style operation that involved one running to the sundry shop for Visine, one to the hotel room for an ice bucket and towels, and along the way, someone acquired the ginormous iced coffee from the casino’s Dunkin’ Donuts. Once these items were assembled, they marched me out the nearest fire exit and into the predawn darkness, my first fresh breath of air in days. In went the eye drops, and then I undertook a forced march back and forth in the parking lot, moving while guzzling the coffee. Then I sat down on a brick curb while they poured ice water over my head, followed by the compresses over my eyes. As the clock ticked down on my break, they wrapped the icy, wet towel around the back of my neck, tucking the front ends into my soaking, cold shirt collar, and marched me, like a blindfolded prisoner, back to my seat at the poker table, where they removed the compresses and applied the second dose of Visine. The results of this makeshift triage were nothing short of amazing. The red numerals on the clock came into focus, and just like that, I was back in the game. The reason the other players had put up with my boorish behavior was because poker players love playing with an easy mark, or a drunk, and while they knew about the record attempt, they perceived me in this way, so their tolerance was driven by selfishness rather than charity. They seemed less than enthusiastic when I returned in a wide-eyed state, and with the finish line in sight and the circadian rhythms of daybreak helping me, I proceeded to go on a winning tear through the remaining hours. At this point, my biggest problem became hypothermia: the air-conditioning in the casino was combining with my soaking wet shirt to induce shivering. The suddenly ecstatic poker room manager retreated to her office and produced a fresh T-shirt for me, a leftover yellow model printed with the logo of the previous year’s New England Poker Finals, now one of my favorite and most storied garments. The remaining hours raced by; finally, egged on by public address announcements from the poker room managers and the sudden entrance of photographers and videographers from various news outlets, a crowd gathered around the table for the record countdown, watching in awe as I won the last three hands, closing out in style with three tens to sweep in the final pot, seventy-two hours and two minutes after I had begun. Approximately 2,300 hands after I had sat down, I had gotten into Guinness.

  I still have the video of ESPN SportsCenter saved on my TiVo. It was the second time my record breaking got me onto the sports news show’s Top 10 Plays of the Day, and I did even better than with my golf record, finishing at number two, behind only the winner of the 2004 NBA Championship and ahead of Sir Richard Branson’s own Guinness World Record set that same day—his crossing of the English Channel in the Aquaticar. The clip ESPN used was shot immediately after the event, after that last hand, when I stood from my chair and Kathy Raymond raised my hand. In the video, I am clearly not lucid, and look like a punch-drunk fighter who needs the referee to raise his glove in a salute to victory. Immediately after this, she led me to her office, where for forty-five increasingly disoriented minutes, I fielded questions from one broadcaster and reporter after another, while my friend Matt tried to get them to let me go to sleep. By the time I finished the interviews, I had suddenly become very hungry, and realized my last meal had been dinner about sixteen hours earlier. I insisted Matt join me for lunch before I went to bed, and against his better judgment he did. As soon as I ordered I passed out with my head on the restaurant table. He woke me and got me to my room, where I fulfilled a promise to call my wife and let her know I was done and okay. She was out walking the dog when I called, so I left a reassuring message and then instantly fell asleep, without even bothering to undress or pull back the covers. When I got home the next day, she laughingly insisted I listen to the message, which she had saved on the machine. It is stream of incoherent mumbling, with not one word discernible. “Blah, blah, blah.” That must have been comforting. Fortunately, Matt had called her as well.

  Once again, the media ate the story up, and the coverage made my golf record seem paltry in comparison. I was on network news affiliates across the country, in Associated Press stories picked up by hundreds of newspapers, and for a day I even did my part to displace the war in Iraq from the front page of the my local paper, the Valley News. I was in Sports Illustrated, though my Guinness World Record–holding colleague Lance Armstrong did edge me out for the cover with his sixth consecutive Tour de France victory. I was offered a spot in the next year’s World Poker Tour Celebrity Invitational in Los Angeles. The Texas Snakeman would be proud of me.

  After all the usual inquiries about the Guinness book and its records, the question I was asked most often by media and friends alike was “how did you do?” Despite the newfound popularity of Texas Hold ’em, the game that put the World Poker Tour on the map and made my attempt possible, and one I play well, I am even better at Seven Card Stud. It is also a much slower version of poker, and since I had to play with my own money, Hold ’em, with its rapid-fire hands, seemed like a bad idea. To further conserve cash, I chose the lowest stakes, $1–$5, less than I usually play for, because as a general rule, the lower the stakes, the lower the caliber of player, reducing my level of competition. My ample casino experience was that I could routinely beat the players in a low-stakes stud game. So my game plan, or best-case scenario, was to win enough in the first thirty hours so that I could coast on my winnings through the “dark times” I imagined would follow, when concentration would be difficult. I set a personal limit of losing no more than a thousand bucks—even a Guinness World Record has its price limit, especially when you already have one. Still, I made sure to bring my ATM card in case I changed my mind.

  When I sat down at the table, I bought in for one hundred dollars in chips to start, keeping the rest of my bankroll, nine hundred more dollars—and my ATM card—in my wallet. I didn’t need either. I won the third hand, about four minutes into my 72 hours, and was in the black from there on in. Despite the fact that for two hours I could not see the cards, and for many more hours I was faced with a situation summed up by military researcher C. DiGiovanni, M.D. in his comment “The more sleep-deprived that [the] brain is, the more likely any decision it makes will be bad, perhaps disastrously bad.” All in all, I won fairly consistently throughout the whole endeavor. I walked away from the table with $373 in chips, a profit of $273, but that was just the tip of the iceberg. In casino tradition, I tipped the dealer after every winning hand, usually one to two dollars each time, all out of my winning chips, and I won about 400 hands, to the tune of $600 in tips. I also tipped the cocktail waitresses generously, since they were my lifeli
ne to all my meals, promptly served and eaten at the table, along with the more than forty cups of coffee, sixty bottles of water, several iced teas, orange juices, and assorted other beverages I consumed. I estimated another $400 in such tips, bringing the winning total to well over a thousand bucks, which the stunned poker managers thought was remarkable for the meager stakes I was playing, with one-dollar bets, even for someone who had not gone crazy.

  The most definitive statistic of my endeavor is seventeen hours, which was the length of time I slept, and slept like the dead, after retreating to my room at Foxwoods. I awoke the next morning feeling fine, as if it had never happened, then drove home and immediately went back to work. The lingering effects were less than those of jet lag from a long flight, and the following day I rode my bike sixty miles, getting reacquainted with the great outdoors. The hardest statistic for me to conjure up was the number of different people I played with, since they came and went from the table, staying for radically different lengths of time; my best guess is around seventy-five. These people, reflecting true diversity, are worthy of a book in themselves, with many characters (in the sense my mom uses the word to mean someone who is odd, and not in a good way). I silently nicknamed these playing partners with such suitably colorful titles as TiVo, Bad Ass Willie, and Mr. Clean. The latter was a menacingly huge bald-headed man doing a reasonable impersonation of the Terminator, complete with black motorcycle jacket, boots, and wraparound mirrored sunglasses. If Mr. Clean was one end of the spectrum, the fellow who explained the cookbook he is writing to me in excruciating detail was the other. Poker, just like Guinness World Records, takes all kinds.

  When I broke the record for greatest distance traveled between two rounds of golf played in the same day, I figured out a whole new methodology, improving on the previous effort by inventing the notion of crossing the international dateline. I thought it an innovative solution to an existing problem, one worthy of Guinness recordom. But the Australian who usurped my record simply lucked into the launch of a longer flight on the same route from Sydney to North America after I had done all the legwork and research for him, and his raising of the bar struck me as exceptionally uncreative. In any case, that experience led me to try to set a record that might stand, and stand it has. There was some press more than a year ago about a professional poker player going for the record in Vegas, but that never happened. As of this writing, I checked the Guinness World Records website and my record, though no longer in the book, still stands, three years later. The explanation is simple, despite the fact that it got far more media attention than the vast majority of records get: not everyone can play poker for seventy-two hours straight. In fact, very few people can, and I suspect the record may be mine for quite awhile. If someone does break it, unlike with golf, they will earn my respect. I certainly wouldn’t try. I feel lucky to have survived it unscathed. I might have another go at long-distance golf down the road, but when people ask me about poker, I always instantly reply “never again.” And this time I mean it.

  THE CLAIM FORM I FILED WITH GUINNESS AFTER MY POKER ATTEMPT

  Guinness Record Attempt:

  Longest Casino Poker Session

  CLAIM ID: 64041

  Gentlemen/Ladies:

  This note is intended to clarify my record attempt and the supporting materials herein.

  On Thursday, June 10th, 2004 at 1:20 PM Eastern Standard Time, I began playing poker in the Foxwoods Resort & Casino in Ledyard, Connecticut. I continued playing continuously, at the same table, until 1:22 PM on Sunday, June 13th, 72 hours and 2 minutes later. I did this under the guidelines presented by Guinness, with just my 15-minute break every eight hours, and under the rules and guidelines for the Foxwoods casino poker room as stipulated in my proposal.

  Enclosed is my personal log, including the prior note from physician and witness thereof.

  Also enclosed are witness forms I drew up to cover the various points required in the marathon guidelines. A poker room supervisor who was present during his or her shift filled one of these out every four hours as required, testifying that I was present and playing continuously, as well as verifying the presence of required medical personnel. Each is also signed by two additional witnesses. The on-duty nurses and Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs) employed by the casino also signed an additional log verifying their presence.

  The best additional contact for any other questions or verification would be Kathy Raymond, poker room manager for Foxwoods, who was present at the beginning, end and much of the middle, and directly supervised the other shift managers present. Her information is:

  Kathy Raymond

  Director of Poker Operations

  Foxwoods Resort Casino

  Very truly yours,

  Larry Olmsted

  7

  The Cheese Does Not Stand Alone: Giant Food and Guinness

  [T]he whale would by all hands be considered a noble dish, were there not so much of him; but when you come to sit down before a meat-pie nearly one hundred feet long, it takes away your appetite.

  —HERMAN MELVILLE, MOBY DICK

  I just thought a ton was a nice round number, so I said, “okay let’s do a ton of fondue.” It was a new record and they said yes.

  —CHEF TERRANCE BRENNAN

  Food and drink records have been a mainstay of the Guinness book since the very first edition in 1955, when such accomplished consumers as American Philip Yazdik and Spaniard Dionsio Sanchez entered its pages, for eating seventy-seven hamburgers in one sitting and drinking forty pints of wine in under an hour, respectively. Fittingly, these are catalogued under the section titled “Human Achievements; Endurance and Endeavor,” alongside Sir Edmund Hillary’s conquest of the highest peak on earth and Commodore Peary’s historic journey to the North Pole. Gastronomic records have remained in the book ever since, eventually growing in scope to encompass the eating of everything from mince pies to bicycles and airplanes. But another entire category of food records is a recent and even more significant part of Guinness World Records history. Operating under its long-standing premise that bigger is better and biggest is best, the book has eagerly embraced “big food” records of every imaginable sort. Just as the athletic set came to realize that getting into Guinness can be most easily accomplished by finding new items to throw, the culinary minded have turned to finding new foodstuffs to grow.

  Giant food records began to appear in the book fairly early on, but have become a competitive and very broad niche for record holders only in the past twenty years. The first two decades of the book saw a handful of enormous cuisine entries for the English and American staples, such as biggest pizza, ice cream sundae, hamburger, and meat pie. Today there are dozens and dozens of increasingly specialized, international, and esoteric giant food records. By 1984 big food had come into its own as a bona fide GWR craze: that edition includes a whole camel as the largest standard dish served at a meal, along with the largest banana split, BBQ, cake, Easter egg, haggis, bread, omelet, pastry, mashed potatoes, lollipop, salami, Yorkshire pudding, and curiously, bowl of strawberries, the sole uncooked or unprocessed entry. The most significant change was in the realm of pies, which soon became giant food’s equivalent of throwing things; limited only by the imagination, the erstwhile apple pie was joined by cherry pie, meat pie, quince pie, and even pizza pie.

  While many seemingly implausible records are listed in the book with no explanation or details at all, giant food records tend to have abridged recipes, listing enormous quantities of the key ingredients, though rarely the complete list. Guinness Time, the in-house company newsletter of Guinness PLC (the same edition that carried the obituary of book founder Sir Hugh Beaver in 1967), contained one of the more impressive early giant food records. At the 1962 Seattle Worlds Fair, a six-sided birthday cake was baked, which weighed 25,000 pounds, stood 23 inches high and measured some 60 feet around. The recipe called for 18,000 eggs; 10,500 pounds of flour; 4,000 pounds of sugar; 7,000 pounds of raisins; 2,200 pounds of peca
ns, and 100 pounds of salt (see vol. 20, no. 2, Spring 1967). While twelve-ton cakes were still unusual in 1962, by the special millennium edition of 2000, with its futuristic, shiny, silver cover, big food had become such an accepted part of the Guinness World Records that for the first time an entire chapter appeared titled just that, “Big Food.” Whether your taste runs to a one-ton gyro or a single, continuous sausage more than twenty-eight miles long, you can find it there. Notable entries in the new chapter include the biggest curry (2.65 tons), longest sushi roll (three-quarters of a mile), biggest onion bhaji (over six pounds), and tallest chocolate model, appropriately one of a life-size dinosaur.

  In a sense, giant food records are perfect for Guinness. Hard to even imagine, that twenty-eight-mile-long sausage is the gastronomic equivalent of Robert Pershing Wadlow, the tallest human being. Enormous foodstuffs also neatly fit—and manage to improve upon—Ben Sherwood’s four-point analysis of what makes records so attractive to the media. Certainly giant foods qualify as-ests, and as Sherwood noted, no pun intended, the “media feasts on superlatives.” They are also highly visual, perfect for television, and easily captured in a single photo for a magazine or newspaper. Consider the fact that television’s Food Network Challenge found so much ongoing fodder in the form of record-setting foods that they devoted a special miniseries to it, Guinness World Record Breakers Week. Sherwood further posits that superlatives are enhanced when they are in categories that are entertaining, curious, or of freak value, which cakes the size of playing fields certainly are. Giant food record attempts are often undertaken in the name of charity, another leg of Sherwood’s chair. There are notable exceptions, however, such as Mama Lena’s Pizza House outside of Pittsburgh, which according to the Associated Press took a decidedly more pragmatic, for-profit approach to Guinness World Records big-food history when it created “the largest pizza for sale in the world.” The Big One is a menu fixture, and for $99 Mama Lena’s will make one for any customer. It measures 4.5' x 3', weighs over fifty pounds, and is cut into 150 slices for serving.