To the city dweller, chewing tobacco is that atavistic lump in a baseball player's cheek. In Raleigh, Miss. (pop. 614), site of the National Tobacco Spitting Contest, it is sport and sociology, an art actively practiced and boasted about. Champions are finally selected, as they should be, in a tournament that feeds the folklore for another year. TIME Correspondent Peter Range joined the aficionados for the 16th annual national spit-off and sent this report:
THE local newspaper, the Smith County Reformer, proclaimed it "the highlight of the year"—the opportunity to see old friends, run coonhounds, engage in a little politicking and, most of all, relish the earthy spectacle of competitive expectoration. The crowd comes early down the red clay road to Billy John Crumpton's pond five miles west of town. Easily 2,000 women, children and men in narrow-brimmed hats, drill trousers and sport shirts gather beside the one-acre pond for the day's events. While the Jaycees barbecue chicken and collect the $1 entrance fee, prize coonhounds —black and tans, red ticks and treeing walkers—go through their paces.
The first event is coon-on-the-log. A chained raccoon in an open box atop a 2½-ft. log is waded out 12 yds. from shore by two handlers. The hounds are released, and the baying dog who can swim to the log and dump the coon into the drink in the shortest time (winning time: 11.1 seconds) is declared the winner. A well-bred sire can bring up to $9,000; raccoons come free to those who can catch them. The canine competition continues through drag races toward a caged coon hanging from a tree and another atop a floating gasoline drum. Among raccoon hunters this is all high art, punctuated by discussions about the bark, speed, height of jump and, above all, the nose of the animals involved.
While politicians, who know a good stump when they see one, exhort the all-white crowd and country bands pick and sing, the spitters gather around tobacco manufacturers' displays on Billy John's log-cabin porch to discuss their craft. Don Snyder, 22, the Mississippi State University student who has held the distance crown for two years, explains that it takes time "to get your juice right. It can't be too thick or too thin. You've got to just chew for about an hour and not drink or eat anything and get your mouth adjusted to it. Then it's slick and smooth and just comes out easy."
Snyder is strictly a competitive chewer; he started at 17 when he first heard about the contest, and has been out to win from the beginning. He wears boots exactly twelve inches long, "so I can measure my practice spits without a tape." For a month before a big contest, he spits for about two hours a day, fixing his eyes, his head, his entire body on target before he lets fly a practice shot. Unlike others, he uses hardly any body thrust at all.