Pork Money Muscle

The BBQ Community Doesn't Do Goodbyes In most businesses, you lose touch with somebody for a few years and you're basically strangers again. You've got to rebuild it reintroduce yourself, re-earn the trust, start over. Barbecue doesn't work like that. In barbecue, you pick up right where you left off. Every single time. Belvidere Way back in the day, I cooked a double contest in Belvidere, Illinois. Two contests, one weekend, same site. If you've never done one, it's a grind cooking around the clock, sleeping in shifts if you sleep at all, turning in boxes on two different schedules. Rich Fergola was there. And Rich was at the top of his game flat out at the top. He walked the walk and he talked the talk. In competition barbecue, plenty of guys can do one of those. The number who can do both is a lot smaller than you'd think. Rich could back up every word coming out of his mouth, and he had a lot of words. That's how I knew him. Competitor. Loud in the good way. Dangerous on the turn-in table. I eventually stepped back from the competition circuit. Not because I fell out of love with it I never did. Competition takes up an enormous amount of time, and I had a family and a business that needed me more than a turn-in box did. That was the right call and I'd make it again. But you don't leave barbecue. You just cook it somewhere else. Atlanta Years later, Royal Oak brought the ambassadors together at headquarters outside Atlanta. I walk in and there's Rich. There was no awkward reconnect. No "so what have you been up to?" We just picked up mid-conversation, like somebody hit pause and then hit play. And here's the thing that's not luck, and it's not just nostalgia. It's because we never actually went quiet. That's what social media has done for this community that nobody gives it enough credit for. I see Rich's cooks. He sees mine. Megan, Heath, all of them, I watch what they're building all year long, and they watch what I'm building. We're in each other's comments. We're in each other's DMs. So when we finally stand in the same place, there's no catching up to do. The relationship never paused. The screen just turned into a handshake. The Super Team Last year at the Royal Oak Invitational, they put together a super team: Rich Fergola, Megan Day from Burnt Finger BBQ, Heath Riles, and me. That was the first competition I'd cooked in about seven years. Everybody else on that team was actively competing at a high level, and I was walking back in at the tail end of the season, when every serious team in the country is sharpening up for the Jack and the American Royal. Rich took point. Nobody voted on it he just naturally stepped into it, and thank God he did. Here's what a lot of people don't know about Rich: before all the barbecue, he was a high school teacher and a wrestling coach. That never left him. You watch him run a team and you can see it. He gives direction without making anybody feel small. He keeps four people with four opinions moving in one direction. He knows when to push and when to let somebody cook their own way. Everybody had a voice. With Megan and Heath on your team you'd be a fool not to listen. But Rich held the wheel. We took first in People's Choice. Middle of the pack in the rest. And they don't hand you a trophy for People's Choice at the Invitational. They hand you a championship belt. A full-on WWE belt leather strap, big gold plate, the whole thing. You hold it up over your head because there's no other way to hold it. In that field, at that point in the season, with seven years of rust on me? I'll take that all day. What Actually Stuck The belt was cool, I'm not going to pretend it wasn't. But what stuck was cooking shoulder to shoulder with those three and feeling that thing you only get around a fire at two in the morning with people who are as serious about it as you are. That's the real magic of this community. We're spread out across the whole country. We see each other in person a handful of times a year. But we're together constantly on a screen, in a comment section, in a group text about somebody's cook. So when we do get together, it's easy. It always is. Rich, thanks for taking point, brother. Let's go again.