Is eating a sport?

Less than a week before yesterday's Nathan's hot dog eating competition, defending champion Takeru Kobayashi announced in his blog that he had pain in his jaw. SportsCenter listed him as "day-to-day."

At which I laughed.

The notion that a guy who makes a living shoving hot dogs (and buns) down his throat being billed as an athlete seems, well, a bit much. It's one thing if Marlins pitcher Dontrelle Willis is day-to-day because of a tweaked hamstring, or if Tom Brady is doubtful for Sunday's game because he injured his hand lugging around all of his illegtimate children. But an eater with an injury report?!

It all boils down to (pun intended) a simple question: Is competitive eating a sport?

Well, depends on what a sport is. Critics of competitive eating point out that there's nothing special about eating; everyone does it, so why pay attention to these yahoos?

But there's nothing inherently difficult about sports - that's why most athletes start getting serious about sports at a young age. Just about everyone can take a block of wood and hit a hunk of leather and rubber with it. Most people can also take a piece of leather and throw it in a cylinder or pass it to a friend. As Kelly Bundy once said, "It's not rocket surgery."

The beauty of sport comes in seeing people like us do things we can't: run 100 meters in 10 seconds, hit a baseball 500 feet or hit a tennis ball 120 miles an hour. Just as most of us can't do any of those things, it's unlikely that anyone short of Homer Simpson can devour 66 hot dogs in 12 minutes.

If there was a time where competitive eating and its governing body, the International Federation of Competitve Eating, were as unwelcome in the world of sports as jock itch. Then ESPN got on board, televising Nathan's Fourth of July event live in 2004. As it did with bass fishing, bowling and poker ESPN made what used to be a fun activity into a corporate-sponsored sport.

Everything else fell in place. The competitors got nicknames like "Tsunami" and "Jaws." Kobayashi, like Ichiro, A-Rod, Peyton or MJ, became a one-name athletic icon. Families still waiting for their charcoal to heat up on Independence Day started watching the festivities because nothing else was on TV.

Even the writing began to look like sports writing. Take a look at this AP story. Gastric gladiators. Joey Chestnut as the red, white and blue hope. More beef than a slaughterhouse. That delicious brand of hyperbole is straight out of 1920s sports writing: I can almost picture Kobayashi, Chestnut, Patrick Bertoletti and Steve Keiner riding across the Cony Island grounds against the sapphire blue July sky.

Fortunately, competitive eating, like horse racing or open-wheel racing, is something Americans only care about once a year. Come December, no one cares how many Christmas hams Jaws Chestnut can shove down his throat.

But on July Fourth, watching these glorified gluttons becomes acceptable - as long as no one has "a reversal." I still don't know if competitive eating is a sport, but once a year, it's something I can stomach.