"I am a farm boy and you do some strange things on farms," he says. "We had one where when you were eating your birthday cake, you could not talk until you'd finish your last bite of cake" The penalty for talking was to go out into the chicken coop with bare feet and have molasses poured on them so they would be pecked by chickens. It's what they call in the competitive eating field, a reversal of fortune. When something goes in but then before it goes down, it goes out.