Cronin: Pro eating league really bites

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Four-time reigning champion Joey Chestnut, center, competes in his fifth Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating World Championship, Monday, July 4, 2011, in the Brooklyn borough of New York. Chestnut scarfed down 62 hot dogs to win his fifth consecutive Fourth of July hot dog eating contest at Coney Island ó the equivalent of about 20,000 calories in 10 minutes. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Updated: January 23, 2012 2:54AM

The first thing you notice in the photo of Pat Bertoletti is a sign of potential distress.

His hand is over his mouth.

As would yours be if you had just gobbled down 53 hot dogs in 10 minutes.

That’s a statistic difficult to swallow.

So is the notion that Bertoletti does this for a living, sort of. In real life, the Palos Heights native is a chef at Jewell Events Catering, cooking up things other than hot dogs. He moonlights as a professional eater. Really. Says so on his web site.

Monday, in the great American traditions of goofy contests and wretched excess, Bertoletti took second place in the hot dog eating contest sponsored by Nathan’s, the Coney Island emporium synonymous with chowing down.

Alas, 53 hot dogs, enough to feed several families, wasn’t enough to capture the title. The winner, Joey Chestnut, ate 62 dogs, buns included. No doubt, he relished the victory.

For this Fourth of July extravaganza, Bertoletti collected $5,000, and all the antacids he needed.

Bertoletti is 26, and has been doing this for a while. It was his fifth top-four finish in the Nathan’s — widely regarded by gustatory cognoscenti as the Masters of frankfurter competitions, no doubt because some of the people in it are green by the end of it — in as many years.

That’s a full plate, but there’s more. Our man, a graduate of Morgan Park Academy and Kendall College, has won contests for eating corned-beef sandwiches, pork ribs, raw oysters, chicken wings, jalapenos and, just before Thanksgiving of 2007, turkey. All of this, mind you, on the clock. There is no time to savor, just slobber, when it comes to competitive eating.

As you digest that, chew on this: Bertoletti has also inhaled 47 glazed donuts in five minutes, 44 cherry kolaches in eight minutes, 11.1 pounds of shoo-fly pie in eight minutes and 29 waffles in 10 minutes.

While there’s no word on his going through a wheelbarrow full of White Castles, his resume brings a whole new definition to the phrase “fast food.”

This is a world of competition — calling it a sport is going too far, no matter how much ESPN promotes it — with which we were previously unfamiliar. Investigation confirms, as Bertoletti’s achievements imply, there’s a full-fledged eating circuit out there, just like the golf and tennis tours.

There is even a sanctioning body involved. The outfit is called Major League Eating, and it’s considered the top dog in the world of high-speed munching, so much so that one must be an MLE-signed eater to chow down at Nathan’s for cash and prizes. There are about 100 MLE-sanctioned eating contests across the world this year. Bertoletti is second in the world rankings, incidentally, just like tennis’ Rafael Nadal and golf’s Lee Westwood.

The MLE deal is why Chestnut’s 62-dog victory, his fifth in succession, may end up with an asterisk next to it. Takeru Kobayashi, the Japanese eating legend who essentially put pro gorging on the map, isn’t in MLE. He wouldn’t sign a deal to eat for dough only in MLE-sanctioned contests.

Last year, he tried to crash the party at Nathan’s and was arrested. This year, he went dog-for-dog with Chestnut from the roof of a Fifth Avenue restaurant, and ate 69 hot dogs, seven more than Chestnut and a world record, in the same 10-minute span. Clearly, there is a crying need for a chew-off between the two.

Doctors and your mom will say high-speed gorging isn’t good for you, and they’re probably right, but Bertoletti and the rest of the field got one big break on Monday. According to the New York Post, which always has its nose to the sewer, the parks commissioner overruled his staff and ordered toilet paper in every stall for Coney Island’s public restrooms, ending a recent rationing plan.

Said commissioner Adrian Benepe, “It’s our business to help New Yorkers do theirs.”

That’s a relief.