With the Mobile BBQ Cookoff and Hog Wild Festival being what seems like 50 miles from my house, I decided to skip the Swine and Dine Affair, a dinner held the Thursday night before the competition, just to keep from having to drive there and back to hang out with the rest of the teams when I had to be at work the next morning early. At some point during that evening while I was going over my list of things to make sure were packed for the event, I got a call from my Double-M cooking partner Mark Crownover, saying he was sitting a couple of seats away from Johnny Trigg of the Smoking Triggers BBQ team. I started wishing at that time that I had went ahead and made the drive!
The Mobile BBQ Cookoff is a charity event which benefits the United Cerebral Palsy Foundation and alongside the tidbits of food samples given to the judges, each team has to give away at least 40lbs of meat during the event. Most served up hundred of pound of mostly pork butt. Thousands of people showed up to support the event so you might imagine the teams were running hard from beginning to end. This didn’t leave a lot of time for us to get out and see the other teams and thier rigs or talk to other cooks.
I had ambitions of meeting up with Trigg and shooting the bull with him but the opportunity never presented itself. Mark and I managed to meet up with him on his way back to his RV from the awards ceremony where we were able to greet and shake hands. Amanda Yeager on the other hand, a co-worker and BBQ buddy, made the pilgrimage from the Back Yard division peanut gallery over to the pro area and harrassed the poor man into getting her photo taken with him! YES… I’m jealous! I’ve only been a smoking enthusiast for a few years and 2010 is my first year of competing against other teams. Johnny Trigg is who I want to be when I grow up!
Admittedly, I had never heard the name Johnny Trigg, Myron Mixon, Tuffy Stone, or Lee Ann Whippen (just to name a few) until TLC aired the “BBQ Pitmasters” series several months ago. Amanda’s impression of Johnny Trigg after talking to him for a while and as polite and outgoing as he was to Mark and myself proved that he was just as laid back and genuinely friendly as the show portrayed him to be. It was a pleasure meeting Johnny Trigg and I look forward to meeting up with him again on the circuit later this year, hopefully at Riverfest in Decatur, AL or the Big Pig Jig in Vienna, GA. It may be a while still before Double-M will be competing in the pro class but I really look forward to it!
