The Wayne Gretzky of cricket spitting

An exotic new sport with its own extraordinary champion has thousands migrating across the country each year to compete.

By Christopher Kemp

Aug. 10, 2001 | Serious cricket spitters always make sure to mark two important dates on their events calendars. The first, the largest and oldest get-together in competitive cricket spitting, is in April at Purdue University, in Lafayette, Ind., as part of the annual Bug Bowl festival, which celebrates everything entomological.

There, thousands of cricket spitters join together to see who can spit a dead cricket the farthest. After two days of competition, including qualifying rounds and a final spit-off, a winner finally emerges and is crowned the cricket spitting champion. Dejected, the losers limp home to work on their technique. Later in the year, some of them will travel to rural Pennsylvania where, each September, the cricket spitters gather again at Pennsylvania State University, which has held its own spit-off annually since 1998. The winner in Indiana reigns for a year, until the next spring, when hordes of hopeful challengers return to spit crickets more than 30 feet in a desperate bid for the title. But who are the cricket spitters? And why do they come here each year, migrating across the country to compete?

Dan Capps is a cricket spitter from Madison, Wis. Capps may be the most famous cricket spitter of them all. According to the "Guinness Book of Records," he can spit a cricket farther than anyone else on the planet. It's right there in the book, sharing the page with records for "Greatest distance pumpkin shot" (1,496 yards) and "Most hamburgers stuffed in mouth" (three). Capps has held the world cricket spitting record since June 1998.

"The actual record is 32 feet and one-half inch," Capps says. "That's often misquoted."

Along with thousands of other contestants, Capps comes here each year simply to enjoy the drama of the spit-off, to mingle with fellow spitters and trade new techniques and styles. Cricket spitting is a mysterious new sport; sanctioned by the "Guinness Book of Records," covered by CNN and ESPN, and treated seriously by a growing number of participants nationwide.

Cricket spitters do not compete in sweaty basements, dingy back rooms or secret dens. Cricket spitting is not controlled by hoods, thugs or dark operatives, and cricket spitters do not gamble on the outcome of a contest, or purposefully "throw a spit" for personal gain. Most open contests are held outdoors, with contestants competing in one of four brackets: senior male, senior female, junior male and junior female.

The sport's aim is simple: to spit a whole dead cricket as far as possible; to beat the opposition with a superlative spit; to claim the cricket spitting championship and return home victorious. In competition, contestants must observe a set of arcane rules, the first and most rudimentary of which reads as follows: "The crickets are to be Brown House crickets, weighing between 45 and 55 milligrams." Another rule reads: "Crickets should be previously frozen, then thawed for the record attempt."

Capps, tall and bearded, his gray hair pulled back in a ponytail, says he was at the 1998 Bug Bowl showing his collection of exotic insect species when he was asked if he'd like to take part in the cricket spitting competition. "I said, 'Well, shoot, I'm not squeamish about these things, I'll give that a try,'" he recalls, "and as it turned out, I was pretty good at it." Consequently, Capps made it through the preliminary rounds, and beat out his opposition in the spit-off, winning the contest. Two months later, he secured the official Guinness cricket-spitting world record, which he still holds today. Being the cricket-spitting world record-holder has its own problems. "I work as a mechanic in a meat packing factory," Capps says. "I've been there for 31 years and it's kind of a redneck environment. I took a lot of ribbing."

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