Hot dog competition’s history is a load of hot air

Nathan’s Famous may be in the hot dog business, but for decades the company has been peddling a whopper.

The showmen behind the company’s annual Fourth of July hot dog eating contest have long claimed that it began in 1916 as a showdown between patriotic immigrants on the Coney Island boardwalk.

That would make this week’s contest a centennial, except for an inconvenient truth: the contest and its backstory were invented in the 1970s by PR men trying to get more attention for Nathan’s, which had just become a publicly traded company.

‘‘Our objective was to take a photograph and get it in the New York newspaper,’’ said Wayne Norbitz, who served as president of Nathan’s for 26 years and still sits on the board of directors.

Norbitz is careful to say that the company’s source for the 1916 story is ‘‘legend has it.’’

He says the first contest actually happened in 1972, and the early chowdowns were small, sparsely attended affairs.

‘‘We’d honestly wait for a couple of fat guys to walk by and ask them if they wanted to be in a hot dog contest.’’

The legend conveniently dates to 1916, the same year Polish immigrant Nathan Handwerker opened his Coney Island hot dog stand using a US$300 loan from two friends.

As the story goes, an Irish immigrant named James Mullen was walking in Coney Island when he challenged a group of recent immigrants to prove who was the most American. They decided to settle it by eating hot dogs.

The contest remained smallscale until the 1980s, when competitive eaters from Japan began taking part, growing it quickly into a full-fledged competition with weigh-ins and elaborate introductions similar to those of a heavyweight boxing championship fight.