A Memphis BBQ showdown: Will dueling events be hog heaven or pork pulled too thin?

Two barbecue festivals? On the same weekend?

Takes one back more than 30 years, to March 16, 1990. That’s the day both “Lambada” and “Lambada! The Forbidden Dance” opened in theaters, to capitalize on a Brazilian dance craze that movie producers expected to sweep North America. It didn’t, and the cinematic dance-off was a fizzle. Audiences weren’t interested in one Lambada movie, much less two.

Don’t expect the smoldering wood chips in the barbecue pits at Tom Lee Park and Liberty Park to be similarly doused by indifference. Memphians love their cooked pig too much to turn a cold shoulder (or rib) to a plateful of pulled pork. Still, one wonders: When a city hosts rival public barbecue competitions over the same few days, and each festival hopes to attract thousands of pig-curious participants, is the pork being pulled too thin?

Or, in the words of Mary Horner, a Memphis in May volunteer since 1999: "Why would they split the barbecue baby? Teams have split up over this.”

Fixture vs. upstart

A Bluff City fixture since the second year of the Memphis in May International Festival in 1978, the World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest this year will be held May 15-18 near the former Fairgrounds area at Liberty Park. Close to 130 teams are scheduled to participate.

Meanwhile, the upstart SmokeSlam barbecue festival, organized by the Memphis-based event company Forward Momentum/Mempho Presents, is set for May 16-18 in Tom Lee Park, the longtime traditional riverfront home of the Memphis in May contest. About 60 teams will compete. The smaller scale was designed to reduce the event's impact on the park.

Tom Lee became available after Memphis in May decided not to return to the riverside space, citing "difficulties" in working with Memphis River Parks Partnership, which manages the redesigned park — and which last year presented Memphis in May with a bill for more than $1.4 million in damages incurred by the park during the festival's signature events, the barbecue contest and the Beale Street Music Festival. In September, the Partnership filed a lawsuit against Memphis in May, seeking to collect $675,000 in still unpaid damages.

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The Memphis in May website refers to the World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest as "the Ultimate Showdown." The SmokeSlam website calls the Forward Momentum-launched event "the World's Ultimate Showdown." But maybe the real ultimate showdown will be between the two contests and not among the dozens of competing cooks and pitmasters.

That competition began months ago, when Memphis in May in October announced plans to locate the barbecue contest for the third time in Liberty Park. (The first time Memphis in May left Tom Lee was in 2011, due to flooding caused by the rising river; the second time was in 2022, when Tom Lee was closed to the public due to construction required by the redesign.)

Meanwhile, Mempho Presents in November announced that its own barbecue festival would be held in Tom Lee Park. The name "SmokeSlam" debuted in January.

A Tale (Tail?) of Two Piggies

Call it — with apologies to Victorian novelist and gastronome Charles Dickens — a Tale of Two Piggies: It was the best of times, it was the wurst of times. (Yes, wurst can be made from pork.) In theory, barbe-connoisseurs should have been in hog heaven; but in fact, too much 'cue, like too many puns, may be hard to digest.

“We put the two barbecues up for a vote with the team members, and there were some younger ones that wanted to do the new contest,” said longtime World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest competitor Dave Reeve, whose Voodoo Q team this year signed up for SmokeSlam instead of Memphis in May. “We’re democratic about it, so there you go.”

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Reeve said the riverside location won a lot of votes for SmokeSlam. Even so, “It just breaks my heart, what’s going on,” he said.

Memphis in May partisans accuse SmokeSlam of trying to piggyback, so to speak, on the reputation and media attention that accompanies the older festival.

"I know there's been a public sentiment that has not been favorable, that we're competing against each other, but that was not the intention," said event co-producer Jeff Bransford of Mempho Presents.

He said Mempho "had no idea what Memphis in May was doing" when his team developed SmokeSlam. Yet the World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest has been held the third weekend in May every year since 1982 (with the exception of the COVID shutdown).

Even so, "We feel like we're producing a different style event," Bransford said.

The definition of 'festival'

Mempho publicity describes SmokeSlam as "putting the 'festival' back in 'BBQ festival' with a fan-first experience like no other," including an ambitious live music lineup (War, the Bar-Kays, even a local R.E.M. tribute band called "Noisy Cats Are We"); a "Memphis Market" and "BBQ Bazaar" offering eating and shopping opportunities; and a "Live Fire Extravaganza" that each day will showcase the culinary kills of celebrity chefs and barbecue masters, creating dishes the public can sample.

"They'll have at least two hogs a day, two lambs, all types of ribs and shoulders and chicken and sausage, and they'll be serving it up," free to attendees, with the price of a SmokeSlam admission ticket, said event organizer Melzie Wilson, an experienced barbecue contest coordinator and 24-year Memphis in May volunteer who this year switched to SmokeSlam.

“Our main thing was to create an inclusive event that was fun for everybody,” said Bransford, whose Mempho company also produced the recent RiverBeat Music Festival, which occupied Tom Lee Park after Memphis in May this year put its long-running Beale Street Music Festival on hiatus. “So even if you didn’t know a team or were associated with a team, you’d still have a good time.”

With the older barbecue fest, he said, “if you didn’t know somebody who wasn’t on a team, there wasn’t a lot to do, in my opinion.”

Memphis in May representatives, however, bristle like the hairs on a razorback at the suggestion at the World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest hasn't been loaded with fun attractions for non-competitors.

The Memphis in May barbecue fest also has nightly music (Marcy Playground, Ingram Hill), along with culinary demonstrations from “some of the biggest name in barbecue"; a “Home Depot Outdoor Kitchen” with food and product samples; a public Big Green Egg “BBQ Alley,” and more, according to Randy Blevins, vice president of marketing and programming at Memphis in May.

“It’s not just barbecue,” he said. “Our event turns into Memphis' biggest backyard. You hang out with your friends and have some fun."

'Barbecue is sexy'

Another difference between the fests is that SmokeSlam boasts a prize purse of $250,000, which a press release calls "the largest in pork BBQ competition history." The Memphis in May purse totals about $100,000.

The SmokeSlam prize money is attractive, Reeve said. And because there are fewer teams and because SmokeSlam — unlike Memphis in May — allows teams to compete in all categories rather than picking ribs, shoulder or whole hog, “the odds are better.”

Nevertheless, he said, the money wasn’t really a factor in his team’s vote to switch from the not-for-profit Memphis in May to SmokeSlam. "We’ve always left with our hat empty," he said. "For us, it’s not just about the cooking, it’s a four-or-five-day party, where you’re entertaining friends and clients and feeding people.”

Similarly, the draw for Memphis in May isn't as much the money as “the prestige of our competition,” Blevins said. “For more than 40 years, barbecue teams have gathered at Memphis in May for the honor of walking that stage and being crowned champion of the world. It’s something barbecue teams have aspired to for decades.”

“I’m very competitive, so if I go for a competition, I want to go for the one that’s the biggest and the best,” said Ryan Murphy, 34, of the South Mane Smkrs, a new rib team that picked Memphis in May over SmokeSlam for its major-competition debut. “The only thing I’m upset about is you don’t get to see the river when you’re cooking.”

"For some of these teams it can be a life-changing experience, to win that contest," Horner said. "They've got day jobs and then they're a finalist in Memphis in May, and now they run a catering business. They figure if they can beat out 150 teams with something that they love to do, they can live out their dream through barbecue."

For Horner, too, the World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest was a life-changing experience, but not in terms of a career: She met her husband, Frank Horner, at Memphis in May in 1999, when they donned pig noses and aprons and agreed to play husband-and-wife hogs in a mock wedding ceremony staged at the fest. (In addition, the bride held a bouquet of plastic flowers inside a beer bottle.) Four years later, Mary and Frank were married for real.

Melzie Wilson said she believes each of the competing barbecue festivals can have a fairy tale ending, too.

"This is Memphis, and barbecue is sexy right now," she said. "I don't see why Memphis can't support two great contests all in one week."

Memphis in May World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest

When: May 15-18

Hours: 5-10 p.m. May 15, 11 a.m.-midnight May 16-17, 10 a.m.-10 p.m. May 18

Where: Liberty Park

Online: memphisinmay.org

Tickets: Single-day general admission tickets are $15, and four-day passes are $54. Tickets can be purchased in advance at memphisinmay.org.

SmokeSlam

When: 2 p.m.-midnight May 16-18

Where: Tom Lee Park

Cost: Single-day general admission tickets are $24.99 and three-day passes are $65.

Tickets: smokeslam.com

This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: Memphis in May vs. SmokeSlam: Memphis barbecue festivals to face off