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Shoveling For Glory
The International Ditch Digging Federation (IDDA) is holding its annual championship tournament near Waco, Texas, this weekend. At the downtown Hilton, broad-shouldered men descend in the elevator. They carry shovels in leather cases and look purposefully ahead, walking through the lobby without a glance at the spindlier hotel guests. Outside, limousines wait in rank to ferry them one by one to the twenty-acre field secured by IDDA for this year’s event.
During the ride out of the city, Todd Brzezinski, 44 years old, a two-time undisputed champion of the All-Purpose Division, balances a black anodized shovel in his lap. He takes deep swigs from a 1.5-liter bottle of Evian water. He is wearing a cream-colored Oxford shirt buttoned to the top, no tie, a black silk vest, black Wrangler jeans, and a pair of glossy black Wolverine construction boots. With his free hand, Brzezinski is caressing his favorite shovel. Now he taps the face of the diamond-encrusted gold Rolex that circles his muscular wrist.
“I won this watch in 1986,” he explains to a journalist, “I’ll never forget Vancouver ’86. I was hungry back then. Starving. The ditch I made? Longer and straighter than anyone thought possible, including me. I floated to the podium like a guy in a dream. They gave me a trophy, a medal, and a watch. The watch was for breaking the world record. A couple of chicks in bikinis strapped it to my wrist while I was on the podium. That watch—this watch—was worth more than all the money I’d made in my life till then.”
The watch reminds Brzezinski that no more than a dozen ditch diggers are conveyed to the tournament by a chauffeur rather than a Greyhound driver. Many aspire to this extravagance and few will attain it. While Brzezinski and other leading competitors checked into four-star hotels on the eve of the 2006 IDDA Dig-Off, then dined at swank Waco eateries such as Tsunami and Galería, most entrants found quarters at Motel Six and dined on sandwiches from a gas station. Some dispensed with a roof over the head, spending the night in a fresh ditch on the border of the tournament site, perhaps for discipline as much as economy.
Brzezinski eases his mountainous frame out of the limo. He carries his set of six shovels, comprising light and heavy competition models and a complement of spares, to the exercise strip behind the grandstand.
At the edge of the field, Sam Joyner, a wiry college senior, has just emerged from the neat four-foot-deep ditch in which spent the night. He brushes crumbs of soil from his red-checked flannel shirt. Like all competitive ditch diggers, he is clad in black jeans, but he affects the beige suede boots favored by the young guard.
“I want to do something that meets a high creative standard,” says Joyner. “Yes, the prestige is in All-Purpose. I just don’t have the speed. I think I can do some damage in the Craft Division if I make it to the afternoon.”
The first round of All-Purpose digging is a mandatory event that will eliminate three out of four contestants over the course of the morning. In this discipline, competitors must dig a ditch at least ten feet long and ten inches deep, with a flat bottom and vertical sides, in no more than ten minutes. They are awarded a composite score that covers eight distinct measures. Six are the physical criteria—Length, Breadth, Depth, Speed, Smoothness, Straightness—of which some are less rigidly defined than others. The judges pretend no exactitude in applying the aesthetic criteria, Grace and Flash.
Only those who make the cut are permitted to compete in the finals of the All-Purpose Division and in the specialty divisions. Joyner’s forte, the Craft Division, is judged only according to Smoothness, Straightness, Ease, and Originality. The Bulk Division takes into account only Length, Depth, and Breadth. The Speed Division is self-explanatory.
“Speed is the crowd pleaser,” nods Glenn Davies, President of IDDA. “There’s dirt flying all over. Kids go wild when they see how fast one man can work with a shovel.”
Davies points to Ernst Lübeck, a hulking Carinthian who was formerly a dairy farmer, as the favorite in this event. Lübeck’s standard aluminum one-piece shovel looks like a toy in his hands. Each fist is the size of an Easter ham. He is a three-time All-Purpose Champion as determined by the World Association of Ditch Excavators (WADE). He has yet to win that title from UDDA, the rival certifying body and the one more esteemed in North America. After an eye injury in 2001 caused his ditches to become less than perfectly linear, he turned his attention to speed digging. Lately, he has been mopping up in this discipline. Lübeck, like Brzezinski, is a perpetual contender for the cash prizes, which are funded by makers of agricultural and construction equipment.
The top dogs of the ditch-digging circuit devote all their time to training, because they depend for their livelihood on success in a few annual events. They don’t befriend each other. They generally scorn the non-competitive disciplines, such as the Spoon Dig and the Trench Crawl, which are put on partly to entertain the spectators and partly to console those competitors who failed to make the afternoon cut.
Joyner, for his part, says he is looking forward to the Spoon Dig, win or lose. It turns out that he wins. First, in the morning round of All-Purpose, he digs with sufficient speed to make the top quartile in a strong field. Over a lunch of orange juice and sesame crackers, he talks about his split personality. Civil engineering is his academic pursuit, but he also has an artistic side that he insists on exercising. Before the start of the afternoon rounds, he wanders through a neighboring cornfield to collect his thoughts.
His entry in the Craft Division is a conventional pattern, the right-angled spiral ditch, that he executes within the allotted ninety minutes on a small scale, but with fluid digging motions that result in razor-sharp lines. The judges give Joyner a merely decent grade in Flash, but they recognize his easy precision with a perfect Grace rating and give him high marks for Smoothness and Straightness. He takes second place in the Craft Division, missing first by less than one point. After stepping off the podium, he sets his trophy on a bleacher and jams the $1000 cheque into a back pocket. He goes on to trounce the field in the Spoon Dig, for which he collects the traditional prize of a silver tablespoon.
“This is what I really came for,” he says, holding the spoon aloft. “Every bowl of gruel will taste better from now on.”