Cow-pie throwing is a draw for farm towns

Timothy W. Martin
Wall Street Journal
Aug. 16, 2005 04:13 PM

TILDEN, Neb. - With one throw left to defend her title, Laura Wilcox gazed down the football field at the distance to beat: 81 feet, 10 inches. As her family and friends cheered her on, she reared back and let fly.

"In any sport, it's all about the release from the ball," says Ms. Wilcox, a 19-year-old former high school basketball and volleyball player. "Except for this time, it's the chip."

As in cow chip - also known as cow pie, meadow muffin and pasture patty. Long ago, people used the dried-out, disc-shaped bovine droppings for cooking fuel. More recently, they are fueling competition among a handful of heartland towns. Farm-town officials here and elsewhere are betting on cow-chip throwing contests to draw in tourists and provide a modest boost to their wilting economies.

Tilden, pop. 1,078, is one of about a dozen towns that now host annual cow-chip tossing contests. In Prairie du Sac, Wis., pop. 3,231, townspeople and thousands of tourists line Grand Avenue and Sycamore Street for the Tournament of Chips Parade over Labor Day weekend. Spectators along the route don black-and-white paper cow masks called chip deflectors.

Beaver, Okla., stakes claim to the first organized competition in 1970 during the town's annual spring festival. A local banker suggested it as an alternative to chasing greased pigs.

The town has since built the event into a small franchise. The chamber of commerce sells souvenir belt buckles and shot glasses, along with "I Flung Dung" T-shirts.

Beaver, with about 1,600 residents, calls itself the Cow Chip Capital of the World. Local officials, aiming to build a sort of championship tour for the sport, offer to "sanction" other towns if they agree to their cow chip-throwing rules.

Tilden, an 11-hour car ride away, signed on last year. It is encouraging local contests in nearby Nebraska towns to join it in a regional league. "We'd like them to be under our umbrella," says Dixie Kucera, chair of Tilden's Official Sanctioned Regional Cow Chip Throw.

Each April, Beaver draws more than 2,000 spectators to watch 100 competitors vie for the "world championship." Beaver's James Pratt has won five world titles since he began throwing competitively about 10 years ago.

The burly 47-year-old fire chief says he doesn't practice before contests, but for good luck licks his fingers between throws. Cow pies "don't have no odor to them," he says. "They're just gritty."

The world record is 185 feet, 5 inches, by Robby Deevers of Elgin, Okla., in Beaver in 2001. But according to folks in Wisconsin, the farthest a chip has ever been chucked is actually 248 feet - nearly the length of a football field - by Greg Neumaier in Prairie du Sac in 1991.

Beaver officials say that contest wasn't sanctioned, so they don't recognize the throw. "Oh, well," says Leslie McFarlane, executive director of the local chamber of commerce that runs the Prairie du Sac competition.

Tossers pitch the prairie projectiles overhand, underhand, and backhanded, like a Frisbee. But much of the skill lies in selecting the proper chip from piles provided by local farmers. Mr. Pratt, who throws overhand, likes a smallish, oval pie about six inches wide and 18 inches long.

"One solid chip is what I look for," he says. If it's too moist, he says, it could crumble in midair. Too long and it might not soar. Wilcox, a backhander, prefers a slightly larger, rounder chip, as she explained at a workshop for aspiring contestants prior to the Tilden throw last month.

Like many farm towns, Tilden, in northeastern Nebraska, has seen lots of local businesses and small farms wiped out. City boosters who want to raise the town's profile and spirits turned to cow chips. They got their contest sanctioned by simply calling Beaver's chamber of commerce and promising to follow its rules.

Wilcox was sitting in the bleachers at last year's contest when a family friend agreed to pay her $5 entry fee. She'd never pitched a cow pie before, but growing up on a cattle farm near Tilden, she says, "I've touched far worse things than dried cow poop." Her heave of 64 feet, 9 inches topped throws by four other women. Pratt drove up from Beaver and won the men's meet with a toss of 147 feet, 2 inches.

The victory earned Wilcox a trip to Beaver in April for the world championship, where her toss of 86 feet was good for fourth place. Back home, local radio and television stations interviewed her, and she wrote a first-person account for the local newspaper. She found the acclaim a bit uncomfortable. "Would you like to be known for that?" she says.

She was the favorite to win last month's women's competition here. That morning, she ate a bowl of Wheaties for breakfast, gulped a jug of purple Gatorade, and tossed 15 practice chips in her backyard. She'd thrown one chip nearly 96 feet in a pre-tournament workshop and set her sights on 100 feet.

She and six other women lined up in front of the crowded bleachers at the Elk Horn Valley High School football field. The winner would get a plaque and a trip to Beaver for the next world championship in the spring. Each selected two chips from cardboard boxes stuffed with pies that had dried in a nearby pasture. As Wilcox chose a pair of chips the size of dessert plates, her mother, Judy Wilcox, said she thought one looked too small. Wilcox rolled her eyes and sighed. "Everybody has something to tell me," she said.

Before Wilcox's turn came, Jessica Eymann, a former high-school softball catcher from Broomfield, Colo., made the overhand throw to beat at 81 feet, 10 inches.

Wilcox grabbed her chips and stepped into the throwing area. She wore sneakers, a high school volleyball T-shirt and black gym shorts that said, "Guaranteed Tough!" The afternoon was hot and humid, with a little crosswind. The announcer, the Rev. Michael Awe of Immanuel Lutheran Church, introduced Ms. Wilcox as a "professional." She asked him to say a prayer, and he replied: "I hear you don't need it."

Her first toss fell far short at 73 feet, 3 inches. Her junior-high track coach shouted, "You're going to have to fling it a lot harder than that!" Wilcox gripped her second chip. An official nodded the signal to toss. She took three quick steps and let go.

The chip was still airborne when she said, "It's not long enough." As the men stepped up to compete (Pratt, the fire chief from Beaver, couldn't make it because he had to work), she walked to the sidelines where her boyfriend waited. "I didn't want to go back to Beaver anyway," she told him.