How the American Royal sauce competition started as the Diddy-Wa-Diddy contest

It all started with a bottle of Arthur Bryant’s barbecue sauce.

Back in 1975, my wife, Gretchen, and I moved from New York City to Kansas City with our 5-year-old daughter, Sarah, and beloved cat, Fat Albert, for a job offer I couldn’t refuse.

We trekked through Harlem and westward, until we landed at a rental house in Roeland Park.

“We’ll only stay a few years until we find a better house,” Gretchen promised. More than four decades later, we own the house.

But we knew nothing of bark or burnt ends when our New York friend Cliff Rosenthal and his wife, Elayne, came visiting shortly after we moved in. Cliff’s first question: “Have you been to Arthur Bryant’s?”

We had no idea what he was talking about. Cliff explained that home boy-turned-New Yorker Calvin Trillin had dubbed Arthur Bryant’s “the single best restaurant in the world” in his classic “American Fried.”

Thus our first dinner with Cliff and Elayne was beef and fries at the landmark barbecue restaurant that has been a pit stop for presidents. When we were lined up in front of the brisket scraps window, we took a tip from Trillin and reached in to help ourselves to free burnt ends, an unbelievably delicious melt-in-your-mouth mix of beef brisket, bark, fat and smoke. Then legendary pitmaster Richard France took our order. He plopped enormous handfuls of beef on our sandwiches.

It was pure heaven!

Bryant’s sauce, however, was another matter. Fortunately, it came in squeeze bottles instead of slathered excessively on the meat. Unlike any barbecue sauce I had ever tasted, it was sour, grainy, with flavor notes of curry, chili powder, pit drippings, a touch of pureed tomato, pepper and salt.

It didn’t agree with me.

On our second visit, the sauce tasted good enough that I bought a bottle to take home. Later that night I craved Bryant’s sauce and had a midnight snack with leftover beef, fries and sauce.

Fast forward to a hot August Saturday in 1984. I was reading Jane and Michael Stern’s “Good Food.” The traveling food duo’s descriptions of the decor, people and cuisine at 80 of the country’s best barbecue restaurants made me hunger to visit each place.

That couldn’t happen, but I resolved to get a taste of each restaurant’s sauce.

[A breakdown of some wonderful Kansas City sauces]

Ry Cooder’s rendition of Blind Blake’s “Ditty-Wah-Ditty” was playing on our stereo. Bingo! I thought. I’ll get sauces from the places featured in the book and hold a Diddy-Wa-Diddy National Barbecue Sauce Contest.

So I wrote to the 80 barbecue restaurants featured in “Good Food,” plus others culled from the library’s collection of Yellow Pages. I also bought local sauces. We ended up with 104.

I settled on Oct. 13, a date that would not conflict with the American Royal Contest in November. Friends, work associates and neighbors were invited to taste and judge. We would start at 12:30 p.m. and run until all sauces were judged.

As founder and self-appointed official tastemaster, I got to work creating an appropriate barbecue persona. I wound up choosing my pen name from college, Remus Powers.

Remus came from Joel Chandler Harris’ fictional Uncle Remus, who shared African folk tales as told to Harris by emancipated slaves. Powers was a cool James Dean-type with wire-rimmed glasses who worked as a mechanic in the Lincoln-Mercury dealership where my dad was the painter.

As homage to my love of philosophy, I gave Remus Powers a Ph.B., Doctor of Barbecue Philosophy.

Daughter Sarah gave me a butcher apron with “Remus Powers Ph.B.” ironed below the bib. In the tradition of 19th-century butchers, I donned a Derby hat, along with a 19th century-style tuxedo shirt and bow tie. A few years later, friends gave me some rib bones from Arthur Bryant’s coated with polyurethane to adorn Remus’ apron bib.

Always a firm believer in the importance of rituals, I penned an official judges’ oath on a piece of Arthur Bryant’s butcher paper, and that oath is used to this day for sauce judges at the American Royal. Later I adapted the oath for meat judges at the request of the Kansas City Barbeque Society (KCBS). The oath is now required at all KCBS-sanctioned barbecue contests.

Because I believe barbecue sauce should be judged on meat, I cooked pork and chicken. Sauces at the first competition were put in numbered Styrofoam cups on a long table in our patio courtyard. Judges evaluated each sauce, or as many sauces as they could handle, using 10-point score sheets for appearance, texture, taste alone and taste on meat. Taste scores were doubled. My brother-in-law, a certified public accountant, was comptroller.

The winner was Wolferman’s Barbecue Sauce, developed from an old family recipe. Sour, not sweet, it was similar to Arthur Bryant’s with mustard. (That was when the then-locally owned Wolferman’s showcase retail store and restaurant was in the space now occupied by Houlihan’s in Fairway.)

“That was fun, but our house is too small for this,” Gretchen said when the contest was over. “Why don’t you try doing it as a fundraiser for a charity?”

Our first benefit was for the Prairie Center on the outskirts of Olathe. It wasowned by a nonprofit group dedicated to saving the 300 acres of prairie as a nature education resource and wildlife preserve.

Chef Paul Kirk, a judge at the first contest and later a cookbook author, volunteered to serve as head pitmaster. He recruited other friends and competitive barbecuers to spend a cold, rainy night tending pit fires, telling stories and listening to coyotes howl. In addition to meat for judging, Kirk and company smoked several hundred pounds of meat to sell. I don’t remember the dollar amount raised, but we declared the event a big success.

The third Diddy-Wa-Diddy took place on a rainy Saturday at Crown Center as a benefit for the local chapter of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.

Councilman John Sharp, KC Star sports editor Joe McGuff and sports writer Mike McKenzie were enthusiastic supporters. In addition to helping organize the event, Mike recruited former University of Kansas basketball coach Larry Brown as honorary chairman. He also asked Star cartoonist Lee Judge to draw a caricature of Remus for the program cover.

As plans began the fourth year, I read that the American Royal Barbecue dates had moved from November to the same date as the Diddy-Wa-Diddy. I called the American Royal office and arranged to meet barbecue contest chairman Jack Kay. Two hours later we were shaking hands to marry the two contests.

We kept the Diddy-Wa-Diddy name for one more contest.

But it lives on in the renamed Get Sauced store, which sells the leftover competition sauces.

This year marks the 28th year of the sauce contest at the American Royal, and both the sauce contest and store have grown bigger and better each year. Eventually, because of space limitations, we held sauce judging before the meat contest. (This year’s event happened Sept. 19.)

Recognition as “Best on the Planet” has become a valuable marketing tool. Contest entry fees and sales of donated sauces, rubs, marinades and barbecue-related products at the store benefit agri-business education programs for youth.

Meanwhile, I’ll never forget the time I opened a contest entry from House of Prayer Restaurant in Florida. I noticed too late that the sauce, which, contained fresh orange juice, had fermented en route. Today, whenever I hear someone say “Let us pray,” I recall the moment that I unscrewed the lid and barbecue sauce sprayed toward the heavens.

This story was originally published September 22, 2015 at 5:00 AM with the headline "How the American Royal sauce competition started as the Diddy-Wa-Diddy contest."