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Tom Ross

Tom Ross' column appears Tuesdays and Sundays in Steamboat Today. Contact him at 970-871-4205 or tross@SteamboatToday.com.

Steamboat Springs — As the winner of the 1971 Elm Drive B pizza-eating contest, this is a difficult confession for me to make. However, the sad truth is that I've been living on the plus side of the Mendoza Line ever since Thanksgiving.

I've been eating cheese logs, Christmas cookies, roast beast, chips and dip, pumpkin pie, homemade candy, chocolate mint bars and seafood dipped in melted butter for seven weeks. I'm wearing khakis with a hidden elastic waistband under the belt loops.

It's time for me to give up pizza, ice cream and breakfast sausage until I cross back below the line. I weigh 204 pounds, and I need to drop five of them toute suite.

Those extra pounds are holding back my ski racing career. If I spend my evenings watching basketball on the television this winter, it will be while I'm pounding away on the Nordic Trak.

The Mendoza Line is an invisible barrier named after former Major League Baseball infielder Mario Mendoza, who forever became a part of American pop culture after he posted a batting average of .198 in 400 at bats with the Seattle Mariners in 1978.

It was Kansas City Royals slugger George Brett who coined the term "Mendoza Line" to signify the threshold of poor hitting. Anything below a .200 bating average was deemed as being below the Mendoza Line.

Chris Berman of ESPN's SportsCenter picked up on it, and the phrase has been applied to all kinds of social contexts since.

For me, the bathroom scale defines the Mendoza Line. But more about the Mendoza Line later. Let's talk about 1971.

Elm Drive B is the name of the dormitory I lived in while a freshman at the University of Wisconsin. I could stand in the courtyard and throw a rock across Elm Drive and into Lake Mendota (hey, how 'bout that?).

I had 15 or so instant best buddies the day I moved into the dorms, and none of them could consume as much pizza as I could. I was a prodigious eater back in the day.

At 6-2 and 162 pounds, I was skinny and there was no amount of food that could change my profile. I used to go through the cafeteria line at college and grab a handful of mayonnaise packets just to get some extra calories in my life. Seriously.

It was no problem for me to eat a whole chicken, a couple of potatoes and three ears of sweet corn for dinner. What's for dessert?

There came a fateful day when one of my buddies took note of an "all-you-can-eat pizza night" at a local restaurant advertised in the Daily Cardinal. We left our dorm rooms intent on putting them out of business.

Our approach to this pig-out was to make a contest of it. I couldn't chug beer, but I could snarf me some pie. I shut everybody down, eating 22 slices of pizza.

My unofficial total, however, was 23 pieces - I ate one more slice of mushroom and sausage pizza in the car on the way home. Nobody called it "talking smack" back then, but that's what I was doing.

Sadly, those days are gone. I'm going on the nuts and berries diet. For breakfast this morning I had multigrain Cheerios with a small handful of dried fruit and dry filbert nuts. Wish me luck.

Mario Mendoza was not among my buddies in the dormitory. He was born in Chihuahua, Mexico, and turned 57 the day after Christmas. He had a nice Major League career as a slick-fielding shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates and Texas Rangers as well as the Mariners.

In order to be fair to Mr. Mendoza, he batted above the "Mendoza Line" for most of his big league career. He finished with a .215 career average.

After Chris "Boomer" Berman popularized the phrase "Mendoza Line," it became a universal way of delineating the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable, as in, "It is unacceptable for me to weigh 204 pounds. Please pass the multigrain Cheerios."

Mario Mendoza was last sighted in a dugout, where he was managing a baseball team called Los Piratas de Campeche.

Here's hoping, Mr. Mendoza, that your players are all batting above the Mendoza Line, but your own weight is still well below it.