Alive & Unedited

Pie Guy

by Chris DeVille

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WILL SHILLING PHOTO

Flying Pizza employee Pat Miller lives the namesake of his workplace. He literally makes the pies fly—around his back, above his head, between his legs. As an acrobatic specialist for the U.S. Pizza Team, Miller, 20, left for Naples, Italy, this week to compete in the International Pizza Competition of Naples.

"It's like the Olympics of pizza, basically," the Cincinnati native explained as he practiced his tricks in the Campus pizza parlor. He went on to give the dirt on the cutthroat world of tossing dough and explained how he got into the game.

What does competitive pizza tossing entail?

Basically, there's three different competitions. There's the largest stretch, which is how large you can make a pizza dough, how big you can stretch it to. There's the acrobatics, which is the trick competition. It's the most flashy, so it gets the most attention. And then there's the fastest pizza maker, and that's how fast you can stretch five doughs out to cover a 12-inch pizza screen.

WILL SHILLING PHOTO

How much competition did you face to make the team?

Usually in a competition for acrobatics to get on the United States Pizza Team, you compete against anywhere between 10 and 25 people from across the country. But there's also larger competitions that once you're on the team you go to, and you're competing against people from all over.

How did you get into this?

Originally, it was back when I was 16 years old. I just needed a job. The company I was working for back in Cincinnati, they had a company trick competition for fun at the holiday party. I did my first trick, just trying something out, started looking into it online and realized there was national competitions and went to one of those and tried learning some new stuff there.

Is pizza tossing something that could turn into a full-time career?

You get a lot of people interested in the advertising part of you. It has the potential to bring in a lot of investors to open my own pizzerias. Also, you do win money at the competitions. And we do performances around the country, and when we do that we get paid pretty well too.

What's the practice regimen like?

If you're a beginner, you'd have to watch videos, and getting one-on-one instruction from somebody is the best way to practice originally. If you've been doing it for a while, you just practice every day in the pizza shop, you know, making pizzas for six, seven hours a day every day. You just get that feel for dough, and you want to try different stuff.

How many people are on the U.S. Pizza Team? Where do they come from?

Right now there's about 15 people. Only six of us do tricks. There's other people who do largest stretch, fastest [pizza maker] and the cooking part. The six people who do tricks are from all around the country. We have one in Indiana, we have one in Missouri, we have one in New Jersey, one in North Carolina, and another one in Dayton.

And you'll be facing people from all over the world?

Teams from all around the world. Teams from Australia, Japan, North Korea, Spain. Italy has three teams. There's France. I hear Canada this year's going to have a team.

Has this been going on for a long time?

Since the early '90s. It's just now, honestly, starting to take off, though. The competition in the early '90s was between a few countries, mostly Italy, and the competition was about 10 to 15 people from across the world. Now the competition has expanded to 10 to 20 teams—I'm not even sure. Every year there's new teams. And the competition's going to have anywhere between 50 and 80 people.

So is Italy the major power in pizza tossing?

Right now the U.S., we're doing some big stuff. We'll see when we get there. Italy's very good. They have three really good tossers. But we also this year think we're going to do pretty well. We've got some new tricks and some new team routine stuff that nobody's ever done before.

May 17th, 2007

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