 And it seems Morty kind of made the whole thing about the history of it before 1972 up. There had never been a Nathan's hot dog eating contest before then. That's fine. It became famous now. Second, if this had happened at a county fair in some small town in middle America, you probably still would not have heard about it. No network was about to put a crew and a correspondent on a plane to cover people wolfing down Franks.