In on the joke during the first ever Florida Man Games

The idea came to Pete Melfi, a radio personality turned podcaster in St. Augustine, Florida, last year after he organized “the laziest race in the history of racing,” a 0.3-mile beer run, and gave participants a grand had organized an event. old time.

Wouldn’t it be fun, thought Mr. Melfi, to have another race, this time with a big afterparty? And what if the theme was nothing more than the meme that drew many thousands of headlines across his home state: Florida Man?

His wild idea turned into an all-day competition with a series of crazy events: a tougher competition. A “mud duel” with pool noodles. An obstacle course to evade arrest, with real deputies chasing the participants. (But just to be clear, there were no actual arrests during the race. The handcuffs came from a sex toy store.)

“We understand that Florida is weird,” Mr. Melfi said. “We embrace it.”

If the rest of the country — the rest of the world — is going to make Florida the punchline, those who call the country home might as well be in on the joke. Don’t think about it too much.

But the Florida Man has been a cultural phenomenon for so long that some in Florida and beyond have spent quite a bit of time thinking about what it means, how it can be challenged and what it says about the state’s identity. Perhaps the St. Augustine games can also be an excuse to explore the evolution of the meme – and of Florida itself.

“Florida to me has always been such an important barometer of where the nation is going,” said Julio Capó Jr., a historian at Florida International University in Miami, who has written that viewing the state and its people ‘in caricature form’ is an age-old habit. “Yet there are very few attempts to take the state seriously – to understand its past, its present, much less its future.”

At the height of the meme’s popularity in the mid-to-late 2010s, everyone, it seemed, was making fun of bizarre and unfortunate stories from the bottomless trove of police and state police reports. The @_FloridaMan account on Twitter, now known as X, attracted hundreds of thousands of followers. The Florida Man Birthday Challenge encouraged people to enter their date of birth and “Florida Man” to see which bizarre headline published on their birthday popped up.

But questions soon arose about putting ordinary people in the harsh public spotlight, especially if they suffered from addiction, mental illness or poverty. Other states also had bizarre incidents, although less involving alligators. Why choose Florida?

Writer Lauren Groff, who moved to the state 18 years ago, recalled another meme from Florida, in which someone sees the state dangling off the map.

“It is a huge and incredibly complex state that has been reduced to something very silly,” she said.

The prevailing theory about how the Florida Man became popular goes like this: The absurdity of the state’s 2000 presidential recount made Florida the butt of late-night jokes. The state’s strict public records laws made it easy for anyone to obtain police reports. The internet and social media have made it a sensation.

But Ira P. Robbins, a law professor at American University, found in 2021 that other states had as broad or broader access to public records than Florida. “Why don’t we have a New Mexico Man, New York Man or Massachusetts Man?” he said in an interview.

Craig Pittman, the author of “Oh, Florida! How America’s Strangest State Is Affecting the Rest of the Country,” noted that Florida has produced strange news since it became a state in 1845. “When we were a territory, we were known as a villain’s paradise,” he said. “Half the people were scalawags and robbers, and the other half were their penniless victims.”

But now many newspapers have stopped publishing mugshots. The owner of the @_FloridaMan account shut it down in 2019 because he felt uncomfortable mocking people’s behavior on what is often one of the worst days of their lives. In his newsletter highlighting strange stories from around the state, Mr. Pittman does not include any about Floridians involuntarily committed for psychiatric care or clearly suffering from addiction.

Yet none of this has spelled the end of Florida Man. The phrase has entered the political lexicon, transforming from a generic term for a non-public figure – Florida Man as John Doe – to a stand-in for former President Donald J. Trump. “Florida Man Makes Announcement,” The New York Post raged in 2022, as Mr. Trump announced his re-election campaign.

While that particular Florida man lives in a gilded Palm Beach complex, ordinary Floridians face real problems that outsiders, including some who have come to the state in recent years, may not understand, said Tyler Gillespie, a writer in St. Petersburg. Their attitude is, ‘We can do whatever we want and we can leave,'” he said of the newcomers.

“My family is here, so I’m pretty rooted,” Mr. Gillespie said. “But there is hardly an affordable place to live.”

As incongruous as it may seem, St. Augustine, where Mr. Melfi lives and hosted the Florida Man Games, is the oldest continually inhabited city in the country and a place steeped in history.

The first-ever Florida Man Games were held at the fairgrounds of a historic district, with tickets priced at $55 each on Saturday. The contest, sponsored by a Florida clothing company and others including a car dealership and a gym, awarded $5,000 to one winning team based on their performance in events throughout the day.

Hundreds of people came to enjoy the laid-back Florida atmosphere of it all. Shirtless overalls. ‘Merica’ hats. Mullions! They weren’t overthinking – and neither was this reporter, once she sat down to watch.

A team from north Tampa, the Red Eyed Gator Huggers, brought along a mascot: a 5-year-old green iguana named Mikey. “What’s more Florida than a stinky iguana?” said CJ Mays, Mikey’s owner, as she stroked his back.

The participants ate a huge pile of pork with their bare hands. “Everything I do is for Florida and America!” Dylan Mullaney of Jacksonville exclaimed as he consumed.

Women dressed in pin-up style competed for the title of “Florida Ma’am,” which included one beer can as a hair roller. Organizers were forced to improvise for the mud duel after someone “cut” the plastic pool in which it was to take place, Mr Melfi said.

“I heard they had New York license plates on their car,” he joked about the person responsible.

The shenanigans were made for Instagram and TikTok, the platforms that spread word of the event in the first place. The presenter was a TikTok personality. There was a man in one of the teams known for holding a large American flag when a hurricane blew up.

Among the participants — all men, most white — was Joshua Ryan, a 37-year-old from Citrus County, whose three-man team was called the Cooter Commandos, in tribute to a local river turtle. Each team member created an over-the-top persona to promote the team on social media. Mr. Ryan was from Captain Cooter, “based on early ’90s wrestling, WWE, a little ‘Macho Man’ Randy Savage,” he said. To compete, he wore a flashy tank top and shorts.

“You have to lean into the joke and lean into the absurdity of it,” he said.

Mr. Ryan’s Florida, he said, involved growing up riding bikes and being in nature. One of his team members has been his friend since first grade.

In recent years, many new people have moved to Citrus County, on the state’s west-central coast, he said, causing some resentment among locals who “don’t want Northerners to move there — they want things to stay the way they are.” they are.”

“We’re just getting our first Chick-fil-A and Target and Starbucks,” he said.

Mandy Millam, 37, whose husband was also one of the Cooters, said out-of-state people still misunderstand too often.

“Florida has a wild heart,” she said. “We have a wild nature. But people see us as wildly surrendered. We don’t cross that line as often as people think we do.”

She added: “I love this place so much.”