by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

It was my belief that rich kids played with Squand. We didn't have cable and, when given access to Nickelodeon at a relative's house or on vacation, I would watch the Squand commercial fly by dozens of times a day. It was "an outrageous underwater sculpting sand" and RoseArt didn't advertise on the free TV I watched, so clearly they were after the mansion and caviar set.

I bring up Squand to illustrate how special Nickelodeon felt, how rare and hypnotizing it was until I was a tween and my parents bought a cable box and HBO was no longer limited to free weekends. Watching a game show like Figure It Out, I was already in a heightened state of pre-teen bliss. And then one time, I saw something that made me both laugh and cheer. I didn't know how to deal with it. I couldn't internalize what I was watching when Chris Meyer ate a couple pounds of watermelon like a cheetah.

If you weren't aware, Figure It Out was a panel game show hosted by Olympian Summer Sanders. A panel of Nick stars (in this case Pete and Pete's Danny Tamborelli, Weinerville's Marc Weiner and Amanda Bynes and Lori Beth Denberg of All That) would try to guess a kid contestant's special talent. Some of them were impressive. Last month, watching old episodes on demand, I saw a rollerskating girl do splits under her crouching father and I involuntarily gasped. Some of the talents were "I like to fly kites" or "I put a piece of string on my retainer case and now it's a necklace."

Chris Meyer, an Arkansan contestant on the first season, could eat 11 pounds of watermelon in one minute. Or that's what the show said. "Ok, so I actually ate that amount in three minutes, when the competition changed the rules one year," he tells me over Facebook chat. "My actual world record was 2 lbs. 15 oz. in a minute. That was on the Guiness Book TV show they had for a while. I'm not sure the episode even aired."

I'm talking with Chris because I've had so many questions since his episode first aired in 1997. I won't go into how I tracked him down, but I did, and he was generous enough to answer those questions.

You can watch a highlight reel of Chris' appearance on Nickelodeon's Facebook page, and it's more than worth your two minutes. You can also buy the full episode on various streaming services, and, watching the entire thing, you clock Chris as a good guy almost immediately. Summer makes a joke about how he'll have to take her to Jamaica if he wins the grand prize and he casually says "maybe" in a way that legitimately made me laugh. Plenty of other kids are frozen stiff–I know I would have been scared out of my mind–but Chris is smiling from beginning to end, clearly having the time of his life.

It turns out you can enjoy yourself and still feel like you're buckling. "Honestly, I was nervous as hell," he says. "I had done local news segments, but those were people we knew already (small state). It felt like I was in my own little booth, separated from what was happening. It felt like a dream (for a kid, it was) and that helped keep my nerves in check. I could have easily frozen up many times. It is surreal being in front of all those people in the audience."

That's another way you can tell Chris is cool–his talent is super fun, but not necessarily the kind of thing a million other kids would find cool. He isn't doing yo-yo tricks or talking about all the BMX races he's won, he's leaning over a watermelon and absolutely destroying it. Chris was 9 or 10 at the time (he isn't sure because the episode aired about a year after it was taped) and confident enough in himself to cover the entire front of his shirt in melon pulp.

He goes for it, too. Chris makes noises for the camera, shakes his head back and forth, cracks up. The audience is both shocked

and impressed.

I cannot stress how good Chris is on camera. He'll peek up after taking a watermelon apart typewriter-style and smile at the crowd. He's putting on a show. There's a version of this where he goes on Figure It Out and eats the watermelon and everybody cheers and there's the version we got, the superior version, where Chris sets off fireworks and hits the Nickelodeon sweet spot between messy, hyperactive and proudly weird.

It's a moment I can honestly describe as heroic. I was thrilled that Chris let me ask him about what happened before and after it.

Pre-Figure It Out

How does a person get discovered for their watermelon demolishing skills? "ESPN covered Arkansas' Cardboard Boat Festival one year to fill in dead airtime. They covered the watermelon eating competition, and it was a hit. The producer from ESPN knew the producer for Figure It Out. They actually contacted me through the local cable access station. We did a taped interview and sent it in. My mom came by the school to tell me the news."

This is wildly more legitimate than I had assumed Nickelodeon's casting process had been. Chris had a talent and displayed it publicly, which makes perfect sense. The only question raised in the explanation is "How did Figure It Out find the kind of kid who makes it on the show for having a rat tail as old as he was?" I may never know. It's possible I shouldn't know.

After Chris was accepted, they flew him and his mom out to Florida–Nickelodeon famously filmed its shows before live studio audiences at the Universal Studios theme park. "After the taping, we asked to go play in the park, so they cut us loose and we went to Universal Studios," he remembers. "Greatest day ever."

Figure It Out wasn't Chris' only TV appearance. On looking him up, I found out Chris had been on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno around the time his Nickelodeon appearance aired. Here he is stealing the show from Jonathan Taylor Thomas, who for some reason is dressed like one of the people who gets murdered in the “Layla” montage in Goodfellas (that's the great Mira Sorvino's hand on Chris' shoulder):

"ESPN knew Figure It Out, who knew Jay Leno," Chris tells me. "It kept going forward because my family was easy to deal with. We didn't have any demands, I used my manners and we were just generally thankful for the opportunity to see the world on their dime." The Leno staff flew Chris' entire family out to LA, gathered them from the airport in a limo and put them up in the Beverly Hilton.

Most of the other shows sent Chris on a circuit. He'd go on Ricky Lake, who would send him to Maury Povich, and then at the last minute the Maury folks would send him to Nashville to make appearances on Home and Family at Dollywood and TNN Primetime Country. He wasn’t even a tween and he was travelling the country, eating watermelon.

Fabulous Prizes

Chris beat the panel and won all three prizes. In his case, that meant a piece of the All That set, $300 in Geoffrey Dollars (the Toys 'R Us gift card currency) and a trip to Jamaica.

To my delight, Chris still has his chunk of the All That set. It's on his wall.

To my decades-delayed frustration, though, he never got the second prize. He explains: "So I didn't get the 300 Geoffrey Dollars. They accidentally sent me the scooter and skate package. IF they would have given me the Geoffrey Dollars, then I would have bought the Nintendo 64. See, my purchase could have saved that entire company."

This was especially cruel (my word choice— Chris seemed fine) because the $300 to Toys ‘R Us was comparatively strong for a second round prize. A contestant on another episode, for example, won $200 to Foot Locker in his second round. Does the Viacom corporation still owe Chris $300 in toys? Only somebody with a heart of ice could argue otherwise. Send this man an N64.

Thankfully, Jamaica was as-advertised. The Meyer family had to buy two plane tickets (Nickelodeon only paid for the first two), but after that, they got a weeklong, all expenses paid trip. "We scuba dived, wind surfed, snorkeled and got fat on the pier. They also allowed kids at the regular bars, so we could order (non-alcoholic) drinks and feel like stars. They had a kid's resort within that had bike rides, video games and so much more. I could go on forever about that. I will never be able to afford something like that again, but I can still dream."

Post-Figure It Out

I had an idea, based on my own history of elementary school bullies and the senselessness of how brutal kids can be to each other, how this all went for Chris when he returned to his real life. When I was a child, I used to think that if I had made it onto a sitcom or won Nick Takes Over Your School, the other kids would crown me their king. Movies, comics and Nickelodeon shows can create this idea that if you win the junior lottery, if anything special happens to you, really, a world of stress would just fall away. Now I have a better idea how it would have played out.

Chris, of course, knows what I'm talking about. "Oh yeah that was the dream. I would use my powers of influence as Nick's greatest star to transform our school and my life. It actually went in the complete opposite direction. My school was full of jerks and I was already unpopular. It made things worse for me and that never stopped.

"It was pretty rough, but as an adult, I know they were just jelly. Kids don't know how to handle stuff like that, including me. I'm sure I didn't help any, but my core friends stayed with me through all of that stuff."

I express my sympathies and, by this point in the story, you know Chris responds with total grace: "I appreciate the sentiment, I don't blame those other kids. My hometown is toxic and small-minded. I was lucky to experience what I did, and they probably felt left out or upset that they couldn't experience that."

Chris has a family now and he lives in a different state, but he still occasionally shows up at watermelon eating competitions to raise money for worthy causes. He goes to school studying Food Sciences & Technology, a pursuit he admits "probably makes a lot more sense than it should." He's got an internship with his state's medical cannabis operations, produces a specialty hibiscus tea and is learning more about aquaponics.

It's impressive stuff from a truly cool person. I don't know how a guy goes on a crazy game show eating a small mountain of watermelon and then goes on to have a more interesting life, but then I don't know how a person eats a small mountain of watermelon in the first place. Thank God for Chris Meyer.