Pablo Garcia, pit master and 14-year veteran dating back to the original Kreuz Market.

Schmidt retained the Kreuz name–as did his progeny who took over the business and, in the mid-1990s, moved the by-then famous barbecue enterprise about a mile up the road to a cavernous, gleaming paean to commercial restaurant modernity. Enter Smitty’s daughter Nina, her husband Jim, and her son, John, who in 1999 decided to take over the original shop and make sure it kept doing what it had always done. It’s those pits in the back, still in existence and operating on a daily basis, that have provided nearly a century’s worth of the smoke which fills the rooms and cakes the walls of the restaurant with a rich, silvery brown hue which today’s most technologically advanced color sampling programs could never duplicate.

A slice of the siganture brisket, best enjoyed with no sauce and more importantly, no fork.

But that’s what a place like Smitty’s is all about–the realization that there are some things that a machine could never do. The ingrained belief that it’s not a matter of being old-fashioned (although the customer experience it creates is a good by-product), but that authenticity means being genuine to the core and not taking even the slightest technological shortcut. There’s something to be said for not giving in to the lure of automation, and standing by the credo that good barbecue depends simply on fire, a well-built smoker, good cuts of meat, and someone who knows how to put all three together without a timer, a thermometer, a computer program, or a propane tank.

Of course it’s simple to break it down that way, and to an outsider it appears an easy thing to do. But spend enough time watching the pit masters and the sausage-makers and the butchers relying on nothing but their senses and intuition to consistently deliver the quality and the sensory experience that makes a visit to the place memorable, and you realize that it’s not so simple to put it all together.

John Fullilove, Smitty's grandson and the shop's manager, takes a break in the hall that used to house the market's main dining area.

But don’t take it from me. Next time you’re in Austin, take a drive about 30 miles south to the little town of Lockhart. Drive past the giant tourist trap of Kreuz Market and pull off U.S. highway 183 into the dirt and gravel parking lot. Walk through the back door and let the smoke hit you as you stroll past the open flame of the pit, and order your meat. It’ll be served up on a pieice of butcher paper with nothing but some white bread and a knife–there are no forks here. Plunk down your cash (no credit cards, please), take your package, and have a seat at one of the community tables in the dining room. Dig in.

It’s just that simple.

Robert Earl Keen and the Robert Earl Keen Band, Gruene Hall, New Braunfels, Texas, February 2008.

I guess the picture to the left is what started the ball rolling, so to speak. It was shot at Gruene Hall, a rickety, crumbling, one-of-a-kind dance hall in the truest Texan sense of the term, with a little point-and-shoot camera one February night as some friends and I took in a Robert Earl Keen show. It’s probably not much to look at but for some reason I recall getting home very late that night and immediately wanting to download this picture and see it on the screen. And I remember getting up the next morning, wanting to do nothing more than get it processed in the computer, working painstakingly to bring whatever I could out of this crappy, high-speed digital file to try and reflect the essence of the performance that I had seen the night before. For the first time in a long time, I felt like a kid developing Tri-X in the high school yearbook darkroom again–I thought I had…something! I knew it! And I couldn’t wait to see what it was. As I looked at the image the next morning, the portrait guy in me promised myself that some day, somehow, I was going to find a way to make a portrait of someone in this place.

Fast forward six months or so. Glossy magazine, an offshoot of the Austin American-Statesman, is doing a feature story on Texas musicians, one of whom is Robert Earl Keen. Would I be interested in shooting him, and did I have any ideas on how and where to shoot it? That picture, that show, that night popped into my head again. Did I ever.

Robert Earl Keen, New Braunfels, Texas, July 2008

A brief disclaimer: I really enjoy, and appreciate, Robert Earl Keen’s music. It’s raw, it’s honest, it’s funny, and it’s deep. It’s It’s also bluesy, folksy and a little bit country, which means that it’s an acquired taste, especially for a born-and-bred New Yorker and child of the ’80s. But I don’t tell you that to try and convert or convince you; I tell you that to give you a little bit of my perspective on the shoot.

You see, I spend a good amount of time working for Sports Illustrated and Golf Digest. Which is to say that I spend a good deal of my photographic life shooting pictures of extremely talented people who can do other-worldly things with the gifts that have been bestowed on them–people who awe us on television with their abilities, and whom we in turn lionize (and sometimes, canonize) in our newspapers’ sports pages and the glossy spreads of our magazines’ feature wells. I must confess, however, that for someone who documents these people as they work and gets to meet and work with them in person, this is a bit of a letdown because, to be honest with you, a good many of them turn out to be assholes who couldn’t care less.

You see, disillusionment is pretty much included in my job description. And so it was with great trepidation that I waited in Gruene Hall one hot morning in July, having positioned the cameras, loaded film backs, and set the lights. I’d done this too many times and met too many people whose talent I genuinely admired, who I was truly looking forward to meeting, and who disgusted me in the end with their arrogance and attitude. I was prepared for the worst. Call me jaded, but I’ve just found that it’s the best way to ease any disappointment.

What a pleasant turn of events it was, then, to discover that the man who is so easygoing on stage, who spins yarns about his old college landlord and tells corny jokes and forgets lyrics as he finger-picks his way through his old, folksy classics, and laughs and jokes and jams with his band as they meander through a set-list that is written half an hour before each show and changes by the minute was…exactly like I imagined, and hoped, he would be. Easygoing. Serious. Cooperative. Thoughtful. Engaging.

In a word: Genuine. And that’s all you really need to know.

I mean, really. How could I ever turn down a trip to Pinehurst? So when Golf World magazine called with the assignment to cover the U.S. Kids Golf Championship, there wasn’t any hesitation on my part. A chance to stay at The Carolina Hotel, to stroll through Pinehurst Village on a lazy summer evening, to while away half an hour with a nightcap in a rocking chair on the Carolina porch and, of no less importance, to partake of the breakfast buffet in the Carolina dining room (and you wonder why I run as much as I do?)…what better way to spend a weekend in August?

Oh, wait–you mean there’s a golf tournament going on, too?

As a freelancer who’s constantly on the road, it’s easy to look forward to the trappings of the trip. Depending on where I’m going, I have my favorite hotels, restaurants, running routes, and the like; all of these make the prospect of being away from home that much more bearable. But in looking forward to those things it’s all too easy to overlook the reason for the trip in the first place: The assignment itself. I’m not sure that’s entirely avoidable in the sports photography business. Eventually one football game starts to blend in with another, golf courses all start to look the same, the baseball game you shot yesterday feels eerily like the one you shot last weekend.

And that’s what was so great about this assignment. Sure, it was a golf tournament–but it was like no golf tournament I’ve ever covered. It was all kids, all the time, ages five through twelve, in a setting more suited to the myriad professional events I’m used to covering. There was a real disconnect–the cynic might call it a reality check–in watching a bunch of kids and their parents hugging, laughing, and running around the same putting green and warming up on the same driving range where, the last time I was here, for the 2005 U.S. Open, dozens of the worlds wealthiest and most stand-offish athletes stoically went about the business of big-time professional golf.

Now, that’s not to say it was all giggles and fun–this is still serious business, this golf thing. Everybody wants to win. And yes, there are some kids–and parents–who take it a wee bit too seriously. Emotions ran high, at both ends of the spectrum. But it was a pleasure to see kids learning the game, and the sportsmanship that is so integral to it, at such a young age, and doing it all without the arrogance and attitude that I’ve come to expect when I’m out on a golf course on a typical assignment.