My journey in the Hemingway Look-Alike Contest began in 2018. My wife and I visited the Hemingway house. In the dining room, there is a painting of a young Ernest Hemingway. Upon seeing it, my wife exclaimed “you look just like him!” We decided that day I would compete in the Hemingway Look-Alike Contest.
Ernest Hemingway did not have a beard when he lived in Key West. He was in his 30s and had brown hair and a mustache. It was only later in his life did the photographer Yosef Karsh take the infamous headshot of Hemingway with a white beard and wool fisherman’s sweater. It is an honor to be the first winner to represent a “Key West Hemingway” the way he looked when he lived in Key West.
Even before my journey in the contest, I have always had an admiration for the Florida Keys and Ernest Heminway. My grandfather owned a home in Islamorada, Florida, where I was fortunate to grow up fishing and diving. I’ve always enjoyed being out on the water, particularly offshore fishing. There is a sense of freedom being offshore when there is no land in site. That is how I imagine a young Ernest Hemingway felt about Key West and the thrill he experienced from offshore fishing.
When I would visit Sloppy Joe’s growing up, I would see the Papa Wall with photos of the past winners. In my mind, they were celebrities. They were larger than life! It is still hard to believe that I have gotten to know them, let alone join their ranks.
In my first year in the contest, I didn’t know anyone or what to expect. I didn’t even make it out of the first round. But, I was fortunate to have met Papa Jon Auvil, who was also a contestant at the time. After the contest, he called me and said that a group was going to Cuba, and I should come! By December 2019, I was suddenly thrust into a foreign country with a dozen bearded men I hardly knew. We visited Cuba to celebrate and recreate the annual baseball game played by the “Gigi Allstars.” Hemingway would hold a baseball game at his home “Finca Vigia” and invited the local children to play, a tradition that we continue to this day. That trip turned out to be something very special. It was one of those trips that you will never forget. Our group calls ourselves the “Cuba 12.” We only had one Papa on the trip at the time, Papa Joe Maxey, who had just won the contest in 2019. I recall him saying “there are a number of future Papas on this trip.”
The following year in 2020, the contest was cancelled because of the pandemic. In 2021, I entered the contest for the second time and made it to the Saturday night finals. In 2022, I honed in on my look and presentation on stage. During the Saturday night finals, I spoke of a young student and journalist, Arnold Samuelson, who knocked on Hemingway’s door asking for the opportunity to learn from him. They spent the next year traveling back and forth between Key West and Cuba fishing and studying marlin with a group of zoologists. As a part of my speech, I said, like Samuelson wanting to learn from Hemingway, I wanted to learn from the Papas. That speech catapulted me into the top 5 of the contest. I was in disbelief!
The best advice I would give to first year contestants is don’t worry about winning. If you do that, it will shine through. If you are there to be in Key West, have fun, and meet people, then you will have figured out what the contest is all about, and it will shine through in a positive way. It is a journey. There were many moments that I wasn’t sure if a young Hemingway would ever win, but I knew why I was doing it and I was determined to continue as long as it took. Keeping the legacy of Ernest Hemingway alive, the history of Key West, and visiting the HLAS family each year is what will keep me coming back to the contest for the rest of my life.