Bill Gillespie: Smokin' Hoggz Hall of Famer and BBQ World Cup Qualifier

Bill Gillespie has won just about everything competition barbecue puts on a table.

He has a Grand Champion trophy from the Jack. He has the American Royal. This spring the sport made it official and put him in the KCBS Hall of Fame.

And yet, more than two decades into a career most pitmasters would trade a smoker for, there is one thing Bill Gillespie has never done.

He has never been to Las Vegas.

In April of 2027 that finally changes, when the Middleboro, Massachusetts pitmaster and his Smokin' Hoggz team join roughly one hundred teams at the first BBQ World Cup, cooking for $1,000,000.

How Bill Gillespie Got Into Barbecue

The fire was lit young, in a New England backyard. Bill's father taught him to grill, and he remembers the ritual exactly: a bag of Kingsford, a bottle of lighter fluid, and the patience to wait until every last coal turned white before a single burger went on.

Summers were for the grill. As he got older there were camping trips where Bill was the one cooking over the fire while everyone else waited to eat.

He had grown up competitive, a baseball and golf kid, and somewhere along the way the two things fused. The cooking he loved and the competition he needed found each other in the same hobby.

The next logical step, as he puts it, was competition barbecue.

Why the Team Is Called Smokin' Hoggz

The Smokin' Hoggz name did not arrive fully formed. It took three tries and the better part of a decade.

In 2005 a couple of coworkers dragged Bill to his first contest down on Cape Cod, cooking under the name Personal Fowl, spelled F-O-W-L, a pun nobody could resist.

The event ran the four standard meats plus a fifth wildcard category with a single rule: everything had to use cranberries.

Bill grilled a salmon, worked the cranberry in somehow, and walked away with a fourth-place call in his very first competition.

He was hooked.

A year or so later he joined a second team. Three of the guys were bald, so, naturally, they called themselves Q Ball.

Then in 2008 that crew ran out of road the way weekend teams do when life gets busy. So Bill, his wife Shaune, and his longtime friend Alan Burke decided to build something of their own.

In September of 2008 they cooked their first contest as Smokin' Hoggz BBQ, hogs deliberately spelled with a Z on the end.

“I wanted to be a little different,” Bill says. “I thought it was kind of clever.”

How Bill Gillespie Won More Than 40 Grand Champion Titles

By day Bill is a design engineer for the local utility, and if you want to understand how a backyard griller became one of the most decorated names in the sport, that is the place to start.

He treats a cook the way he treats a blueprint: a step-by-step process, repeatable, measurable, and always under revision.

“I'm always tweaking things to stay one step ahead of everybody else,” he says. “If something's not working, you've got to make it better.”

That discipline built a record most teams only dream about. Across more than 300 contests, Smokin' Hoggz has won Grand Champion more than forty times and stacked up hundreds of top-ten calls.

Ribs are the meat that started it all for him, and still the one he is proudest to put in a box.

Bill Gillespie at the Jack and the American Royal

The proudest night of that long run came in 2011, at the Jack, the invitation-only event in Lynchburg, Tennessee that competitors simply call by its first name.

It was only the fourth time Smokin' Hoggz had ever won a contest outright.

Bill remembers standing there with a single top-ten call to his name, a ninth in pork, listening to the walk-backs. Other teams had top-five calls. When the announcer named Big Bob Gibson's for reserve, Bill turned to his crew and thought, well, who won this thing?

Then they called Smokin' Hoggz.

Three years later he did it again at the American Royal Invitational, the other crown jewel of the calendar.

For all the hardware, Bill will tell the losing stories just as fast.

His favorite cautionary tale is a brisket in Lakeland, Florida. He had decided, against his own instincts, to cook an entire contest on pellet grills he had never used. Set it and forget it, he figured, how hard could it be.

At four thirty in the morning something woke him. He walked out to the pit, opened it, and found the brisket charred black and already at temperature.

“I learned not to take things for granted,” he says. “Do a little more research. Practice on something first.”

For an engineer, it was less a defeat than a data point.

The Smokin' Hoggz Team: Bill Gillespie and His Wife Shaune

Ask Bill who is in his corner and the answer is short and immediate. These days it is Bill and Shaune, husband and wife, on the road together.

She is no bystander. She builds the boxes, keeps the supplies staged, wraps the ribs, and runs the whole operation like a pit crew.

She also, Bill admits, has the better palate. “She can tell when something's a little off,” he says. “I usually like everything. She'll be like, nah, something's not right, and she's spot on.”

They save every hour of vacation time for barbecue and have not taken a real trip since before the pandemic.

Alan Burke, the friend Bill has known for more than three decades, was there at the founding.

And two people Bill wishes could see this next chapter are gone: his mother, who passed in 2019, and his father, the man who first handed him a pair of tongs over a chimney of white coals, who died in 2009.

Asked to name his dream cooking partner, alive or gone, Bill does not hesitate. His dad.

“I'm sure they'll be watching,” he says.

How Bill Gillespie Qualified for the BBQ World Cup

Bill earned his place in Las Vegas the way he has earned everything, by out-lasting a bad day.

The Grand American ran two days in New Paltz, New York, in early May, and Saturday did not go his way. In a 43-team field, Smokin' Hoggz finished fourth, close but on the wrong side of the line.

So he did what engineers do. He adjusted.

On Sunday, against a larger 59-team field, Smokin' Hoggz posted a 712.58 and won Grand Champion outright, and with it a ticket to the BBQ World Cup.

A Hall of Famer, twenty-two years into it, still finding another gear on day two.

What Bill Gillespie Would Do With $1,000,000

For a man who has stood on every big stage the sport has built, the BBQ World Cup is something genuinely new. “I don't think there's been anything like this, with this kind of prize pool,” Bill says. “Vegas is the premier location. All the lights and cameras. It's a big show.”

He is not chasing a restaurant. He has watched enough friends run one to know exactly what it costs.

What he wants is to take Smokin' Hoggz, the rubs and the sauce and the bestselling cookbook, and turn it into a household name. Maybe a small barbecue supply shop someday.

And if he wins the $1,000,000, he says, he will probably put it all on red, double or nothing, and worry about the rest later.

When he walks onto the stage in Las Vegas, he wants Iron Maiden playing, “Wasted Years,” because he is and always has been a metalhead.

Twenty-two years of white coals and charred briskets and midnight box-builds, and Bill Gillespie is finally getting on a plane to the one city in barbecue he has never seen.

Win-win-win, he calls it. It is hard to argue.