Tiffany Brown

Bricklayers from three countries, including Mick Daffern from England, right, and his tender, have converged on Las Vegas for the World of Concrete convention, many competing in the Spec Mix Bricklayer 500 to see who can build the highest, most perfect 26-foot-long, two-brick-thick wall in an hour.

By Brendan Buhler

Thu, Jan 24, 2008 (2 a.m.)

One of the highlights, and there are many, of the World of Concrete convention is that it holds competitions.

There is, for instance, a front-end-loader driving competition. But of the contests, the premier event has to be the Spec Mix Bricklayer 500, in which masons compete to see who can lay down the tallest 26-foot-long, two-brick-thick wall in an hour.

It has the drama of competition, the skill of working men and the excitement of mortar drying.

Put yourself there, on a bright and crisp Wednesday afternoon, across from the Las Vegas Convention Center. Bleachers surround the competitors on three sides and the ground under their feet is tan and gritty with spilled mortar. Twenty teams are gathered on this parking lot of glory.

There are two men to a team. One is a tender, who hauls bricks and mortar to his wall and his bricklayer. The bricklayer smears mortar across his 26-foot wall and adds bricks. As each brick is pushed into place, it squeezes extra mortar out over the side of the wall; the bricklayer catches the mortar in his trowel and places it at the brick’s end, ready to join that brick to the next one. It takes him only a few seconds (there’s a reason the competition’s logo is a flaming trowel) but all the bricks must be regularly spaced so the wall stays square and level.

Different bricklayers have different strategies. Some mortar and build up one side of the two-brick wall a couple of bricks high before evening out the second side. Other bricklayers work on both sides at once. The 2007 champion, Mike Boll of St. Charles, Ill., likes to do both at once so he has to spread mortar only once for any given layer of bricks. It saves energy, he says.

“This contest is a lot about stamina and how much juice you have left at the end,” he says. “But I don’t know how much difference it really makes.”

Boll has been laying bricks for 18 years, followed his brothers into it, most of it building homes, but since the housing bubble burst, he’s being laying concrete blocks on commercial jobs.

“You still get a house here and there,” Boll says. “But it’s nothing compared to what it was, that three-year boom.”

Now, to stay handy with bricks, he practices at home in his garage.

The competition has a host and is broadcast live on the Internet. As if the drama inherent in bricklaying weren’t enough, the host spends much of the hour announcing side entertainments and promoting sponsor products.

As the clock winds down, Contestant 17, Ray McDermott of Lakewood, Colo., is urged on by his wife.

“Come on, Ray, step it up. Slap it on!”

Ray works on in silence. His tender, Leo Mullen, speaks up.

“Yeah, well, can we get a Jack & Coke?”

“When you win,” she says.

“Step it up, Ray. Ten minutes. No pressure. Ten minutes.”

Time’s up. Ray McDermott’s wall lags behind those of his neighbors and he sits down, exhausted. He and the other teams have 10 minutes to rest before they’ll be given 10 minutes to clean up their walls for judging. The break is soon over.

A big point of pride for this year’s competition is that two foreign teams are entered, one from Canada and the other from Britain, a fact that causes the host to say that maybe the Bricklayer 500 will become “the America’s Cup of bricklaying,” which seems unfair. Bricklaying, after all, is interesting to watch.

The guys from Wolverhampton, England, do not look likely to win, having built a fairly small wall, but they aren’t upset because they think it’s built well — and because they’re in Las Vegas.

When asked what they were going to do later, Mick Daffern answered for himself and Nigel Jackson by saying, “Drinking and drinking and maybe a bit more drinking, I think, but after that maybe we’ll fit in a bit more drinking. We have to sleep, which is a shame, but we don’t need to sleep that much.”

The judges inspect the finished and cleaned walls, checking to see whether they’re square and level, checking for neatness and, most of all, checking for voids. Also called “bee holes,” voids are gaps in the mortar the size of, yes, a bee. Today no one has the 20 voids that would earn disqualification. The judges tally their scores and confer.

Neither Ray McDermott nor the English team places. Mike Boll comes in second, which gets him $4,000 and a pile of tools.

The champion is Garrett Hood, a young man from Monroe, N.C. Hood laid an 11-brick-high wall of 791 bricks, the same number Boll did last year when he won. This year Boll laid 11 fewer bricks.

Hood won $5,000, a brand-new Ford F-250 and even more tools. And though he was smiling as he laid his bricks earlier, he’s tight-lipped and squinting as he poses with his prizes, even the pickup.

A young woman has ambled up to the edge of the crowd, where she’s spotted by one of the contest organizers.

“Are you the wife or girlfriend?” he says.

“Girlfriend,” she whispers.

“Well, get in there.”

She slides in and wraps her arm around Hood.

And for the first time since he won, Hood smiles.