Der Viener Schlinger puts fun in the bun

Game day at Memorial Stadium can mean a lot of different things for a lot of different people. For the football players, it's about winning the game. For the cheerleaders it's about pumping up the crowd.

For Conrad Good and Cody Haynes, it's all about firing Fairbury Brand hot dogs into the sea of red.

Good has been working the legendary hot dog cannon, "Der Viener Schlinger," at Cornhusker football games for the last nine years while Haynes has been his partner for four. The duo also works Der Viener Schlinger at Lincoln Stars hockey games, Saltdogs baseball games, Eagle Raceway and many other sporting and promotional events.

Good admits that landing this job was a matter of being in the right place at the right time.

"I happened to play golf on a regular basis with the guy that did the advertising for Fairbury Brand meats," Good said. "He saw the gun on Monday Night Football and decided to get one for Fairbury. At that point in time, they needed somebody to shoot it, so things just fell into place."

Before Haynes jumped onboard, Good was working around 500 to 600 hours a year in what was basically a part time job. Attending all the different events where the giant hot dog-shaped bazooka appeared took up a lot of Good's spare time on weekends and evenings.

"I'm thankful for Cody," Good said. "It has kind of given me a little rest. He's got his own little deal going because he's younger, so he gets to relate with a lot more of the students at the university and some of these other places."

Good and Haynes both agreed the fan support through the years has been amazing. The cannon was expected to have a run of a few years only to be forgotten by fans, Good said, but the exact opposite has happened.

Every year the number of events that request an appearance by Der Viener Schlinger increases.

"It's pretty unique," said Matt Murphy, a junior education major at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. "You'll see students from other countries, and they think it's pretty cool, because you really don't see hot dogs being shot into the air all that often."

But fan response hasn't always been perfect. Haynes recalled one incident where a woman who wasn't paying attention was accidentally hit on top of the head with a hot dog.

"We moved down the line and someone threw a hot dog back at us," Haynes said. "All of a sudden here comes this guy out of the stands, and he starts getting in Conrad's face and yelling at him."

The angry fan went on to inform the two they had hit his wife in the head and they needed to be more careful. When the fan admitted he was the one who threw the hot dog back, Good reminded him that he could have hit someone in the head as well.

"The guy calmed down after that," Haynes said. "That was my first negative experience with the whole thing."

While there have been a few bad instances, Haynes believes that 'Der Viener Schlinger is one of the small attractions that can add to the Husker football game experience. And even though he doesn't think of himself as the center of attention at games, he realizes that he means more to some fans than he could have ever imagined.

"I've got a lot of people at other shoots who will come up to me and tell me that their kids or their sister only goes to the game to watch us shoot," Haynes said. "It's kind of cool to think of it like that. I think the fans would really miss it if it wasn't there."