Wing Bowl: Philly chows down for Super Bowl

[Chmee]

Ahhh, Philly ....

February 5, 2005
Philadelphia's Simply Ravenous for a Winner
By JERE LONGMAN



PHILADELPHIA, Feb. 4 - This city's buildup to its first Super Bowl appearance in 24 years reached a fevered and boozy pitch Friday morning with an outlandish Eagles pep rally and eating contest known as the Wing Bowl.

At 3:30 a.m., 23,000 fans began squeezing into the Wachovia Center. Some had slept; many had breakfast in a bottle. By 5 a.m., people in line were advised to leave, with about 10,000 still waiting to get into this annual gustatory challenge, described by its founder as "Fellini meets the Hell's Angels at a family picnic."

Before the eating of chicken wings began around 8 a.m., 29 contestants made grand entrances with their entourages, as if this were a prizefight. Then Miss Wing Bowl burst from a giant replica of the Vince Lombardi Trophy, flapping 6-foot Eagles wings and wielding an ax to ceremonially smite New England's chances against Philadelphia in the Super Bowl.

Although Miss Wing Bowl swung the ax with great purpose and accuracy, she wore stiletto heels, fishnet stockings and a G-string not found in the average lumberjack wardrobe, hinting at her dual careers as an exotic dancer and master mechanic.

"She can build a Harley from the ground up," Al Morganti, a Wing Bowl founder and host at WIP all-sports radio, said with admiration.

Thirteen years ago, Morganti and the fellow WIP personality Angelo Cataldi started the Wing Bowl in a local hotel lobby with two contestants. Now a basketball arena can barely contain the event, which does nothing to undermine Philadelphia's reputation for rowdy sporting passions.

"I feel like I'm in 'The Twilight Zone,' and I keep looking for Rod Serling," Cataldi said upon his arrival at 5 a.m., surveying a crowd that combined the raucous fervor of a frat party and a "Girls Gone Wild" video. "What scares me is, they're so drunk."

For weeks each year, WIP promotes this bacchanal, which grants automatic entry to its gastronomic superstars but requires feats of alimentary extreme for lesser contestants. One ate a one-and-a-half-pound Yankee candle to gain entry. Another swallowed six pounds of spinach in 79 seconds.

Obe Wing Kanobi, the stage name for a physics student at Villanova, munched on eight Madagascar hissing cockroaches, then said he trained at altitude for the Wing Bowl to help his oxygen-carrying capacity but had avoided the temptation of steroids. "I want to do it right, for the kids," he said.

The favorite was Sonya Thomas, who won the 2004 Wing Bowl by eating 167 wings in 32 minutes. This was considered especially remarkable because she weighs only 99 pounds. A 37-year-old Burger King employee from Alexandria, Va., Thomas dines daily on a chicken burger, fries and a gallon of diet soda.

Her previous achievements included eating six pounds of asparagus in 10 minutes, an 11-pound cheesecake in nine minutes, 432 oysters in 10 minutes and 65 hard-boiled eggs in 6 minutes 40 seconds. She warmed up for this Wing Bowl by eating a nine-pound cheeseburger in 48 minutes. "No doubt about it," she predicted of repeat victory.

The top challenger was Bill Simmons, known as El Wingador, a 300-plus pound truck driver from Woodbury Heights, N.J. A popular four-time champion, El Wingador said he felt he had been robbed in a second-place finish last year. He vowed to regain his crown, which he would proudly place over his peroxide mullet and then retire. Over the past two weeks, he attempted to strengthen his jaw muscles by eating seven pounds of frozen Tootsie Rolls.

On stage, each contestant was surrounded by supporters known as Wingettes, who provided the plates of wings. Most Wingettes are strippers. A couple seemed to be wearing little more than strategically placed Eagles logos.

One exception was Jennifer Drumgoole, a 27-year-old graduate art student at Yale, who served as a Wingette for Sonya Thomas as part of a photography project. However repulsive the objectification of women is at the Wing Bowl, she said, she found Thomas fascinating. Drumgoole dressed in a leopard unitard with the hidden support of duct tape.

From the beginning of Friday's contest, an undercurrent of xenophobia was evident in this parochial city. Thomas was an outsider, a native of South Korea who lived near Washington, and a woman As many saw it, the Wing Bowl was a local event, and the winner should be a hometown boy.

"This is supposed to be for fat guys," a contestant named Hank the Tank said.

As Thomas made her entrance as her nom de wing, the Black Widow, carried on a mini-float with a spider-web backdrop, she and her entourage were pelted with beer and other flying objects.

"I got hit with four beer cans," Drumgoole said. "The other Wingette got it with a block of cheese. I don't know what that was about."

One of the contestants, Uncle Buc, invited a derisive response. A native of Philadelphia, he had wearied of the Eagles' frequent failure through the years and now loved to skewer the team, making the faithful apoplectic at recent Wing Bowls.

Uncle Buc and his entourage dressed in New England jerseys and held up a sign that read Patriots 30, Eagles 0, drawing a hail of beer, sauce, Cheese Whiz and other projectiles. It could have been worse.

"No one threw false teeth this time," said George Sarkis, a member of the Uncle Buc entourage.

The Wing Bowl was begun, Morganti said, as an homage to fans of the Buffalo Bills, who always celebrated the coming of the Super Bowl even though the team lost four consecutive times in the 1990's. In Philadelphia, the end of an Eagles season brought unfailing gloom. The Wing Bowl was meant to lift the community spirit.

In time-honored Philadelphia style, a fight in the stands halted for the national anthem on Friday, then began again. Soon, attention turned to the eating, which was held in three periods lasting 14, 14 and 2 minutes. It was clear from the start that El Wingador was on his game.

"There is a physical poetry there," George Shea, chairman of the International Federation of Competitive Eating, said as a radio commentator. "He's eating with an intuitive understanding of the wing that I haven't seen before."

Before the two-minute lightning round, Shea stood in his suit and straw boater and summoned his best oratorical bombast, saying, "Competitive eating is the battleground upon which God and Lucifer wage war for men's souls."

After 30 minutes, though, the Black Widow and El Wingador were tied at 147 wings apiece. In a two-minute overtime, both ate ravenously, but when the buzzer sounded, El Wingador had consumed 162 wings and the Black Widow had swallowed but 161. El Wingador was the five-time champion and the title had been returned to a resident of the Philadelphia region.

Only in Philadelphia could 20,000 fans cheer for a truck driver, said Marc Rayfield, general manager of WIP. Shea said: "El Wingador went beyond competitive eating into an area of pure emotion. He separated himself from the rules of physics and was able to do something science can't explain."

And that was it. By 10 a.m., El Wingador was retired from competitive eating at age 43, his face, T-shirt and pants smudged with sauce. He wanted to lose 50 pounds, he said, and did not want to die of a heart attack while his daughters were young. But he had one more immediate stop on this blustery morning.

"Breakfast buffet," he said.

[Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba]

That's really going above and beyond the normal limits of human consumption. 162 in a little over a minute? *whistles*

[HemlockGrey]

Ah, yes, the Wing Bowl, Philadelphia's unique, unapologetic tribute to gluttony.

[Fleet Admiral JD]

This is in the same city that the government requested people to begin all e-mail with "Go Eagles"

Cool kinda event though.

[Pick]

That makes me ill to imagine... Too much! Too much!

[Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba]

That's more than 2 per second. How could he do it?

[Burak Gazan]

No gag reflex?

I keep thinking one of these contestants someday will self-destruct like a bad Monty Python Movie ....

[HemlockGrey]

162 in a little over a minute?

No, no, no, it was 162 in 32 minutes. Read the article again. Still pretty amazing. I also thought the "65 eggs in a little over 6 minutes" was also stunning, especially given that Cool Hand Luke could barely do 50 in two hours.

[RedImperator]

You have to see these guys to believe it. They have a move which basically strips all the meat off the bone with one turn of the wrist.

I love Wing Bowl. It's perfect Philadelphia: 30 fat guys shoveling chicken in their mouths while strippers dance and 20,000 drunken lunatics cheer them on--and it's free to attend. One of these years I'll have to take a day off and go down there. The tailgating starts a little after midnight; they start selling beer at 7 AM.

[Col. Crackpot]

You have to see these guys to believe it. They have a move which basically strips all the meat off the bone with one turn of the wrist.

I love Wing Bowl. It's perfect Philadelphia: 30 fat guys shoveling chicken in their mouths while strippers dance and 20,000 drunken lunatics cheer them on--and it's free to attend. One of these years I'll have to take a day off and go down there. The tailgating starts a little after midnight; they start selling beer at 7 AM.

thats. fucking. awesome.

the earliest i've ever started tailgating was 9 am.