Wing Bowl champion Bill “El Wingador” Simmons, as seen in the documentary “No One Died: The Wing Bowl Story.”
First it was the best of times. Then it was the worst of times.
And in the end, it was just time. Wing Bowl, a sports radio station’s annual Super Bowl promotion that required all manner of gluttony and masticatory disgust to drive its over-the-top wing-eating contest, eventually became too outrageous, even for Philadelphia.
The mercy killing arrived in 2018, after The Eagles finally won a Super Bowl. This gave station management a great excuse to put an end to 26 years of the beer-fueled, titillating spectacle that had jumped not just the shark, but an entire school of them.
And now, lest anyone forget just how warped the 94WIP Wing Bowl was, there is a new documentary film that tells the story about how a simple wing-eating contest that started in the lobby of a hotel, with a smattering of onlookers, ended up in the city’s largest sports arena with 20,000 juiced spectators cheering on the wing eaters, their Vegas-on-steroids entourages and scores of scantily clad assistants, called “Wingettes” (okay, they were really strippers).
“No One Died: The Wing Bowl Story” (watch trailer below), by Frank Petka and Pat Taggart of Owl Town Productions, embarks on the film-festival circuit this month in its quest to ink a streaming deal that will share the it-could-only-happen-in-Philly event with the rest of America.
“I think Wing Bowl was the most unique event in the history of media. I truly believe that,” says Taggart, who runs the creative half of the filmmaking team. “First and foremost, it’s entertainment. You go on any streaming platform now, it’s all murder. It’s all true crime. Right? Somebody has to die. Well, no one dies here. That’s part of the reason we chose the title.”
A scene from the 2006 Wing Bowl, from “No One Died: The Wing Bowl Story.”
The other part of the reason is that every year at the station’s Wing Bowl postmortem meeting, the best anyone could think to say about the latest iteration of the event was, “Well, at least nobody died.”
“That became the bar we had to clear,” says Angelo Cataldi, who helmed WIP radio’s morning show for 34 years, before his retirement from the station last year. “We thought as long as no one dies, we’ll probably keep doing it.” Even though, by his own admission, they had absolutely no idea what they were doing or how to host a promotional event.
The most dangerous of the early years, in terms of physical safety, were the first 15, when there were no lawyers to put on the brakes and no medical personnel in-house. Contestants were required to audition live, on-air, to qualify for the main wing-stuffing competition. And the tryout had to be an outrageous eating stunt. The result was weeks of theatrical consumption. Pure radio gold. The stunts usually came in two categories: massive volume or outright disgust. These were ridiculous chow-downs that would have made any responsible first responder grab a trauma kit.
There was Corn Boy, who slurped down six large cans of creamed corn and then quickly corn-sparkled the studio’s wall with it. A twofer of volume and disgust.
And Slushy Shelly, who pulled up to the station in a snowstorm, took the slush out of the wheel well of his car and ate it live on the air. Disgust.
Then there was the actual main event, where contestants were jamming literally hundreds of bone-in chicken wings down their throats as fast as possible in just 30 minutes. The film really should be called “No One Choked.”
Which was a good thing because, until 2007, the only medical personnel at Wing Bowl was Dr. St. George Hunt, a local veterinarian. “He couldn’t Heimlich anyone,” says Cataldi. “Basically, he neutered cats. I ended up with two of them.”
He laughs. “It was a joke.”
Yes, a big ha-ha, until Ice Cream Man showed up. “A guy came in for an eating stunt. He wanted to eat two gallons of ice cream, and we thought that was cool,” says Cataldi. “So, the guy ate the first gallon of ice cream fine. He was feeling good.”
But a few spoonfuls into the second gallon, his lips started turning blue. “By now, the guy is shivering and he’s moving slower. We ended up calling 911. He was in some physical jeopardy at one point. And that was the day we were told all eating stunts had to be approved by the legal department and that there had to be doctors on duty at the event — things we should have been doing all along.”
A scene from “No One Died: The Wing Bowl Story.”
Oh, by the way, don’t look so smug, Jersey. Just because Wing Bowl was held in Pennsylvania, it doesn’t mean the Garden State didn’t get into the act. You are responsible for this, too. Thousands of you, mostly from South Jersey, crossed the Delaware to attend the event. And many years, you even made the darn wings!
There also were some notable Jersey wing-eating participants:
• Carmen Cordero. Wing Bowl’s first winner, in 1993.
• Bill “El Wingador” Simmons: winner of the most Wing Bowls (five).
• Jonathan “Super Squibb” Squibb: biggest monetary winner (two cars and cash).
As Wing Bowl grew in popularity, so did revenue. And that’s when all the silliness turned into insanity. “Our station tried to maximize the profits by getting sponsorships for the individual eaters,” says Cataldi. “Those sponsorships ended up being bought by gentlemen’s clubs, and they packed the arena with exotic dancers. Then, as the competition between the gentlemen’s clubs got more intense, they started rolling in porn stars.”
It got to the point where they couldn’t stop women from taking off their tops — and that was in the stands. Is it any wonder why Wing Bowl was the No. 1 beer-selling event every year at what is now The Wells Fargo Center, outperforming every sports and music gathering. And that’s with the restriction of limiting brew sales to between 7 and 9 a.m. Has there ever been a more intense two hours of beer-drinking in America?
“Finally a lot of people said, ‘I can’t go anymore. It’s tacky. It’s not right,’ ” says Cataldi. “And it wasn’t what we intended. The whole evolution of the event was not anything we ever planned. It took on a life of its own. That was the worst part: that it didn’t end in a more positive way. I lobbied as hard as I could for one more because I knew I could sell one more: ‘The last Wing Bowl! Come out to see the final one!’ No one else really wanted to do that. And they were right. It was the right time.”
Former WIP radio host Angelo Cataldi, interviewed in “No One Died: The Wing Bowl Story.”
So, was it good, old-fashioned capitalism that killed Wing Bowl? “Yeah, what a shock! The more money they made, the more they wanted to make,” Cataldi says with a sly smile. “But that capitalism got us into arenas. It got us a lot of years building it up to what it was, which at its peak was the most successful annual radio promotion of its era. Other cities tried to do it. It didn’t carry the weight it did in our city. We just rode the wave.”
And it was a lucrative wave for contestants. The first Wing Bowl prize was a sad little hibachi grill that WIP Wing Bowl co-creator Al Morganti plucked from his garage the morning of the event. The final giveaways included a pickup truck, an SUV, a vacation to the Bahamas and a passel of jewelry — all totaling $100,000.
“For these people, for one day a year, they got to put on a cape and a mask, and they got to be somebody,” says Taggart. “It was Halloween for these people, in the very best way.” And everyone the filmmakers spoke to said they miss it. “They know it can’t come back, but they were so excited to talk about it.”
Cataldi says seeing the finished film made him view the event more kindly. “I think the documentary handles the tawdry elements of it in a balanced way. They didn’t overdo it. It made me appreciate it more. In its heyday, the Wing Bowl took an average guy, just a guy working a job every day, put him in the middle of an arena and got him to experience what it was like when the greatest athletes did it. You know, like when a (hockey player) gets a hat trick. They got the big ovation. They got the acclaim. It was just average regular guys who did it by competing in a stupid event that attracted 20,000 people every year.
“That’s what made it great: made it worth the 26 years we did it.”
“This contest was never really about chicken or who could eat the most,” says Taggart. “They had to be characters, because this was a radio show. It was entertainment. They were just looking for the wackiest people they could find. So if you come in and offer to eat slush off your car, you’re a perfect fit for Wing Bowl.”
Molly Schuyler, the 2018 Wing Bowl winner, interviewed in “No One Died: The Wing Bowl Story.”
Petka and Taggart, who have been friends since they met as kids playing hockey at a city rec center, say their film has a perfect story arc. Wing Bowl was started because everyone never thought The Eagles would win a Super Bowl, and it ended when they finally did.
“Our job was to go in very unbiased, curious and respectful of the people who created this story,” says Taggart. “That’s all we tried to do. And the 90 minutes of what you see in the film is just a reflection of everything that people said. Yeah, there are conflicting stories, but at the heart of it we just tried to get to the truth and paint people in a respectful light.
“I feel better about Wing Bowl. I found heart in a story that I didn’t know I was going to find. Some people are going to think that sounds ridiculous. But I do think there’s community in this story, and there are some really beautiful elements to this story.”
The final Wing Bowl ended with professional eater Molly Schuyler downing 501 wings in 30 minutes — the most ever. She was not carried out on a stretcher. So, if you’re still wondering why no one died during 26 years of eating madness, Taggart has a pretty good guess.
“Because God has a sense of humor.”
“No One Died: The Wing Bowl Story” will screen at The Philadelphia Film Center, Oct. 22 at 8:45 p.m.; and at The Philadelphia Film Society Bourse, Oct. 26 at 10:15 p.m.
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