This week in Philly history, Wing Bowl gets its start
On Jan. 29, 1993, the inaugural eating contest that would become known as Wing Bowl was held in a Center City hotel lobby.
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The circus came later.
The frustrating football came first.
The Philadelphia Eagles were not Super Bowl stalwarts in the early 1990s. But the Buffalo Bills were — making four consecutive championship games from 1991 to 1994.
And this got WIP sports radio hosts Angelo Cataldi and Al Morganti thinking.
The winter doldrums had taken hold on the Philly sports calendar. And Morganti loved Buffalo wings.
“I thought we could have our own little party,” he told the Daily News in 2012.
They discussed a theoretical wing-eating competition on their morning radio show, and two competitive listeners accepted the challenge.
If Philadelphia wasn’t going to be in the bowl, then they would hold their own.
So on Jan. 29, 1993, the Friday before a Super Bowl game that featured the Bills and the Dallas Cowboys, Cataldi and Morganti held the inaugural Wing Bowl.
Carmen “Beast of the East” Cordero faced off against Donald “Big Doc” Dougherty in the lobby of the former Wyndham Franklin Plaza Hotel at 17th and Race Streets in Center City.
The goal was to see who could eat the most Buffalo-chicken wings in 30 minutes, and Cordero won after polishing off 100.
“They asked him what he’d do next,” producer Joe Waechter told the Daily News in 2012. “And he said, ‘Get ready for Wing Bowl 2.’”
And in later years the spectacle devolved into debauchery.
The hot-sauce circus moved from the Electric Factory to the Spectrum and to the Wells Fargo Center.
It started with a few hundred spectators, and grew to about 20,000 before its final occurrence in 2018, consisting of mostly intoxicated men and half-naked women lamenting their lack of football glory and drowning their feelings of inferiority.
The prizes would become more lucrative every year, and the event would expand its competitor pool, from international gorgers like Takeru Kobayashi, to South Jersey gnawers like Kevin “Heavy Kevy” O’Donnell.
And the eating contest became only part of the pageant, with producers later adding Wingettes and parade floats and a tic-tac-toe competition between a trained chicken and longtime, recently ousted, sports talk radio host Howard Eskin (they tied).
Wing Bowl wouldn’t end until 2018, holding what would be its final competition days before the Eagles won their first Super Bowl title. Philly’s appetite had changed.