El Wingador wins Wing Bowl, again

Check out our Wing Bowl X Photo Gallery

With dawn still hours away, the major arteries taking traffic to the sports complex at the southern end of Broad Street were packed last Friday morning.

They were packed with pick-ups and Pintos, El Caminos and all varieties of K-Cars -- many with New Jersey license plates -- carrying thousands to the First Union Center.

Twenty-three thousand, as a matter of fact.

The almost entirely male crowd gathered to watch 28 men -- and one woman -- eat chicken wings.

Wing Bowl X -- radio station WIP's annual pre-Super Bowl event -- lived up to its reputation as a hedonistic free-for-all. Locals, many sporting Eagles' garb and swilling beer, filled the arena.

The event culminated with a win for Bill Simmons, endearingly known as El Wingador, who devoured 143 wings by the end of the three-round, 30-minute extravaganza.

The victory gave El Wingador his second consecutive Wing Bowl crown and a trip for two to Aruba. The winner of Wing Bowls VII and IX heroically withheld the contents of his own stomach in the final seconds to claim the championship for a record third time.

Tollman Joe, Wing Bowl VIII champion and the only person ever to defeat El Wingador, did not even reach the final two-minute round.

Competitors giving El Wingador a run for his money included Don Lehrman, an "outsider" from New York. This heel, posing as a 90-year-old, faced an extra challenge -- the wrath of the Philadelphia crowd.

Unlike last year, the flow of vomit was minimal. Competitor Sloth amazed the crowd with a projectile stream in the final round of Wing Bowl IX but did not finish off enough wings to pass the first round this year.

Coon Dog, another "outsider," came closest to, well, losing it. In the second round, the competitor from Akron, Ohio, was eliminated as a stream of chicken and juice flowed from his nose.

But the event was not merely about drinking beer and devouring poultry.

There was also a wedding.

Judge Seamus McCaffrey helped to kick off the morning by uniting two young lovebirds in a ceremony to remember.

Still, perhaps more memorable than the wedding, or even the main event itself, was the entertainment between the first two rounds of gluttony.

Bob Meyer amazed the crowd by using his forehead to, in under two minutes, crush six full beer cans -- supposedly setting a world record.

But no Wing Bowl would be complete without the notorious Wingettes, the event's official cheerleaders, who made up a sizable number of the females in attendance.

The Wingettes joined the 29 competitors in the hour-and-a-half-long processional onto the main stage before the contest began.

And rounding it out was Jennifer Burmeister, this year's Miss Wing Bowl, who rode into the arena in a giant birthday cake, dancing with a chicken mascot and wearing selected parts of Old Glory over selected parts of her anatomy.

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