Wing Bowl: Celebrating gluttony since 1993

By Chase Miller
Collegian Staff
February 7, 2007

You stagger in between battered cars and trucks, seeking refuge from the militant, enraged faithful. Dodging glass projectiles, carelessly tossed with malice, you spot a cargo van and a pickup truck parked next to one another. That should be a fitting shelter from the ubiquitous carnage.

The crowd, which at this point has devolved into a pride of gorillas, swallows your bee-line through it as a fire truck pushes its way to yet another bonfire, seemingly started out of necessity but fueled by alcohol-induced hatred. Empty beer cases, milk crates, old tires, beach chairs and anything else between one and three drunken guys can find, and have the presence of mind, to carry through the malignant milieu. The carcinogenic smell that proceeds is palpable.

Any guesses as to where this cluster of chaos, this eye of the inferno might be located? Los Angeles riots? Woodstock ’99? New Year’s at Times Square? Surprisingly, no, just Wing Bowl XV, Philadelphia’s adapted Super Bowl weekend tradition, with each year registering higher on the Richter Scale and lower on Dante’s circles of Hell.

The event was started in 1993 by radio hosts Al Morganti and Angelo Cataldi as a potent mixture of part publicity stunt for their WIP 610-AM show, part license for Philadelphians to party even though our team is continuously left behind and part reason to drink inordinate amounts of alcohol and eat fatty foods—as if we needed yet another. The only problem with the Wing Bowl, at least from my perspective, is the rituals surrounding the event.

Have you ever tailgated? You can’t really say you have until you ahve tailgated at a Wing Bowl. Because the competition was designed to coincide with 610’s morning show, doors to the Wachovia Center open at 5 a.m., and the introductions promptly commence at 6 a.m., when the show goes on air. With that kind of time frame, the pre-gaming to the Wing Bowl usually starts at 11 p.m. the previous night, and they aren’t eating chicken wings. That means that your average Wing Bowl attendee under 25 years of age has endured just around four to six hours of drinking, fighting, burning, breaking and about nine other types of debauchery before they even bask in the house lights of the Wachovia Center.

It seems, though, that such behavior has been occurring ever since the event moved to a larger medium. Originally started in the lobby of the Wyndham Franklin Plaza hotel, in 1996 it was moved to the Electric Factory. Since then, it’s been held in the Wachovia Spectrum and now the Center. Just last year, a riot broke out among the 50,000 hopefuls waiting in line for an event in a 20,000 seat stadium. A ticketing process has since been introduced to curb the violence.

So what to do about this disturbing display? Maybe replace the overpriced stadium beer, with overpriced coffee. Maybe this will be enough to sober up that random troublemaker so that he doesn’t hurl beer cans he snuck is as contraband in his pant legs into section 119 where I was sitting.

Or, maybe heighten the entry checkpoint to more than just a quick slap of my pockets and pinch of my backside. As fun as the competition can be, something needs to happen before trampling and broken bottle stab wounds join heart disease and clogged arteries on the list of Wing Bowl-related causes of death.

millerc10@lasalle.edu