Lord of the Wings
His fork stabs into enemy territory as we relinquish our dinners, bit by bit:
"I’ll steal some of Mommy’s butter off her potatoes," says Bill. "She don’t need all o’ that." He swabs the butter on his broccoli and lets out a muffled sound of awe. "We’re huge vegetable eaters," he tells me, staring at an entrée with a 10-to-one meat-to-veggie ratio. "How much broccoli do we eat, hon?" Debbie agrees they eat lots of broccoli. Bill turns toward his daughter Ashley. "How is it? It’s good, isn’t it? I’ll take that crust when you’re done."
Bill has always been a competitor. Growing up in National Park, New Jersey, he played semipro baseball through high school, and even earned tryouts with the Phillies and the Atlanta Braves. He blew them off. "Opportunity has knocked on doors for him," says Felicia, Bill’s mother, "but he has not, ah, I guess, listened to that knock." Temple’s baseball coach once visited Bill’s high school to scout him, but Bill cut school that day. "I was into partyin’," he says. "They said I had raw talent, but my head wasn’t in it." He laughs. "I kinda let myself down."
When Bill was 19, his girlfriend got pregnant, so he married her, had a son, and went right to work. The marriage ended in divorce. "That’s the part of my life I don’t like to talk about," he says. Bill’s son is now 24; Bill hasn’t spoken to him in a year.
Sports didn’t work out, so Bill had to do something else. Says Bob Thomas, Bill’s longtime friend and grade-school buddy, "Ever since we were kids, Billy always wanted to be … somethin’." Wing Bowl gave him that opportunity. A few years back, one of Bill’s friends mentioned Bill’s love of chicken to Kevin "Heavy Keavy" O’Donnell, a two-time Wing Bowl champ. Keavy encouraged Bill to sign up for Wing Bowl VII, where Bill — totally unknown, a long shot — ate 113 wings to take the crown. The next year, Bill got the flu on game day and lost, but he went on to win the next three Wing Bowls handily.
Like the athlete he is, Bill worked out a training regimen. Two months before Wing Bowl, around Thanksgiving, he chucks six pounds of Tootsie Rolls in the fridge. Two weeks before Wing Bowl, he chews on them to strengthen his jaw. "Tootsie Rolls don’t really dissolve," he says. "After doing that, I could probably chew this table in half." In the weeks to come, he stretches his stomach by gorging on Puerto Rican rice and beans and chicken; he also chugs gallons of water, to absorb all that rice. Then, the day before Wing Bowl, Bill starves himself. The next morning, Debbie chops up a few onions and unwraps a stick of butter, and sizzles them in a frying pan with heaps of bacon. Pretty soon the whole house smells like breakfast, and El Wingador awakens, "hungrier than a mud bear," ready to devour the world.
