Lord of the Wings
In calmer moments, Bill admits, "I don’t know what happened," and he avoids using the word "fixed," but when you combine his certainty that he ate the most wings with his belief that WIP brushed him aside for "political" reasons having to do with "the Benjamins," his meaning is unmistakable.
In an e-mail, Cataldi calls Bill’s claims "totally unfounded," because advertisers "never expressed any concern whatsoever about Bill’s dominance," and adds that Wing Bowl revenues have grown "every single year." Cataldi acknowledges that he asked Bill to sit out, but says he was only trying to help Bill stay involved with Wing Bowl in case he had to skip for personal reasons. "What I was hoping to do" with the color-
commentator offer, says Cataldi, "was to pit the Sonyas and the [Cookie] Jarvises and the [Damaging] Dougs against each other, and then have [Bill] come back the following year to prove his greatness." In his e-mail, Cataldi writes, "He clearly was angry that he was fairly and squarely defeated."
"The job that I had at that point, for the last three years, was to promote the possibility that he could be beaten," says Cataldi. "So every year, when he called in, I would say, ‘You’re goin’ down this year, Simmons. You won’t finish in the Top Five.’ If I’m not mistaken, I said to him" — and Cataldi’s voice gets cartoonishly gruff and evil — "‘YOU WON’T EVEN BE IN THE FINALS. YOU AREN’T NOTHIN’. NOW YOU’RE DEALIN’ WITH THE NATIONAL GUYS.’ Now, if he wanted to take that seriously?" Cataldi’s voice drips with disdain. "The fix was in," he says. "Yeah, how did I fix this, exactly? Jesus … The last damn thing in the world I need to do is fix the Wing Bowl. I will deal with whoever wins the damn thing."
The history of Wing Bowl is replete with bombastic claims of rigging, partly because the judging is, by design, subjective. "There are always complaints," e-mails Cataldi. "It is the nature of our event." After Wing Bowl II, losing eater Carmen Cordero’s father walked up to Cataldi and thundered, "You robbed my son." More recently, "Damaging Doug" Canavin threatened to release a secret videotape he said would prove he’d been cheated. (He never released it, if it ever existed.) Every year El Wingador won, someone claimed Wing Bowl was fixed to boost Bill, says Cataldi.
Like everything else about Wing Bowl, this WIP-Wingador spat is both silly and vital. Silly for obvious reasons, plus the fact that Bill has no proof he was robbed and seems temperamentally quick to suspect shenanigans, as I saw in Tennessee when he lost the burger contest and, within 15 minutes, was wondering aloud whether it had been rigged "for a local boy." Besides, most observers, including Wing Bowl commissioner and former National League umpire Eric Gregg, say Sonya cleaned her bones. And Thomas, the world’s No. 2 eater, doesn’t need any help to win contests — as she proved last summer when she beat Bill in a hot-dog battle.
But Bill’s complaint does underscore something real, which is the stress caused by Wing Bowl’s success — and the difficulty of scaling up the Philly recipe now that everybody in the world wants a piece. Most national eaters have contracts with the International Federation of Competitive Eating, or IFOCE, a sanctioning body that sets standards for the sport. Two years ago,
