A new Wing Bowl documentary chose to celebrate the event instead of focusing on the ‘ugly’

Angelo Cataldi made a passing comment after Pat Taggart and his crew visited WIP’s morning show years ago, telling them they were the guys he would pick if there was ever a documentary to be made about Wing Bowl. Time went by, Cataldi retired, and Taggart saw no one ever made that film. It was time, he thought. So they reached out to Cataldi in 2023. The former radio host told them to meet him in Sea Isle City. He’ll be on the beach, reading a book under a blue tent.

“Sure as anything, we showed up to Sea Isle and there he was,” Taggart said.

Taggart, who grew up in Southwest Philly, caught Cataldi’s attention in 2016 when he directed a documentary called Billboard Boys about a promotional stunt by an Allentown radio station. Cataldi loved it. Taggart promised Cataldi on the beach — “I was wearing a bathing suit and flip-flops,” he said — that he would treat Wing Bowl the same.

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“Angelo is an interesting guy,” Taggart said. “Him in real life is not like him on the radio. He’s very much an introvert and not overly talkative. He’s a family guy. We got there and we weren’t there very long. He had his book and he said, ‘Everybody says they’re going to do this and nobody follows through.’ I don’t even know how much eye contact we made. But we left there and he said, ‘You guys are the guys. I believe you’re going to do this right.’”

Wing Bowl — which ran for 26 years before the station 86’d it in 2018 — seemed ripe for a documentary.

A popular champion went to state prison, there were fights in the arena, the mayor attended, a major league umpire was the judge, and gentleman’s clubs were as much a part of the eating event as the restaurant that provided the chicken wings. The scene was often as ugly as the guy who vomited one year after eating a wing that still had a feather attached.

But Taggart steered his film — which is titled No One Died — away from the mess. The documentary touches on the ugly and describes the chaos in the arena but most of the 95 minutes are spent celebrating Wing Bowl as an event unique to Philadelphia that brought people together.

“You have to show the El Wingador stuff. You have to show the ugly of the fights and some of the misogyny,” Taggart said. “But I feel like you have to show enough to tell the story and not linger on it. At the end of the day, this was always a comedy. My fear was that if someone from out of town told this story, 75% of it would’ve been that.”

“He really wanted the story told, and he wanted the story told by people who understood Philadelphia and understood Wing Bowl and people he trusted. I’m so grateful that was us.”

The crew asked Cataldi if he wanted to be a producer but he declined. The man who redefined sports talk radio in Philadelphia said he didn’t want to control the narrative. But he had one request: interview Arson Arnie, a longtime caller to Cataldi’s morning show.

“We showed up to his house and he’s sitting on his front stoop in a Randall Cunningham jersey chain smoking out of a Veterans Stadium ashtray,” Taggart said. “In his backyard under a tree are two Veterans Stadium seats rotting away and in the middle of the yard is a Deion Sanders Starting Lineup [figure] with its head ripped off. He didn’t place it for us. That’s just where it lived.”

Arson Arnie, who is a cab driver named Arnie Adkins, fills the documentary with old Wing Bowl stories and what it means to be an Eagles fan. The filmmakers conducted more than 40 interviews and even sat with Jason Kelce — who competed in Wing Bowl 22 — at his house the day before he played a game during one of his final NFL seasons.

But Taggart said Arson Arnie is the character who seemed to resonate the most.

Arson Arnie seemed to encapsulate what fandom looked like in the 1990s when Wing Bowl was launched as a radio stunt to celebrate another Super Bowl without the Eagles. WIP — especially Cataldi’s show — didn’t just tell fans what to think about but often succeeded at telling Philadelphia how to feel. The AM station was the guiding light for people like Arson Arnie.

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“It’s different now,” Taggart said. “Whether you think it’s better or worse, it’s absolutely different. If you were a fan of WIP, it was hard to not be a fan of Wing Bowl. They were so smart that they stretched a one-day event into two or three months of programming.”

Taggart interviewed El Wingador, whose real name is Bill Simmons, and asked him how he went from wing king to state prison on drug charges. They showed footage of the rowdy crowd that nearly rioted in 2005 after being turned away days before the Eagles played in the Super Bowl.

The film didn’t hide the fights in the crowd, the all-night partying that bled into the event, or the other things that led to a former WIP promotion director saying in the documentary that Wing Bowl had become “out of place” by the time it ended. But Taggart’s film looks fondly on a bygone era and the people like Arson Ernie who made it happen.

“It was uniquely ours,” Taggart said. “Find someone in Philadelphia who likes a cheesesteak outside of Philadelphia and raves about it. You can’t find it. Why? Because the cheesesteak is ours. Wing Bowl was Philadelphia’s. It was a true original. Other people tried to copy it with absolutely no success. It only worked here. It needed the perfect fan base that understood what it was and got behind it. This was never an eating contest. This was a party.

“Someone said to me, ‘If you wanted to miss Wing Bowl, it was very easy. It happened once a year. It happened in an enclosed building for four hours. If you didn’t want to see it, don’t listen and don’t go.’ So it was absolutely a voluntary event for people.”

Taggart said he was negotiating a deal with two production companies before he realized he would be trading away the ability to edit his film and the documentary’s final cut would be out of his hands. So Taggart said he backed out and decided to release the film himself earlier this month. The documentary can be purchased on Prime, Apple TV, and YouTube.

“We weren’t willing to take that risk,” Taggart said. “We wanted to make sure the film got out there the way it was intended. If this got out there and it was a smear piece on Philly and the lazy narrative of snowballs at Santa and look at the stuff they did on a snowy morning every year, I would’ve been distraught.”

He showed the film to El Wingador and then asked the five-time champ if the documentary treated him fairly. It was perfect, he said. They showed it to Ed Rendell, who as mayor helped WIP move the event in 1998 to the Spectrum. The documentary shows a clip of Rendell saying how Wing Bowl was to Philadelphia what Mardi Gras was to New Orleans. Taggart asked Rendell after he watched the film about his time at Wing Bowl.

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“He said No. 1 I looked around and said this is the craziest thing I’ve ever seen,” Taggart said. “Then my second thought was I probably shouldn’t be here.”

Cataldi says in the documentary that he wasn’t ready to end Wing Bowl but the station decided it was time. It was the end of an event that was often used as a punchline by outsiders. But Taggart says for Philadelphians, Wing Bowl wasn’t a joke. It was something to treasure.

“It was a moment in time,” Taggart said. “It was the wackiest event in the history of the media and it can never happen again. But to ignore that it ever happened would be silly. I just watched a baseball game the other day in St. Louis, which is supposed to be a baseball city. There was nobody there. We had 50,000 people that day on a snowy February morning trying to get in to watch a chicken eating contest. This city is just different.”