Column: Too Many Wings

It started as friendly banter. It would end several weeks later with me never wanting to eat another chicken wing.

One summer night, I watched an NBA Finals game with my buddy at a local watering hole when a commercial for Buffalo Wild Wings came on. As he often would say, perhaps even more after a few cold ones, he wished our town had a “B-Dubs.” This evening, what started as talk about how great wings were and how boneless wings were just way too crunchy chicken nuggets turned into trash talk about who could eat more in one sitting.

My friend Jared was bound a determined he could eat more chicken wings than me, and I took offense to this and laid down a challenge. The next week before the UFC pay-per-view event, we will find out who can eat the most wings and who the pretender is.

I am no stranger to food challenges, but it had been quite a while since I had tried one. I still watched that glutinous show “Man vs. Food” and had picked up a few tips on how to down a lot of wings.

Our biggest issue was finding a place where we could get many wings and not have to pay way too much money. Since we didn’t have a “B-Dubs,” we thought about doing the challenge at a bar, but we probably would have gone broke at about $10 o $15 for an order of wings.

We probably still, to this day, will argue about who came up with the idea of going to a local chain buffet restaurant. I remembered they had wings and thought for around $15 to $20, and we could eat as many as we wanted.

I was never a big fan of going to the “Golden Corral .”It was just one of those places where the food always looked like it had been sitting out for hours, and you might as well eat it in the bathroom because that is where you were going to end up.

For this occasion I figured they couldn’t possibly mess up wings, so the location was settled.

On the day we went, I tried to eat a light lunch and drink a lot of water.

The entire ride to the restaurant, there was so much trash talk that I just wanted to jump out of the passenger seat. Once we were there and I purchased an adult buffet dinner, I was nervous but ready to go. I wanted to keep it on the down-low with the staff, but my buddy let pretty much everyone in the restaurant know what we were doing, and nobody seemed to care.

We both started with 20 wings and I noticed right away these were some gigantic wings, which was going to be a real chore. Looking back, I should have just gotten regular hot wings but decided to mix it up with about four or five flavors to go along with my vat of ranch dressing.

Twenty wings were not a problem. The following 20 were not too much of an issue, although I could start to hear my stomach rumble. I kept hoping he would want to be done, but we went and got 20 more. At this point, I was just eating to prove a point, and I was about to get sick. After eating about a dozen more, we both looked at each other and nodded. It was time to call it quits, and the challenge would end in a tie. There was no more trash talk. We just both wanted this chapter in our lives to end. Some people may not think this is a lot of wings, but I challenge them to try it and they might sing a different tune.

About an hour later, I was sitting in the bathroom at my house proclaiming I would never eat a wing again, let alone do a food challenge. Moments later, a group of friends came over to watch the UFC fight and brought a huge meat and cheese tray, and I had to run back to the bathroom as soon as I smelled it.