Greeley, Charlotte chicken-wing warriors bet on Super Bowl

GREELEY — The Denver Broncos and Carolina Panthers will play on professional football’s biggest stage this Sunday, but Super Bowl 50 also has sparked a good-natured game of chicken.

Broncos fan Brian Seifried, owner of four Wing Shack restaurants in Northern Colorado, has spiced things up by making a bet with Panthers fan Justin Holland, owner of D.D. Pecker’s Wing Shack in Charlotte, N.C. The terms of the bet are simple: The man whose team loses must eat a dozen wings tossed in the winner’s hottest sauce while wearing the winning team’s jersey, and a video of the event will be posted online for the world to see.

The two companies aren’t related, said Doug Baker, marketing director for Greeley-based Wing Shack Enterprises, which runs two restaurants in Greeley, one in Loveland and one in Windsor, with plans for a fifth to open this spring in Fort Collins.

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“Wing Shack is a name you can’t copyright because it’s so prolific. It’s been used so much around the country,” Baker said. “But we keep an eye on the others to see what they’re doing. So when we knew the Broncos were playing the Panthers, we called D.D. Peckers.”

If — dare we say when? — the Broncos win, Holland will have to chow down on wings drenched in Wing Shack’s “Bear Hot” sauce, which Baker said is a “kicked-up habanero” concoction with three additional top-secret heat spices. “And we’re very liberal in its application,” he added.

If the unthinkable occurs and Carolina prevails, Seifried will dine on wings soaked in D.D. Pecker’s palate-scorching “Blazing” sauce.

“He dropped his in the mail today and so did we, so nobody can drop out at the last minute,” Baker said. “We want everything there. The loser will eat them probably on Monday morning — probably a wings-for-breakfast deal to make it that much more excruciating.”

Baker said his restaurants are preparing for the rush of Super Bowl-related orders by preparing hundreds of gallons of ranch and blue cheese, cutting up thousands of stalks of celery and finding room to store more than 10 tons of chicken wings. D.D. Peckers undoubtedly is doing the same.

Baker actually is a native of Statesville, N.C., but said he came to Colorado long before the National Football League expanded to Charlotte, so “I’m Broncos through and through.”