The Great American Saloon Series/Jock Bars
Mysak, Joe
THE GREAT AMERICAN SALOON SERIES JOCK BARS by Joe Mysak O nce, all bars were sports bars, the crafty Ferguson once said to me. "The black-and-white television was on all the time, there was a...
...Or: Build a bar where you pay $10 at the door, then get to work the stick and drink all the beer you want...
...There were some things you could still depend upon...
...In Manhattan, once virtually an entire city of sports and Irish bars (another worthy topic for a future date), the situation is dismal...
...Go there...
...We mulled the way certain girls with shoulder-length hair walk when they wear blazers, why redheads almost invariably overplay it, and whether Jack Clark will make any difference to the Yankees, or Bob Homer to the Cardinals...
...We watched the Red Sox lose, and got to listen to one particularly ornery fan who kept bellowing, inexplicably, "One knock for Knickerbocker beer, one time?' In Manhattan, one has to go a ways to scare up similar cozy holes...
...The formula once seemed indestructible and incontestable...
...For some inexplicable reasonthere were piles of duck decoys over the bar's back mirror, but I was willing to overlook them...
...I had, in sum, been taken in...
...Yet the place looked as homey as the scenes of my youthful haunts, from the dirty floor, to the pool table, to the metal shuffleboard bowling machine, the jukebox, and the usual neon beer signs and advertisements...
...99 Hudson...
...There was a large red and white flying horse tacked on the back wall, which in more glorious days graced a Mobil filling station, and which is now apparently the last word in saloon decor in the big town...
...Not only was there nobody beyond the age of 35 in the place—other than one fellow who looked like the famed Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, the sixties car customizer, in full poundage—but the crowd included at least a full score of preppie lasses...
...I sat down and took in the cloud of acrid cigarette smoke and the rich aroma of Jack Daniel's on flannel shirts...
...But there are as many loathsome Met fans here as there are out at Shea Stadium...
...A loud crowd, fast and friendly bartenders, a good television, Joe Mysak is The American Spectator's chief saloon correspondent...
...No pictures of Casey Stengel or Ted Williams, two popular saloon subjects, but this was okay...
...Marketing strategy," I said...
...This was good, and the way talk should go in a sports bar...
...Pete's also contains the mellow memory of a famous double-date, when, after we packed the girls away in cabs to their destinations, the Big Train and I looked at each other, said, "There's a basketball game on inside, and an awful lot of beer left," and returned to size up THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1988 37 the evening...
...Or J. B. Winberie's, in Boston—the site of Fred Sullivan's fantastic eighteen-rumand-Coke night, when he kept pace with me and the Tough Al's honorable husband, who were drinking beer...
...There was a girl bartender, who mourned a lack of five-dollar bills...
...T here is, on the Upper East Side, 1 Rusty Staub's ribhouse, which features lots of good Staub material, including some aged bats and some great sequences of photographs...
...I know what we want...
...And it is so...
...Marketing strategy: Budweiser should staple little bags of pretzels and nacho chips to each bottle," Mac said...
...Faced with a crowd of advertising men, lawyers, and investment bankers out slumming for the evening, most of whom were wearing white wrinkly button-down shirts—and one who looked as if he'd just come in from the tennis courts—I decided the appropriate talk was of marketing with the Celtic poet, McCorry...
...W ant a good sports bar...
...But I think the place has it," said the Celtic poet...
...heavy use of sporting memorabilia...
...What do you have on tap...
...Louis...
...Lou Gehrig was one of them...
...I settled further into the booth...
...We pondered the pool table, and the presence in every bar of The Guy Who Is Great At Pool, and who beats all comers...
...Besides that, the Lodge had opened just three weeks before...
...Even Uptown, I could smell out a Jersey bar...
...for as a class, the big money ballplayers tend to avoid the riff-raff: professional sportsmen do not as a rule go to true sports bars, and Meet The People...
...There are, of course, the tonier restaurants and hotel bars throughout Midtown where ballplayers disport themselves...
...This particular one looked like a rock band roadie and moved in a herky-jerky fashion...
...Ifanything, its brass rails are a little gimmicky, and its black ceilings a little high-tech for most drinker's tastes...
...All well and good, until I saw him take a slug of his, Good Lord, Mexican beer with a wedge of lime in it...
...A session at the Sporting Club can be just as jolly as attending one of the brawls at the House That Ruth Built up in the Bronx...
...But it does show just what money can buy in Reagan's America: at least a score of televisions, in all directions, including those wide-screen jobs, except in this place, they actually work...
...Now, we have sporty boutique saloons designed by Ralph Lauren, and the bartenders are all women...
...Redemption, as always, lies in the search for the genuine...
...For a fan of an out-of-town team, this is a godsend: no more ducking out to make surreptitious calls to SportsPhone to check thescores...
...If you want to Meet Athletes, a passion of arrested development if ever there was one, you must, of course, hit such spots...
...The Sporting Club...
...Near the pool table, there was even an aging list of names of those challengers who wanted to play pool, and the appropriate stubby, chewed pencil...
...The Ancient Mariner asked, by way of proffering advice...
...Consider Champion's, in Georgetown...
...Its bar is not particularly romantic or aged...
...One reliable adviser pitched the Raccoon Lodge, a recently opened (little did I at first realize how recently opened) tavern on 83rd Street and Amsterdam Avenue...
...Get a grip, man," said the land baron...
...To the last man...
...I stared into the back-bar mirror, and the Iron Horse grinned back...
...This one would make a mint...
...But do you really want to hit three figures for an evening's work, just to look at two Leroy Neiman paintings and a cast-iron jockey under bad lighting...
...In the outer boroughs and environs, such places might be scared up with little enough problem...
...I'm sorry, we don't have draft beer," said the bartender...
...The Sporting Club is not old...
...The prices are a little heavy...
...The place lacks the requisite layers of memorabilia...
...And really cold air conditioning...
...And there's Moosehead on tap...
...Lincoln should begin manufacturing four-door convertibles again...
...The black-and-white television was on all the time, there was a photo of the '57 Dodgers on the wall, and there was a good man behind the stick...
...Sports and drinking and photos of the Bambino, referred to elsewhere as the patron saint of good food and drink, are naturals...
...When the girls started to play pool, we took our leave...
...Or Mike Shannon's, in St...
...True enough, but as ever, there are gin mills, and saloons, and sports bars...
...I waited no longer for a word of explanation, but raised anchor...
...This was not a man who was going to knock them back all night—at least, not without some ugly consequences...
...Finally, too, the Sporting Club features an actual new idea: an enormous electronic scoreboard, just like you have at the ballpark with all the out-of-town scores, updated continually, and with a tape running along the bottom flashing details...
...Nowhere is this more true than in Manhattan, where a recent tour examined what the more pretentious writers might refer to as the genre of sports bars...
...The Old Town...
...Take a closer look...
...This is what it's come to...
...The sports bar formula is just about incorruptible...
...Then again, this was not a batch of crusty vets putting to flight the day's demons, but a crowd of slightly homesick young folk living The Life in Manhattan...
...One of Ruth's spiritual sons, Mickey Mantle, recently opened his own showcase place, but I balk at saucing it up on Central Park South...
...It is also not, strictly speaking, a sports bar...
...There were several old "Honeymooners" photographs, apropos of a place called "The Raccoon Lodge," which everyone in the Free World knows was Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton's old club...
...For a moment, we ponder Pete's Tavern, a nice ancient place 0. Henry apparently wrote in, and vaguely a sports bar, if the presence of some prehistoric equipment and a few pictures means a sports bar...
...Yet honest city drinkers are forever damned with the false, or, if you will, faux saloons, some done up so handsomely they fool even seasoned veterans with bourbon-soaked elbows...
...And so off down to east 16th Street to the Old Town, a fine old place, looking as it should...
...I have done considerable damage in the Old Town, which has one of the top 10 turn-of-the-century bars in Manhattan, but for my sports-bar money, a saloon must have brew good off the wood...
...Poseurs," pronounced the mogul Cheney, on first observing the crowd...
...They're all fakes...
...And the Big Orange can surely cook up a tender and tasty plate of ribs...
...That would be bad enough, but at Rusty's, there is also a tad too much, shall we say, meat on the hoof...
...Pete's is a gentle spot, and worthy of more than a casual look here...
...This would not do...
...Not bad in its way, but not a saloon, at least not one of the gorgeous sports dumps I patronized in my youth...
Vol. 21 • May 1988 • No. 5
