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I don't like bars. That's not to say I'm against drinking. I'm half Irish. Often, my cup is at least half full.
I love football. You'd know that only from talking to me about football and only if you brought up the subject, or from reading a column such as this.
You wouldn't know it because you saw me in a drinking establishment with a gazillion bar stool quarterbacks watching (and coaching) the game on a Big Screen TV. No, you won't see me there.
I will watch any NFL or Division I-A college football game any time. It's not a personal prerequisite that I be a fan of one team or the other.
I watch from home where I am the sole football fan (and beer drinker). I will adjust to any chair in front of any TV in the house. It makes no difference.
Over the years, bars have become too trendy. They have become Theme Bars, usually called Sports Bars and they have cute names like "Sluggers" and "The Dugout" and "The End Zone", and any town of any size has them.
As Jimmy Durante used to say, "Ev'rybuddies try'n ta get into da act." Everybody has a gimmick. I guess that's just part of the Wide World of Commerce.
When I first drank legally and socially, it was in a bar in Fullerton, Nebraska, the town where I lived. Fullerton boasted a population of less than 1500 citizens and the bar was called, quite simply, J&L Tavern. That was before the age of cable and dish TV and Pay-Per-View and if J&L Tavern even had a television set above the bar, it was probably a 19" Black-and-White model.
If you wanted to talk sports, you could talk baseball with the bartender, Bags Umstead. He was a good bartender with a great memory. Once you'd drank at J&L, Bags could match any face with its drinking pleasure.
Bags knew baseball. That's how his nickname originated. He not only knew the sport, he could have played it. Instead, he ended up tending bar at J&L Tavern in Fullerton, Nebraska, population 1400-something.
There was probably a sad story there. But that's what life is. People and their stories, happy or sad.
Hoisting a couple of beers at the bar or in a booth at J&L was tolerable. Pleasant, actually. The tavern had that small town ambiance and the patrons were good company.
Mainly, no one there put on airs. I don't like putting on airs.
In his memoir, "A Drinking Life", writer Pete Hamill recounts how he got through his first few weeks without booze by reciting these words every morning: "I will live my life from now on, I will not perform it."
I've thought about that often. We are performers.
Even Shakespeare said, "The whole world's a stage". He knew.
Sometimes none of us are real. We all have an innate talent for acting and that's how we react to life and its slapdash twists of fate.
Perhaps when we get to heaven, there will be an Academy Awards type of ceremony and we'll all be nominated. I hope I don't win.
When I sat in a bar like J&L Tavern, I didn't feel like I was waiting in the wings. My friends and I conversed, we listened to the jukebox, we played shuffleboard. It would generally be a quiet, good time.
Beer was two bits a draw and if we were hungry, a buck and a quarter could get us a good burger and some pretty tasty French fries. No nachos, no tortilla chips and salsa, no fancy drinks with paper umbrellas and snickering ha-ha names like "Sex on the Beach", "Hanky Panky", or "Flaming Volcano".
The Sports Bar today offers a much different milieu than the small town J&L Tavern of yesterday. With fully staffed kitchens touting grand Tex-Mex menus, bartenders who will concoct anything you want to drink and offer up a name for it as well, and a half dozen ESPN-locked TVs viewable from any chair in the joint, the Sports Bars are rocking.
But one thing they lack is intimacy. Because people don't live life, they perform it.
People like to be on and a Sports Bar is just another backdrop to act out life against. There will be a stage full of noisy fellow actors there, brimming with liquor and hot wings, and the Big Game will bring out the worst of both insecurity and arrogance in the room.
Each play will be sent around the tables for review and a subsequent faulty analysis by some of the most brazenly vocal, yet unknowledgeable fans in the city. The biggest and most empty barrels can be found on any given Game Day in any given Sports Bar.
Not only do they not know how to enjoy a game, they don't know how to drink. But the Sports Bar is their stage. So they act.
And I stay home, where I can enjoy a few beers in peace and listen to the play-by-plays and analyses of qualified professionals.
If I want to have a drink with friends, I'd just as soon seek out a bar like J&L Tavern, where there is no pretentiousness, no Big Screen TV, no fancy cocktails, and no roaring crowd.
And if I want to talk Sports, I'll talk to the bartender who has a sad story and doesn't tell it. But he sure knows the game.
Copyright Wendel Potter
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