Sports Bars Are Own Form Of Entertainment

I am about to give up on sports bars.

Just for the sake of accuracy here, I do not include as a “sports bar” every eating and (especially) drinking establishment with a television tuned to a football game.

No. I’m talking about your classic sports bar - more televisions than sober people, more fat-filled dishes than noun-verb agreements, more beer bellies than clean undershirts. That kind of thing.

Although I suppose if I am asked to attend a birthday party or a bachelor party or a bar mitzvah or something, and it happens to be held at such a place, I will attend. I mean, think of the free food.

But when it comes to relaxing and watching a game with friends, I’ll either stick to good restaurants that offer a game almost as an afterthought, as if it were scented soap in the restrooms or something, or my own living room, thanks.

There are several reasons, none of which has to do with the selection of games, which is almost always excellent. I can’t get this kind of variety anywhere else, at least until one of my friends gets off the dime and buys one of those satellite dishes.

(Odd sociological item, the satellite dish. The older, gigantic ones used to be the living, breathing symbol of poor white trash. They might as well have been sold with the car seat for the front porch included in the purchase. But now the small, more-modern versions are a badge of achievement, like owning an off-road vehicle you never drive in the rain or a state-of-the-art computer you don’t know how to turn on.)

For one thing, if a game is at all interesting, you can count on any decent sports bar being packed. Now, if you go to a bar that specializes in the team concept, that may be fun for you. For instance, if a bar is known as a hangout for Green Bay Packers fans, most of the crowd probably loves squeezing in 10 to a booth and wearing those cheese-head hats and spilling beer all over each other and cheering on their team to victory.

But for those of us non-Packer fans who wandered into the place for a grilled-cheese sandwich, a beer and a game, it’s like punishment for not liking bratwurst or something; your sentence is to spend three hours in tight quarters with a bunch of obnoxious Midwesterners.

Of course, mildly obnoxious behavior is tough to notice in a sports bar, in the same way a birthmark is tough to notice at a nudist colony; there’s so much else going on, it kind of gets lost in the shuffle.

I suspect that this has something to do with the seemingly endless variations on the happy-hour, chug-till-you-offend-everyone-within-earshot specials many of the places offer.

And I’m not preaching from atop the mount here. I’ve taken advantage of plenty of those kinds of specials myself. It’s just that I don’t appreciate the incredible rudeness and jerklike behavior in the other patrons, when, clearly, I am the only person who should be allowed to act this way.

This is not to say that I have not had good times in sports bars. I have. It’s just that the good times usually had nothing to do with the game at hand.

Once, for instance, one of my brothers came to visit. Naturally, I wanted to show him a good time, so we headed for a sports bar to watch “Monday Night Football.” An especially boisterous group sat in front of us; I think maybe pitchers of boisterousness were two-for-one that night.

Finally, along about the fourth quarter of the game, one of the guys in the group slipped off his chair and fell straight back. We laughed. Ha-ha, my brother said, thanks for taking me to such a classy place.

The thing was, the guy stayed down. And never got up, at least while we were there. My brother’s appreciation grew accordingly.

All of which, when you think about it, was more entertaining than any game could have been. Why, if I could be guaranteed this kind of fun every time, I might even put up with the other aggravations and head back to the sports bars.

Although I’d also like control of the remote.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Bill Goodykoontz The Arizona Republic