Dallas – People often ask me about the glamorous life of a sportswriter. Well, folks, here’s a snapshot from the Friday night before the Texas-
Oklahoma game: I’m sitting in a dark bar, alone, surrounded by nothing but TVs and eating a pile of chicken wings.
On the romance-on-the-road meter, that ranks down there with typhoid, Turkish prisons and Eastern European border crossings in the ’70s.
But for sportswriters, or any sports fan alone on a business trip, we often find safe havens in the dining genre that has grown in the United States like fungi in the back of a bachelor’s refrigerator.
Sports bars have become the new living room of the new modern man. That’s because the new modern woman is no longer standing in the kitchen making us mushroom burgers while we watch the Raiders lose again on TV. But we can be in Barstow or Birmingham or Boston and find a sports bar where someone will do that for us. And often the new modern woman is sitting there with us, wearing a football jersey and plotting assassination attempts on the local loser coach.
The food is guy food. Wings. Burgers. Steak salads. Nachos. The size of the portions are always massive, just in case, you know, the local NFL team missed their pre-game meal and decide to stop in after the game for a snack.
The quality is usually between that of the frozen food section of a 7-Eleven and the Black-eyed Pea. It’s often mass produced, heavy in grease and has the nutritional value of spending nine innings chewing raw lard.
But we’re not cooking it, and we can sit with as many friends as we want, eat the food we want and watch what we want. Sports bars have replaced the hunting lodge as the bastion for male bonding. After all, in sports bars, you don’t have to kill your lunch.
In recent years, sports bars on Saturdays have become alumni headquarters. Specific bars with satellite TVs will show college football games you can’t get on yours or provide a space for alumni who want to break out their ol’ State U shirts from school. While in town, I occasionally hit Jackson’s All-American Grill on 20th and Blake, partly to see my Oregon Ducks play with other Quacker Backers but also for one of the best barbecued bacon cheeseburgers known to man.
(Yes, some sports bars do have gold- medal-winning food.)
Dallas was the perfect place to reconnect with my past life in sports bars. Few cities are more sports-crazed than this one, with the Cowboys fostering a culture so arrogant it’s called America’s Team and alumni of Texas’ football- crazed universities filling the city’s high-rises.
Christie’s Sports Bar is in the modern McKinney section near downtown and is relatively unassuming. (Many sports bars are as subtle as a carnival ride with giant neon facades and a loudspeaker telling pedestrians outside of a double off the Fenway Park wall.)
Founded in 1991, Christie’s has a simple awning and pleasant patio with, of course, TVs. Inside, I took a seat in the middle of the restaurant and faced a kaleidoscope of sports. Giant screens showed the Yankees-Tigers playoff game and the Louisville-Middle Tennessee football game and a smaller TV showed the Denver-Miami of Ohio college hockey game.
Eight more TVs were to my left. Three more were behind me. The guys in ball caps at the pool tables were curiously oblivious to it all.
The menu could have been in any sports bar in the country, although I doubt the sports bar in Bangor, Maine, serves a pepper-jack cheese sausage dog or stuffed jalapeños. I ordered the bread and butter of sports bars: wings, the wings sampler, to be exact. For $10.95 I got two each of the Tabasco, zipper, inferno, Gillette and Buffalo-style wings.
They all tasted relatively the same – meaty, well-fried, hearty – except for the inferno, which torched my nostril hair. I chugged two bottles of Tecate beer in the bottom of the fifth alone.
By the time the Yankees finished impersonating the Toledo Mud Hens, I remembered why I loathe sports bars. I covered Major League Baseball for five years and the ritual among many baseball writers was: Cover the baseball game, write the baseball game, then go to a sports bar, eat wings and watch highlights of more baseball games.
Often it’s the only place to eat late, but there are few things more lonely than eating wings in Pittsburgh at 1 a.m. while watching a ground ball go through a Kansas City Royal’s legs.
Too many visits alone to sports bars saddled me with a terribly annoying habit. If there is a TV anywhere near where I eat, I watch it. It doesn’t matter what’s on. Billiards. The Super Bowl. Women’s beach volleyball (well, with women’s beach volleyball it does matter). I’d have my neck craned to the wall while lifting a piece of steak to my mouth.
With the proliferation of TVs in mainstream restaurants, it has driven my girlfriend crazy. She loved living in Rome with me merely because Italians wouldn’t dare desecrate their dining experience by putting on a soccer game.
My habit has become harder to break than meth. One time while dining in Breckenridge, Nancy sat me with my back to the TV but I still couldn’t focus on her. She turned around. In the window behind her I was watching the reflection of a flyweight boxing match from Vegas.
Unlike in sports bars, sports and food don’t always mix.
John Henderson can be reached at 303-954-1299 or jhenderson@denverpost.com.
