Meaning a bar with lots of television sets and informal decoration, probably sports themed. Buffalo Wild Wings is the best example I can think of and they were founded in 1982. I don’t know if they had all the TV sets back then.
Applebee’s and TGI Fridays are two others although they have been removing the sports decorations and I would call them more family oriented today.
Dennis
FWIW, Google Ngrams shows the phrase first appearing in 1984.
Further research finds the phrase in use in my local paper* back as far as the 1950s, but not in the cited sense. It appears to have previously been used to describe the sporting goods section of a department store. Possibly the current usage was originally intended to reference that.
Anyway, I find a 1983 article describing the opening of Jimmy the Greek’s Restaurant & Sports Bar in Durham, NC. Given Jimmy’s association with sports gambling, it’s a safe bet that it’s what we would think of today as a sports bar.
*The Charlotte Observer
A 1946 Seagram’s adshowing what Men Who Plan Beyond Tomorrow will be thinking of depicts a restaurant filled with large, rectangular, flat-screen televisions showing sports. Pretty good prediction.
A Sports Bar use to mean a bar with 3+ TVs tunes to Sports most of the time. I would hate to think that Buffalo Wild Wings is the best example of a Sports Bar today.
Toots Shor’s Restaurant in NYC was describe as a “nuthing fancy” Sports Bar. That is back in 1950s and before. Ruth, Dempsey, DiMaggio among others often hung out there.
I’d guess roughly the early 1980s–say, 1983 or 1984. That was about the time that a “sports bar” opened nearby. Having never heard of such a thing, but curious to find out what this thing was, my buddies and I went to check it out. We had experienced nightclubs, discos, urban cowboy bars, British pubs, singles fern bars, and other kinds of watering holes, but what was a “sports bar”?
We found plenty of TVs, showing sports, of course. Perhaps it helped that that was also about the time we got a 24-hour sports channel, so such a thing was possible. The decor was sports-themed (hockey sticks, golf clubs, jerseys, team logos, etc. on the walls). We’d never been in such a place, and rather liked what we found.
The concept probably aligns with access to cable and satellite television.
Damn, one of the most accurate visions of tomorrow I have seen!
Dennis
Well, there are 1200 of them, all with 50 TVs tuned to sports and the walls lined with jerseys of the local heroes. They are the very personification of a sports bar.
Dennis
In about 1950, it was already somewhat common for bars to have TV sets even though not many homes had them. They were a little too expensive for most people to own themselves, but not too expensive for a bar (and certain other places) to have to keep their customers happy. So it remained a habit for bars to have a TV set blaring in the background much of the time. It wasn’t too great a stretch then when someone around 1980 decided to advertise their bar as a sports bar by having a bunch of large TV sets showing various sports, some of them only available on cable.
I think the writers of Cheers!, which debuted in September 1982, called it a “sports bar” almost from the very beginning, so I’d guess the concept was in widespread use well before then.
I first visited a self-described sports bar (Champions, in Washington, DC) in 1983. I don’t think there was more than one or two TVs, but the decor had a lot of sports memorabilia and the wait staff wore jerseys or referee uniforms. A lot of bars had some degree of sports kitsch on the wall before that, but weren’t primarily “sports bars.”
And the explosion happened when lots of sports went from Free To Air to suscriber only channels.
Ironically, though, the Cheers bar never had even a single television in it, let alone bunches of them. For obvious reasons.
Incorrect. They had at least one tv. They were watching it when Cliff’s mom was on Johnny Carson.
I can’t believe you passed on the opportunity to introduce that with “Little known fact …”
Yeah—except for the way everyone’s dressed.
They absolutely had at least one TV, probably more. But they occasionally showed the regulars watching a ballgame.
And yet the hockey players aren’t wearing helmets and the goalie lacks a face-mask.
For what it’s worth, my grandfather made it a point to watch his games at his favorite bars, preferring getting hammered with his buddies to listening to Grandma bitch about it at home. Many of the bars he went to had Cubs, Cardinals, Illini, Bears, Whatever tchotchkes/memorabilia about, though they could hardly be called “sports bars.”
This would have been in the 70s and 80s.
