I recently re-watched the film Eight Men Out, about the 1919 World Series. At least one scene depicts people gathered in a public establishment (may have been a hotel lobby) watching a large mechanical tote board showing the status of the baseball game, with a pictogram of the diamond and little cutout baserunners and everything.
I don’t know how common such devices were, but I’m guessing the concept of folks gathering to drink and follow sports long predates television or the term “Sports Bar.”
Sports Bar was a type of bar before the modern ESPN world. The 20 flat screen version is fairly recent but Sports Bars go back a long time and may have just had a radio broadcast and sports loving fans as the main clientele.
I think then the definition of ‘sports bar’ is the bit that has to be established to really answer the question. “A bar where the clientele are sports fans and listens to sports on the radio” probably goes back about as far as radio broadcasts of sports, and I would not be surprised at all if the Romans had bars where people would couldn’t afford to go to the main event hung out and bet on the outcome of races or fights while runners brought updates on scoring. The modern sports bar with multiple TVs displaying sports constantly as a feature almost certainly is a product of ‘the ESPN’ world so wouldn’t be older than 1979 when ESPN launched, and I would be surprised if the first one came about more than a year later. Watching sports and drinking goes back as far as humans had alcohol to drink and sports to watch, and putting as much of the sports as possible into a place where people drink is a pretty obvious thing to do.
Resolved: a sports bar must have all of the following
Multiple TVs showing different sports all the time
Primary target clientele is groups of friends
Offers many different food choices with a dedicated kitchen
Lots of tables
I worked at a pizza place in 1981 that had multiple TVs that showed sports. We also served beer and wine. It probably matches your criteria. The food choices were only pizza or lasagna though. It was that was in the 70s when I was a kid as well.
Thanks. I’ve got the entire ad campaign on my website as Men Who Plan Beyond Tomorrow. A fascinating blend of solid predictions and utter silliness, though it’s obvious they didn’t have a clue which were to be which.
That’s a good list although my main complaint about BWW’s menu is that they do not have a single dinner entree. It’s wings, burgers, sandwiches and salads all day long.
Coach’s was the first sports bar in Kansas City in 1983.
I met the owners when they called Brandsmart, the AV dealership at which I worked asking to see a Kloss Novabeam, a very popular projector of the time. I told them I would have it set up tomorrow, and if they would mind if I had a second unit set up, the Panasonic PT-101.
I had both on the same screen, and a video switcher set up between the two and let them see both on the same screen. They sold themselves two of the more expensive *Panasonic *units.
That was the start of our working relationship and friendship. Eventually Coach’s had 25 55" or larger flat panels as well as four projectors. The audio was set up so the bar could be divided into four zones.
Cable and Satellite is OK for a non-serious Sports Bar, but the secret sauce was going beyond those.
They eventually had 4 10’ C/Ku dishes, originally analog but eventually equipped with DVB digital receivers to pick up raw network feeds. I also built them computer systems to get internet-only games like preseason football and basketball and run it through ATSC modulators to distribute to all of the sets and projectors.
Sadly, the bar is no more. After surviving 4 floods, one of the owners, Mike Darby, was murdered while out walking his dog. Two months later, the place was flooded for a fifth and final time.
Note the quotes. Too many people think of “cable” TV as originating in the later 1970s. But that’s when the union between cable and satellite took off. ESPN, the super stations showing their local sports nationally, etc.
But cable TV goes back to around 1950. My step-father wired up our town in the 50s. We got two channels. So cable but no big sports thing.
Starting around 1980 it was possible to run sports all the time on bar TVs. And then it was possible to watch unencrypted sat feeds directly on your own antenna (sans cable). Even today a sports bar might have a sat-TV subscription and no cable.
Note that it was possible in that era to also get over-the-air rebroadcasts of HBO and such. Special antennas, etc., required. They even have such things on secondary TV channels now where you have to get a box and pay a fee to view the movies and what not.
So satellites were the key breakthrough. Cable was along for the ride.
Since large excellent quality flat screen TVs have gotten so cheap sports bars are no longer the only place where you can see the game, they’ve had to get into some other areas. Coach’s, the sports bar that I wired up, used their projectors for a lot of corporate meetings (especially sales promotions). Another big area is people reserving the rooms to hold their fantasy sports drafts. I suspect many of these people didn’t have a living room or recreation room big enough to hold all of the members of the fantasy league.
Yeah, I realize that y’all are thinking “uh? A bar is by definition a type of public house!” But the difference between a sports bar and a peña deportiva is that the peña is private. A peña deportiva is a group of followers of a specific sports club, and also the name of the locale where they meet to watch their club; said locale may be a regular bar or one owned by the peña and accessible by invitation only. I know that many Spanish clubs have peñas abroad but, having always seen them mentioned in Spanish media or linked to Spanish Casas(*), I’ve got no idea what the heck they’re called in English.
(*) Clubhouses owned and operated by associations of immigrants from Spain. They’re often named after a specific region but eventually the decor, music and food end up country-wide 99 times out of 100.
To the extent that they exist anymore, they’re called “sports clubs” - there used to be a lot of them in my area*. They were only open to members who were typically immigrants (or children of immigrants) with a shared ethnicity who watched soccer. Since I was never a member of one, I don’t know if the members all followed the same team or if they were all fans of different teams from a particular country.
They all seem to have changed into either “social clubs” or restaurants, although I’m sure soccer is still on the TV as much as possible.
Most of them serve food, but I don’t see that as a requirement. The sports bar that I occasionally go to might set out some peanuts and pretzels, but that’s it. Patrons call Domino’s(or whatever) if they want food.
Must’ve been 1972 when I lived in Miami, there was this place way out on Sunset that was one large room built up on blocks in the scrub oaks and palmettos. No TV, just a primitive electronic dart board game. Some pool tables and bar stools. The bar ran down one side of the room and offered pickled eggs and some kind of pickled pig parts for food. It wasn’t loud. There was the mumble of trash talk, the wooden floor creaked as players moved around the tables, the balls clicked and rain dripped around the open doors and windows.
I’d say it was a ‘sports’ bar, but not the kind where young boys in expensive sweaters go to pick up girls.
With regards to Cheers, it’s also worth noting that they actually had one episode which contrasted the Cheers bar with what most of us now would consider to be a “Sports Bar”, with the wall of TVs showing 10 different games. There was a scene with Norm and Cliff at the new bar, and one complains about how turning his head to try to follow all the games was giving him neck pains. They other says, “Try just moving your eyes…” “Aha!”
It was clear that, to the characters, this was an entirely new kind of bar experience.
