A Guy Feels Right at Home in Sports Bar

Sunday you would have found me in a bar at 9:30 a.m.

A sports bar.

I used to think such places were filled with guys who had missed out on brains at birth because they stood in line twice for muscles.

I played sports, but I never watched them on TV. That began to change when I moved away from Western New York 12 years ago. Two or three times each season, the Buffalo Bills played on national TV. I began to watch them, not because I had become a football fanatic, but because wherever I moved I always met at least one other person from Buffalo. Watching the Bills became a companionable taste of home.

Sure enough, when I moved to Malibu, I met two Buffalo fans who lived in Marina del Rey. We didn’t go the bar route then. We started getting together to watch the Bills games aired on network TV. We’d each bring a six-pack and make the proverbial Bills-watching chow--Buffalo chicken wings, fried and dripping with Frank’s hot sauce.

Until this year. It started one Saturday early in the season as I looked at the TV listings and was disappointed to learn that the next day’s Bills game wasn’t scheduled for broadcast here.

My neighbor said, “If you want to see the game, just go to a sports bar with a satellite dish.”

A sports bar? Sure. It would smell like old socks and stale beer. Yeah, and we could get in at least one fistfight.

But, we’d see the game.

My football buddies and I had heard of a place in the Marina called Sports Harbor. We arranged to meet there that Sunday. As I cruised down Pacific Coast Highway, I was filled with apprehension. Is this how it starts? Today a sports bar, tomorrow who knows? How long would it be before I was cooking hot dogs on the tailgate of a station wagon?

I had a vision of myself arguing with a guy named Lefty, something about the point spread of a game. He was wearing a plaid polyester sports coat and several gold chains.

It was like a visit from the ghost of football future.

I assured myself this would be my first and last venture to a sports bar.

To my surprise, the place didn’t smell. At 10 on a Sunday morning, the bar was filled with regular folks. Women, too, most without tattoos.

There were seven televisions, three of them with big screens. They had every game from all over the country via satellites.

I noticed that people were segregated, based on the colors of their shirts and caps. My buddies and I found the red, white and blue hats, T-shirts and jerseys designating the Buffalo crowd. There were a dozen Bills fans standing on chairs and yelling at the screen. We added our yells to the chorus. The next thing I knew, we were having a great time.

Give me Andre Reed over the middle, James Lofton up the sideline and Don Beebe in the end zone. Add a touch of snow in Orchard Park, and it feels like I’m home.

After that, we went back to that bar almost every week--even though it bakes its Buffalo wings with cayenne pepper, not the recipe of choice for purists.

Maybe when everything you knew and loved as a youth becomes your past, human nature demands you try to re-create something of that time. When I’m with other Bills fans, I find out some news from home. We talk about snowstorms and the politics of our New York hometowns.

I’ve even heard of “Bills bars” where more than 100 former Western New Yorkers turn out every Sunday. But, I’d rather go to the Marina, where there are fans from Philadelphia, Washington, New York City and New Orleans.

I don’t usually know where they work or what kinds of cars they drive or where they live. I do know they are trying to touch their roots.

Some have found real friendships through this weekly ritual. Quite a few of the singles have paired off. It makes sense--shared geographic roots could be a great advantage to a couple. If nothing else, they’re less likely to fight over where to spend the holidays.

Beyond the dozen or so Buffalo regulars wearing their “lucky” team shirts, there are usually a few new faces each week at Sports Harbor. I’ve met a dozen rovers, people who head out to a different bar each Sunday.

Of course, there are some real football fans, too--the kind who pile into chartered buses to see their team play in Phoenix or San Diego or reserve whole sections at the Coliseum when their team plays the Raiders.

However, these fans are more the exception than the rule.

After all, you don’t need to know any team statistics or memorize the NFL rule book to find a little hometown camaraderie in Los Angeles.