Beer and baseball: Reunited, and it feels so good – Chicago Tribune
The crack of bat against ball. The roar of the crowd. The smell of freshly cut grass. Another baseball season, full of hope, arrived earlier in the week. But both of our teams were out of town and so you did the next best thing and headed to the nearest tavern TV.
“Hey, another season,” said a friendly face, sitting at the bar. “Let me buy you a beer?”
“No, thanks,” you said. “But I will have bourbon.”
“No beer with baseball?” the man said. “What are you, a Communist?”
The relationship between baseball and beer is not taken lightly. According to reputable figures, the U.S. ranks 14th on the world’s list of beer consumption per capita, at 217 12-ounce beer bottles per year. And a considerable portion of our beer is consumed watching baseball. As writer Peter Richmond put it, “Beer needs baseball, and baseball needs beer — it has always been thus.”
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For reasons perhaps best explored on a psychiatrist’s couch, I don’t like beer. But I, too, get in line during the summer and will have a beer or two whenever I am lucky enough to find myself sitting in the stands at a ballpark, envious of those around me who find beer a regular companion.
Few liked beer as much as a fellow named Andre Rene Roussimoff, who was born May 19, 1946, in France to Russian parents. He would become much better known as Andre the Giant and was a professional wrestler and occasional actor in television and film, his best-known role coming as Fezzik in 1987’s “The Princess Bride.”
I read this about him in Modern Drunkard magazine (yes, that’s a real magazine), in a piece by Richard English: “You won’t find it in the ‘Guinness Book of World Records,’ but Andre the Giant holds the world record for the largest number of beers consumed in a single sitting. These were standard 12-ounce bottles of beer, nothing fancy, but during a six-hour period Andre drank 119 of them. It was one of the few times Andre got drunk enough to pass out, which he did in a hallway at his hotel. … Think about it: 119 beers in six hours. That’s a beer every three minutes, nonstop. That’s beyond epic. It’s beyond the ken of mortal men. It’s god-like.” (The entire story is pretty amazing/shocking/fun).
It is unknown — but doubtful, since we certainly would have heard about it — whether Andre the Giant ever sat and drank at Wrigley or Comiskey (yes, I know, but old habits die hard). Thousands of others have and do and will.
Here is one man’s memory: “I’ll never forget my first Cubs game back in 1983, just after graduating from Purdue and moving to Chicago. It was my first professional sporting event as a ‘legal drinking aged’ adult. I loved baseball and the classic grandeur of a vintage park. As I walked out of the concourse and saw the intense green of the grass, I was immediately confronted with two amazing options: a hot dog vendor and a beer vendor, both bellowing their wares. ‘Hot dogs’ was followed by three clanks of his metal lid and ‘Beer, beer here’ was followed by the tap-tap-tap of the bottle opener on the plastic tray.
“As I found my seat I had my first sip of that Budweiser. The crisp bite of cold lager imprinted my taste buds, followed closely by that first bite of stadium hot dog with mustard and sweet relish. Then a second, bigger drink of my Budweiser. The harmony was incredible. Suddenly, the organ sprang to life and the Cubs came running onto the field.”
It is now 33 years later and this man, whose name is Jeffery Goad, has recently become a Doemens Beer Sommelier, which means he has been certified by the Siebel Institute in Chicago to consult people and businesses on all things beer.
He goes on: “At a game last season, July 3, to be precise, I was in the reopened center field bleachers at Wrigley when my wife and I spotted my old friend, Doug Sohn (the former proprietor of that recently shuttered, legendary hot dog Mecca called Hot Doug’s).”
Sohn was at the park promoting his gourmet dogs (as he will be doing this season as well; they are named after former Cubs players).
“I was excited, of course,” says Goad. “And then my eye caught the logo of Goose Island (Brewery) on the tap handle at the counter. I saw ‘Green Line’ burnished into the wood. At the time it was a ‘draught only’ American Pale Ale available only in the Chicago area, and there it was at Wrigley.”
So, Goad bought a Green Line and a Dave Kingman hot dog.
“As I sat down with my wife, I took a long sip of this amazing beer and my first bite of that gourmet dog,” he says. “I was still instantly transported back to that first baseball beer/food pairing. It was so visceral that I could still taste that tart green apple of the beer and the sweet but tart flavors of mustard and relish on the dog. I’ll never forget those baseball firsts.”
Of course, not all beer-baseball experiences have this sort of impact. And not all such encounters take place at ballparks. Baseball season also finds taverns crowded with those watching games. These crowds are usually knowledgeable and passionate, and baseball brings out the best and worst in barflies — the best being blind hope and the worst being the desire to start silly arguments. Jeff Magill recently retired after spending nearly 35 years behind the bar at the Billy Goat Tavern, home of the lengthy and durable “curse” in its subterranean quarters under the formal 430 N. Michigan Ave. address.
Magill has, with the behind-the-bar observational skills of a philosopher, this to say: “Those of us that remember baseball referred to as ‘America’s pastime’ can include beer at the old ballgame or at the old tavern as tantamount to apple pie for dessert. In the process, beer gets a decided public stamp of approval. With that, comes a grand sense of affiliation, a collective abandonment of inhibition, enabling a greater expression of fan generated exhortation.”
Of course, some in-the-park and in-the-tavern fans overdo it, but no more than on St. Patrick’s Day or New Year’s Eve. So, watch yourselves about that “abandonment of inhibition.” We live in politically correct times and don’t suffer the over-served any more kindly that we would this admission from former Cubs’ great Hack Wilson: “I’ve never played drunk. Hung over, yes. But never drunk.”
And then there was Harry. If you need the last name, you might need to move on to another story.
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