The Beer Necessities

When I was 16, my father, with Wite-Out, rolled forward the odometer on my birth certificate so that I could sell beer at Minnesota Twins games, where the official brand was Schmidt, whose brewery, in St. Paul, bore enormous, electrified letters that lit up at night. On those unfortunate evenings when every second letter failed to illuminate, you could drive by and see, like a beacon on the side of the brewery, a brazenly honest bit of beer advertising: ScHmIdT.

From my boyhood bedroom in Bloomington, Minn., I could see the Hotel Sofitel, in whose bar a tanked-up New York Yankees manager, Billy Martin, punched out a marshmallow salesman.

In Bloomington, 27 years ago this week, Minnesota Vikings safety Nate Wright was pushed to the ground by Dallas Cowboys receiver Drew Pearson, who caught a touchdown pass from Roger Staubach that the quarterback afterward called a Hail Mary. The game brought that phrase into the sports lexicon, killed the father of Vikings quarterback Fran Tarkenton (whose name was Dallas and who died of a heart attack in front of his TV in Savannah) and sent the Cowboys on their way to the Super Bowl. But we remember it today primarily because referee Armen Terzian -- as he stood in the end zone, oblivious to Pearson's pass interference -- was brained by a whiskey bottle. (That toss is still regarded, in the Twin Cities, as the game's true Hail Mary.)

I attended college in Milwaukee, where the baseball team is the Brewers, who were additionally nicknamed, at the time, after a cocktail: Harvey's Wallbangers. Whenever a Wallbanger hit a home run, a lederhosened Bernie Brewer slid out of a giant beer keg in centerfield and splashed down into a beer mug. Between innings the public address system would play that polka paean to binge drinking, Roll Out the Barrel.

Until I was 21, I thought that Colt .45 was a malt liquor named for a baseball team, and I'd never heard of the handgun, though that is, when you think about it, a quintessentially American trifecta: baseball, firearms and malted beverages.

So last week, when Harvard researchers released a study (of 14,000 college students) concluding that sports fans are more apt to be binge drinkers than are nonfans, I thought to myself, No Schmidt! Of course we are. Indeed, who can say any longer if drinking exists to serve sports or if sports exist to serve drinking?

Have there ever been two words more symbiotic than sports bar? As a kid collecting beer cans -- the Cincinnati Reds were on cans of Hudepohl, the Pittsburgh Steelers on cans of Iron City -- I assumed that beer coursed through the very veins of athletes. And, in so many cases, it did.

Beer is the alpha and the omega of the Babe Ruth story, which is in turn the archetypal story of American sport. So I knew, from a young age, that Yankees owner Jacob Ruppert bought Babe Ruth from the Boston Red Sox with $100,000 he'd tapped from his Ruppert Beer & Ale empire, and that Ruth was said to have drunk beer between innings at McCuddy's bar across from Comiskey Park in Chicago, and that his funeral was on a sweltering day in August 1948 at St. Patrick's Cathedral, where -- in the pallbearers' pew -- his old teammate Joe Dugan whispered, "I'd give a hundred dollars for a cold beer." To which Waite Hoyt replied, "So would the Babe."

The voice of baseball, Mel Allen, called every Yankees home run a Ballantine Blast, after the beer that sponsored the broadcasts, and in the decades since, beer vendors themselves have achieved a minor celebrity. You may have received a sodden single as change from Wally the Beerman in Minneapolis (who has his own bobblehead doll and Coors Light commercials), Bob the Beerman in Denver (who has published his professional memoirs) or Scooter the Beerguy, who has slung suds conspicuously at several ballparks. Each of these vendors is beermarked for the Baseball Hall of Fame.

As a sportswriter, in countless locker rooms I have been sprayed with champagne in the manner of a firehosed civil disobedient. And I have interviewed tailgaters for whom beer was almost literally like oxygen, conveyed into the body by twin plastic tubes attached to cans attached to a construction hard hat.

We build ballparks named Coors and Miller and Busch. At the same time, as in the disapproving Harvard report, we express all manner of beer and loathing toward sport fans, who are taken for drunken, goalpost-pillaging louts. City officials in Tempe, Ariz., last week complained that the Fiesta Bowl will, for the first time, allow beer sales, presumably necessitating increased security. Iona basketball coach Jeff Ruland last week issued a public apology for offering to provide students of legal drinking age a couple of kegs to fire them up before home games. "To alcohol," as Homer Simpson put it. "The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems."

As in life, so in sports. And so the question remains: Do we drink because we're at the game, are we at the game to drink, or are drink and spectator sports now so codependent that we're simply emulating W.C. Fields, who advised, "Always carry a flagon of whiskey in case of snakebite. And, furthermore, always carry a small snake"?

Issue date: December 23, 2002

Sports Illustrated senior writer Steve Rushin pens the weekly Air and Space column in the magazine.

 

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