I've never been a huge fan of watching NFL games at sports bars. Sure, there are some advantages. You usually get a nice set of screens showing all of the games in HD, and there's plenty of food and drinks around (assuming you can get a waitress's attention). Then there are the negatives. The fact that, no matter where you sit, you get a stiff neck from staring at awklwardly-located monitors. The annoying Bears / Packers / Cowboys / [insert other hated team(s) here] fans who obnoxiously cheer every time their running back carries for more than a yard. Having to pretend to be friends with a guy just because he, too, is wearing a New York Giants jersey in Northern California, even though if you bumped into the same guy in New York you wouldn't think twice about it. In general, I'd rather watch at home with a few friends then go out to the bars, and I consistently maintained that stance while living in Manhattan over the past few years.
While living in the Bay Area has been great, one of the downsides has been limited local access to Giants football. While we've already established that I enjoy the early Sunday start times that the west coast provides, it's an entirely different story when the Giants game is only available on Sunday Ticket. Now, instead of rolling out of bed shortly after 9 and flipping on FOX, I have to drive into downtown Palo Alto to watch the game at one of the local watering holes - on California Sundays, non-alcoholics go to bars in the morning, too. Watching football in the morning isn't quite as relaxing when you're doing it alongside questionable characters at a place called "Old Pro."
It's almost sensory overload, in fact - while Sunday mornings are supposed to be "chill," as the kids say (or at least as they used to say in the early 2000s . . .), a morning at a sports bar is anything but. The air smells of stale beer from the night before, and of fresh beer from the breath of the guy next to you who inexplicably started drinking at 9:30 AM. People are cheering at different points from all over the bar as you frantically swivel your head around to try and figure out which team did something good, if that affects the Giants in some way, and whether or not there might be fantasy football implications. The chairs, tables and floors are always sticky, and the coffee served from a thermos in the corner is among the worst you'll ever drink in your life. If you were there to do anything else but watch some NFL football, you'd be miserable.
But that's the beauty of it - you are watching NFL football, and that makes everything more than tolerable. When the games are going well and your team's playing well (like the Giants did in defeating the Lions at home on Sunday), you really get into the sports bar experience. Suddenly the smell's not so bad; instead, it's a reminder of sports and masculinity and fits perfectly with the plethora of beer commercials popping up on screens all over the bar. The sticky chairs and floors remind you of the seats and concourses at Giants Stadium, and the annoying fans make you feel like you're watching your team play live in a hostile road environment. In short, it's actually pretty fun.
From now on, I'm going to try and give the morning sports bar experience a fair shot to earn my admiration. Since I'm going to be living in California for at least another NFL season-and-a-half and can't get DirecTV, I don't really have much of a choice.
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