Where Everybody Knows Your Team » Brats & Beer

November 5, 2006
posted under: Badger bars, Billy’s, Blogs, Packer bars, TheWisconsinSportsBar

GBFan at The Wisconsin Sports Bar posted yesterday a request for help trying to locate Packer bars and Badger bars outside the state of Wisconsin. There are a lot of us ex-pat Midwesterners living in far flung corners of the country where the alternatives for watching the games are usually pretty grim. Either you brave the confines of some humongo sports bar where you have to put up with everyone else’s shit, or you stay safe at home and hope the game is on TV.

Here in Austin, we had a tough time finding a place to watch Packer games before Billy’s on Burnet opened. We went to one of the big sports bars around here for the season opener against Minnesota a couple years ago, and it turned into a nightmare. The place had four billion TV screens, but the only one showing the Green Bay game was outside on the rooftop. The glare from the sun was pretty annoying, but that was nothing compared to the douchebag Vikings fan that showed up wearing a Randy Moss jersey and purple Mardi Gras beads. Jesus, I just wanted to punch that guy after a while. I didn’t help neither that Green Bay lost to Minnesota that day.

There are a few lists out there already for Packer bars, though. The South End Zone maintains a list of places to watch Green Bay games that looks pretty comprehensive, and the Press-Gazette has a smaller list of Packer bars on their site. The Packers web site (packers.com) used to have a list of Packer bars, but it looks like it has disappeared after the big redesign this year. (UPDATE: Located the official Packer bar list from Packers.com. They seem to be hiding it in the gameday material now.)
I’m not aware of any such lists for Badger bars, though. If anyone has knowledge of one, you might want to pass that info along to help out other Badger fans. If there’s not one already, maybe a bunch of us could put our virtual heads together and create one. I think it would be a great resource for Badger Nation.