Downtown Sports Bars Mired in Yuppiness
Seahawks Truck courtesy of Seattlest Flickr user Bernzilla
It took us almost four years to get the nerve up to dine at Fisher Plaza’s Sport restaurant. Any bar that close to Steve Pool and Fox Radio gives us pause. The fact that ABC has random video cameras hanging from the ceiling didn’t help either.
Sport subscribes to the Fox Sports Grill theory that any modern sports bar worth its weight in jojos must have an equal ratio of flat screens to tourists. Sport doesn’t feel like a Seattle-themed place because it isn’t. It could be in Dallas and you wouldn’t know the difference. We found the autographed Peyton Manning jersey in the main "booth" section much more impressive than the 4" flat screen TVs at every table. We were delighted to find we could manually switch the channel to Univision, which elicited a strange look from our server, who wasn’t accustomed to seeing four dudes spice up their mini pizzas and burgers with an afternoon telenovela when they could be obsessing over teenagers playing baseball like everybody else.
Sport happens to boast the most hyper-complicated football seniority seating program in Seattle. We were intimidated after the third paragraph, but it says something about rotating booths and $10 penalties per person for watching additional games. Apparently Sport is managed by the city council, because, after much confusion, we realized we would be paying extra for something we shouldn’t.
The wait staff wears jerseys, so it kind of has a Foot Locker vibe. But to be fair, the food is good by sports bar standards. Autographed sports paraphernalia from the past 70 years are sprinkled throughout the place not unlike a Hard Rock Café for ESPN junkies. Seattlest admits the autographed Babe Ruth ball is nothing to scoff at, but we couldn’t help but think that, if we had the money to open a sports bar, a poster of Shawn Kemp dunking would be mandatory. The picture of Gary Payton posing with some nerd was nice, but not nearly as cool as some vintage Seattle time capsule.
Our trip to Sport reaffirmed our belief that downtown Seattle has a definite shortage of legitimate Sea-Town-identified sports bars. Many of the ones we do have feel more like pretentious, yuppie, multi-screen TV boxes (that means you, Spitfire, with your "no ranch" snobbery and Fox Sports Grill—enough said) than bastions of Seattle nostalgia like they should.
