Spice Up Your Summer Olympics at a Sports Bar

While in Italy 12 summers ago, I found that the sizzling afternoons often attracted locals indoors as they spent hours huddled around a single TV set, anticipating and reacting emphatically to each crucial moment of the Summer Olympics.

In America, such fanaticism is familiar yet somewhat segregated according to individual preference, save for national level events like the Super Bowl, which many still choose to watch in the comfort of their homes.

Since airfares to London are hardly affordable for most, there’s something to be said for leaving the house this week to experience the year’s Summer Olympics vicariously through a public TV and root for your team in the stimulating company of others.

A friend of mine recently came back from the new Overtime Bar on 6th Ave, and told me that the drinks were cheap, and the food was “greasy and good,” but most notably, the bar bolsters sports enthusiasm with its portraits of local sports heroes and a centrally located big-screen TV for watching standout games of the year.

[Besides hamburgers, french fries, beer and other staples of the American palate, the enormous HD screens, cheap drinks, greasy food, and communal sports-watching clientele of sports bars make them likely locations for athletic enthusiasm and patriotic pride.]

As the week carries on, you may find that while a 6th Avenue sports bar may not be the Olympic arena itself nor one of London’s seedy, boisterous pubs filled to the brim with enthused locals, it offers you the closest experience to actually being there by coming together with other Tacomans to pool your excitement rather than isolating it at home.

When you walk into a room with a single person watching sports on TV, it’s rare that you’ll find them jumping, hollering, or commenting on the players’ performance without someone to listen.

This is because excitement is fundamentally contagious, as I’ve seen at home during local football games, abroad in Italy and everywhere else that watching sporting events such as the Olympics brings people together from all over the world for a healthy dose of competition.

So where’s a place to find that kind of excitement for the Olympics? Maybe right here in Tacoma.

What’s your favorite?