Where everyone knows your game

One of the many treats of Deadspin are the weekly updates from David Hirshey “the closer” and rather enthusiastic Arsenal fan.  His tales of the Kinsale Tavern in NYC on weekend mornings watching the EPL are always good for a laugh or two as well as a knowing nod.  Maybe they even give the mainstream Deadspin readers a taste for the beautiful game. 

You know, when he makes comments like these:

Kickoff for what the British papers were hyping as Grand Slam Sunday, because it involved The Big Four of ManU, Liverpool, Arsenal and Chelsea and was at 8:30 — or to put it another way, three and a half hours before any alcohol could be served at the bar.  Imagine how frustrating it must have been to have a sweating beer tap a few tantalizing inches in front of you and realizing that if you reached over and yanked on it before NOON, you’d pull away a bloody stump. Yet all the deprivations of sleep and alcohol would have been worth it if the soccer on view hadn’t been so godawful.

Could there have been a more pathetic looking figure among the Kinsale mob than RZM? Even the shmuck at the end of the bar in a throwback Csonka jersey who tried to watch that other football game in London yesterday could at least delude himself that his 0-8 team once had a proud history. Poor RZM had nothing other than his pint of Guinness and the look of a man who had endured a double colonoscopy.

When I walked into Kinsale Tavern on Saturday morning at 8 a.m., the proprietor Pauline had the kind but concerned look of someone about to engage in an intervention. My initial thought was that she had caught wind of my insane plan for a 15-hour footy-watching drunkathlon and had decided it was a cry for help.

My version of the Kinsale is Summers, in Arlington, Virginia, just across the Potomac from DC.  I’ve been going there for about a decade now.  It’s a sports bar, sure, but it’s really that rarer gem in the U.S. — a soccer bar.  A place where soccerheads like me can gather where everyone knows the game. 

So here’s a tribute to Summers I wrote when I was living overseas…