Monday March Madness

Except that it’s actually April. Tonight is still the championship game in college basketball, and with a Big 12 team in the final–Kansas–against a southern team–Memphis–and the game being played locally–San Antonio–I’m guessing tonight will be a busy night in the sports bars.

Strangely enough, downtown/warehouse district sports bar Ringers abruptly closed its doors last month. Its website is still live, like an eery vestige to a life taken too soon (maybe I’m taking that too seriously). Rumors are swirling about how the owner didn’t even tell his employees he was closing shop, he just chained the doors shut and that was that. Classy, sports-loving Austinites still puzzle over how the only place to watch a game downtown and not feel like you’re still in college at Cain and Abel’s could possibly close.

In any case, it leaves just two downtown-ish venues for watching the game tonight: Third Base and The Tavern. I prefer the Tav, but it’s on 12th and Lamar, which isn’t quite downtown. And it looks like my north-dwelling friends are going to ask me to come up to Sam’s Boat for crawfish and sports, not a bad combo. Although I’d probably prefer the airy outdoors and people-watching at Doc’s, I can’t blame the northerners for not wanting to drive that far south.

3 Comments to “Monday March Madness”

  1. Just stumbled on to your blog today for the first time. I’ll be sure to use it for things to do when I move back to Austin in a couple of weeks.

    BTW, Ringers closed for two reasons…..A)the food was horrible, B)drinks were overpriced. I never knew why a Warehouse District sports bar would charge 4 bucks for a Lonestar. I guess no one else knew either.

    Have a great day!!!!!

    Patrick

  2. Hey Patrick! Glad you found the blog. Word on the street is that the owner didn’t pay his taxes for three years and the IRS finally caught on … while I agree the food was pretty bad and the drinks pretty pricey, Ringers did have a primo spot downtown in the Warehouse District where bars can get away with charging more. Anyway, welcome back to Austin!

  3. The location was primo, but not necessarily for a sports bar. Red Fez and Whiskey Bar are just down the road and are also overpriced, but they have/had the “swanky” vibe going. Ringers didn’t. Nighty night

    Patrick

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 63 other followers