Badgers-UCLA Kickoff Pushes Three Waukesha Bars Into 'Unprecedented' Early Openings

WAUKESHA — Three Waukesha bars will open hours earlier than their usual Saturday schedules this weekend to accommodate the Wisconsin Badgers' 4:30 p.m. kickoff against No. 12 UCLA, a scheduling quirk owners say has nothing to do with the game itself and everything to do with the six hours of pregame television, food prep, and seating logistics that now precede it.

Clancy's Corner on White Rock Avenue will unlock its doors at 10:30 a.m., owner Pat Clancy said, the earliest the bar has opened on a football Saturday in the 31 years he's owned it. The Strike Zone Pub on Sunset Drive follows at 11 a.m., and Dugout Tavern on Grand Avenue, which normally doesn't unlock before 3 p.m. on a non-Packers Saturday, will open at noon.

Clancy said he arrived at the decision Tuesday after counting, on a legal pad he keeps by the register for exactly this purpose, fourteen separate customer requests for a Pacific-time kickoff watch party since Monday. "Normally I get maybe two requests for an early open, and one of them is a guy who just wants coffee," Clancy said. "Fourteen is not a request anymore. Fourteen is a mandate."

The six-hour math

Clancy said the 10:30 a.m. time wasn't chosen to coincide with the kickoff itself but to leave what he called "a full pregame runway" before the 4:30 p.m. start, including a breakfast menu he is extending for the first time past its usual 11 a.m. cutoff. Nance Dobrowski, 52, who owns the Strike Zone Pub, said she settled on 11 a.m. after a regular pointed out that a 4:30 kickoff with a likely finish past 7 p.m. meant some patrons would be ordering a fifth or sixth round well into what she called "dinner territory," and she wanted the kitchen staffed for it from the start rather than scrambling at 2 p.m.

"I've done early opens for playoff games before. I have never done an early open for a game that doesn't even start until the sun's going down out here. That's a California problem showing up on my doorstep."

— Nance Dobrowski, owner, Strike Zone Pub, 52

Dobrowski said she has reserved eleven of her eighteen bar stools in advance for a group of Badgers alumni who called ahead, a first for the Strike Zone Pub, which does not otherwise take stool reservations.

Dugout Tavern's notepad returns

At Dugout Tavern, owner Rick Holmstrom said he had declared the bar's bank of eight televisions settled business two weeks ago when he committed all of them to the World Series, retiring the notepad he'd used all September to track complaints about screen allocation between the Brewers and the Packers. The Badgers-UCLA kickoff, he said, has reopened the notepad for a third time this fall.

"I said nothing was left to tally. I lied. There's a Badgers column now," Holmstrom said. Holmstrom said he will dedicate banks one through four to the World Series and banks five through eight to the Badgers game starting at noon, a split he described as "the bank six solution, just inverted and with worse odds of surviving the night."

Holmstrom's noon opening was delayed by roughly twenty minutes Saturday morning after the bar's beer delivery truck missed its turn onto Grand Avenue twice navigating the downtown one-way grid and was then held another eleven minutes by a freight train stopped, not moving, across the Broadway crossing. Holmstrom said the driver eventually found the loading dock by approaching from the south side, though he declined to say whether anyone had mentioned the Newhall Avenue underpass to him beforehand.

Patrons planning the whole day

Dale Tackett, 58, a Dugout Tavern regular who has appeared in this paper's coverage of the bar's television arrangements before, said he plans to arrive at noon and remain through the game's expected conclusion around 7 p.m., a stretch he is treating as a single continuous sitting rather than two separate visits. "I'm not leaving and coming back. That's for people who have somewhere else to be," Tackett said.

Clancy said he expects Clancy's Corner to clear out by early afternoon and refill for a second, louder crowd closer to kickoff, and that he has told his two bartenders to plan for a lunch rush that, for the first time in the bar's history, will consist entirely of people who ordered the same thing: a Bloody Mary and an order of cheese curds, no substitutions requested so far.

All three owners said they expect to return to normal Saturday hours next week, regardless of Saturday's result, though Holmstrom said the notepad is staying out through the end of football season "just in case."