Brewers' Playoff Run Forces Dugout Tavern To Split Screens With Packers

WAUKESHA — For the first time since the 2016 Packers playoff run, a television inside Dugout Tavern on Grand Avenue is not showing the Green Bay Packers, and the bar's owner says he has the letters to prove people noticed.

Rick Holmstrom, 47, who has owned the tavern for eleven years, said he made the call last Tuesday to dedicate one of the bar's six TV banks, the one closest to the dartboards, to Milwaukee Brewers playoff baseball. The Brewers finished the regular season 103-59, the best record in the National League, and enter October as the NL's top seed.

"Six screens, one Brewers game, that's the whole ask," Holmstrom said. "I did not think that was a big ask."

Three regulars disagreed in writing. Holmstrom said he received two notes left under the register and one longer letter, folded into thirds and sealed with a piece of packing tape, from a man who identified himself only as a Friday-night regular of nine years.

The letter

The sealed letter, which Holmstrom shared with a reporter on the condition that the author not be named, argued that the bar had been "a Packers house since the Favre years" and that baseball, in the author's words, "does not belong on bank six, bank four, or any bank." The letter proposed a compromise television mounted above the men's-room doorway, a location Holmstrom said carries a 30-degree viewing angle and has been unused since a 2019 karaoke machine was removed.

Holmstrom declined the men's-room proposal. He said bank six will stay on the Brewers through the end of their playoff run, win or lose, and that the other five banks remain Packers-only, including during any simultaneous kickoff.

"I've got regulars who've sat in the same stool through four different owners of this place. I'm not telling them to find a new bar. I'm telling them to look fifteen feet to the left."

— Rick Holmstrom, owner, Dugout Tavern

Wednesday's collision

The dispute intensifies Wednesday night. Game 4 of the NLDS, if necessary, is scheduled to air at 9 p.m. Eastern, the same window as a Packers watch party the tavern has advertised in its front window for two weeks with a hand-lettered sign reading "WATCH PARTY WED - BIG SCREEN - WEAR GREEN."

Holmstrom said the watch party sign predates the Brewers' scheduling conflict and will not be taken down, since the bar's largest screen, a 98-inch unit mounted above the shuffleboard table, will remain on the Packers broadcast regardless of what the Brewers are doing on bank six that night.

Dale Tackett, 58, a regular who said he has not missed a Packers home-opener watch party at Dugout since 2011, called the arrangement "workable, barely." Tackett said he plans to station himself at a stool with sightlines to both banks and alternate his attention "like a tennis match, except one of the players is wearing green and gold and the other one is wearing navy and I don't care about."

Not every regular is opposed. Carol Jarocki, 39, said she has been quietly rooting for the Brewers all season and welcomed the change, though she acknowledged doing so only after confirming with Holmstrom that her usual stool, third from the taps, maintains a direct line of sight to bank six.

A six-screen compromise

Holmstrom said he is tracking the complaint-to-compliment ratio on a notepad kept behind the bar and will revisit the one-screen arrangement if the Brewers advance past the NLDS, though he declined to say in which direction the policy might move. He added that the men's-room television proposal has not been entirely ruled out for football's own overflow needs during a potential Packers-Brewers scheduling collision in January, should both teams still be playing.

For now, bank six stays on baseball, the dartboard crowd has adjusted its throwing lanes around a slightly larger audience, and the sealed letter remains taped, unopened response pending, to the underside of the register drawer.