THE BEER BEAT: Football, how it used to be for me, why I seldom watch it at all -- and don't even mention those horrid beers.

(Part two of two ... part one is here)

In the first part of this Sunday morning mental exercise, as we await the games later today that will decide this year's Super Bowl contestants (I'll watch little if any of them), there is little in the way of righteous indignation to disrupt the medicinal effects of the coffee. It's more about weariness at the time elapsed, and wariness of those moments when I allow nostalgia to warp my discernment.

Unlike Kevin Turner's parent, it isn't easy for me to persist as a spectator, knowing what I know, and knowing it far less directly than them. On the other hand, slaughterhouse videos seem not to deter me from eating animal flesh. Perhaps football has come to symbolize those aspects of America that I fail to grasp and wish not to indulge, while baseball's analogies still resonate.

I wrote the following essay in 2014 and published it at the beer blog. How much do I miss those Sundays? A better question: Do I miss the person I was then? Now that's the real head-scratcher.

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Football, swill, brain death and the American Dream.

RING RING RING RING RING

“What the … ?”

(Old school, rotary dial – it was 1989, for chrissakes)

“Yeah.”

“We’re cooking and drinking.”

CLICK.

Translation at the speed of hangover …

This undoubtedly meant it was Sunday morning (who’d have known?) and the football games would be starting soon. Barr lived just a few miles away. It would have been senseless to call back.

So, I threw on some clothes, brushed my teeth and drove right over. The house smelled like chili, pre-game shows were blaring, and of course there wasn’t any beer.

That’s not quite true. There was beer, although far short of the amount needed to carry us through the entire day. Because Indiana prohibited carry-out beer on Sunday, the inevitable trip across the Sherman Minton to the Louisville's West End needed to come sooner rather than later, when highway driving would be inadvisable.

The really dumb thing about our Sunday beer shortages was their frequency. Most of the time, I’d have worked a Saturday shift at the liquor store, and it would have been easy for me to pick up a case of something/anything, receiving my employee discount on top of it.

But no; advance planning would have made far too much sense. Perhaps there was a secret, nostalgic enjoyment about these runs to Louisville, and actually we were reliving junior high school.

There we’d be, cruising down the Interstate, allowing the chili to simmer for another 35 minutes or so as we tried to time our arrival at the front door of the package store to the precise moment of its 1:00 p.m. opening time. Once inside, pushing past the crowds of fellow Hoosiers, the hunt for acceptable swill began in earnest.

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Kindly note that by this point in our drinking lives, we knew what good beer was; it’s just that we weren’t always interested in paying the price for it, especially when purchased in bulk during times when the hot pepper content of the chili threatened to render one’s taste buds null and void.

As celebrity chef David Chang recently observed in GQ, mass-market swill pairs with any food owing to its vigorously carbonated flavorlessness. But these were the days of $5.99-per-case Wiedemann and Top Hat, beers to which the words “benign” and “tasteless” seldom were attached. They had plenty of flavor, just the wrong kind, and consequently a process of thoughtful triage was required.

I’d witnessed it countless times while working at the liquor store. Standing in front of the glass door, we’d begin by eliminating the brands we couldn’t or wouldn’t stomach – essentially, all of them – before beginning Round Two by working backwards and nominating two or three of the least objectionable choices. Price points briefly were parsed, cash collected, and within minutes we were back in the car, pointed toward Indiana and safety.

Subsequently, those cryptic words from the telephone came vibrantly to life, usually achieving saturation around halftime of the afternoon game. The feast would continue into early evening, but because Sunday night football had yet to be invented, there was a two minute warning in the form of the weekly and obligatory viewing of 60 Minutes.

Maybe a final cigar … and the last dregs of a dirt cheap Schaefer.

By then, I’d have beered myself totally sober (or so came the slurred insistence), and would take the back road home. By Monday, almost all of it had been forgotten, making an encore performance the following Sunday all the more likely.

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Thinking back 25 or more years to those hours of chili, swill and football, it was all about the camaraderie with wonderful people, not specifically the cooking, drinking and watching. I miss it for that reason alone. Granted, the chili was good. The beer usually wasn’t, but what strikes me today is the football component of the equation, and the way times have changed for me.

We always used to blithely joke about the damage being done to our brains while watching football, never realizing that the carnage on the field was no laughing matter. Today, ignorance no longer constitutes an excuse.

I played football only briefly as a lad, and never was a diehard football fan. Twice I attended college football games, and both were utterly forgettable, not because of the quality of the games themselves, but reflecting my own level of inebriation.

Professional football always appealed to me more; even so, my attention span over the period since those halcyon Sunday couch residencies has waned steadily, to the point where in recent years, I've seldom seen more than a quarter or two of action prior to the playoffs. This year, I haven’t seen a single down, and probably won’t.

I’ve turned away from football because of the increasingly well-documented, regrettable, lifelong physical toll suffered by the players. It isn't just the professional game. The more I read about youth football injuries, the greater my disconnection. We begin to see difficult subsequent lives, erratic adulthoods, and eventual dementia in a different light, and it’s easier to look away – not from the sadly afflicted, but from the violence of the game itself.

The gladiator as metaphor stops being entertaining when the suffering and death are real, not just implied in a voice over.

And if it ever required so much good, bad or indifferent beer to fuel those entire days seated in front of the television, soused and insensate, screaming slogans and pumping fists … well, perhaps the memory of it also compels me to look away from the collisions in the modern coliseum.

Into yonder mirror.

Look, Ma -- it's that big tent with no good beer inside it.

It's called the Swill Unlimited Tent, right?

Or maybe I'm thinking of something else ...

In the early innings, craft beer is losing at Slugger Field.

At the Potable Curmudgeon, a report on the craft vs. crafty situation at Louisville Slugger Field for 2013. Hint: Craft is losing, and badly.

The Louisville Bats really must hate craft beer to marginalize it this way.

... It's just as sad a situation as during the last couple of years, with craft beer restricted to the virtual ghetto of the roasted peanut stand on the main concourse near section 115, with signage limited to table tents so as not to offend the behemoths who grease the wheels.

ON THE AVENUES: No country for principled men.

ON THE AVENUES: No country for principled men.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

Stagecraft is an essential component of the craft brewing business. If not, Dogfish Head’s Sam Calagione would be on the couch watching television, not gleefully hawking his wares on a television series like a modern day PT Barnum, and Jim “Sam Adams” Koch might finally retire that hoary, Horatio Alger shtick about vending cases from the trunk of his car.

I acknowledge the theatrical in my daily role as carnival barker for the New Albanian Brewing Company, and to vary the routine, I’ve found it quite useful lately to play against type – with one major exception, because my deep-seated aversion to mass-market lager in the form of world’s Buds, Coors and Millers remains wholly intact.

Even more so for their low-calorie, light-this-and-that bastardizations. How many times have perpetually timid palates begged and pleaded with me?

Roger, can’t you be realistic and compromise? C’mon, Rog, can’t you just agree that even if “real” craft beer is preferable, there are times when these nice, light, ice-cold barley pops really fill the bill?

Actually no, I still cannot sanction these detestable liquids, even if they started me down the path so many years ago. I cannot accept mass market swill, and I cannot condone what the planet’s monolithic brewing companies have done to the essence of beer and brewing. I have little interest in accepting the light, lighter and lightest beers they’ve devised as their chosen means of decimating beer’s diversity. My position is clear.

But what if my long encroaching cynicism at last compelled me to do exactly that, and issue an apologetic for the indefensible?

What if, while watching this week’s episode of Project Runway, a paper cup of white zinfandel in hand and a Rally’s dollar combo meal a mere arm’s length away, I suddenly elect to dispense with my pride, and climb aboard the Silver Bullet Express to Tasteless City?

A clue lies in use of the word “pride” itself, suggesting a possible course of rhetorical capitulation, because many of us recall pride being mentioned during certain Sunday sermons of remotest youth – the last time I ever went to church for any reason other than softball eligibility, organ concerts or weddings was prior to the age of ten – and pride long has been considered one of the 7 Deadly Sins.

It’s true that in the hands of a trained professional (pick me), this septet of intemperate emotions provides essential lessons for a life of sustained debauchery, but it takes experience of an entirely higher order to render them into theoretical, nudging, winking, facetious counterpoints.

Accordingly, I’ve managed the remarkable feat of staying awake while culling through the self-indulgent dross printed in dusty back issues of “Advertising Age” and “Beverage Dynamics,” and have identified 7 Deadly Reasons why a craft brewery actually SHOULD sell venal, industrial swill, as voiced by entirely fictitious owners and customers.

Wrath
I’m so goddamned tired of listening to Roger Baylor tell me what to drink, I could explode. He thinks he’s so smart for having a Lite Free Zone since 1994. I hate his guts, and that’s why I come to this brewpub here in Louisville, where I can look at the shiny brewery tanks while sipping on a triple-hopped Miller Lite, just to spite that bastard over in Indiana.

Greed
Our group of venture capitalists selected craft beer as a vehicle for the expansion of our investment portfolio precisely because the growth rate is so hopeful in these uncertain times. However, to ignore the huge segment of the marketplace occupied by light, low-calorie lager makes no sense from the perspective of our blushing, bottomed lines.

Sloth
Look, we could take time to educate the clientele about the beers we’re paying these crazy hippies to make, and probably win a few medals while we’re at it, but why waste the effort? Customers want the lowest common denominator: Light beer, some box wine and lots of diet coke – and they all get advertised in the media everywhere, all the time. After all, we’re a restaurant. We can’t turn anyone away, right?

Pride
My girlfriend heard about this brewery place from her brother’s wife, you know, she’s an architect and all uppity trendy and %^$, and now I’m sitting here looking at this beer list, and what the %$@* does any of it even mean – but I can’t possibly let her know that I’m a absolute, stereotypical dullard, seeing that’s no way to get a piece of ass … hey … wait, they have Miller Lite in cold-activated bottles! Hot damn. Whew. That was an awfully close call.

Lust
The red hot college chicks all hang out at trendy Bud Light bars, and without them for eye candy, we’ll lose all the male customers trying to escape the grim reality of their married, child-filled, workaday lives – and how can we expect them to find consolation in geeky concoctions like oyster stout and Belgian IPA? We need some buckets for those boobs – I mean, those longnecks.

Envy
Yes, I know: What we’re doing here is unique, and we’re a niche business with a promising growth curve and all that, but just once, wouldn’t you like to be Cheeseburger in Paradise, with all those nice fake trees and a gift card in every Wal-Mart from here to the Keys?

Gluttony
These barley pale hoppy black bock beers are so heavy. If I had me a good ol’ light beer right about now – well, they taste great AND they’re less filling, so there’s always room for that extra portion of gnarled goat gnocchi.