The eyes of Pubclub.com were upon Texas on the weekend of Sept. 24-25. The occasion – or excuse, if you will – was the UCLA-Texas football game. The excitement of spending three days – we arrived on a Thursday – was too much to ignore. For PubClub and Bruin fans, as well.
This is a party report of the Texas football experience.
UCLA always plays at least one strong road game a year. In 2009, it was Tennessee at Neyland Stadium. Bruin faithful like to experience the flavor and atmosphere of different colleges, so several thousand travel to the games. In the case of Texas, many just wanted to party in Austin which is, without question, one of America’s great towns. There’s 6th Street, with its three-block lineup of bars that bring out college students with ridiculous pricing like $1 beers and $2 drinks, to the more refined areas for working professionals such as 6th Street West.
Then there is the pre-game tailgate party and post-game celebration/drown the sorrows and blame the offensive coordinator bar blow-off talk.
Austin, it must be said, did not disappoint.
Well, for the most part. Thursday was fairly slow (by UT standards) on 6th Street. PubClub arrived in plenty of time for Happy Hour but there was little happening until nearly 11 p.m. When a few students did arrive to the bars, they were as difficult to talk to as California girls – something we came all the way to Austin to avoid! This certainly was not in character for a previous Austin experience.
PubClub also had a tasteless, useless “dinner” at a place that, on the outside, seemed to be a good choice. “Legendary” Tex-Mex a sign read outside of Chupacabra and it’s probably legendary all right because the salsa was flat in flavor, the chicken so bland it defies any further description and while the pork had potential, it was dry and what taste it offered was overwhelmed by a Texas-sized amount of sour cream. So basically there was no dinner.
Still, the beers were as little as a dollar at two of the most popular bars, The Library and The Aquarium.
The next day’s partying began at a great Austin bar a 15-minute (cab) ride from downtown. It’s an oasis – but not The Oasis – on Lake Austin called the Hula Hut. Right on the water, it’s a highly popular place for Happy Hour and weekends. A few drinks there turned into several drinks there. At night, we went to 6th West, a lineup of lounges and bars better suited to those with jobs rather than learning about jobs. We hit the hot trifecta: Star Bar, a lounge with a patio front and back and a lot of beautiful Texas girls in sexy skirts, Kung Fu Saloon, a more casual bar/lounge, and The Dogwood, a nearly-all-outdoor bar that had rocking music and rocking patrons.
Then it was game day! And in Austin that means getting to a campus bar, a place called Schoultz’s, 3 hours before kickoff. This is a German beer hall of sorts, with a large patio surrounded by two buildings with bars. It holds several hundred people and gets so packed there is a line to get inside one of its bars, even for those on the patio. Beers here are more expensive – $6 and $7 though they are 20 ounces – but for those without a tailgate to crash, it’s the pre-game place to party.
We walked the dozen blocks to the massive stadium, which was remolded only last year, and caught the band and cheerleaders entering the field through the tunnel (it’s at the Red McCombs Red Zone). In fact, the girls were posing for pictures in about as friendly a display of pre-game personality as their must be in all of college football.
UCLA, which can struggle to reach a respectable bowl – if making a bowl at all – always gets up for the big games and quite often, the Bruin fans return home with the satisfaction of an upset road win. In, fact, in the team’s last trip to Austin in 2007, UCLA whipped the Longhorns worse than any team in Texas history, 66-3. Remember the Alamo; heck, Texas fans were saying “remember 66-3!” wonder what they will be saying after THIS year? UCLA, two weeks removed from a 35-0 beating by Stanford at home, whipped No. 7 Texas 34-12.
Yet PubClub went to the University of Alabama and the desire to watch the Tide in a very difficult game at 10th-ranked Arkansas proved too much to overcome. So at halftime, after a walk around the inside edge of beautiful Memorial Stadium, it was back to Schoultz’s. Alabama was down 20-7 but the cute girls who had served beers loved PubClub and served beers at a discount (including throwing in a couple of freebies), a hot lady from Vanderbilt came in to root for the Tide and we celebrated as Bama made its fourth-quarter comeback. Soon, the place was filled with Longhorns, who had left their game early.
Eventually, the entire PubClub Party Group showed up and we were all amazed at how friendly the Texas folks were in defeat. They complimented UCLA and saved criticism for their team’s offensive coordinator. The loss did not stop them from drinking, that’s for sure. Oddly, UCLA fans were more in shock than were Texas fans; somehow the Longhorn faithful were almost expecting it, if not this week than another.
Later, on 6thStret, PubClub was standing by the bar at Austin’s spring break bar, the Dirty Rooster, when a girl climbed up the back of The Bartender (PubClub’s roving party animal and author of this blog) and hopped up on the bar. Seconds later she was joined by a half-dozen other girls and the place exploded. A female bartender then joined them and started spraying beer on everyone. This was like being in the winning locker room at the World Series.
The rest of 6th Street was going OFF, especially the upstairs balconies at Maggy Mays and the Blind Pig Pub.
So that’s a football weekend in Austin, another awesome experience in this totally fun Texas town.
Monday, September 27, 2010
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