Where Football Comes To A Head

On the night before, the night after or the afternoon of a college football game in which your feelings are involved, you don't want to go to just any tavern. You want to go to one where the patrons are as caught up in the game as you are. As can be seen on the preceding pages, such watering holes come in no special form, ranging, as they do, from a rambling roadhouse like the Alpine Beer Garden near Stanford, with horses tethered out front and al fresco tables in back, to a boisterous two-story hangout like the Alumni Club of Notre Dame (the "Senior Bar"), located just across a parking lot from Notre Dame Stadium. In many ways typical of these diverse establishments is Manuel's Tavern in Atlanta.

Established in 1956, Manuel's stands in a nondescript neighborhood handy to several colleges. There is the old terrazzo-floored barroom proper, whose booths have been worn at appropriate spots by thousands of elbows; there are two newer adjoining rooms for the overflow; and there is a chamber where pinball machines flash and jangle. Throughout there is personality.

You can't really say, "If these old walls could talk..." about the walls in Manuel's, because they do talk. Warm inscriptions shine from photographs of Hubert Humphrey and Henry Aaron. A framed poem points out, at some length, that the horse, the frog and various other non-imbibing members of the animal kingdom live much shorter lives than Man, who drinks. A sign says, IF YOU'RE DRINKING TO FORGET, PLEASE PAY IN ADVANCE. And behind the bar hangs a message from the proprietor: ANYBODY DON'T LIKE THIS LIFE IS CRAZY—MALOOF.

Manuel Maloof is a Lebanese saloonkeeper son of a Lebanese saloonkeeper. He is a diehard fan of the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets. He is an elected De Kalb county commissioner. He is a swarthy, lumpy figure who exudes a brooding, common-man-with-more-sense-than-the-fancy-guys authority. "I guess some people just weren't born to wear teeth," he said resignedly once when the choppers he had bought to wear while campaigning on TV were bothering him. Manuel was born to run a bar, specifically the kind of bar where people from all walks get together and exchange views. On football-weekend nights, however, the activity in Manuel's is beyond discussion.

"Those are the only nights I allow singing in the place," he says. "I allow it because I can't stop it."

The carved wood bar and the find-out-your-biorhythms machine and the stool made of crushed together beer cans and the pictures of Manuel's heroes (Churchill, FDR, the Kennedys and Jimmy Carter) resound to the strains of Rambling Wreck from Georgia Tech, Glory (to Old Georgia) and other college songs. Not to mention college yells.

"A friend of mine named Jimmy Rogers, a steward on an oil tanker, would always get here for the Auburn-Tech game," Maloof says. "He's dead now, but no matter where his tanker was in the world, he'd make it to the game somehow, and afterwards he'd be in here yelling. I never in my life heard anybody holler 'War Eagle' like him. He could holler the greatest 'War Eagle' that there ever was.

"One year the game was in the mud, and one of their boys kicked a field goal to beat us. Lord God, we was all soaking wet. We come in here, and Jimmy just assumed he could drown us all out with that yell. I just came back at him with my 'Go Yellow Jackets!' The whole store was waiting to see who was going to stop hollering first. The only time I ever saw him put down, and I was the one who did it.

"I never went to Tech. I went to the Army instead. I guess it's something a psychologist could take apart, but when I was a kid everybody had a team, and Tech was mine, and it always will be till I die. And I don't see anything very wrong with it."

A lot of his patrons do, however. "We're primarily a Georgia place," Maloof sighs. Even Manuel's brother Robert, who tends bar, is a Georgia fan. "The worst thing is after a Tech-Georgia game when Tech loses," Manuel says. "I don't know what it is, but I can't stand for Tech to lose. If we're in here watching it on television and people start rooting against Tech, I've been known to throw 'em out. Of course, if Georgia loses, we notice a striking decline of business. We have to go and ferret out those Georgia fans."