It’s a busy weekday night at the G.O.A.T., a two-level sports bar in the heart of Clarendon that opened last year. More than 50 high-definition televisions, including a wall-sized one that resembles a movie screen, are showing just about every athletic competition available. The overhead sound system plays a propulsive Ibiza beat, creating an up-tempo yet chill vibe.
Upstairs, members of an amateur bocce league roll balls on long strips of green plastic AstroTurf in the back lounge, while in the front lounge a gaggle of millennials celebrate something with toasts and shots. Elsewhere in the room, scattered couples enjoy dinner at high-top tables.
Amid this lively throng is Michael Gary O’Harro, who takes it all in and, when asked, gives a considered opinion between bites of a sizeable prime rib.
“This is a nice place,” he concludes. “I like it. The food is excellent. They do a good job.”
But?
“This isn’t how I remember a sports bar,” he says. “This would be a great place to watch a game, but it’s more of a high-tech restaurant.”
O’Harro should know what makes a sports bar: In 1983, in an unused building located down a 148-foot alley in Georgetown, O’Harro and his partner Jim Desmond opened a small nightclub called Champions.
They outfitted the walls with authentic sports memorabilia and put two black and white televisions on shelves over the bar, tuned to whatever game happened to be on TV. It was the country’s first sports bar.
“I thought, ‘What do people like most?’ Religion and sports,” O’Harro says. “And I didn’t want to build a church.”
The key to Champions, he says, was that the memorabilia enshrined on the walls took in all sports, not just one. A football bar would have folded by the time the season was over. But a sports bar, with posters, framed autographed photos and sports gear, could draw a crowd year-round.
In short time, Champions was not just the hottest bar in the Washington region, it was making national headlines thanks to O’Harro’s relentless creative promotions of the club. Because of its inescapable reputation, Playboy magazine included it in its 1984 and 1985 surveys of the country’s best singles clubs.
When O’Harro, at age 51, finally sold the business to Marriott Corporation there were 24 Champions sports bars around the world that he either owned, franchised or had a hand in—as well as thousands of other bars with TVs tuned to new broadcast entities such as Home Team Sports and ESPN, calling themselves sports bars.
The sports bar format, as evidenced by the new G.O.A.T., remains a nightlife mainstay 35 years later. ESPN declared the creation of Champions No. 79 in its ranking of the “100 Biggest Innovations” in sports.
It would be legacy enough to be known forever as the Father of Sports Bars, as he is, but O’Harro, now a fit and trim 78, did two other remarkable things before creating the sports bar industry.
“When I tell my story, nobody believes it,” he says. “It’s inconceivable these things would happen in Washington, D.C.”
“These things” are culture-shifting, landmark firsts: the first singles bar and the first disco. O’Harro has hundreds of ring binders full of newspaper and magazine clippings documenting the events, neatly labeled and filed away in closets in the Arlington house he’s lived in since 1977.
In 1964, O’Harro, then a lieutenant junior grade in the Navy, began hosting not-for-profit Friday night parties at Arlington’s Knights of Columbus Hall, under the imprimatur of Junior Officers and Professional Association (JOPA). To get around Virginia’s archaic alcohol laws, JOPA operated as a private club.
“We had a couple of rules,” he says. “Men paid $3 to belong to the club, women just had to be women, and you had to be 21 to 35 years of age. And you had to be single.”
When the parties became so big, often with thousands in attendance at various venues, and so frequent, O’Harro and Desmond decided to make it a business. Gentlemen II nightclub is recognized as the first stand-alone singles club.
Gentlemen II gave others the idea to open singles bars, and a new industry was created. In a few years, with the market diluted and the fun becoming more like work, O’Harro decided to exit the business and go to Europe. When he returned three years later in 1973, there was a new format of music afoot: disco.
In 1975 he opened Tramp’s, a cavernous room in Northwest Washington boasting a vast dance floor and a disc jockey booth, novel at the time. Tramp’s opened two years before the most famous disco, New York’s Studio 54. In fact, Steve Rubell, who opened Studio 54 in 1977, asked O’Harro to consult on his club.
As a measure of its popularity, the U.S. Olympic Committee recreated a federally funded Tramp’s Discothèque in the Olympic Village at the Lake Placid Games in 1980 so the athletes could shake their booties when not competing. People magazine profiled the glamour of the club in 1976, not coincidentally the same year O’Harro met Linda Roth, a recent college graduate who stopped by the club to apply as a manager of Tramp’s.
“But he said, ‘No, we’re starting the International Discothèque Association and you’re going to write the newsletter,’” Roth recalls. “That’s Michael. He gets right into it.”
To bring real heat to the club, O’Harro and Roth, who eventually started her own Linda Roth Associates hospitality public relations agency, designed promotions intended to not only attract crowds but to make an imprint on the city’s entertainment landscape. Celebrities were key and Roth was tasked with making sure Elizabeth Taylor, astronauts, soccer hero Pelé and Won Ton Ton the wonder dog knew where the club was. O’Harro cultivated relationships with gossip columnists and reporters who came to count on him as a source.
“I tell people I graduated from the Michael O’Harro School of Public Relations and Promotions,” Roth says. “He challenged me, and that’s what you need in a mentor, someone who teaches you there’s no such thing as too much calculated risk.”
Thanks to the success of Tramp’s, O’Harro came to be known as the Prince of Discos. He’s in the Disco Hall of Fame (it’s a real thing) and the Nightclub and Bar Hall of Fame.
In no time, Tramp’s, like Gentlemen II before it, created an industry that came to overpopulate the market. “There’s wasn’t just one guy opening a disco, it was every Chinese restaurant turning into a disco for the weekend. Every Holiday Inn put a DJ in the lounge and called it a disco,” O’Harro says. “There were hundreds of discos overnight.”
Once again, fun became more like work, so he sold his interest and went to Hollywood to try his hand at acting and modeling. When that proved to be more involved than he liked, O’Harro returned to Arlington four years later and created the sports bar.
Shortly after Champions opened in 1983, Playboy, then at a circulatory and culturally influential peak, included the club in a national survey of the hottest singles bars in the country. “That was a big break,” O’Harro says. “That really put us on the map.”
“The same name kept popping up,” says Bruce Kluger, the former senior editor at the magazine who conducted the survey. “I just kept hearing about it with everyone in Washington I spoke to.”
Intrigued, he came down from New York to see the club for himself. “What I liked about it was it wasn’t your typical ferns-and-wood-panel club,” he recalls. As for his impression of the owner, O’Harro, Kluger says, “the cynical side of me tried to resist” his charms. But eventually he realized O’Harro “lives up to the hype he created. And he was a walking, talking billboard for all-things Michael O’Harro. But he delivered the goods on his promises.”
In typical O’Harro fashion, Kluger says, O’Harro convinced Playboy’s management to let him host the launch party at Champions for the 1984 issue with the hottest-singles-club survey in it.
“What did Playboy have to lose?” says Kluger, who is now an author and on the board of contributors to USA Today. “It was genius.”
“He really cared about his customers,” Kluger adds. “And Michael was unabashed about being the King of Nightlife. But he had this gentlemanly gratitude for his good fortune, and I find that touching.”
As with Tramp’s before it, daily promotions were essential to the success of Champions, and O’Harro and his team, including Roth, upped the ante. Each morning at 9:30, he and his brain trust would concoct that night or week’s promotions, which included crowd-generating political look-alike contests, barstool basketball, celebrity bartenders and appearances by athletes, particularly Washington Redskins.
“In the history of the Redskins they’ve won three Super Bowls,” O’Harro says. “I owned Champions from 1983 to 1991 and they’ve never been back to the Super Bowl since. We were lucky for the Redskins, and the Redskins were lucky for us.”
As the Champions franchise proliferated, other cities adopted the sports bar as their own, and that meant the local teams flocked to them as well. Because of the popularity with athletes, O’Harro was the first non-player inducted as an honorary member of the National Football League Players Association.
O’Harro retired at 51, after selling Champions to Marriott 27 years ago. At 78, O’Harro could easily pass for someone in their 50s. He dresses tastefully, generally in sleek jeans, cowboy boots and shirts and jackets that flatter his lean frame. His enviable complexion is the result of clean living and plenty of sleep, including a daily nap that he sometimes announces on his Facebook page, where he also dispenses sage life advice and jokes, and posts photos from his career as an impresario.
He works out three hours a day at the nearby Gold’s Gym, where he occasionally draws the attention of women who might want to get to know him. But he’s not interested. “I’m never going to be anybody’s sugar daddy,” he says.
O’Harro is a life-long bachelor and a proponent of singlehood as a lifestyle choice. He was known for dating beauty contest winners, fashion models and actresses and at one point was labeled in the press as “Washington’s Hugh Hefner.” “I haven’t left a trail of broken hearts,” he says in retrospect. “I was always honest and treated them with respect. Some women from my past want to renew friendships. But I’m not interested. I like being alone, I like doing what I want to do.
“Most women I know wouldn’t want to watch 160 Nationals baseball games a year, or stay up until 11 to watch Arizona sports from Tucson.” (O’Harro graduated from Arizona State University and is a loyal supporter.) “I’m alone, but I’m not lonely,” he says. “I sleep well at night knowing I have friends that care about me. I have 2,500 friends on Facebook and most of them are in this area. It’s nice to be thought about, and that suits me fine.”
As a result of lifetime bachelorhood, O’Harro’s house is a wonderland of masculinity; a loft-style, three-level A-frame filled quite literally to the rafters with … stuff. It’s a carefully cultivated personal museum of collections of pop kitsch and retro objets d’art. Everywhere you look there is something to see, except for a feminine touch.
His collection of vintage space toys—appraised at a quarter of a million dollars—is on display at the Smithsonian’s Udvar-Hazy Center, although his extremely rare, 1934 tin Buck Rogers Rocket Police Patrol spaceship has been at the Air & Space Museum in Washington since 1993.
“Michael collected baseball cards,” Roth says. “But he never played with them like a lot of kids do, and he had a complete set that he’d been collecting since childhood. So when he went to sell them, they were in mint condition, all of them. No one had ever seen a collection like that.”
O’Harro doesn’t have a cleaning service; he doesn’t like people handling his things, so he dusts, vacuums and polishes everything himself. One visitor left a thumbprint on a Samurai sword blade that bugs him years later.
Outside, in the covered garage, there are four collectible cars, down from nine, that he drives to the gym: a 1935 Cadillac, a 1935 Chevy hot rod with a Corvette engine, a 1957 Thunderbird (his college car) and a 1994 Viper formerly owned by Redskin quarterback legend Sonny Jurgensen.
Champions closed in 2002, but its spirit lives on in thousands of sports bars around the world. But to get an idea of what the first iteration of O’Harro’s Champions looked like we paid a visit to the Crystal City Sports Pub on South 23rd Street in Arlington. Nearly every square inch of the three-story, TV screen-laden family restaurant and bar has a vintage poster, photo or framed sports novelty screwed into the wall.
Not only are all the items from O’Harro’s personal Champions collection, but he hung them himself. “I like doing that,” he says as we take a tour of the bustling bar. “I like making sure there aren’t too many baseball ones near each other, things like that.”
As we eventually reach the third floor we stop in front of one of the only non-sports posters in the entire building. It’s a photograph of a dapper man in a tweed coat and flat cap, his jodhpur-clad foot on the bumper of a silver Bentley, a glass of Champagne aloft in his hand and a riding crop and gloves in the other.
In a large, post-modern font the words “Poverty Sucks” hover dramatically over the image. The photo was taken in 1982 in front of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, which adds to the intended irony.
The model is Michael Gary O’Harro.
The “Poverty Sucks” poster has sold some 5 million copies, he estimates. “It was a spoof, it just worked,” he says, adding that it was his Bentley in the photo.
“There are two posters I can think of that are the most famous posters of their time,” says Kluger. “One is the famous one with Farrah Fawcett in that red swimsuit and the other is Michael O’Harro’s ‘Poverty Sucks’ poster. If Farrah was the queen of posters, O’Harro was the king. That poster was everywhere.”
O’Harro is asked if there are any other nightlife concepts that are yet to be devised. In other words, does he have a fourth new industry up his sleeve?
“I’m sure there is,” he says. “I’d have to research it if I was interested in doing it again. But I’m not.”