Dreaming of a Green Super Bowl

Ben Fraiser is excited that the Jets made the playoffs. But as a co-owner of the Beach House, a popular sports bar on West Beech Street, he’s a bit bummed that Saturday’s Wild Card game against the Indianapolis Colts is scheduled for prime time.

Fraiser’s bar already hops each Saturday night with patrons who indulge his drink and live music. Tonight, though, alongside the sizable crowd that will undoubtedly gather to watch quarterbacks Mark Sanchez and Peyton Manning in a potential shoot out, Fraiser also has a birthday party booked for his backroom, which means limited seating for Jets fans.

“It’s going to be great, don’t get me wrong,” Fraiser said about the Saturday night game. “For ratings, it’s great, but from my perspective, it’s like having New Year’s Eve on a Friday night. You want New Year’s Eve on a Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday, to get that extra push.”  

Since a band can't play while the game is on, his strategy is to air the game but also have a DJ play music during the commercials and at halftime. “That way the DJ can keep the place going and also play to the birthday crowd,” he said.

Of course, business would be much better if the game were slated for 4 p.m. on Saturday, and ideal if it aired at the same hour on Sunday. But if the Colts lose tonight, as Fraiser prays they will, the Jets would then face their division rivals, the New England Patriots, next Sunday at 4 p.m., a perfect alignment of match-up and time slot.

“Regardless of the outcome of that game, that would be our New York Super Bowl,” Fraiser said. “It would just be unbelievable.”  

New York sports bar owners like Fraiser have it comparatively good. Their market offers two teams in each major sport. What’s best, of course, is if those teams are winners, and the deeper a New York team goes into the playoffs, especially in football, the more their fans come in to watch the games and enjoy their buffalo wings, sliders and beers.  

Either the Jets or Giants, or both teams together, have made the playoffs each year since 2004, and that means Long Beach bars rake in the bigger bucks.

“The impact that the Jets and Giants have on local businesses is incredible,” said Tom Corning, who has owned Minnesota’s on West Beech Street since 1994.

While Corning estimates that his business picks up about 50 percent when just one football team makes the post-season, Fraiser said that sales receipts skyrocket 75 percent when both the Jets and Giants are in.

Their most profitable games, of course, where when the Giants upset the undefeated New England Patriot in Super Bowl XLII, in Feb. 2008, and when the Jets made it to the AFC Championship game for the first time in 11 years last January. Corning believes last year's championship game was bigger money-maker at his bar than the Giants' Super Bowl, since Long Island is generally considered Jets Nation.

Corning grew up in Point Lookout when several Jets players, including Joe Klecko, Greg Buttle and Mark Gastineau, took up winter residence there when the team practiced at Hofstra during the 1980s, and Corning later worked at Buttle’s sports bar in East Meadow. While he still bleeds Jets’ green, as a New Yorker and a bar owner, he’s still disappointed that the Giants failed to make the playoffs this year.   

“The fact that the Giants were literally one quarter away from locking up the NFC East and two games later they are not even playing in the playoffs, it’s an unbelievable collapse,” he said. “But we’re so thankful the Jets are in.”