Bar Guide 2015: Six Very Different Portland Sports Bars

Rip City, babe.

YURS

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Yur's 

717 NW 16th Ave., 224-0160.

Yur's is a beautiful example of adaptability, having gone in recent years from resolute cabbie bar to unwitting PNCA after-class slum to, lately, one of the more laid-back sports dives around, with a big ol' screen in the back, pitchers for sale and a side room that looks like the den of your brother-in-law's house, complete with coffee table and couch. Not far from the Timbers or the day-drinker hellscape of Northwest 21st Avenue, dirt-cheap Yur's projects a comparative stately dignity.


Blitz Ladd

2239 SE 11th Ave., 236-3592, blitzladd.com.

Blitz Ladd is in many ways Portland's best sports bar, a labyrinth of big screens, couches, stools and picnic tables fueled by a better-than-respectable draft list and a killer club sandwich, not to mention shuffleboard and a weird skee-ball/Pop-a-Shot hybrid called Basket Fever. It's also the unofficial home of Cleveland sports fans, but nobody's perfect.


The Fields

1139 NW 11th Ave., 841-6601, thefieldspdx.com.

Picture a sports bar in the Pearl. OK, now add polenta fries and wine stems and more flat-screen TVs than you even had in your head, and you've got a game plan for the Fields. But say what you will about the traditional sports-bar fetish for beer neon, burgers and cheap pitchers: This is a sports bar truly made for its neighborhood. Which is what a sports bar is, right? A place to watch the game with your neighbors, over kale and a pinot?


4-4-2

1739 SE Hawthorne Blvd., 238-3693, 442soccerbar.com.

There are many homes of soccer in Portland—many determined by geography, like the Bitter End, the Civic Taproom, and the baseball-named Cheerful Bullpen—but none believes so truly as 4-4-2, owned by a former league soccer player from Bosnia and home to the most rabid Timbers, Barca and especially Bosnian soccer fans in the city.


Claudia's

3006 SE Hawthorne Blvd., 232-1744, claudiaspub.com. 

Some sports bars are an ode to themselves as much as the game, a monument to the high life as advertised only by Miller. Claudia's is almost 60 years old and nowhere near retiring, with barstools that look like thrones and pool tables that anoint kings, semi-licit-looking poker games and a wall of TVs showing American-made games for the common man. Ah, Claudia's.


Beulahland

118 NE 28th Ave., 235-2794, beulahlandpdx.com. 

Beulahland is a punk-rock dive that turns—with the speed of a costume change—into a sports bar in which only Portland and RuPaul "drag racing" exist, a tattoo-heavy, stocking-cap happy neighborhood dive with a Blazers and Timbers fetish that goes deeper than the river, projected on a big screen that rolls down, in a side room that fills in an hour before each game or match.

WWeek 2015

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