Legendary tales of winners and stars who shouted the bar
From Lady Gaga to winning punters and pollies, these generous souls have famously reached into deep pockets to celebrate successes — and lucky barflies have reaped the rewards.
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You can get it ridin’. You can get it slidin’. You can get it workin’ a plough.
But if you’re really lucky, you’ll get it when someone even luckier than you shouts the bar at your local.
That’s how all the new friends of one Melbourne punter got theirs the day after he won $252,371 for a $200 bet on the quadrella on Australian Guineas day at Flemington on Saturday, February 27.
His mate Darrin Dean, identifying the punter only as MM, tweeted that MM and his pals went out for drinks at a Williamstown venue the next day, confirming: “Honestly he shouted the whole suburb #fireball” when asked if MM bought the drinks.”
Here you go punters hip hooray for MM pic.twitter.com/lDpGVJrsec
— DJD (@DarrinJDean) February 27, 2021
The time-honoured tradition of shouting the bar is pretty common in punting circles.
Larrikin Sydney ad man and thoroughbred owner John Singleton is legendary for whetting the whistles of racegoers after a big victory, just as he did back in 2000 when Belle Du Jour stormed home to win the Golden Slipper that year.
Melbourne Cup-winning trainer Darren Weir put $5000 on the bar at Perth’s Ascot Racecourse after his charge, Stratum Star, won the $1 million Kingston Town Classic in December 2016.
And a South Australian man popped down the street on a Sunday in 2016 to buy a newspaper, and found he had won just over $1 million in the previous evening’s X-lotto draw.
What did he do next? He went straight down to his local, Willunga’s Alma Hotel, and bought a round for everyone there.
Swans star Buddy Franklin has promised to shout drinks if aptly named racehorse Shout The Bar wins the $5 million All-Star Mile at The Valley on Saturday.
The Sydney champion is backing the Gai Waterhouse-trained mare in the world’s richest mile race.
“There are so many horses from all around Australia and New Zealand in this race. Let’s all get behind Shout The Bar and no doubt, if it does ... win, I will be shouting the bar somewhere,” Franklin said last month.
WINNERS ARE GRINNERS
Comedian Matt Parkinson, now probably better known as Goliath on Seven Network quiz show The Chase Australia, took home all the cash and the prizes from the Sale of the Century showcase back in 1992 — and promptly put some of that cash jackpot over the front bar at the iconic Esplanade Hotel in St Kilda to celebrate his big win.
They might mind the government purse strings, but our treasurers aren’t averse to buying the drinks in times of celebration either.
Federal Treasurer Josh Frydenberg pulled a few of the beers himself when he fulfilled an election promise to shout the bar at the Auburn Bowls Club in his Kooyong electorate if he won the seat again in the 2019 federal election.
And in 2016, his Victorian Government counterpart Tim Pallas boasted of shouting the bar when his beloved Doggies broke their 62-year grand final drought.
Pollies picking up the bar tab goes back a lot further than Frydenberg and Pallas in political circles, though.
George Washington’s booze-up to celebrate his move from military to political life in 1789 and the completion of the soon-to-be-signed US Constitution, which he headed up, was a doozy.
General Washington, with a party of about 55 officers and wellwishers, partied at the City Tavern in Philadelphia and Washington covered the tab for food, drinks and broken glasses that was worth about USD$18,000 (AUD$23,422) today.
Back in 1984, then-PM Bob Hawke shouted the bar at the Labor Party-owned Colac Hotel during an unscheduled stop on his visit to Adelaide.
BIG BAR SHOUTERS
Big celebrities have been known to put their hands in their pockets to buy a round for old friends and new.
Star Croatian striker Mario Mandzukic paid the bar tab for people in his home town, Slavonski Brod, who gathered at a football ground to watch on the big screen as Croatia played Russia to make the football World Cup semi-finals in 2018.
Mandzukic spent more than 25,000 Croatian kuna (more than AUD$5100) to shout his home town compatriots.
Lady Gaga, in the UK on her Monster Ball US tour in 2010, showed no poker face in expressing her delight during a night out at Birmingham’s Prince of Wales Hotel, where she sat on whiskey and Diet Cokes for a couple of hours, then shouted the entire pub and left a big tip for the folks behind the jump.
In a Pub in England, ruining bar napkins with lyrics and memories. Dreams are never weak like we are, drunk or sober.
— Lady Gaga (@ladygaga) May 26, 2010
Music producer Jay-Z’s effort to celebrate friend Juan “OG” Perez’s birthday in 2018 probably tops that, though.
Jay-Z dropped a whopping $110,000 on a big night out in New York in bars and restaurant, with just over $91,135 (including an $11,000 tip) at nightclub Playroom.
Jay-Z D’Usse cognac and Ace of Spades champagne were among the tipples guzzled on the night.
But the winner of the most extravagant bar shout must go to a mystery businessman who in 2012 splurged £204,000 (that’s AUD$431,683.65 today) for drinks for everyone at the Playground nightclub at Liverpool’s Hilton Hotel – and that included a £125,000, 30-litre bottle of Armand de Brignac Midas champagne and a 10 per cent tip for the staff!
WHY SHOUT THE BAR?
Motivations for big shouts are many and varied.
The Kelly Gang added to their misplaced cachet as the friends of ordinary people when they twice shouted the bar during their criminal career.
Once in Jerilderie in southern NSW in February 1879 after robbing the local Bank of NSW branch bank, and again on June 28, 1880, to keep their 34 hostages happy as police surrounded the Glenrowan Hotel before the gang’s deadly last stand.
Some do it to effect change. Publican John “Seven Star” Wallace arrived in present-day Rutherglen in northeast Victoria soon after gold was discovered there in 1860 and established the Star Hotel in the main street.
But the Rutherglen Historical Society reported that the town’s original name, Barkly, was not to his liking.
Local man and later vigneron DG Hamilton suggested that Seven Star could buy naming rights for the town. Wallace laid his money down and chose Rutherglen, his Scottish home town.
When miners Brant Webb and Todd Russell were freed from the collapse at Beaconsfield, Tasmania, in 2006, everyone was delighted to see the two surviving men come to the surface.
In the ensuing TV bidding war for the story, jubilant Sunrise host David Koch, then-Nine Network CEO Eddie McGuire and Nine executive chairman Jeff Browne all shouted the bar Beaconsfield’s Club Hotel in the days after the miners’ rescue.
Nine won the bidding war despite Kochie famously jumping into Todd Russell’s ambulance minutes after the rescue.
There are even instances in which shouting the bar is an attempt at redemption.
Take disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong, for example. In 2017, well after he was stripped of his six Tour de France victories and just about everything else he accrued in his riding career, Armstrong was visiting the US city of Denver and was abused by dozens of patrons on a patio at a bar as he walked by.
Armstrong told Freakonomics Radio that he was left shaken but reflected on the ugly moment while sitting in his car minutes later, phoned the bar and spoke to the manager: “I said, ‘OK, I need you to do me a favour. Here’s my credit card number. I want you to walk out there and you buy everything they’re eating and drinking. And tell them that I understand.’
“Me of 10 years ago, I would have jumped across the railing and start throwing punches. But this is 2017 in summer, sitting in the car saying, ‘I have to act. I got to do something’.”
The winner of the All-Star Mile — and the “honorary owner-ambassador” — will have plenty of reasons to shout the bar.
Each horse in the race has been assigned an “owner ambassador”, chosen out of the pool of public voters who helped decide the field.
The “owner ambassador” of the winning horse will take home $250,000 — that’s plenty of dollars to put behind a bar. (The remaining owner ambassadors share in the total $500,000 prize pool.)
But it doesn’t really matter why someone shouts the bar. Whatever the motivation, it’s the thought that counts. And we can all drink to that.
The All-Star Mile is at The Valley on Saturday, March 13.
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