I don’t get out much during the week, but I would have felt bad blowing off my buddy Tom, who told me I just had to check out Overtime Sports Bar & Grill. The “O/T” cozies up to the Tarrant/Johnson county line in Burleson and is owned by the same folks behind the Horseman Club at Cityview.
Happy hour at the O/T is complicated but boils down to something cheap every day: $2 wells on Wednesdays, $2.25 bottles on Sundays, cheap domestic pitchers on Mondays and Tuesdays, and happy-hour prices from 2-10 p.m. on Fridays. See? Cheap.
As I pulled into the parking lot and wedged my teensy car between a Dodge diesel and a Chevy four-by-four, I thought, “Kicker bar! Cool.”
The building looks like a huge ranch house, replete with a giant front porch. Once I’d cleared the doors, I saw it wasn’t quite a kicker bar. There were more guys in baseball caps, button-downs, and Abercrombie & Fitch t-shirts than bubbas in overalls and straw Stetsons (although there were a couple of them, too). And, yes, there also were guys clearly affiliated with the oil-and-gas industry but the kind who actually, y’know, do all the work, not the guys who sit around and count d’money, plus maybe a few pilots from nearby Spinks Airport.
Everyone seemed polite and willing to buy a lady a drink or take a lady for a whirl on the dance floor that looks slightly wider than Dirk Nowitzki’s wingspan.
Refreshingly, there weren’t any trust-fund clowns onsite — and, surprisingly, few women. Come to think of it, O/T is probably where the boys are. Maybe it’s the dozen big-screen televisions. Or the drink specials. Or maybe because it was Wednesday — I was told that on Thursdays and Fridays the O/T cranks up the DJ-fueled dance and hip-hop, which apparently brings the ladies in for frenzied booty-shaking. But when I was there, it was just a handful of gals, me, my buddy Tom, and about 50 other guys. If you were there, I was the over-dressed chick, the one in a shirt that covered both my cleavage and belly button.
(Tom, BTW, is the only guy I know in town who has a drink named after him. A “Tommy Boy” is basically a Jägerbomb with an all-important splash of lemon. “The lemon’s what makes it special!” Tom told me, proudly. Yeah, it cuts the cough-syrupy taste of the Jäger and the Red Bull, but … well … .)
Some other good things about the O/T you should know: attentive waitstaff, clean tables and — yes, ladies — clean bathrooms. The O/T also has a micro-menu that doesn’t condescend to its intended audience: nothing fancy, just burgers, fries, and pizza. A 10-inch pie is under five bucks. “Good deal” is right.
And like most neighborhood watering holes, the O/T appears to be recession-proof. O/T manager Leonard Callaway said that the only thing that can really hurt a place like his is the price of gas. “When the gas prices go up, business goes down,” he said. “When a gallon of gas costs more than a bottle of beer, we worry.”
The O/T also has live music most nights of the week. Too-rock-for-country-radio guys like Bleu Edmondson and Johnny Cooper have played the joint, and on the night I visited – acoustic night – local singer-songwriter Matt Wayne opening for slightly better-known non-local singer-songwriter Ryan James. Wayne, with his Eric Clapton t-shirt, cigarettes, and songs about women who did him wrong and booze, was less kicker, more working-class troubadour, like most of the regulars there.
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