Now Playing at a Sports Bar Near You

Kansas City, Mo.: Dickey's
Welcome to Lynn Dickey's Sports Cafe. It's hard to miss. It's the place with three giant satellite dishes on the roof and Lynn Dickey's name mounted on the outside walls in stylized letters.

It's on Westport Road, just across the old trolley tracks from a squeezed-together collection of watering holes psychobilly singer Mojo Nixon once described as a ''bar vortex.''

Lynn Dickey's — named for the former Kansas State, Houston Oilers, and Green Bay Packers quarterback who is one of the owners — does serious numbers. On Friday and Saturday nights, the 14,000-square-foot place is packed with 500 to 700 people. ''By 9 o'clock Friday, we usually have a line a block long,'' says Sean Bracken, the restaurant's general manager.

The establishment's clientele is a far cry from the hippies who once defined Westport. This is mainly a young, money-minded, red-suspendered audience, attracted by high-tech trappings and an atmosphere of visual variety and controlled gloss.

A display case in a foyer is a shrine to Dickey's football career. It contains the helmets he wore from high school (in Osawatomie, Kan.) through his last year with the Packers and a pair of flattened, grass-stained white football shoes. The walls of the All-American Room, in the back of the restaurant, are covered with 38 years' worth of framed photographs of football stars from Missouri, Kansas, and Kansas State. (Dickey's waitresses have their choice of college jerseys from those schools; this is a place designed for local fans.) There's a serious menu here — Dickey contributed his own recipe for Cajun catfish — and the food is served on plates, not in plastic baskets.

For fun, there's a dance floor (it gets busy about 10 p.m.). Tuesday nights, customers can bet play money on videos of dog races from a local track. Wednesday nights, customers get the chance to step inside ''The Money Machine,'' a glass booth with flying dollars and coupon prizes. And a patio-side volleyball court is planned.

For sports of another sort, there are TV sets. Seventeen of them. One in every corner, four above the bar. ''With three satellite dishes, we can pull in just about any game in the country a customer would want,'' Bracken says.

The place does its best business during football season, but Missouri, Kansas, and Kansas State alumni kept the place hopping in the weeks leading up to the Big Eight basketball tournament in early March.

The conference is always well represented in the NCAA tournament (though none of its teams made the final 16 this year) and, Dickey says, ''people get after it.''
-Robert Trussell

Washington: Champions
The evening news rarely shows its face on the seven TV monitors inside Champions sports bar in Washington. Never mind that Champions is just minutes from the White House. Let Henry Kissinger proclaim that power is an aphrodisiac. For Champions cofounder Michael O'Harro, sports is the love potion. His Champions is singles club, disco, and sports bar rolled into one. Its slogan might as well be ''Jocks just want to have fun.''

Millionaire entrepreneur O'Harro, 50, styles himself the high priest of the modern sports bar. When he and partner James Desmond founded Champions in 1983, dressing up an old warehouse in Georgetown, he figured he was onto something. ''I was inspired by the Miracle on Ice — when the U.S. hockey team beat the Soviets in the 1980 Olympics. Seeing all that enthusiasm in Lake Placid, I knew a sports bar would be a fantastic idea. And let's face it: The two most interesting things in America are religion and sports. And I knew that I did not want to build a church.''

Situated in an alley off Wisconsin Avenue, Champions looks like a sports chapel. Its walls are crammed with icons: pennants, jerseys, banners, ticket stubs, autographed balls, autographed pictures, and a special wall dedicated to the Washington Redskins. There's headgear from boxer Joe Louis, a pair of humongous basketball sneakers from Moses Malone, even a 1933 sprint race car. Staring up from under the bar glass are hundreds of earnest faces on old sports cards.

The crowd that has gathered on a winter weekend night is young and well scrubbed, dressed in sweaters and sweatshirts — a frat bunch. All seven 26-inch monitors on the two floors are showcasing a b-ball game between the hometown favorites, the Georgetown Hoyas (the campus is five blocks away), and the Connecticut Huskies in a battle for first place in the Big East Conference. Georgetown is winning handily. Everyone seems elated except bartender ''Bronco Johnny'' Ballard, dressed in referee stripes. ''When it's a blowout, it's slo-mo back here,'' he mutters. ''Close games are better for business.''

While the bar predictably fills up for Georgetown basketball or Redskin football games (it holds 200), some of its most electric moments come when out-of-town teams clash on the tube. Taking advantage of Washington's identity as a city of transients, O'Harro and his public-relations director, Brad Nierenberg, book area alumni groups to root for their teams. On a recent Sunday, graduates from Duke and the University of Arizona, most of them garbed in school colors, hollered and stamped as their teams squared off on television.

What makes this scene possible are the microwave and satellite dishes on the roof, which can bring in dozens of games a week. ''If your team has a game on TV, we'll find it,'' says Nierenberg, a former football player at Ithaca College in upstate New York. ''There are hundreds of games out there in the sky that the listings don't mention.'' He said that later that week the bar would be packed with fans for a hockey game between Colorado College and the University of Denver.

One thing refreshing about the clientele is there's no shortage of women bending elbows and cheering baskets. That fits O'Harro's notion of a modern sports bar perfectly. ''I wanted a place where women would be comfortable,'' he says. ''I couldn't see some smoke-filled room where a bunch of guys sit around a black-and-white television set talking about a high school game in 1956 in which one of them scored a touchdown. My bar would not be a male-bonding place.''

Obviously, women like the aura this sports bar offers. ''This is probably the only bar I've ever been to in the middle of the afternoon,'' says 22-year-old Sylvia Tennies, who was watching her alma mater, Duke, play North Carolina on the screen. ''At Duke the atmosphere at the games was so intense. Seeing it here in the bar with other Duke fans is like being back at school.''

For other women, Champions is a good place to check out the local guys. ''There's always more men than women, so it's a great place to pick up a man if you want to,'' says Trisha Love, who plays summer-league slow-pitch softball. Kim Freeman, who used to meet a Washington Capitals hockey player on dates here, simply smiles and says, ''The sports bar thing is a good alibi.'' In 1986 Cosmopolitanmagazine agreed, telling women that in Washington, Champions was the Best Place to Meet Jocks.

Around 9 o'clock on most nights, a DJ appears and the first floor mutates into a disco. Sports remain on the monitors, sound off.

No matter what the hour, there's always something happening here. In one typical week, members of the Super Bowl champion San Francisco 49ers dropped by after receiving a presidential handshake at the White House. Two nights later, for a promotion, Playboy sent over five of the ''Girls of the Atlantic Coast Conference,'' featured in the April issue in various stages of undress. ''We're our only competition,'' O'Harro boasts. ''We're like the senator that no one wants to run against.''
-Thomas O'Neill