The New Yorker:

The Sports Bra started as an inside joke between a chef and her friends. It created a national trend.

By Hannah Goldfield

When Jenny Nguyen was in her twenties, working as a chef in her home town of Portland, Oregon, she became a regular at pickup basketball games organized by a group of “lawyers, plumbers, women from all walks of life,” she told me recently. “The only thing we had in common was basketball.” Some of the women became her close friends, and one became a longtime girlfriend. When they weren’t playing, they got together to watch women’s games at sports bars—or tried to. Persuading a bartender or a manager to turn one on was a “constant situation,” Nguyen, who is now forty-five, recalled.

On April 1, 2018, the group got lucky when they met at a bar to watch the final of that year’s women’s N.C.A.A. tournament, in which Notre Dame defeated Mississippi State by just three points, with a player named Arike Ogunbowale—now a point guard for the Dallas Wings—hitting the game-winning jumper with 0.1 seconds left on the clock. As they were leaving, Nguyen remembered, “I hugged my friend, and I was, like, ‘That was the best game I’ve ever seen.’ And she goes, ‘Yeah, can you imagine if the sound was on?’ ” In the excitement, Nguyen had barely noticed that they’d been relegated to a small, silent TV in a corner. “I was really frustrated, not just with myself but with the whole situation,” she told me. “I said, ‘The only way we’re ever going to watch women’s sports the way it deserves is if we have our own place.’ ”
Exactly four years later, Nguyen opened the Sports Bra, a pub that exclusively screens women’s sports, in a storefront in Northeast Portland that was once occupied by a gay bar called Jocks. In the years before it opened, the concept was a running gag among Nguyen’s friends. “Whenever somebody would turn us down at the bar, we’d be, like, ‘Oh, at the Sports Bra they show volleyball,’ ” she said. Today, the Bra, as Nguyen calls it, is an institution imbued with that puckish idealism. Most of the twenty-odd beers on tap come from breweries that are owned or operated by women, and there are drinks named for the pioneering golfer Patty Berg (an Arnold Palmer with a cherry on top) and for Title IX. The homey space, panelled in dark wood, recalls a nineties coffeehouse, chockablock with sports memorabilia and flyers advertising community events: an adult L.G.B.T.Q.+ summer camp, an Asian climbers’ meetup called ElevAsian.

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