Jenny Nguyen is the owner of The Sports Bra, a first-of-its kind women's sports bar in Portland.
Courtesy The Sports Bra
The Sports Bra opened last year as the first bar to exclusively play women’s sports. It’s a small bar in Northeast Portland, but owner Jenny Nguyen wanted to host a Women’s World Cup watch party that was big enough to accommodate the enormous enthusiasm for the team, including the Portland Thorns. The event, in collaboration with the Portland Community Football Club, starts at noon at Portland’s Pioneer Courthouse Square and will include a showing of the classic movie “Bend It Like Beckham” at 2 p.m., with the match between the U.S. and Vietnam in Auckland at 6 p.m. We’ll talk with Nguyen about the event and the excitement leading up to the U.S. team’s first match in pursuit of its third consecutive World Cup title.
Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We end this week with the Women’s World Cup, which started yesterday. The U.S. team is trying to do something that no national team, women or men, has ever done: win three World Cups in a row. The U.S. will begin their quest tonight at 6 p.m. against Vietnam. You can watch it at home or, if you’re in Portland, you can see it on a really big screen at Pioneer Courthouse Square. The event is being put on by The Sports Bra, which opened last year in Northeast Portland. As far as anyone can tell it is the first sports bar in the world that’s focused exclusively on women’s sports. Jenny Nguyen is the owner. I talked to her this morning while she was getting ready for the watch party. I asked her how the event came to be.
Jenny Nguyen: I had just heard that the Vietnamese women’s team made the World Cup for the very first time ever. I was really thrilled about it; I called my dad and I was like, ‘Guess what?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah, I just heard!’ I went to bed and then I woke up the next morning and I thought, ‘You know what would be really cool? Is if we took over Pioneer Courthouse Square and did a watch party for USA vs. Vietnam.’ Or something of that nature. And I was just like, ‘No, that’s too much; that’s way too big of an idea.’ This was maybe like three months ago, and I was like, there’s no way.
Then I have a friend who does event coordination, and I had just very casually mentioned it to her. And she goes, ‘No, you need to do this. This is important. Downtown Portland could really use the boost.’ Because we feel like Portland has made a great comeback from COVID but that downtown has been slow to recover. So we just felt like it was a really great opportunity to, one, highlight women’s sports in a capacity that’s much bigger than our 40 feet bar [laughs] and that we just, we wanted to make it big. Then also just the coincidence that USA’s first game was against Vietnam, the country that my parents are from, just made it seem really important to me personally. So that’s kind of the vision behind it. I woke up with the idea, talked to a couple of people, and they were kind of like: This isn’t crazy. This is something that we can do. Which I feel like all crazy ideas start out that way. So yeah, that’s kind of how it began.
I think the third or fourth person I talked to was Kaig, who’s the founder of Portland Community Football Club. I’ve been a huge fan of him and his organization since before The Sports Bra opened, when I found out about the work that they were doing. So I reached out to him, and I was just like, ‘Hey, I have kind of this crazy idea. I’d love it to be a benefit for you guys if you’re into it.’
Miller: They’re a youth sports program?
Nguyen: They are a youth sports program. Yep. And they are celebrating their 10th year anniversary this year, so it is another coincidence that is just really… It’s really cool how everything kind of just pulled together.
Miller: What can people expect at this event?
Nguyen: We’re starting at noon – goes from noon to 9 [p.m.] We’ll have DJs. We have community vendors. We chose some Vietnamese community vendors to kind of highlight team Vietnam. So Mama Dut will be here, HeyDay Doughnuts will be here, Matta PDX is gonna be here, plus all the food trucks that are normally in the Square. We’ll also have a beer garden that has all the things: cocktails, beer, non-alcoholic, cider, hard seltzer, pretty much everything.
At 2 p.m., we partnered with Flicks on the Bricks to show ‘Bend It Like Beckham,’ which is pretty cool. Then kickoff is at 6 [p.m.], so I think it’s just gonna be a full day worth of, lots of fun. We have some special guests coming, and there’s some soccer activities planned. It should just be a really good, great community event.
Miller: As you know, this will be the first time that the Women’s National Team from Vietnam is in the World Cup. That’s not the case for the U.S. team. They are trying to do something that no team on the women’s or men’s side has ever done and win it three times in a row. They’re a juggernaut. So it’s likely that they will win today, although I suppose nobody should jinx that. Would it be a bittersweet win for you?
Nguyen: I think for me personally, it’s a win-win situation today. You know, I love… Like, last night I watched the Philippines play, and when they came out and they played the Philippine national anthem, I cried. And I only imagined the power of seeing that on a big screen today. My grandparents flew in from Houston yesterday, so they’re going to be here at the Square. I think it’s just a really big deal for Vietnam. So it’s a win just getting here, you know what I mean? So I think it’s just going to be powerful and to have the Vietnamese community here. That to me is more meaningful than a [win] for Vietnam. But the opportunity to bring the community together here in the middle of downtown Portland to celebrate all of it, I think that’s the key to making the day glorious.
Miller: Let’s turn to the U.S. team for a second, starting with just the Portland contingent. What Thorns players are on the U.S. team?
Nguyen: Oh my gosh, that’s like a trick question for me. I’d never started following soccer until I opened The Sports Bra, so I’m still learning about all the people…
Miller: Oh, because you were a basketball fan first. Is that right?
Nguyen: [Laughing] Exactly. Yeah, that’s correct. Yeah, so I was strictly basketball. I’m a huge fan of Crystal Dunn just because I think being a mother and being an athlete is super human. I love that, so Crystal Dunn. Sophia Smith, clearly, I would love if she had the first goal. I am secretly rooting for her for Golden Boot for the whole tournament. Those are my faves, [laughing] if we’re talking about faves. But, I think that there’s three or four other players that are also on the team, but I honestly can’t remember.
Miller: Has it been then a kind of soccer education in a soccer-crazy town running The Sports Bra?
Nguyen: Oh, my gosh. One hundred percent. And I kind of tell people, ‘Don’t say anything but I don’t know much about soccer.’ [Laughs]
Miller: Do people give you guff for not being a serious soccer fan, given that you run a bar focused on women’s sports in the Thorn’s city?
Nguyen: Uh-huh. Yeah. No, for sure. I mean, I think the key is not just a soccer buff but I’m generally bad at remembering names and faces, for whatever reason. I really need to meet somebody, and have a full-on conversation and maybe say their name like 10 times to remember anybody’s face or name. I think it’s just my capacity for remembering those things is hard. I don’t think it’s soccer. Like, if you showed me the top basketball players, I could probably do it. But that’s because I think and talk about it all the time. But yeah, I’m a huge fan of Athletes Unlimited softball, and I’ll watch the teams play and watch all those games.
But if you asked me to name a player, I couldn’t do it. So, I think I’m missing that gene…
Miller: I think I’m missing most of that gene as well, which is why I have your name written on a computer screen right in front of me right now.
[Mutual Laughter]
Let’s take a step back and go a little more than a year into the past. Why did you start The Sports Bra?
Nguyen: Oh, my goodness. I think that I’ve always been a basketball fan. I started playing when I was five or six years old. As I got older, all of my friends and almost all of my acquaintances either were directly or indirectly through a basketball league that I played in as an adult. What we did for fun was we went out to watch women’s sports games at bars. Pretty much every time was anything from an inconvenience of having to ask a server to change a channel, or we’d sit down and order food and drinks and then ask to watch a game and they’d be like, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, but too many people are watching this other game.’ So you’d kind of like be stuck there with a bill and no entertainment.
There’s also the idea that a lot of… I’m a Person of Color. I kind of have an androgynous look. A lot of people in our group are queer folks of color, and some of the spaces that are traditional sports bars don’t always feel safe or meant for us. So that was always another concern. I can’t recall a time where I’ve ever gone to a sports bar by myself. All of those things kind of combined into a crescendo of this moment when, in 2018, my friends and I went to go watch the NCAA women’s basketball championship, which for us was like the biggest game of the year. We went to go watch it at a sports bar, and it wasn’t on any of the TVs. So we asked them to put it on, and they did, which was great. Then we watched the entire game on a 32-inch screen with no sound on. It was one of the best games I’d ever seen: It was a dramatic comeback; it was a last second three pointer to win it. And it really occurred to all of us that day that a game like that really should be the focus. It should be highlighted. The fact that we watched it on a tiny screen with no sound on, and we were celebrating it all by ourselves at our table.
It was at that point where I was like, ‘You know what? We need to have our own place.’ But I said it, and I didn’t mean I was going to open it. I just meant it as, that’s a fact. It wasn’t until years later that that little… that moment became something that was the driver for me to be like, ‘You know what? I feel like the time is now.’
Miller: It sounds a little bit like the way you were describing the watch party. This idea…
Nguyen: Exactly.
Miller: … It’d be cool to do this, and then eventually you’re the person who’s going to do it.
Nguyen: Yeah. I mean, to me it just seemed a little bit far-fetched, a little bit crazy. Then the more I thought about it, the more I talked to people around me… They were just like, ‘No, that’s a really great idea.’ Then other people were very confident that it could happen.
But it’s always really scary, you know, especially The Sports Bra because it had never been done before. I did a bunch of research, and I was like, ‘Oh. This doesn’t exist.’ I remember when I sat my parents down, and I told them that this was my plan. My dad’s first words were, ‘There’s probably a reason nobody’s done it before.’ That’s what he said. And it kind of was just like: Oh. Maybe there is a reason. But, if you think about it, nothing would ever get done if everybody felt that way about invention or innovation, right?
Miller: You did note that one of the practical questions, though, I mean just reflective of the existing imbalance and sexism, is that – this was last year when you said this – that only 4% of televised sports was of women’s games, which wasn’t enough last year to have games on all the time at the bar. And so last year, you said that you would just make that, in a way I guess, a feature as opposed to a bug. That if there weren’t games on then there wouldn’t be something else, as a kind of… I don’t know, maybe you didn’t put it this way, but I sort of saw it as a silent protest. Have you stayed with that?
Nguyen: Exactly. Yeah, I mean, there are days where we definitely have one or two of the screens on a screen saver, or we just turn it off. Yeah, for sure. I think that we’re always trying to draw awareness, not only to promoting and uplifting women’s sports that are on but to show that there’s still so much work to be done. What we don’t want is for people to come in and say, ‘Wow, Jenny, you’re open five days a week, 12 hours a day, and every time I come in there’s always something on TV. It must mean that women’s sports is always on TV.’ It would be like a false narrative.
We do want people to understand that we want to be entertaining, and we want people to have a great time. A lot of that has to do with having entertainment value on the screen. But we also use that as an opportunity to be like… Again, we’ve made dramatic steps in what is available, especially with access to some streaming, but there’s still lots of work to be done…
Miller: What might the Women’s World Cup mean for you, businesswise? This is the first international… the first Women’s World Cup, that has happened since you opened.
Nguyen: It’s been nuts. Yesterday we were just absolutely packed for the first of two for that double header. It was Canada and Nigeria, and it was just absolutely packed. It was just so exciting to see people come in. We had people traveling internationally that wanted to watch a World Cup game at The [Sports] Bra as part of their visit to the U.S. It adds a whole other dimension of how important and impactful a space is to have that is dedicated to women’s sports. Yeah, so that’s been awesome.
And again, our place seats like 50 people, maybe, tops. On game days, if it’s the Thorns or if it’s the Seattle Storm or if it’s another big local-ish team, we’re gonna fill up. It’s gonna feel the same way as far as businesswise. But the vibes… no matter how many people you fit in there, with the World Cup, it is dramatic. It is dramatic just how everybody is so passionate, and there’s just this… you know, it’s World Cup vibes. And it happens in the Bra with 50 people. It’s pretty magical.
Miller: Just before we go, you mentioned the Seattle Storm – Seattle’s WNBA team. Do you think there’s going to be a Portland WNBA team four years from now?
Nguyen: I am a hardcore optimist. Some people say it’s a flaw of mine. I cannot imagine that the W[NBA] would not put a team in Portland with everything that’s going on. It’s just the perfect rivalry for the Seattle Storm. Clearly we’re women’s sports fanatics here in Portland, and I think that they know that. There’s a lot of logistical things with the WNBA right now. I think that if they have the capabilities of having expansion teams, I believe Portland will be one of them. Yes.
Miller: Jenny, thanks very much.
Nguyen: Thank you very much, Dave.
Miller: Jenny Nguyen is the owner of The Sports Bra, a Northeast Portland bar that’s focused exclusively on women’s sports. She organized the watch party at Pioneer Courthouse Square for the U.S.-Vietnam game in the Women’s World Cup. The game starts at 6 p.m.
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