In this era when playing cards counts as a spectator sport, there's no activity that cries louder for its own ESPN series than flair bartending. It's got it all: high emotions, exciting visuals, good sportsmanship and dramatic tension. And judging by the two girls in tight-fitting tops who scored a couple of free beers, the crowd shots should be pretty good, too.
It was all in evidence Monday at the Best of the West Bartender Showdown finals, hosted for the fifth year at Henderson's Roadrunner Saloon, where top bartenders from Vegas and around the country came together, raising over $4,000 for Opportunity Village and competing for $5,000 in cash prizes, trophies, and of course, bragging rights.
Anyone who's seen the movie Cocktail will be familiar with flair bartending, but if your knowledge begins and ends there, brother, have you missed a lot. Bottles are juggled—often four at a time—bounced off of knees and elbows and caught on the backs of hands in a move known as a stall; shaker tins do helicopter twirls on elbows, are juggled and used as catcher's mitts for airborne bottles; drink glasses are rolled over shoulders and down extended arms; those giant beer openers you see at every bar in town—called blades—are hooked onto long-necks and spun around backs. In short, anything and everything that isn't fastened down is fair game.
Emceed by DJ Christopher Garcia, the competition saw 15 men competing to open two beers in two minutes and then moving on to mix a lemon drop and a cocktail of their choosing in six minutes. All of it was choreographed to music, with stalls, tosses and flips set to the beat. Broken up by auctions and raffle draws, the contest ran for six straight hours. Judges based their scores on difficulty, flow of the routines, creativity, showmanship and stalls, with points deducted for spills and drops.
Three heats narrowed the field of nearly 50 down to Dan van De Water of the Rio, Shawn Oana of Kahunaville, Toby Ellis from Tangerine, Oscar Perez and Justin Keane of the I-Bar, Juan Llorente of the Shadow Bar, Tom Alley from the Voodoo Lounge and Vache Manoukian, Timmy Morris, Josh Nemerow and Christian Delpech from the Carnaval Court. Coming from out of town were Colin Griffiths, a Brit from Kansas City, Missouri; Rodrigo Blascovich from Los Angeles' Rockin' Taco Cantina; Paul Trzcianko from the Infinity nightclub in Minneapolis; and Levi Donaldson from the Voodoo Lounge in Kansas City, all of whom had only qualified that afternoon.
Characters stood out, and the contest had all the colorful personalities you'd expect from any sport. Ellis played air guitar with two tins and a bottle before moving on to juggle a lemon wedge with a pair of tongs. Perez wore a huge silver pendant and chain with "Lucky" embossed on one side—which must have helped when he accidentally bounced a bottle off the back wall. Not to be outdone, Llorente caromed a bottle off of the emergency light. Morris, recognizing the phallic symbolism, turned his set into a tongue-in-cheek porn show. Nemerow was the rising star: One year ago, he was a bar-back and now he had qualified in second place.
The night's highest drama came with Donaldson. Working to a remix of the Beach Boys' "I Get Around," his music started to loop four minutes into his main routine, causing him to miss a stall and throw the rest of his act off. When the set was finished, he stormed off the stage to return a few minutes later, visibly angry and frustrated, at one point nearly in tears. The judges and Garcia conferred, deduced the problem came from the CD Donaldson had provided, and offered him a second chance. Too dispirited by what he saw as a poor performance, he said no.
Alley won third place and Manoukian took second. The winner, and odds-on favorite, was Delpech, who had the judges gasping and applauding with his mercury-quick flips and glue-like stalls. Delpech has long dominated the flair world, and while this was his 100th trophy in four and a half years, it was only his second Best of the West first-place finish in five years.