I went to the British Bulldog pub here in Denver yesterday afternoon with my friend Mark to meet up with Leeds United Colorado soccer fans, and watch Leeds play Rotherham (located in South Yorkshire). For quite a while, I kept hearing Rotterdam instead of Rotherham, and wondered how Rotterdam wound up in the UK's Championship Soccer League. However, I was soon set straight. The Leeds United Colorado group are a very genial bunch, and very enthusiastic about Leeds soccer. Sadly, Leeds and Rotherham tied, but happily, Leeds is still in third place, with dreams of being promoted back to the Premier League dancing in their heads. I took the photograph on the left of Mark, who is doing well and as enthusiastic as ever about soccer, in front of the pub right before we went in.
It has been a while since I was last in the British Bulldog. The building started out back in 1885 as a house, and was turned into a pub not long afterwards. Back then it was called The Punch Bowl, so named because they would hold prizefights there, and bets on the matches would be thrown into a punch bowl. The bar, seen in the photograph on the right, is original to the place, and used to feature bare lightbulbs in a half circle, since lightbulbs were the new technology, and it was trendy to display them. The place remained the Punch Bowl, minus the boxing matches, until it was taken over by new owners and became the British Bulldog. They remodeled the place and cleaned it for the first time since 1900, but it still retains its Victorian ambiance, and is now the meeting spot for many Denver area soccer fan clubs. Nice to see that the place was able to escape urban renewal, at least for now.
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