You hear him before you see him, like a rattlesnake. But instead of a dry, warning clatter, it’s a booming tenor – one that timbers across the galleys and ping-pongs around until you feel completely enveloped in its noise. A few seconds later, the sound is followed by its source. Ray Wilkins has stampeded his way into the main-concourse commissary of Busch Stadium, where I’ve been waiting for him, to find out how one sells beer at the ballpark.
It’s an interesting relationship, baseball and beer. Have you ever tried to watch a game on TV without one? It seems weird and unnatural, the epicurean equivalent of wondering if you closed the garage door before leaving for vacation. Watch a baseball game in person without a beer, and that unease increases dramatically. As adults, we’ve intertwined the hoppy liquid into the fabric of what baseball is so that when we do go to the stadium, we don’t just want a beer, we need it. That’s exactly why Wilkins is here, to set everything right with the world by delivering you a cold dose of comfort.
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Wilkins does not know what quiet is. A keg of a man, swaddled in the instantly recognizable neon yellow uniform of a stadium vendor, he alone is the reason keyboards have caps lock. “WHAT’S GOING ON BIG DOG,” he shouts at me as I stand no more than two feet away. He proceeds to offer me the first of what would be many fist bumps that evening. As I sit, amused by the scale of his entrance, Wilkins saddles his giant plastic container onto a stainless-steel table to be refilled.
The beer vendor system at Busch Stadium is brilliant in its simplicity. Before the game, vendors are fronted their first two cases of beer. Once sold, they return to the commissary and pay for the first two cases, along with any additional beers they wish to purchase for resale. A team of cashiers, counters and stockers sits in the commissary to ensure every single bottle is accounted for. Not only does this create zero possibility for theft or abuse, it also makes slinging beer at Busch Stadium a near perfect meritocracy: You want to make money? Earn it.
“Earn it” in no way does justice for what Wilkins does when he leaves the commissary. He instantly enters selling mode, yelling and literally hooting and hollering to get peoples’ attention. “WHO’S ROLLING WITH THE BIG DOG?” he proclaims as he begins swimming through the aisles of red seats. Almost immediately –
“Hey, King, over here.”
While his driver’s license might read differently, Wilkins goes by “The King” – at least in Busch Stadium. When pressed as to how he got the nickname, he explains how he began calling Budweiser “The King” years ago. (“YOU GOT BUD LIGHT AND YOU GOT THE KING,” he’d say.) Over time, the name somehow got transferred onto him. So as The King goes up and down the aisles – and up and down he does go (each aisle is, at minimum, 20 steps one way) – he maintains his legacy: “WHO WANTS TO TREAT THEMSELVES TO THE KING?”
As does every vendor at Busch Stadium, Wilkins has a designated area. The King’s kingdom is roughly defined as the space between the left field foul pole and the visitors’ dugout. It’s the same every game day. And because of this, Wilkins has a faithful crowd.
“This is the best beer guy in baseball,” one fan tells me.
“I only buy beer if it’s from The King,” says another.
To this, Wilkins guffaws and offers a fist bump. “THAT’S MY DOG RIGHT THERE!” In fact, he’s always fist-bumping. (It didn’t occur to me until later that I should’ve kept count of just how often, but the one time I did count, I saw him fire off 11 in less than a minute.) As he continues up and down the rows, he is constantly stopping, not just to sell beer, but to say “hi” to his regulars.
“YOU TAKING CARE OF MY GIRL OVER THERE?” he asks a man and his wife at the end of a row. And when he comes across a group of young boys, the fist bumps start flying. He then proceeds to beat his chest three times, throw a sideways peace sign and bark, “HOOT!”
It’s Wilkins’ shtick – he’s got about 10 moves total. There’s the fist bump. The barking (hence, the “big dog” references). The “HOOTIE-HOOS!” But there’s also the random removal of beers from his ice chest so he can jokingly rub them along peoples’ faces (he later explains to me, “THEY LOVE IT WHEN I DO IT IN JULY WHEN IT’S HOT”). There’s also the question he asks when he comes across a gaggle of women: “IF YOU NEED PROTECTION, DO YOU WANT A LITTLE DOG OR A BIG DOG?” If someone tells him that they’ll take a beer the next time he comes around, his response is almost always, “I’LL GO SEE MY GIRLFRIENDS OVER IN THE NEXT SECTION, AND I’LL BE BACK.”
On paper, Wilkins’ jokes might seem a bit old-fashioned, but more than anything else, he comes off as lovable, a favorite uncle who tells silly, if not slightly inappropriate, jokes. The proof is in the fans, laughing, buying and tipping all the while.
But there is a serious side to Wilkins’ work. The large plastic ice chest he’s been lugging around, which is able to hold anywhere from two to three cases of beer, plus ice, is no joke. I ask Wilkins and his fellow beer vendors how much a full tub weighs. The answers come quick.
“Sixty pounds.”
“Seventy-five pounds.”
“The heaviest I’ve ever carried is probably around 100 pounds.”
Regardless of the actual weight, Wilkins carries his burden with relative ease. Moving between aisles and sections effortlessly, I decide to stop following him a few times down the aisle so I can rest for a bit. When he comes back up, I ask him how he’s able to do this for an entire game.
“YOU PICK YOUR SPOTS,” he explains and proceeds to tell me about the lulls when no one’s buying beer (hint: it involves T-shirt cannons). It’s these times he’ll take a knee and rest.
Over the course of three innings he’s sold approximately 50 beers – a lot by most measures, but Wilkins assures me it’s a slow game. The most he’s ever sold during one game? Seventeen cases.
Four. Hundred. Beers.
We’ve all witnessed the feats of strength beer vendors go through. Watching the Cardinals when the heat index hovers around 100 degrees is barely tolerable on its own, and that’s just sitting there. When you think of the details of this job, the rules in place – how they must kneel down every time they serve a beer so as not to block the view, how they’re not allowed to use the handrails to support their bins (also known as “riding the rails”) due to safety concerns, how they must card every single person who appears to be under the age of 30 – it’s insane. But Wilkins loves it.
The King has been a vendor since he was 13 years old. He has worked at two of the three Busch Stadiums, and during the off-season, he sells beer at the Edward Jones Dome, Scottrade Center and the Family Arena, just to name a few. The man honestly doesn’t want to do anything else.
“I WENT TO COLLEGE, GOT A FULL-TIME JOB, BUT IT WASN’T FOR ME,” he explains. “IT’S HERE. THE EXCITEMENT. THE PEOPLE. YOU GOTTA LOVE IT.”
To see Wilkins sling beer is to see a man that completely and fully enjoys his work. As we run up and down, again and again (in four innings, I calculated, Wilkins must have run more than 800 stairs, which by some approximations is almost a 40-story building), Wilkins jokes with his fan friends about how photographer Jonathan Gayman and I are his bodyguards. When explaining to fans and stadium staff that we’re doing a piece on selling beer at the stadium with Wilkins, no one is surprised.
“He’s the best we have,” admits one of the section’s staff members.
After a few more innings, I’m spent. Wilkins’ act is still going strong, hootie-hooting his way from foul pole to dugout, leaving a trail of laughter in his wake. When he finally comes back up to meet me and I tell him I think we’ve got enough for the piece, he throws out one final fist bump.
“It was fun, wasn’t it?” he says in a voice reserved just for us. But before I could answer, he was gone.
