BREWERS’S NO. 1 FAN
59-year-old Milwaukee man has attended every home game since Aug. 30, 1981
You look at every box score the last 35 years and I’m in it. You know, where it says ‘Attendance, 30,502.’ One is me.” BOB KOEHLER BREWER’S NO. 1 FAN
Bob Koehler would never claim to be the Milwaukee Brewers’ biggest fan. He’s a practical man and, speaking practically, it’s impossible to prove or disprove such an assertion. There are no metrics to gauge fandom.
“How do you measure ‘big?’ ” Koehler says. “If you go to one game, you’re a Brewers fan. How can one fan say he’s a bigger fan than another?”
However, when you’ve structured your life around a baseball team, when you’ve built a daily routine around games and never, ever deviate from it, when you haven’t missed a pitch — not a single pitch — since the Brewers moved to Milwaukee in 1970, well, is there even a close second?
Baseball is more than a pastime to Koehler. It’s more than an interest or a hobby or even a passion. It’s his identity. His business card describes him as a “Specialist in Brewers baseball” and includes his seat at Miller Park — Field Diamond Box, Section 114, Row 3, Seat 5. Quite literally, it’s the best seat in the house, right next to the Brewers’ dugout and mere feet from the on-deck circle.
When Mark Attanasio bought the team in 2004, he wanted to reserve 20 seats in the first four rows for the ownership group. Uh-oh, veteran staffers told him. That’s going to be a problem.
“Mark loves to tell the story,” Koehler says. “The people in the front office said, ‘You can’t take Bob’s seat because it would probably be more trouble than it’s worth. It’d be a good business decision to let him have it.’ I think the media probably would have blown up on it —
you know, they kick a longtime season ticketholder out of his seat for some guy from California who bought the team.
“There’s 20 seats in the owner’s box and he’s got 19 of them. I’ve got the other one.”
Loyalty does have its rewards.
Koehler, 59, has attended every home game since Aug. 30, 1981. His streak is at 2,882 consecutive games going into Tuesday night’s game against the St. Louis Cardinals at Miller Park. For comparison’s sake, ironman Cal Ripken Jr. holds the major-league record for consecutive games played at 2,632.
Koehler’s got Cal by 250 games, though he dislikes the comparison because he’s not a player. It’s the same reason he rarely wears Brewers apparel. He dresses for games, almost always, in pressed pants and a button-down shirt or polo.
“I don’t like wearing Brewers clothing because I don’t think I’m part of the team, sitting in the stands,” he says.
He attended his first game on May 11, 1970 and estimates he has missed only 40 to 45 of the 3,890 home games, including playoffs, in franchise history. He became a season ticket-holder in 1983, after learning in ’82 that buying individual tickets for every game didn’t guarantee tickets for the postseason.
“They had a lottery for the playoffs,” he says. “I was like, ‘I go to every game and I’m not going to have a ticket?’ I got a ticket through the lottery, luckily. So the day after the season ended, I called the Brewers (and purchased a season ticket package for ‘83). I thought, ‘I don’t want this to happen again.’ ”
As if his attendance streak weren’t impressive enough, Koehler claims to have never missed a single pitch of a Brewers game. Either he’s listened to the entire radio broadcast, watched the entire game on television or has been in his seat at County Stadium and Miller Park from “Play ball” to the final out.
Even when he played softball for 10 years, Koehler kept a transistor radio in his back pocket, the volume turned up loud enough so he could hear the game.
Such dedication requires sacrifices and a lifestyle that is difficult for many to comprehend. Koehler has his share of critics, though he can’t figure out why. He’s living his life the way he wants to live it and isn’t hurting anyone.
“You can’t believe all the negative comments I’ve heard from people over the years,” he says. “One guy gave me a book and wrote in it, ‘Try other things, Bob.’ And if you happen to miss somebody’s wedding because there’s a game …”
Speaking of that, Koehler was married once, for four years. He divorced in 1990 and has been single since.
“She was not a bad person at all,” he says. “She didn’t understand baseball. She said, ‘Oh, you can go to games.’ But you could sort of see, you know? And then one day she said, ‘How many day games are you going to give up for me?’ And that was the end.”
He’s not averse to trying marriage again someday. He doesn’t want to grow old alone. For now, though, and for the foreseeable future, he knows his unique relationship with baseball makes such a prospect all but impossible.
Maybe none of this would have happened if Koehler hadn’t been asked to move a piano in the fifth grade. He and another boy were pushing it down a hall at Willow Glen Elementary School in St. Francis when it somehow tipped, fell over and crushed Koehler’s ankle.
“June 5, 1968,” he says. “Two days before school ended. That just changed everything. Totally destroyed my ankle. I didn’t want to call my dad at work because in those days you didn’t want to bother people at work. My mom wasn’t home, so I laid on a cot outside the principal’s office for an hour and a half.
“When I got to the hospital, the doctor said, ‘We’d better amputate it.’ My dad said, ‘He’s just a kid. Can’t you do something?’ There just happened to be a doctor from Egypt there, Dr. Hussein, and he thought he could save it.”
Dr. Hussein pieced the ankle back together, but Koehler walked with a pronounced limp for a long time and couldn’t play sports. Two years later, Bud Selig brought the Brewers to Milwaukee and Koehler started living vicariously through the team, as many 13-year-olds do.
The thing was, Koehler never really outgrew that phase.
“I look in the mirror and I can see my dad,” he says. “But I look in my heart and I still see that little boy from April of 1970. It’s amazing. Sometimes, I think I didn’t grow up. I don’t know.”
Koehler bought a house in Story Hill so he could walk to County Stadium and now Miller Park. It’s just 10 minutes down the hill. When he worked — he retired in 2001 — he used his vacation days one at a time to attend home games.
“In 28 years of work I never had more than one day off in a row,” he says. “I might have burnt myself out. But I never missed a day of work, either.”
Koehler, an only child, is a dutiful son who still cuts his parents’ lawn and shovels their snow. And they support his lifestyle. When his mother needed major surgery last summer, she put it off until the Brewers went on a nine-day road trip.
“The first day they were out of town we were there at 6 in the morning for surgery,” Koehler says. “One day before they came home, she got discharged from the hospital.”
His father once needed emergency surgery during a home game. The doctor who performed the surgery was at the game, got paged in the seventh inning and left. Koehler, of course, stayed until the end.
“It went 12 innings on top of it,” he says. “So then I had to rush over to the hospital to be with my dad and I stayed until 4 in the morning. The doctor was the biggest Brewer fan you could imagine. My dad said, ‘All he wanted to do was talk about the damned baseball game.’ ”
Koehler’s season ticket package costs $6,075. He is not wealthy, but he saved and invested wisely when he worked and paid off his house in four years.
“I don’t really spend much money,” he says. “My ticket is very expensive but besides that I don’t do a lot.”
Because he walks to games, he doesn’t have to pay for parking. And he never buys concessions at the ballpark.
“Sometimes people give me stuff, but I never pay to eat,” he says. “I bring my own Pepsi with me. They let you bring in one bottle as long as it’s sealed. So I save $340 a year by doing that.”
Koehler has monitored his liquid intake since a game earlier this season, when he had to use the restroom between innings — the one and only in-game bathroom break he has ever taken — and (horrors!) nearly missed the start of the next inning. He made it to the stairwell just in time for the first pitch.
In 1993, he came down with cryptosporidium and stopped eating for three days so he wouldn’t have to use the bathroom at County Stadium.
“I’ve had fevers and colds but otherwise I haven’t really been sick,” he says. “Three weeks after the Brewers got (Zack) Greinke (in 2011), I was feeling terrible and I actually went to the emergency room and they admitted me. I thought, ‘They finally get a good team and I’m going to die?’ It just turned out to be a urinary tract infection.
“I’ve never had a physical. I’m afraid they’ll find something and put me on pills and I’ll have to use the bathroom during games.”
One would think that as devoted as Koehler has been to the team, and with a prime seat just outside the dugout, he would have gotten to know a lot of players over the years. The opposite is true. Only two have bothered to walk over to the railing to talk to him: Jim Sundberg and now-manager Craig Counsell.
“They haven’t made any effort to be friendly towards me and I don’t make an effort to be friendly towards them,” Koehler says. “I’m a fan of the game. The players come and go. I don’t root for the name on the back of the shirt, I root for the name on the front.
“When Carlos Lee got traded in Attanasio’s first year, his wife was crying: ‘We hated to trade him.’ I said, ‘I don’t care. He didn’t want to be here.’ They come and go so much.”
He hasn’t cheered for Ryan Braun in several years. Not so much because of the PED scandal, but because when Braun reportedly called 100 season ticket-holders to apologize, he didn’t
call Koehler.
“I cheered for every home run he ever hit. I believed all the stuff he said,” Koehler says. “They claim he called 100 season ticket-holders and I found out it was the CEO of Northwestern Mutual, the owner of Kelly’s Bleachers. It wasn’t random.
“I figured he would say, ‘That guy who sits next to the dugout, what’s his name?’ Don’t you think he could have asked for my phone number? I’ve never cheered for any of his home runs since.”
Though he isn’t tight with the players, Koehler has gotten to know most members of the Brewers’ ownership group. Attanasio calls him “Baseball Bob.”
He counts George Novogroder, president of Chicago-based Novogroder Companies, among his baseball buddies. Every year, Koehler gets an invitation to Novogroder’s Fourth of July party on a private beach in Malibu. The list of attendees, according to Koehler, has included Dustin Hoffman, Jennifer Anniston and Halle Berry.
He always sends his regrets. He wouldn’t think of missing a game just to schmooze with a few A-list celebrities.
“This year, the Attanasios were in town on July 3 and I said to Debbie, ‘Are you going to George’s party tomorrow?’ ” Koehler says. “She goes, ‘Yeah,’ and I said, ‘I’m invited, too.’ She said, ‘You can come back to L.A. on our private plane with us.’ I said, ‘No, I’ve got to go to the game tomorrow.’
“Even Mark shook his head. I told him, ‘If you guys were 20 games out of first place like usual, I may be tempted to go, but you guys are in first place. I’m not missing a game.’ And then they lost to the Marlins.”
Koehler has sat next to Jane Seymour and Sugar Ray Leonard in the owner’s box. He’s talked baseball with Roy Firestone and two Wisconsin governors.
Three years ago, singer-songwriter Paul Simon sat in front of him. When a ball boy handed Simon a baseball, he turned and gave it to a young girl sitting with her father. He asked her if she wanted him to sign the ball and she pointed at Koehler and said, “I want him to sign it. He’s more famous than you are.”
Though Koehler’s regular-season attendance streak could be some sort of record, he has no interest in attending spring training games. And other than about 35 games at Wrigley Field, he’s never seen the Brewers play on the road. He’s never even been on an airplane.
A few years ago, he committed to a Boston road trip and bought a round-trip plane ticket. Because of his connections, he would have sat in a suite at Fenway Park. But the Brewers lost four in a row just before going on the road and a frustrated Koehler canceled the trip and ate the $400 ticket.
Home games are another story. It would take some sort of catastrophic event or a significant health problem to end his streak.
“You know one of these days it’s going to happen,” he says. “Sometimes I say if they do win the World Series, I might not buy season tickets anymore. That might do it. I want to go out on top like Lombardi, sort of.”
Until then, you can find Koehler on game days in Field Diamond Box, Section 114, Row 3, Seat 5. He’ll arrive a few minutes before the first pitch and will be out of Miller Park “35 seconds” after the final out. He’s just there to watch baseball.
“You look at every box score the last 35 years and I’m in it,” he says. “You know, where it says ‘Attendance, 30,502.’ One is me.”