MINNEAPOLIS - You won’t find him on any of the pre-game injury reports, and unfortunately, you won’t find him at Target Field when the Twins play today’s home opener, despite the fact that he was a fixture at Twins games for almost 30 years, from 1982 through most of 2010.
“People come up to me and they say, come back to the ballpark, we miss you at the ballpark," he said. "I’m having fun doing what I’m doing, and I always did. I tried to make it fun for people.”
I’m talking about the one and only Walter McNeil, a.k.a. Wally “The Beer Man,” who at age 83, and coming off knee replacement surgery in February, will be working the Twins home opener, only he’ll be applying his famous skill set a few blocks east of Target Field.
“I’ll be at Sneaky Pete’s,” says Wally. “Where the weather is fine, the food is good, the people are good, the management is great, everything is good!”
Wally was more than good when it came to selling suds, a side career he fell into, almost by accident.
“I started in the beer business on a fluke, really, back in 1970 at the old Minneapolis Auditorium,” says Wally. “One of the guys who worked for me at the pharmaceutical company said nobody out there wants to make any extra money and I said, 'What are you doing?' And he says, 'Well, we’re selling beer out at the sports show, and we make about $10-12 bucks in an hour.'"
"So, they’re selling two cases, and on the first night, I sell three-and-a-half," Wally explained. "The next night I sell five. The next night, in an hour I sell seven. The guys who are running it says, you’re not too bad, how would you like to come out here when we’re having boxing and wrestling matches or concerts? And I said, 'Yeah, why not?'”
Wally didn’t need the gig. He worked for a pharmaceutical sales company that he helped grow from less than a million dollars in annual sales to $269 million the year he retired, in 1992.
Meanwhile, Wally’s side gig in hawking beer covered 40-years, and led to feature stories in Sports Illustrated, ESPN the Magazine, NBC Nightly News, and made Wally the first vendor with his own trading cards.
“Kids would come up to me every year at the ballpark and ask me if I had a new card and I would give them one, and their dad would buy something. If they come up to you, 90 percent of the time they’re going to buy something.”
Well, at least they are from Wally the Beer Man.
Everything was going great for Wally until a September night in 2010, when the Twins were hosting the Toronto Blue Jays, and the then 75-year old Wally, working for ballpark vendor Delaware North, was caught in a sting operation at the ballpark, and charged with selling beer to a 19-year old decoy, working for the Minneapolis police.
“I asked the guy if he was 21 and I said, ‘if you’re not 21 and you say you’re 21 you’re entrapping me’, and he said, ‘yeah I’m 21’ and he walks away and the next thing I know the cops say, ‘You just sold to somebody underage.” But, the next morning my phone rings and it’s a call from Sneaky Pete’s, and they knew what they were doin’ and I was very happy to do something different.”
Wally went to court, where he was acquitted, but his days his days of selling beer for the Twins were over.
“When I was acquitted, Delaware North called and asked are you coming back? And I said ‘No thanks, I’ve got a new opportunity and I’m going to pursue it.”
Wally, who lost his beloved wife Joyce a few years ago, still works big events out at Canterbury Park, where the two once owned ‘Wally’s Choice’, one of the most successful horses in track history.
And, while Wally says that kind of success was mostly luck, in an era where everybody is constantly searching for the next way to connect, Wally offers some business advice for the ages.
“You gotta put a smile on your face and everybody is your long-lost cousin. You gotta make them feel like you’re part of them and they’re part of you. It’s very simple, you gotta take care of the customer because without the customer you got no business.”