Bartender at the End of the Block
It’s the end of your shuffle. Your feet kill, you’re cold, and you’re a little more than drunk. You get to Broney’s Alumni Grill, get in line, and finally make it up to the door. The man looking back at you is bald, muscular and extremely intimidating. Meet Brad Wharton.
This former Ohio University football player — an inside linebacker from 1997 to 2001 — and lifelong Athens resident is the owner of Broney’s. This bar and grill, considered a “newbie” at the ripe age of three years, has managed to make a name for itself on Court Street with its clean design and signature drinks (peach champagne slush, anyone?). Opened in March 2006, the bar boasts more than 100 types of beer and more plasma screen TVs than any other bar in Athens.
Brad and his older brother Tony (Brad + Tony = Broney’s) opened the bar a year after lucking into a liquor license. At the time, Brad was in grad school at OU for Coaching Education and managing at Courtside Pizza & Sports Bar. He acquired the license, rented the space, and a year later Broney’s was born.
Back before Broney’s inception, the corner lot was inhabited by a body shop and later a car dealership. Across campus in Sargent Hall, freshman Brad wasn’t even thinking about bar ownership. As an upperclassman, he lived in a house on the corner of Mill and Palmer and on Congress. “It was typical of any college student,” Brad said of his experience at OU, aside from 1999’s Palmer Fest when the band O.A.R. played in his back yard.
Other than partying with O.A.R., Brad enjoyed One and Two Fests (which were called Derby Days back then). “That was always a good time,” he said, “The guy who coordinates those … I bartended with him at Courtside back in the day.”
The book-loving, workout fiend who frequented the Pub and C.I. in his college days now is less apt to party hard at 31 years old.
“Maybe I’ll go out twice a month,” Brad said. “I go to Courtside and the Pub if I go out. I go here (Broney’s) a little bit but it’s kind of hard to relax here.”
If you do catch him chilling at Broney’s, you’re sure to find him with a Jameson on the rocks in hand. “We go through a lot of Jameson … partly because of me,” Brad noted.
Although this whiskey-loving bar owner has an intimidating exterior at 5’11” and 220 pounds, he is a softy on the inside. He loves his 28 employees, secretly enjoys the peach champagne slush. “I like it. I just don’t drink it in public,” he says. He tends to get too attached to the college kids that come through. “I like the university. I like the students. But I don’t like how the students change every year. You get to be close with a couple of them and then they’re gone,” Brad sighed.
So next time you come to Broney’s, don’t be intimated by Brad’s tough look. Like he said, “The bald head just means I have a lack of hair, but I’m a nice guy.”
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