Red’s Bar Owner Spends a Lifetime Saying Yes to Missoula and Griz Nation

By Bowen West, UM News Service

MISSOULA – On a quiet afternoon at Red’s Bar, before the television volume rises and the room fills with the friendly flood of a Grizzly football weekend, Mike Helean is talking with regulars.

It’s a role in which the University of Montana alumnus has spent much of the past four decades: greeting customers, keeping an eye on the room and presiding over a place that has become part sports shrine, local haunt and unofficial downtown clubhouse for Griz Nation.

On Thursday, Oct. 1, Red’s will host Griz on Tap, a free Homecoming Week social inviting alumni, friends and members of the UM community to reconnect. It’s a natural fit for a bar whose history is so entwined with the University and the generations of Missoulians who have passed through its doors.

Helean, owner of Red’s Bar, grew up in Missoula. He attended St. Anthony Grade School, Meadow Hill Grade School and Sentinel High School before arriving at UM in the fall of 1981 to study business management. Like many students, he worked while in college. Unlike most, he also spent four years as a walk-on football player for the Grizzlies.

Many of Helean’s closest friends still trace back to his university years and the teammates with whom he practiced, traveled and competed. But even then, another education was underway. At age 18, Helean began bartending at the Boardroom Lounge, owned by his uncle and located in Missoula’s old Florence Hotel. He continued working in bars whenever he could through college.

Owning a business was always the dream. He just didn’t know it would come in the form of the local watering hole.

After graduation, he kept bartending, worked assorted jobs and began coaching football at Big Sky High School in the mid-1980s. Coaching offered camaraderie and a connection to the sport he loved but not much in the way of a long-term income. In 1987, while coaching, he started bartending at Red’s.

Three years later, a new ownership group asked whether he wanted to buy in. Helean decided to take the chance.

By 2000 he had bought out his partners and become Red’s sole owner. The work has been good to his family, he said, and the business remains fun – provided a person keeps perspective. Running a bar means long days, late nights and the particular responsibility of a place that is open from morning until 2 a.m.

It also means learning how to balance the business with life at home – especially after Helean and his wife began raising their two children. In the early years, that balance was the hard part. Over time, dependable employees made it possible for Red’s to remain both a family business and a community fixture. Helean speaks warmly of Von and Collin, who help prepare the bar for each day’s games.

“Obviously, our location and decor play a big role,” Helean said. “But No. 1 is definitely my employees.”

The bar’s character is evident the moment a sports fan walks in. The walls and ceiling hold decades of memorabilia: helmets, photographs, signs and artifacts from teams that have crossed paths with the Grizzlies. Some came from former UM coaches whose careers took them around the country. Others tell more specifically Missoula stories.

Hiding in plain sight are pieces of goalposts carried through downtown after Grizzly playoff victories in 2001 and 2004. In 2001, Helean watched the scene build after a semifinal win that sent Montana to the national championship. Red’s buses were returning from the game as students carried a goalpost down Higgins Avenue. Before long, a section of it made its way into the bar.

“We actually have two signed goalposts up there,” Helean said. “That was easily one of the most epic days in Red’s history.”

The goalpost did more than become décor. In 2002, Helean, Red’s regulars and other downtown partners helped fund new collapsible goalposts for Washington-Grizzly Stadium after the old ones had become a recurring target of celebration. The project involved Red’s, the Press Box and Lifting Technologies.

Long before artificial turf arrived at the stadium, Helean and his partners helped paint the field before home games. Alongside former longtime UM equipment manager Steve Hackney and others, they volunteered their time and bought the paint needed for the end zones and Grizzly paw at midfield.

That impulse – to show up, help out and say yes – has shaped Red’s relationship with UM and the broader Missoula community. The bar sponsors local athletics, including a Missoula Youth Football team known as the Red’s Bar Bills, and supports Grizzly teams and events when it can. Red’s also operates buses to home football games, carrying two or three busloads of rambunctious fans to Washington-Grizzly Stadium on a typical Saturday.

“A big part of our success is staying involved with the community and having a central location – we’re right in the middle of everything,” Helean said.

That is perhaps why Griz on Tap belongs at Red’s. The Oct. 1 event will offer UM alumni and friends a chance to gather without tickets or an admission charge, mingle with Alumni Association staff and Board of Directors members, and reconnect during Homecoming Week. For Helean, it’s another opportunity to open the doors to a community he’s known all his life.

His advice to students considering their own paths is simple: Find work that holds your interest. Helean loves football and the atmosphere that comes with it, which makes the long Grizzly Saturdays and NFL Sundays feel less like an obligation than a place he wants to be.\

“It’s been a lot of fun,” Helean said of Red’s relationship with UM athletics. “Moments like that are what make this so enjoyable – it’s truly what we love to do.”

###

Contact: Bowen West, media information coordinator, UM Alumna Association, 406-243-4658, bowen1west@umontana.edu.