Still Hustling

From the bleachers at Plevyak Field, spectators squint at the track below. “Isn’t that...?” On the sideline, fist-bumping a sprinter as he catches his breath post-race, Coach Clarence “Fancy Clancy” Haskett is unmistakable–something of a celebrity among Maryland sports fans. 

Striding through Camden Yards with his thick chevron mustache and the brim of his ballcap upturned slightly to show off his name scrawled across the underside, he’s just about as recognizable as the Oriole Bird. In fact, he’s been working O’s games longer than the beloved Baltimore mascot. Clancy started vending in 1974 at 15 years old–five years before the Bird was “hatched” on the diamond at Memorial Stadium. Several generations of fans can recall watching Clancy sprint up and down the stadium steps on game day, slinging drinks and shouting his signature rhymes. 

“Step right up and buy a cup,” he’d call. “Empty your pockets, put your money in your hand, ’cause here’s Clancy, your beer man!” 

Now a 51-year vending veteran, Clancy doesn’t have to rely on hawking to make sales. He has nearly 200 regular customers’ phone numbers saved to his contacts. “No matter where I am in the stadium, when I’m running back to reload, I hear my name every 10 feet,” he says. At 66 years old, these relationships have allowed him to continue to compete with the “top dogs” on the vending circuit. 

“I’ve been competitive since I started running track at 15,” he says. “Part of the reason I’m still vending is because it’s a competitive job. I still look at it as if it’s a sport.” 

Clancy ran track at Catonsville Community College, now CCBC, and Eastern Kentucky University, an NCAA Division I school. His best event was the 200-meter dash, clocking an impressive 20.5 seconds. 

A graduate of Walbrook Senior High in West Baltimore, Clancy had raced against the Gaels at a few meets as a teen and went on to become teammates with some Mount alumni at Catonsville, including shotput thrower Barry Moss ’77. He was more than familiar with The Mount and its tradition of athletic excellence, so when a buddy called him up to say he heard MSJ was looking for a sprint coach, he jumped at the opportunity. 

That same day–four years ago now–Clancy printed off his resume, drove to campus, and handed it to Head Coach Kyle Reagan ’00. Within 24 hours, he had the job. 

“I love working with the young guys, especially when you get a freshman and you coach him all the way up,” he says. “I just think it’s fun coaching at an all-boys school. There is definitely a difference in the kids here than at the public schools where I’ve coached.”
 

The same affable, outgoing personality responsible for skyrocketing his beer sales is on full display as he interacts with his sprinters on the track. “My athletes would probably say Coach Clancy is friendly. Sometimes I think I’m a little bit soft on them,” he admits. “But I always tell them to compete.” And compete they have. In the three seasons Clancy has been coaching, MSJ sprinters have broken school records in both the indoor and outdoor 4x200-meter relay and the indoor 4x400-meter relay. They’ve earned all-time top five marks in the 55-meter, 300-meter, 100-meter, 200-meter, and 4x100-meter events. “We have almost totally rewritten the record books,” says Kyle. 

Clancy retired from his full-time job just a few weeks before he joined the coaching staff at Mount Saint Joseph. He served 32 years with the Maryland State Highway Administration, teaching work zone traffic safety. He won local, regional, and national awards for his training. All the while, he was still vending. 

On his first day selling sodas–too young to sell beer at 15 years old–he made $8.25. By 17, he’d grown a mustache thick enough to pass as an adult, so he swapped the Sprite for Budweiser a year early. In those days, fans were allowed to bring their own beer into Memorial Stadium. They’d carry in kegs and coolers, and Clancy would be there to serve them when their taps ran dry. Outside drinks were banned in 1985, much to the delight of stadium vendors but to the chagrin of fans like “Wild Bill” Hagy, who, on the night before the ban went into effect, launched his empty cooler from the upper deck to the field below in protest. 

On Opening Day in 1988, Clancy set the stadium record for selling 40 cases of beer in one game. “Back then, if the game went into the 16th inning, you could still sell beer,” he explains. In 1989, a rule was instituted to stop alcohol sales after the seventh inning, but with recent MLB regulation changes aimed at quickening the pace of play, ballparks have extended beer sales through the eighth inning to combat the shortened game times. 

Plenty more has changed since Clancy sold his first soft drink. Most notably: the prices. “When I started, you could sit on the front row behind home plate for $8.75,” he recalls. “Today, you can’t even buy a beer for $8.75!” 

Now, on a good day, Clancy will sell between 15 and 18 cases of beer. “The studs, they’re selling 18-25 cases.” he says. “A few years back, in my younger days, I was knocking that out too. I was #1 in sales for 15 consecutive years. I don’t need to be #1 anymore; I let the young boys have their day.” 

These days, the only place to “buy a cup” from Clancy is Camden Yards, but in his earlier years of vending, Clancy traveled around to different stadiums and events, working 27 venues across the country. He worked NASCAR races in Las Vegas, professional boxing matches in New Jersey, the Kentucky Derby, Preakness, and four straight Super Bowls from 1999 to 2002. 

Over the years, Clancy and his friend began to notice that the concessionaires running the stadiums’ food and beverage services didn’t put much thought or effort into the in-seat vending operations. At the time, there were no companies focused specifically on vending. The pair said to themselves, “We can do this better.” So, when the Ravens came to Baltimore in 1998, All Pro Vending was born. All Pro vendors sell on the lower level at M&T Bank Stadium, the upper level at Camden Yards, and at the Naval Academy. 

Clancy certainly keeps himself busy for someone who is technically “retired,” and he doesn’t see an end in sight either. “I’m going to keep doing it as long as my body tells me I can do it,” he says. “I have a vendor working for my company who turned 89 years old this year. He doesn’t move too fast, but he’s still out there doing it.” 

He adds, “My grandfather told me back in the day, ‘Continue to work. The way you don’t die when you get old is by always doing something.’” 

And so, in the weeks leading up to Opening Day each year, you can find Clancy running the bleachers at Plevyak Field and hitting the Smith Center weight room, preparing his body for another season of serving ice cold beer to Baltimore’s baseball fans.