While trapped on the roof of his bar waiting for the Bengals to win a dang football game, Jeff Lanham learned a lot about modern survival skills.
For example, when you’re spending nights out in the freezing Indiana fall, you can’t crawl into your sleeping bag with the same clothes you’ve been wearing all day (the bag will reverberate the chill and lock you into a low-grade refrigerator at night—it’s boxers or nothing). Also, when you’re living on top of a bar and people find out about it, you’re going to get buckets of Miller Lite sent upstairs at all hours of the morning, so don’t turn down the exercise bike your friend offered to install for you because you might gain a little weight.
Another thing: If your wife promises, live on the news, that you’re not going to come down from the roof until the Bengals break what is then a four-game losing streak to start the season, there’s a good chance television stations from all over the town, state, tri-state area and the nation are going to start showing up at 4 a.m. to make sure you’re actually holding up your end of the bargain. As precious as sleep is up there, REM sleep gets broken by the sound of clicking tripods and news anchor jargon.
“Other than not getting rest and storms and stuff, I partied a lot,” Jeff says. “I drank a lot of beer up there.”
Two years ago, Lanham had his brush with celebrity. He spent 57 straight nights on the roof of his restaurant, the Hog Rock Cafe, between Cincinnati's loss on Oct. 6 to the Cardinals and their win over the Jets on Dec. 1. It was an homage to Wildman Walker, a Cincinnati-area disk jockey who slept in a billboard for 61 straight days until the Bengals won a game back in 1991. Lanham’s quest began as an innocent (and slightly alcohol-fueled) utterance during one of his televised tailgate parties. Frustrated by Arizona kicker Zane Gonzalez’s last-second field goal sailing through the uprights, dropping the Bengals to 0–5, he said he was headed upstairs until Zac Taylor & Co. could turn it around. Then it got repeated on television. That’s when Lanham, a former iron worker who opened a restaurant with five-pound hamburgers, chicken wings and killer barbecue, heard his life’s credo kick in: If I said I was going to do something, I’d better go ahead and do it.
The next day he moved upstairs, having all of his meals delivered by either the restaurant staff or his wife, Chrissy, who lived about five minutes away. He had a Halloween party there (he dressed as a prisoner). He and a group of roughly a dozen people had Thanksgiving dinner there. He ran a DirecTV line. Lanham’s family packed with him the essentials: milk crate shelving full of hot sauce, popcorn, Welch's fruit snacks, Goldfish, honey peanuts, Hot Hands and—Chrissy’s idea—a volleyball with a painted face a la Wilson from Cast Away, the Tom Hanks film about a man stranded on a desert island. Pages from his granddaughter's Disney princess coloring book—Ariel from The Little Mermaid and Elsa from Frozen—hung on the makeshift canvas wall with a note: To Pap, Miss you! Lanham said he ate a lot of deer summer sausage and watched every imaginable series on Netflix.
Courtesy of Jeff Lanham
“I had a few drinks,” Lanham says now, “next thing you know, it’s history. I’m up on the roof of my restaurant sleeping until they won.”
Lanham may have thought his story ended the moment the game clock hit zeroes in the Bengals’ first win of the season—over the Jets on Dec. 1—and he walked down from the roof accompanied by a local radio crew filming him for YouTube and a nearby television station. He was wearing an Ickey Woods jersey and a bucket hat, sprayed with beer by his loyal barflies. Walker called him and said, “In the famous words of Bob Barker: Come on down!” He made a promise to never drink and run his mouth off again.
Like so many hopelessly in love with the Bengals, soaking up this unimaginable Super Bowl run, Lanham’s life was about to change again, quite possibly for the better. Even after his home for all those nights went up in smoke.
A few years ago, Lanham was injured at his iron working job and open to a new challenge in life. He donated a lot of his time—and still does—to the American Legion, cooking free of charge, allowing them to take the profits for scholarships. It led to a chance meeting between a friend and a woman who was selling her restaurant. He called Lanham and told him he should buy the place. Jeff emptied his annuity and snapped it up.
“My grandpa told me if you can find something to do that you love, that’s what you do, so we just kind of took a shot at it,” he says.
He made the restaurant into the Hog Rock Cafe, right around the corner from the Milan ’54 Museum, the living monument to the famed basketball team at the town’s high school. Milan—with a student body barely pushing 150—upset state powerhouse Muncie Central in the state championship that year. The victory was memorialized in Hoosiers; you can buy their replica “Hickory” leather jackets at the shop for a little under $400. Lanham had the footstep of his bar made from the actual parquet floors of the old Milan gymnasium, with a mural of the players and some of the actors who played them in the film, including autographs, plastering the backside of the bar.
Courtesy of Jeff Lanham
In the nine years leading up to his rooftop stunt, Lanham gave his heart to the place and his community. He’d open up the bar for Bengals road games and dole out free food as if he were hosting a tailgate for hundreds of people. The menu went from a little rectangle the size of an index card into an 18-page bible full of fried chicken, ribs and a “Rodney” hamburger (if you ordered it, what you’d get was at the complete discretion of the chef).
So it wasn’t a surprise when the community completely and totally embraced his time on the roof. His wife, Chrissy, remembers two old women from the nursing home who heard about the stunt and took a field trip to bring him a care package (in a basket shaped like a cat, full of individual sized bags of Doritos and Kroger snack mix). A camping company donated him a nicer tent when his first one blew away in a storm. Campbell’s donated a skid pallet full of soup. Ickey Woods came over to have a sandwich (he and Woods are still in touch to this day) and he had a meal with Woods and Wildman Walker. Chrissy, dutifully, had a cardboard cutout made of her husband and brought him to Bengals home games to sit in his season-ticket spot.
Lanham, in turn, kept trying to give back. Every time a news outlet came, he tried to work in a mention of his friend’s baby daughter Brooke, who was born with spina bifida, to raise money for a new ranch-style house and other necessities for the family. He auctioned off dinner spots on the roof each night, with the proceeds going straight to Brooke.
“That was probably the best part about having that spotlight,” Jeff says. “Just being able to help that family out, just the way it altered their lives.”
In the months that followed, the Lanhams enjoyed the windfall that Jeff’s time on the roof brought the business. The Hog Rock had an online review naming them the “best wood-fired barbecue in the state of Indiana” and a near-five star rating on Google in a world where every wannabe Pete Wells doles out one star when a napkin isn’t folded to their liking. It was a successful, thriving restaurant.
One year later, the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, a band called EFN (Everyone From Nowhere) was on stage playing to a packed house and stopped when the smell of smoke started to overwhelm their senses. After checking their amplifiers (the band members thought it was their equipment that shorted out) they played again for another hour before a black fog started pouring out of the vents. Not long after evacuation, the entire building burned down.
After investigation, they found that in the crawl space between the first two floors of the 100-year-old building, some old knob and tube wiring was never changed out and shorted.
In the coming days, the community Lanham loved so much came together. They sold “Hog Rock Strong” T-shirts and brought Jeff a check for more than $35,000, presenting it to him in front of the ashes of the old restaurant (one of the presenters was dressed like Buddy the Elf). He and Chrissy turned around and handed it to their employees for Christmas, knowing their work options were limited during the pandemic.
This entire dream season for the Bengals has felt like a whirlwind. Instead of away-game tailgates at the Hog Rock, the Lanhams host their regulars at their own home, having converted a tin shed in the back into a full-blown Bengals man cave. A picture of the old restaurant hangs in the center of a framed collage of Bengals successes past and present. On one side, copies of the Cincinnati Enquirer from 2021 with pictures of Joe Burrow being carried off the field on his teammates’ shoulders. On the other, the Cincinnati Enquirer from January 1982, previewing the Bengals’ Super Bowl XVI matchup against Joe Montana’s 49ers.
Just before Halloween, Lanham packed his Goldendoodles, Cash and June, drove to a bank and withdrew $1,000 from his account before making the short trip across the way to a Barstool Sportsbook on Hollywood Boulevard in Lawrenceville, Indiana. He had never placed a bet in his life, but at that point, the Bengals were 5–3. For some reason, the team (which would lose to the lowly Jets the next day) struck him with such conviction that he decided to throw down a huge chunk of money. When asked why, he says Zac Taylor carries himself well. The players all seemed humble.
He stared at the computer terminals, completely bewildered on how to enter the cash, look up the right bet and receive his ticket. He asked a few patrons in line, before getting someone to agree to place the bet for him. “He was like, ‘Man, you don’t wanna do this.’” The patron, in good conscience, couldn’t imagine a world in which the Bengals would win the Super Bowl.
They eventually agreed on a $100 wager. And instead of a Super Bowl victory, he placed a bet for the team to win the AFC. Lanham took the ticket and thought nothing of it. He clipped it to the visor on his car and didn’t check it again until he was leaving Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City on the way back to a rental home they secured for the weekend during the AFC title game. He looked at the stub and smiled, seeing that he’d just won $1,800.
At some point, Lanham thinks by March, a new Hog Rock will be standing about nine miles from the original. He’s in talks to buy an old wedding venue. The woman selling the place contacted them out of the blue before her retirement, saying something told her to reach out. She felt an emotional connection to Jeff after seeing a picture of him on Facebook donating food to the Legion.
The Hog Rock is going to make money first as an events center, catering massive barbecue parties that they’ll use to fund the creation of the bar Jeff will build by hand over time. Eventually, Bengals games will be here again. He thinks the employees will come back. He knows the patrons will return, as they’ve seemingly never left. With 28,000 square feet of space, there is enough room for an entire community to live on the roof if a bet ever goes south again. Jeff isn’t planning on that.
