Big Hurt Beverage Company

Big Hurt Beverage Company

At 6-foot-5 and north of 250 pounds, with a wingspan that reaches two ZIP codes and a perma-grin that could light up a dark hallway, Frank Thomas doesn’t exactly blend into his surroundings. Or so you would think. On this late winter day, as the former Major League Baseball great casually strolls along the second floor at the Cosmopolitan toting a black duffel bag, he doesn’t draw so much as a double take. Finally, near the end of a 45-minute conversation in the bar at Holsteins, one fan clad in a Los Angeles Dodgers shirt and cap hesitantly approaches the Chicago White Sox legend—he of the 521 home runs, 1,704 RBIs, .301 career batting average and two MVP awards earned over a 19-year career—and extends his right hand. “Sorry to interrupt. Just wanted to say hello and tell you I enjoyed watching you play. Tremendous career.” The gentle giant they call the Big Hurt smiles (he always smiles) and thanks the 50-something man. “In Chicago, I was like a fish in a bucket every day, and it was tough to live like that,” says Thomas, who bought a home on Henderson’s Rio Secco golf course in 2002 and has lived there full time since retiring in 2008. “I come from a small Southern town, so I’m used to saying hello to everybody and just going about my day. But I just couldn’t do that in Chicago. Everywhere I went it was, ‘Hey, there’s the Big Hurt!’” I couldn’t enjoy dinners, couldn’t do anything. Here, you blend in with all the other celebrities. I love it, because I like being normal. I like walking through here with a bag of beer in my hand and people don’t freak out. They just say, ‘Hey, Big Hurt—Frank, what’s up?’” About that bag of beer: It’s not just your run-of-the-mill brand; it’s Big Hurt Beer. And it’s Thomas’ new career. This isn’t his first business venture away from the diamond: He was the spokesman for Zizzazz energy drink, and he’s launched his own record label, Las Vegas-based W2W Records, whose most notable act is BelleVoxx, a local all-female trio. But right now, he’s all-in with his signature brew. Two years in the making, Big Hurt Beer recently hit the shelves in Chicago and Las Vegas, including at the Palms and New York-New York, with additional distributorship coming next month in California and throughout the South, including his home state of Georgia. The lager is light and crisp and, with a 7 percent alcohol content, packs a bite; Thomas beams with pride when he talks about it. And, as we learned during our chat, that’s not all he’s proud of. I love beer. I used to tell my teammates all the time that I was going to go into the beer business, and they’d just laugh their asses off. But this started almost two years ago. They came to my agent and were like, “Big Hurt” would be a great name for a beer. That’s where it started, and it’s taken almost two years to get it together. We’ve been working our butts off. When people ask me about the beer I say, “Here, taste it.” That’s the best way to advertise it. Just have some.