Sixty seconds, no words, and a horse named Ringo doing the only thing the country needed to see.
On Sunday, February 3, 2002, during Super Bowl XXXVI, Anheuser-Busch ran a commercial that broke every rule a beer company is supposed to follow. No voice-over. No jingle. The Budweiser logo stayed off the screen until the final seconds.
The Clydesdales left a farmhouse with snow still on the ground and started walking east. They moved through open country and small towns, past a barber who stepped out of his shop to watch them go by. They crossed the Brooklyn Bridge and stopped in a park with the Manhattan skyline and the Statue of Liberty standing behind them.
Then the horses turned toward the empty space where the World Trade Center used to be, lifted a leg, and bowed.
Three words came up on the screen. We’ll never forget.
Budweiser never aired it again.
The Ad Ran Less Than Five Months After the Attacks
The timing is what gets lost when people share the clip now.
September 11, 2001, was a Tuesday. The commercial aired the following February 3, less than five months later. The wreckage at Ground Zero was still being cleared, and the country was at war. Nobody had figured out how to talk about any of it yet, and a beer company decided the answer was to say nothing at all.
Anheuser-Busch calls the spot “Clydesdale Respect.” When the fact-checking site Snopes asked about it years later, the company confirmed it ran a single time.
“We continue to be overwhelmed by the positive response,” Budweiser said. “Anheuser-Busch is proud to be an American beer company and we wanted to express ourselves in respectfully honoring those affected by the events of September 11.”
The company has never publicly explained why it was pulled after one airing. The common understanding is that they wanted it remembered as a tribute rather than a commercial.
Filming It Took Permission From Congress and the Mayor of New York
Shooting a beer commercial in Lower Manhattan in late 2001 was not a simple production request.
Bob Lachky, then executive vice president of Anheuser-Busch Global Creative, told Fox 2 in St. Louis what it took. “We filmed in New York City,” he said. “We had a helicopter going over the Brooklyn Bridge.”
Airspace over New York was locked down. The shoot required cooperation from Congress, the New York City Mayor’s Office, and several other agencies, and Mayor Rudy Giuliani personally signed off on the aerial footage of the Clydesdales in Battery Park.
A city that had been attacked five months earlier cleared its skies so a crew could film eight horses bowing.
The Horse That Bowed Was Named Ringo
The most human detail in the whole story belongs to an animal.
Amy Trout, ranch manager at Anheuser-Busch, told Fox 2 that a Clydesdale named Ringo was trained specifically to perform the bow at the center of the commercial.
“One of my favorite Clydesdales, Ringo, was taught to bow for that commercial, and he was truly a magnificent animal,” Trout said. “I am happy that I was able to care for him for many years.”
Getting a Clydesdale to that point takes most of its young life. Training begins at six months, when foals are weaned and sent to Grant’s Farm in St. Louis, followed by three and a half years learning what Trout called all the social graces a Clydesdale needs to know.
Ringo learned one more thing than the rest of them.
Budweiser released an updated version of the tribute for the twentieth anniversary in 2021, with the Clydesdales bowing again. The original ran once, on one night, in front of a few hundred million people who never needed to see it again.
