The Games People Play With Tickets Have High Stakes

Ed Balatti, a 60-year-old used car dealer who calls himself Horse Trader Ed, has taken his lumps for the San Francisco 49ers, both as player and fan.

Balatti played on the original 49er team in 1946. A permanently crooked finger hints at the toll playing both ways took on his body. He has held at least two dozen 49er season tickets for the last 32 years, and much of his tenure as one of the 49er faithful has been fouled by long stretches of losing.

“I used to tell my salesmen that if they sold a car, they would get a couple tickets to the 49er game,” Balatti said the other day at his small lot on Van Ness Avenue. “But the team got so bad I started telling them that if they didn’t sell a car, they would have to go to the game.”

Two weeks ago, a computer selected which 49er season ticket-holders would be entitled to buy two of 20,000 tickets set aside for San Francisco fans to watch their team play the Miami Dolphins Sunday in Super Bowl XIX at nearby Stanford Stadium. The computer, for reasons of its own, passed over Balatti.

“It’s rotten,” Balatti said. “The longtime fans are the ones who support pro football . . . and if they don’t take care of the fans they are heading for disaster.”

His complaint was but one in a wailing chorus as the annual grovel for Super Bowl tickets, already a source of scandal for the National Football League, this year became wilder and more unseemly than ever before. The usual hysteria was heightened by the game site’s proximity to San Francisco, the appeal this city holds for tourists, and the anticipated quality of competition.

Black-market prices soared, with sellers seeking $1,000 for tickets that have a face value of $60. “You owe me” was the cry of the land, as those who somehow had access to tickets were besieged by friends and strangers alike calling in old debts, real or imagined. Fans unable to raise enough cash to buy tickets made feeble attempts to barter for them, offering everything from auto repair work to cases of champagne--and yes, even Cabbage Patch dolls.

Counterfeiters and masked men wielding guns joined in the fray, along with the usual assortment of scalpers, con artists and other Super Bowl greed merchants.

“During the gasoline shortage, people were stealing tanker trucks,” said San Francisco Police Lt. Michael Para. “Now it’s Super Bowl tickets.”

Para was investigating the robbery of 47 tickets. Two brokers from San Diego were dealing out of a Holiday Inn here last Sunday when bandits wearing ski masks stole the tickets at gunpoint. Para said late this week that he had no leads. Detectives were planning to go to the game in an effort to determine who wound up with the tickets and perhaps trace back the transactional chain.

On the San Francisco Bay Peninsula, Millbrae police met with greater success in breaking up a ring of counterfeiters who had intended to flood the market with nearly 1,000 bogus tickets. The tickets, printed in Hawaii, looked almost--but not quite enough--like the real thing. A suspicious buyer alerted police.

Two men were arrested, and investigators recovered all but 95 of the fake tickets, most of which had been dumped in a storm drain when the police began moving in. A dozen of the tickets were recovered in Reno, where one of the suspects, said by police to be filled with remorse, paid $2,700 in restitution to the buyer.

At least 40 of the at-large tickets were not believed to have been put out on the market, said Millbrae Detective Ray Celeste. When one of the alleged counterfeiters attemped to sell the 40 tickets, he was rolled, Celeste said., “Well, not rolled really. The buyers recognized them as counterfeits and said, ‘Hey, you are trying to rip us off,’ and they took them from him.”

The counterfeit case cast an aura of paranoia over the ticket scene. A ticket office was opened at Candlestick Park to allow ticket buyers to verify their tickets. Shortly before it opened at 2 p.m. Wednesday, more than a dozen people were waiting.

“You bet I’m scared,” said Bob Scott, a stocky 34-year-old forklift driver who had come to the window four hours early, clad in a gold 49er warm-up jacket.

Scott befriended another buyer, a 22-year-old Milpitas disc jockey named Darryl O’Donnell, and they talked quietly about their tickets, taking them out from time to time to make furtive comparisons, and training a wary eye on anyone who came near. They were convinced someone might try to hijack the tickets.

“This is like having $500 on you,” Scott said. “I’m having a cow. This is worse than getting your wisdom teeth pulled.”

Scott had bought the two end zone seats from a friend of a friend, and he intended to take his 12-year-old son as a surprise. The sellers were an older couple from St. Louis and they looked honest enough. “But you never know,” Scott said. “Even though people can be real nice, they can rip you off.”

O’Donnell had found through a newspaper ad a ticket broker who would sell him two end zone seats for $900. He wanted to use the second ticket to impress a date. Plans were made to meet in the lobby of a San Francisco hotel.

“As I was waiting for the guy in the lobby, I started feeling a little queasy,” he said. The longer O’Donnell waited, the more scared he became, and when the ticket broker arrived, the young man panicked and bought only one ticket, romance taking a back seat to fear and pragmatism.

As Scott and O’Donnell talked, more ticket buyers began to arrive at the ticket verification office. Some came by taxi, others drove fancy European cars. All kept to themselves as they waited for the window to open, suspicious. A lone police officer wearing sunglasses sat on the tailgate of a pickup truck, glancing up occasionally from a Robert Ludlum novel to make sure no one was getting robbed. Scott walked over to the officer and gave him the license number of a car that had circled the parking lot twice.

Both Scott and O’Donnell, it turned out, had bought legitimate tickets. The police officer declined a request by Scott to provide an armed escort to their waiting cars. The two left together, creeping out of the lot in a two-car convoy. They planned to stay together all the way down to San Jose.

“That way if someone pulls one of us over, the other will be able to go ahead and get help.” O’Donnell explained.

When the men who run the National Football League decide how Super Bowl tickets will be distributed, they do not forget that mythical fellow, Joe Fan.

This year, for instance, 1,000 tickets were made available through a lottery that attracted 30,000 fans. Two hundred more tickets were set aside for charity.

The 82,000 remaining tickets were divided among advertisers and other corporations that have dealings with professional football, the franchises playing in the Super Bowl, television networks and other media, all NFL players, team employees and various other supporters.

“From the beginning, it’s always been the idea of the owners to try and accommodate the people who have supported football over the years,” said Don Weiss, executive director of the league.

So the Super Bowl, then, really isn’t a event intended for the average fan?

“No, it isn’t,” Weiss said.

Once the tickets are distributed, the fun begins. Travel agents and ticket brokers begin foraging for tickets to build travel packages around and take care of longtime customers. People with tickets who don’t want to go themselves start hunting for the top dollar. Estimates on how many tickets are resold to brokers range from 8,000 to 25,000. Precisely where they come from is not clear.

“We make arrangements to purchase tickets in advance from various sources,” said Ken Baker, who runs Murray’s ticket operation in Los Angeles. “We advertise in all the participating cities and people know we are here.”

The NFL in previous years has tried, without great success, to trace tickets, Weiss said. The league has hinted that non-participating players are a likely source for Super Bowl tickets, although that would contribute only about 3,200 tickets to the market.

Raider owner Al Davis has said in sworn depositions that NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle is himself involved in peddling Super Bowl tickets, an allegation that Rozelle has vehemently denied.

This year, with $1,000 prices being bandied about, even season ticket-holders who got lucky in the lottery have been thinking twice about turning a profit and watching the game on TV.

Federal officials have been investigating allegations that tickets were scalped five years ago by underworld figures and the profits were not reported for income tax purposes. The tickets allegedly came from people affiliated with the Rams. There have been no indictments. The scalping allegations generated a tremendous amount of public discussion about the Super Bowl ticket situation. Rozelle told Sports Illustrated in 1981: “There’s a sickness about the whole thing. You feel a sickness in your stomach. There hasn’t been anything like this in my 21 years as commissioner. We’ve had problems, sure, but not of such a serious internal nature. It does make you sick.”

Despite the flurry of breast-beating and promises to find a way to rein in the resale bonanza, nothing tangible has been done to alter the distribution system in the last four years. Weiss this week reiterated Rozelle’s contention that nothing can be done to prevent the resale of Super Bowl tickets.

“We’ll just have to keep taking our lumps,” he said.

Others think different. A few public officials here suggested this week that laws might be changed to make resale illegal. In California, it is illegal only to resell tickets at a game site.

Some NFL owners have long argued that the league should increase ticket prices to better reflect their real market value. This would at least divert some of the profits from the middlemen back to the NFL.

That was one of several ploys tried at the Los Angeles Olympics in an effort to keep ticket brokers and scalpers from sticking their fingers in the Olympic committee’s pockets.

Another was the Olympic patron program, which gave high-rollers a chance to buy the best seats by donating $25,000 to a charity that would bring disadvantaged youngsters to an event free. Olympic organizers reasoned that such people would pay top dollar anyway, and it was better to funnel the money to charity--since it was tax deductible, the real cost of becoming a patron was much lower--than to a ticket broker.

The classified ad was sandwiched between columns of Super Bowl ticket offers. Most were offers to pay small fortunes or swap valuable commodities--a week at a Lake Tahoe condo; a 1965Mustang--for tickets. This offer was more modest, and the ad had an appealingly plaintive tone.

It said: “49er Season Tix holder feels left out. Needs tickets. $200-$300.”

It listed a telephone number and said to ask for Joe.

Joe Fan?

No, Joe McManus, 34, a San Franciscan who has held season tickets for four years.

“The ad was just a ploy to get some sucker to give me a ticket,” McManus said. “I presume I will be able to get tickets at my price, but the closer the game gets, the more I think I’ll stay home and watch it on television.

“It’s just a big hype,” he said. “I mean, how would you like to pay $1,000 to have some big fat guy sit next to you and take up half your seat, and some guy from Texas sitting behind you with his knees in your back for the whole game, and some woman in front of you with a four-foot hairdo she got for the big game. And you can’t see anything. All you can do is kiss it goodby and watch the game on a portable TV on your knees. Who needs it?”

Surprisingly, McManus already had received at least eight offers of tickets priced around $300 at a time when $500 was said to be the minimum amount one could pay for a ticket.

That illustrates one of the fundamental truths about big-event ticket scrambles. Everyone lies. Brokers lie about how much they will pay for tickets in order to keep the buying price down. Then they lie about how much people are willing to pay in order to drive the selling price up. Buyers lie about how much they are willing to pay. They also lie about how much they actually did pay. Some, bragging, inflate the figure. Others, embarrassed, scale it down.

Nonetheless, by the end of the week there were signs that, as has happened in most Super Bowls, the prices already had peaked and were in decline. On Wednesday, a large crop of new advertisers appeared in the classified columns. Significantly, they were all sellers.

By Friday, some prospective buyers were confidently predicting that, once again, tickets would be going for face value on game day.

“People panic,” said Mike Domeier, a 31-year-old season ticket holder who was offering free auto body work in exchange for tickets. He had a couple of offers early in the week, but was expecting more as the game got closer. “I’ll be there,” he said.

On Thursday night, a man wearing a Kansas City Chief windbreaker and cap entered Prego, a popular Union Street restaurant, and identified himself as a Chiefs player. He produced from inside the front of his sweat pants an envelope containing two end zone tickets, which he said were part of his allottment.

“I had a lady offer me $500 for these last Monday,” he said. “I should have sold them then. I don’t think I can get that much for them now.”

Unable to find a buyer, he sauntered off into the increasingly foggy night.

Had he been at Candlestick Park Wednesday afternoon, he would have found a scalping soulmate, a man whose personalized plates identified him as an NFL player. He slowly lapped the stadium in his car, calling out softly: “Tickets. Super Bowl Tickets. Tickets.”

For the players who will take part in the game, their complement of 20 tickets each was just one more distraction in a two-week frenzy of hyperbolic silliness. Most purchased telephone answering machines to screen callers. Guard Randy Cross of the 49ers said he left a message that began: “If this is another feeble ticket request, don’t bother to leave your name.” Teammate Dwaine Board said he had received 60 requests on his recorder for tickets in a single day.

Bubba Paris, the 49ers’ massive left tackle, said the pressure for tickets was tremendous. Paris, a born-again Christian given to onfield witnessing and blessing opponents after he blocks them, said he decided early which members of his family would get tickets and he has not strayed from his list.

“The majority of my family now can’t stand me,” he said. “I have 200 members of my family and they can’t understand why I can only give away 20 tickets. They also can’t understand why a person who is going to make at least $18,000 can’t afford to buy 100 more tickets.”

Paris said he has not been approached by any professionals seeking his tickets, and he has taken steps to ensure that his relatives do not succumb to temptation and attempt to turn a profit on the tickets he has set aside for them.

“I’m too much of a businessman,” he said. “I don’t want anybody making money off of me. So I’m going to be sort of like the Tampa Bay owner. In order for Tampa Bay to pick up their tickets, the players have to report in person at will-call at the game.

“So that’s how it is going to be with me. They have to leave my home with me on the day of the game in order to get their tickets.”

It seems appropiate that Ed Balatti calls himself Horse Trader Ed.

Unable to get tickets through the lottery, he resorted to other, more familiar means. A couple moving to Michigan showed up on the lot with an old Mercedes. Some dickering was done. The man told Balatti that his wife, a hotel employee, had two tickets. More dickering was done.

A deal was struck. The man and woman walked away from the lot with $1,200. They left behind their car, and two tickets to the Super Bowl.

“He said he wasn’t really a big fan anyway,” Balatti said.

And the quality of the car?

“Oh, it will bring a good price.”