SAN DIEGO SUPER BOWL XXII HOST : Scalpers May Have Cut It Too Close

Ticket scalpers working hotel lobbies and the parking lot of San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium on Saturday for 11th-hour deals found that what may have been the hottest ticket in town last week had taken a sharp drop in value.

Super Bowl XXII tickets that would have fetched $1,500 or more a week or two ago were being offered on Saturday for $400 and $500, scalpers said. And even at that price, there were few takers.

One man, who didn’t want to give his name, said he had two tickets near the 50-yard line, high in the stadium. He bought them for $700 with hopes of a quick profit, and on Saturday he said he would sell them for $400 each--a $600 loss. Still, he couldn’t sell them.

“Who needs tickets? Who needs tickets?” he said, not too loudly, as he walked the perimeter of the stadium.

So what happened to ticket prices?

“The big spenders have their seats and now all the vultures are out,” said Michael Osment of Buck’s Ticket Service.

“Ticket holders were holding out for more money when they were already being offered good prices, and then buyers started losing interest,” said a man who identified himself as Johnnie at Hot Tickets in San Diego.

The high price of scalper tickets was even mentioned by comedian Bob Hope during his special “Hope for a Drug Free America,” televised live Saturday night from the Civic Theatre by the USA-Network.

“They were going for $2,500,” Hope said. “That’s more than Phyllis Diller paid her plastic surgeon for a new seat.”

Hope’s joke aside, Richard Jacobson, of Jax Ticket Agency in San Diego, said the ticket-buying public was frightened away by sensationalized publicity about scalping, even though there were more reasonably priced tickets on the market.

“It’s the media’s fault. You overplayed the ticket price story and scared everybody away,” he said.

“People read that tickets are going for $1,500, and they’re afraid to call,” he said. “Yeah, I sold two tickets today for $1,500, on the 50-yard line--but I also sold 200 tickets Friday and today for between $350 and $550.”

Media stories earlier in the month about some good tickets going quickly for $2,000 and more raised naive scalpers’ level of expectations for quick profits when in fact relatively few people were apparently willing to pay those prices.

But the scalpers continued to hold out hope and by Saturday, they had scalped themselves into a corner and faced selling tickets at a loss.

At the stadium on Saturday, one man was offering six tickets for $3,600. He had no takers.

A fan from Boulder, Colo. said he was offered a ticket for $300--and turned it down because he would not pay more than $200.

Another said he was offered two tickets for $250 each in the end zone, but he also turned them down as too expensive.

At the San Diego Marriott, a scalper was trying to get $400 for a 30-yard-line seat, and having no luck.

Jacobson said numerous $300 tickets were available Saturday afternoon through his ticket agency--”but you can’t see from those seats. They’re the first five rows of the field level. It’s junk.”

A Waiting Game

Osment said his ticket prices ranged from $400 to $1,000--half of what they were last week. “It might be to your advantage to wait until right before the game, but then you’ve got to scramble and it’s nerve-wracking.”

Last-minute scalping would most likely occur in major hotel lobbies since only people with game tickets or other credentials will be allowed in the stadium parking lot today, and police are expected to be on the lookout for scalpers along Friars Road.

Osment said he was getting calls on Saturday from fans in Denver who wanted to see if there were tickets available before they decided to fly in for the game.

“The problem is, they don’t want to come out unless they know they’ll have a seat to the game, and we don’t want to sell them a ticket to the game until we know they’ve got the money--and that means they’ve got to come out here.”