Calculating the High Price of Friendship at Super Bowl Time

Fastidious in their bookkeeping, the Denver Broncos offer a ticket breakdown for the upcoming Super Bowl, that monument to national lunacy, announcing they are receiving 13,000 of the 72,104 seats available in the Superdome.

The San Francisco 49ers will receive the same number.

As host team, the New Orleans Saints are tendered 6,100 seats, and 18,850 are spread among the other 25 brothers in the National League, amounting to 754 each.

Next, the league office is accommodated with 13,500, a figure to be explored shortly, and the remainder is allocated the luxury suite holders in the home stadium.

It has been asked what the league office does with 13,500 tickets, and the answer never has been clear, no more than it is clear what anyone who gets tickets does with them.

The league contends it takes care of friends, such as television networks and their sponsors. It also has a lot of friends in Washington and in industries dispensing products related to the league.

Each of the 28 teams has friends, as well as the luxury suite holders.

We have, at Super Bowl time, a display of friendship warming the heart of the republic.

It is the sheerest coincidence that seats earmarked for friends should wind up selling for $500 and more--much more in some instances.

Before it entered into rest, the Herald-Examiner was planning a Super Bowl contest which would reward the winner with a trip, and two tickets, to the game. In order to obtain the tickets, it made an inquiry of a Los Angeles broker, obviously one with friends.

Indeed, the broker could provide the tickets--at $1,250 each.

If there was any redemptive feature to the shutdown, it was only that the Super Bowl tickets weren’t needed.

But the point is, how has this monster evolved, this blatant scalping of a commodity reserved mostly for friends?

The security force at 410 Park Avenue, residence of the National Football League, is massive. It levels a watchful eye on drugs. Its surveillance of gambling is close. It studies the personal habits of coaches, general managers and players.

It isn’t disclosed, but it is generally understood, that it keeps a dossier on each owner, too, tracing his everyday functions.

Its ramparts of decency guarded with such impeccability, how does the league become a part of this heist, the shameful hawking of tickets to its biggest promotion at up to 10 times or more their value?

Are those handling the tickets throughout the league being made accountable enough for their distribution?

During his incumbency as commissioner, Pete Rozelle always worried about Super Bowl ticket scams, his worst fears realized when the fiance (later to become the husband) of the Los Angeles Rams owner got his hands on a large parcel of her tickets, scalped them and went to jail for failing to report the profits.

“We try very hard to keep control of the tickets,” said Rozelle, “but find it impossible to track down where they go after they leave the hands of those originally receiving them.”

If a Denver or San Francisco fan, for instance, latches on to a pair, the league can’t account for what he does with them.

Scalping, though, is so wide-scale that suspicion must focus on areas outside the fandom of the participating teams.

Openly, for example, certain clubs over the years have gone into the travel business, selling Super Bowl packages at less than bargain prices.

The trick to selling a Super Bowl package is to produce a Super Bowl ticket, around which can be wrapped air fare, hotel rooms, airport transfers and meals.

Purchaser of the foregoing may be rewarded, at the packager’s expense, with a welcome mai tai.

Super Bowl tickets, believed supplied by owners, have served as a carrot at political fund-raisers, at which coaches have been enlisted to analyze the game for education-hungry contributors.

One surveying the scene is willing to allow for normal larceny on the part of street guys turning a Super Bowl buck, but the league must labor to convince one it is doing enough to keep Super Bowl ticket distribution sanitary.

In this Great American Scalp, too many seats are winding up in strange hands, dealing them off at strange prices.

New Orleans has no law against scalping. All it does is prohibit this practice on the Superdome grounds. The scene, it feels, shouldn’t be polluted by villainy and rascality.

As it happens in Louisiana politics, enough explanations were required to justify the cost of the Superdome itself, running at the time $175 million, or roughly $100 million over budget.

Their fears misplaced, the villagers in 1975 got a bargain, considering a stadium today costs $150 million with no roof.

But the revelry has begun in New Orleans, where, as it usually happens in every town hosting a big event, the police have declared a crackdown on prostitution, promising a wholesome environment for visitors.

At the Derby each year, Louisville police crack down on prostitution, anxious to purify the scene for Derby entrants, who are only 3.

If a horse makes a private deal through a bellhop, however, that’s his own business.