Many Wait, Few Can Buy Ducks Tickets : Sports: Hundreds of hockey fans who stood in line for hours are angry to learn many choice games were already sold out.

For four hours Friday, Ron McGuire stood in line to buy Mighty Ducks hockey tickets, and he was mad enough to high-stick someone.

He was about the 210th person in line when he arrived at the Anaheim Arena at 8:30 a.m., and at 12:30 p.m. he still had 50 people in front of him and another 200 behind him. Worse, he would not know until he reached one of the eight ticket windows whether tickets to the games he wanted to see were still available.

“I’ve been waiting three months for today and a chance to buy tickets and I have to put up with this,” McGuire, an Anaheim maintenance technician, said. The team should have put up a board letting people know which games had sold out, he said. Making bathrooms available would have also been nice. “It’s insane,” he said.

Friday marked the first day fans of the National Hockey League’s newest team could buy tickets to individual games, and hundreds of Duck fans had flocked to the arena to buy up to the limit of 10 tickets per game, at prices ranging from $13 to $125 per ticket.

And while snafus and long lines were creating simmering anger among many outside the arena, they were creating smiles inside at the Ducks’ offices. The team had already sold about 13,000 multi-game ticket packages, leaving about 4,000 seats available for each of its 41 home games.

“We are sorry that there are problems, but we will learn from this,” spokesman Bill Robertson said.

About 12,000 tickets were sold Friday at the arena, by phone and at Ticketmaster outlets, Robertson said, and perhaps five of the games are now sold out.

“But (long lines) are positive problems to have,” he said. “We would be concerned if nobody was in line. This shows that there is interest in the National Hockey League in Orange County.”

Many felt their efforts to buy tickets to the Oct. 8 opening night against the Detroit Red Wings and to games against popular teams such as the Los Angeles Kings, Montreal Canadiens and Pittsburgh Penguins had been checked by erroneous information in advertisements placed by the Ducks in Orange County newspapers.

The ads said no one would be allowed to line up prior to 8 a.m. and that random numbers would be passed out at 9 a.m. That meant everyone would have an equal chance at being first in line when the ticket booths opened at 10 a.m.

However, people were allowed to camp out overnight at the ticket window, ticket buyers said, and no random numbers were distributed. Instead, it was first come, first served. That played into the hands of ticket scalpers and brokers, those in line said, because they brought vanloads of people to the arena early Friday morning to buy up tickets to the best games.

“The scalpers came and sucked up all the tickets,” Jay James of Norwalk said. He and three co-workers from a grocery store warehouse were about 200th in line. “They should have done this a better way.”

Robertson could not explain why the method used to distribute tickets differed from what the Ducks said it would be in the ads, except to say first come, first served is the method commonly used to sell sports tickets.

“We take responsibility (for the error),” Robertson said. “When you are selling this many tickets, it will never be an ideal situation. But we are excited about the overwhelming response.”