Another Rose Bowl Loss : UCLA is badgered by Wisconsin’s ticket-scalping revelations

Speaking just in public-relations terms, it’s been a tough year for UCLA. Student hunger strikes. Faculty houses unsold on the West Side. The flap over Michael Milken’s lecture contract. Amid all the negative news, the football team’s Rose Bowl appearance was supposed to be an uptick.

Guess again. Chancellor Charles E. Young and other UCLA officials are now caught up in a new mess over Rose Bowl ticket scalping. The controversy grew out of an investigation by the Wisconsin attorney general, who is trying to determine if charges can be filed against travel agents who failed to deliver on promised Rose Bowl tickets for several hundred Wisconsin fans who traveled here for the game.

In the course of their probe, Wisconsin investigators learned that UCLA, with Young’s approval, sold a block of 4,000 tickets to a single athletic department booster, Angelo Mazzone. He paid the face value of the tickets and donated an additional $100,000 to UCLA. In turn, Mazzone sold the tickets to a broker for an undisclosed sum.

So far there appears to be nothing illegal about the deal. Reselling tickets is legal in California. And school officials say they agreed to Mazzone’s offer to avoid financial losses that UCLA would have faced if large numbers of tickets had been left unsold. They say they did not anticipate the ticket demand that resulted when Wisconsin, which had not been to the Rose Bowl in 30 years, qualified as the visiting team.

Still, this is another PR problem UCLA does not need. It has angered UCLA boosters who were told before the Rose Bowl that they could buy only a limited number of tickets. It revived anger in Wisconsin over hundreds of tourists who came out here for the game and got ripped off. And it may yet became a financial problem for the taxpayers who support UCLA. Last week, both the school and UC regents were named as defendants in a class-action lawsuit filed in Wisconsin on behalf of irate fans who did not get the tickets they paid for. Some uptick.