Details of Rose Bowl Ticket Deal Revealed

UCLA football booster Angelo M. Mazzone III and his business partner may have netted as much as $400,000 from tour packages put together with 4,000 tickets to the 1994 Rose Bowl they obtained from the Westwood school, according to estimates released Friday by Chancellor Charles E. Young.

In a six-page letter dated May 18, Young wrote to his counterpart at the University of Wisconsin that “documentary evidence” exists proving that Mazzone’s tickets were sold to Wisconsin tour operators as part of packages that were resold to Wisconsin fans. The packages, according to the letter, were for four-night “land tours” the booster put togetherwith Al Brooks Rose Bowl Tours Inc., a Downtown ticket and tour agent.

Mazzone and Brooks sold those packages to out-of-state tour operators at $510 each, “prices which could not be described in any way as ‘gouging,’ ” Young wrote. Those operators then added air fare and resold the complete travel packages to Wisconsin fans.

The letter, which Young released Friday to The Times, is the first accounting of how much money changed hands as a result of the private deal between Mazzone, a prominent UCLA athletic donor and former associate athletic director, and university officials.

At the urging of Athletic Director Peter Dalis, Young approved the deal to sell Mazzone 4,000 tickets at their $46 face value in exchange for an additional $100,000 donation to the athletic department.

The transaction angered football fans at both universities who were either turned down for extra tickets or forced to pay scalpers’ prices to attend the Jan. 1 game. A Wisconsin law firm filed a class action lawsuit against UCLA and the University of California regents on behalf of disappointed fans. Wisconsin Atty. Gen. James Doyle, who has also sued three ticket brokers, has blamed UCLA for contributing to an overheated ticket market.

Young apologized for the transaction in a letter to alumni, but said he and other UCLA officials could not anticipate the high demand for tickets at the time and feared that they would be stuck with unsold tickets. As it turned out, demand for tickets for the game, marking the Wisconsin Badgers’ first Rose Bowl appearance in 31 years, was the highest in many years.

Although Young could not be reached for comment Friday, he said in an interview this week that he personally reviewed Mazzone’s records and found no evidence of “excess profiteering.”

Mazzone has refused public comment on the controversy, and on Friday a receptionist at his pension management firm, Qualified Benefits Inc. of Woodland Hills, said he was unavailable. Ticket agency owner Jaron (Jay) Brooks declined comment.

In his letter to Wisconsin Chancellor David Ward, Young offered the accounting of Mazzone’s costs and profit to rebut accusations that “UCLA’s transaction with Mr. Mazzone contributed to a ‘frenzied’ secondary market and to an overall pricing circumstance that hurt the University of Wisconsin supporters.”

Young’s letter said Mazzone and Brooks have had a “joint venture” of providing Rose Bowl “land” packages to out-of-state operators for more than 10 years. Young said this year’s four-night package was offered in November--before Mazzone made his deal with Young and UCLA--at the wholesale price of $510 per person. All of the packages were sold to Wisconsin tour operators in early December, who resold them to Wisconsin fans “on a timely basis,” Young wrote.

Mazzone’s package not only included a Rose Bowl ticket, but also a $28 bleacher seat for the Rose Parade; a $4 pass to the Rose Parade “float facility”; an adult ticket to Universal Studios; bus transportation during the trip; an estimated $200 for four nights in a double-occupancy Los Angeles hotel room, and $10 for a box lunch on the day of the football game, Young wrote.

In addition, Young said the cost of each tour package included a $25 “pro rata share” of the $100,000 donation to endow UCLA athletic scholarships.

Deducting those costs, plus a 10% commission for the tour operators, Young estimated that Mazzone and Brooks made $99 on each package, or almost $400,000. That figure does not include “indirect costs” for staff time, printing and promotion, he wrote.

The Times reported this month that Mazzone bought another 733 Rose Bowl tickets at face value from other Pac-10 schools. Using Young’s cost figures, Mazzone and Brooks could have cleared at least another $72,000.

Young noted in his letter that the $510 land package offered with the UCLA tickets sold for less than the $843-per-person land package offered by Conlin Dodds Inc., which was chosen to put together official tours for the Wisconsin Alumni Assn. Young acknowledged that there were some differences between the packages.

Tim Van Alstine, Wisconsin’s ticket director, said Friday that rules for the Big Ten conference obligate the alumni association of the conference’s Rose Bowl representative to put together official tour packages, and that Conlin Dodds was awarded the business after competitive bidding.

As part of the deal, Van Alstine said he sold Conlin Dodds 6,000 Rose Bowl tickets at face value for the tours.

Los Angeles ticket brokers have said they would have paid UCLA considerably more than Mazzone had the school opened the tickets up to bidding.