Sales Are Slow for PGA Tickets

Ticket sales for the 1995 PGA Championship at Riviera Country Club are lagging badly, with no more than 13,000 sold so far for the tournament.

This represents a weak response in a city where the Nissan (Los Angeles) Open claims to draw up to 40,000 fans at the same course.

But tournament organizers say they are not worried by the relatively slow public response.

According to Jim Magnusson, the tournament director, about 40% of the tickets allocated for the Aug. 7-13 event remain to be sold.

“If the phone calls had leveled off, we’d be alarmed,” Magnusson said Monday. “But we were getting 300 calls a day and now we’re getting 1,000, from people seeking information.

“Now that the British Open is over, I think people will focus more on the tournament. We’re excited.”

The PGA had limited total ticket sales to 22,000, meaning that about 9,000 remain unsold.

“We expect to sell the majority in the next two weeks,” Magnusson said. “If we don’t, there will be daily sales, but we won’t know that until the last weekend [before the tournament].”

In May, the PGA announced the creation of two-day ticket packages to supplement the season-ticket badges that had been available earlier. It also announced that TicketMaster would handle the sales.

The season-ticket badges, which are still available, cost $175 for the grounds and $225 for the Wanamaker Club for the week.

The two-day packages, for either Thursday-Friday or Saturday-Sunday, are priced at $100 and $130, respectively.

Clubhouse ticket packages have been sold out.

Magnusson dismissed the notion that the cost has contributed to the slow sales.

“It [Los Angeles] is a strange market,” he said. “I’ve been here two years, and the consumers here tend to wait until the last minute.

“Nothing here surprises us. It was the same with the World Cup [soccer championship] last summer. They thought they were going to have tickets left, but the games were sold out.

“We’re still shooting for a sellout,” he said. “A lot depends on the next two weeks.”

The last time the PGA Championship was played in Los Angeles--in 1983, also at Riviera--total attendance for the week topped 112,000, a PGA spokesman said. There was no limit on sales then.