HOT TICKETS

Dave Copier, director of athletic ticket sales at the University of Utah, leads a quiet life in Salt Lake City.

Or he did, until the Utes’ upset of Arizona last weekend sent Utah to the Final Four.

“As soon as we got in Sunday night, a guy’s coming through the door, saying, ‘I’ve got $170,000,’ ” Copier said. “I told him, ‘We’re not going to sell these,’ and he got on the phone and said, ‘I’m qualified to offer you $300,000 for a large block of seats.’ ”

A day or so later, a man carrying what looked like a computer case motioned Copier aside.

“He flashes what looks like $30,000 in $100 bills and says, ‘We have a touring company,’ ” Copier said. “They do everything but call it scalping. I told him, ‘You’ll do well with that briefcase somewhere else.’

“You’ve seen the movie ‘The Lion King’? It’s like the hyenas, waiting out there to pick the bones.”

A Final Four ticket is a ticket to make money, and it isn’t the NCAA or the participating teams that are making a lot of it.

“It’s all those people in the streets,” said Cheryl Hammitt, director of ticket operations for Stanford.

The NCAA took in $21.5 million in ticket revenue for the 64-team tournament last year and reported net receipts of $6.7 million--excluding television revenue.

Don’t feel sorry for the NCAA, though. It earned $188.4 million from its $1.7-billion deal with CBS, to be distributed to the schools and conferences.

As for the tickets, the average price for all tournament games last year was a modest $33.20--less than it costs for a good seat to a regular-season hockey game between say, the Mighty Ducks and Vancouver.

Even a ticket book for all three Final Four games--Saturday’s two semifinals and Monday’s national championship game--sold for a face value of only $80 for the upper reaches of the Alamodome or $100 for the lower level.

But scalpers or middlemen such as tour companies scramble to acquire as many of the 40,500 tickets as possible, and then make what the market will bear.

As of Thursday, ABC Ticket Co., which placed a special Final Four ad in the San Antonio Yellow Pages, was selling the $80 tickets starting at $450 and the $100 tickets starting at $1,250. There were reports of prime seats going for $4,500.

NCAA Executive Director Cedric Dempsey spent part of Thursday listening to a report from a marketing committee searching for ways to earn more from basketball, claiming only 65 athletic programs in the country make money and that basketball is the best opportunity to maximize profits.

The outside marketer reported in part that young, single males like college basketball, and people who don’t like college basketball don’t go to college basketball games.

The NCAA could have saved itself some money on that.

However, Dempsey said he isn’t inclined to try to take back some of the scalpers’ profits simply by raising the ticket prices.

“We’ve tried to keep the prices down so students on the campuses that are competing can afford to come,” Dempsey said. “Some people have suggested we raise the prices to be more competitive with the pro championships.”

The market is affected in some ways by the NCAA system for distributing tickets, although it’s difficult to say exactly how.

Only 10% of the 40,500 seats at the Alamodome were made available to the public, and about 140,000 people applied for the lottery that decided who would receive those 10,000 tickets.

An additional 14,000 tickets went to the four participating schools, which receive 3,500 each and must pay the NCAA for them, then distribute them as they wish, eating the tickets they give out to players and staff.

The local organizers received almost 5,000 tickets, and the National Assn. of Basketball Coaches received 3,500.

The rest go to the NCAA, its sponsors and other Division I schools.

The sponsors are often assumed to be the source of many tickets on the black market, because companies that receive them don’t have a vested interest in any team and might distribute them to clients, who could resell them.

However, a spokeswoman for Sears, a major corporate sponsor, told the San Antonio Express-News that selling tickets to brokers would be a cause for dismissal and that the company has strict policies regarding tickets.

The coaches’ tickets were once a sore point too, because many depart before the final game Monday. Jim Haney, executive director of the NABC, said the policy is clear now.

“No scalping. Do it, and you lose your ticket privileges for five years,” he said, adding that he has rescinded about “a half-dozen” coaches’ privileges in recent years.

And what of those students?

At Kentucky, policy dictates that one of every three tickets is made available to students, and fulfilled all requests this year.

But to prevent students from money-making schemes, Kentucky has sometimes required them to pick up their tickets in person at the site of the Final Four.

Utah gave 10% of its tickets to students and distributed the rest to boosters, running out after selling the last ones to a donor who had given a modest $750.

At North Carolina, athletic donors received 2,400 of the 3,500 allotment, but the qualifications to purchase them were a little steeper.

“If you wanted to qualify for tickets and had never made a gift, it would have taken a donation of about $45,000,” said Moyer Smith, president of what is known as the Educational Foundation.

At least they know those tickets probably aren’t headed for the hands of scalpers. Utah feels the same way.

“To me, what you’re saying is you want your people to know they bet on a good horse,” Copier said.