I was representing a company in a baseball marketing deal.
My appointment answered the door of his Fort Lee, N.J., penthouse in his bathrobe and led me into the living room. He was representing a future New York baseball icon, as any close family member would. Less than three months earlier he himself made front page news by beating a health crisis of major proportions.
“Inspirational,” the tabloids called him. I reveled in his recovery and evenly prepared to deal with his irascible nature in an effort to sign his brother.
On a coffee table, under the sports page, were what appeared to be stacks of dollar bill-sized cardboard. Two landlines, their ringers muted to a dull buzz accompanied two cell phones. This guy was not going to miss a call.
A young lady handling FedEx envelopes reached for the stacks and revealed that underneath the newspaper laid over 500 glossy tickets to Super Bowl XXXI-street value, over a million dollars. Today this haul would be worth anywhere from five to ten million cash. “Inspirational” to scalpers everywhere.
Here was a baseball guy in possession of a good chunk of football’s lucre: tickets to the Super Bowl, feathers from the NFL’s Golden Fleece. Admittance to the kingdom, a palpable invite to the real party of the game’s aristocracy and all that surrounds the biggest day in sports.
About 1% of all Super Bowl tickets take a direct route into the hands of NFL fans. When taxpayer money pays for glittering new stadiums from coast to coast, that is an obscenity. Let the market dictate the ticket price but at least give the unconnected fan a realistic chance to buy.
Averaging over two million dollars in salary, each NFL player gets to buy two Super Bowl tickets at face value (up to $2,500 this year). These four thousand or so tickets are promptly scalped to insiders at five times the cost. Those ducats that aren’t claimed at the game site by players (the tariff factored into the scalp) are returned to the team and then slipped to connected guys like the baseball lifer. That’s over $20 million in commerce funneled to moneyed athletes rather than getting those tickets into the hands of TV ratings generating, merchandise buying, fantasy league participating, everyday fans. That’s a disgrace.
One quarter of all Super Bowl tickets go to media members, media partners and sponsors. Really? Well, who’s buying what these entities peddle more so than the blue collar fan? Why not pass on some of this haul directly to them? Even local contests and promotions that try to do this must bear the aristocratic imprimatur of the NFL. And the fan friendly NFL Experience of the host city? It charges admission. Not a very generous or affable experience for those not part of the ruling class.
The NFL passes a set amount of tickets to the teams and accounts for all others in house, down to the ticket. In the nineties, many of them were run by the now-defunct NFL Properties, a cesspool of skim and corruption. In keeping with that spirit, tickets that trickle down to fans from the teams must now pay a vigorish to a hospitality company partly owned by the team owners. Not very hospitable.
Nefarious boxing promoter Don King once said of bootleggers who were selling knockoff merchandise along the Vegas Strip during Mike Tyson’s mega fights, “Let them make a living.” Roger Goodell has spearheaded a nationwide assault on all unlicensed Super Bowl merchandise and activities promising prosecution.
Even glitzy parties in the host city must carry the seven-figure stamp of the NFL: licensed hats and horns for the aristocracy, not “Joe Fan” who may have miraculously scored a game ticket. If it could strong arm Super Bowl box pools, the league would do that too. When you lose the compassion comparison to Don King, it’s time to take notice.
Pro football, so much of its popularity built on the backs of steel workers and coal miners and meat packers and subway riders, owes an adamantine debt to the common man. He’ll just never collect in person on Super Sunday.
Marotta is a documentary filmmaker and radio talk show host.
