There is a certain experience in going to a sporting event that separates the live from the televised. The intro to “Where the Streets Have No Name” echoing off the Camp Randall bleachers or the booming voice of Herb Carneal reminding you there’s “nooo smoking in the Metrooodooome” will never be captured by Joe Buck or those crazy robot television cameras.
Even outside the stadium there is a certain chaos that will never be beamed to your HD flat screen and TiVo’d for later viewing. The walk to any great sporting event in America is a marvelous journey through a churning sea of humanity. Friendly alumni offer grilled brats to students — but only to those from Wisconsin. Vendors hawk off-brand team apparel and shirts that suggest just where St. Louis Cardinals fans like it (their Pujols). Boys bang out rhythms on five-gallon buckets under the July sun. Old men fill skyways with lonely saxophone notes, safe from the winter cold. And yes, scalpers walk through the crowd, tickets held high, looking for takers.
Well apparently one of these things just doesn’t belong, and believe it or not, the legislators aren’t going after the poor people for once. The Wisconsin State Senate passed a bill last week that would give cities, stadiums and campuses the power to create “resale zones” surrounding their facilities where tickets could only be resold at or below face value. And, of course, you’re not allowed to sell outside of the resale zones either.
To be fair, the Assembly has a bit of a different version in mind, stripping these powers from university facilities and allowing fans to sell up to four tickets anywhere, but the premise remains the same.
If the beginning of this column dripped with sappy nostalgia, the next section will burst with bitter pessimism. Despite the Legislature and teams’ insistence on having the people’s best interests at heart, this move will do little to improve the “fan experience” and even less to curb the price of tickets.
According to Sen. Jim Sullivan, D-Wauwatosa, the rationale behind the bill is that scalpers are “not un-akin (double negative!) to aggressive panhandling.” And hey, a group with an obvious interest (the Milwaukee Brewers) is pushing the move to make it easier for themselves to arrest people, so let’s do it!
Scalpers can be greasy. They can gouge prices. They can tell you Barry Bonds just hit number 754 while you and your family were lost in San Francisco on some stupid bus trying to get to 3com/PacBell/AT&T Park so you and your brothers could boo the shit out of said bitter, roided-up Giant and challenge any mocha-sipping Californian who took exception to put his money where his mouth was. But in retrospect, I guess it was better than finding out from the scoreboard.
They’re easy people to hate, but scalpers don’t refuse sandwiches and insist on money instead. They seldom follow people down the street, harassing them with stories in hopes of inducing their charity. They just buy and sell tickets and rarely approach the 300 percent markups that appear on web-based brokerages like StubHub.
Like the saxophone guy and the drummers, they’re just trying to make a buck, and I don’t really care if the Legislature and Mark Attanasio feel like scalpers are cramping their style.
Nobody likes paying more than face value for tickets, but this move is not about protecting my dad’s wallet next time he takes my brothers and me to a game. After all, a group of friends with one extra ticket would now be forced to eat that $10 service fee Ticketmaster charged them or risk up to a $500 fine.
No, this move is about protecting the establishment. Those mysterious service fees won’t change, and price gouging is still legal on StubHub and at the box office (at least on sunny weekends and when the Yankees come to town). Freshmen who didn’t hit the lottery still have to shell out big money to be sure they’ll be able to muck Fichigan or jeer the Gophers every fall.
The state could have looked into ways to fix all of that, but instead they created “resale zones” and started patting themselves on the back, not knowing or not caring that a good chunk of ticket scalping now takes place online through speculation websites, not outside the gate.
There are plenty of scrooges surrounding modern sports — probably just as many as there were 30, 50 and 80 years ago. If lawmakers are looking for an opportunity to grandstand to regular guys, they can drag Eric Gagne in front of their committees and try to find out if he juiced while on the Brewers (not that it really mattered anyways — he sucked). But if they think the thing that concerns sports fans most is some old guy with a cardboard sign who is willing to get up early or stay out late and brave the cold in hopes of turning a few bucks at a game, well, then their logic is “juuust a bit outside.”
Joe Labuz is a senior majoring in Biomedical Engineering. If you are buying or selling tickets, let him know at [email protected].
