The Greatest Ticket Story Ever Told?
A recounting of the best story I've ever heard about getting in to a sporting event.
Alumni and fans of Ole Miss are all abuzz this week about the Rebels trip to the Sweet 16. Having won their first two NCAA tournament games, the men’s basketball team advanced to the 3rd round of the tournament for the first time since I was in college (we watched those games at a friend’s beach house in Gulf Shores during spring break).
After the second round victory, conversations and text thread chatter understandably turned to whether or not someone is going to attend the next game(s), where tickets are available, and how much will they cost?
This brought to mind some of my favorite stories of people finding ways to attend big sporting events, come “hell or high water” - as they say. I have had my failures, like the time that I got $100 from the ATM and drove to Memphis with a friend, hoping to somehow get last minute admission into a Mike Tyson fight. That was maybe the first time that I used and understood the term “a fools errand”. We did not have the same level of information-share back then. Today a quick twitter search would have appropriately squashed my silly fantasy. I have never felt more out of place and uncomfortable than I did driving around the venue, we did not even get out of the car. This was not the same as strolling around a stadium parking lot holding up 1 or 2 fingers.
If you are much younger than me, your experience of “tickets” has been mostly QR codes on a screen. There was a day when the way that you unloaded extra tickets was by simply holding them up over your head until someone who needed a ticket offered to pay you cash for them. Most sports fans my age and older will have at least one story about that experience. Some stories are tragic, like when my dad and brother purchased counterfeit tickets to a Saints/Cowboys Monday Night Football game. Tim swears that he would still recognize the crook who duped him 20 years ago. “He had the most distinct silver blue eyes I have ever seen…I should have known,” he still often laments this out loud. Some stories are comedic, like my dad leaving the cash in his hotel room that he had intended to use to get into the Ole Miss - LSU game (Eli’s senior year). Having travelled from Texas with two friends, they became desperate. They decided to hang out near the player-parent gate where pre-torn tickets were scanned by athletic department so that team members families had seats each week. They each waited for a family that seemed like they might “fit in with” and simply followed them through the gate with their head down. My dad just held his phone to his hear pretending to be on a call as he hurried through amidst what could have been the cousins and neighbors of a back-up offensive lineman from Centreville. It worked. 3 for 3.
Some ticket stories defy all categories.
This one is my favorite, and I wish it would have happened to me.
It was October of the year 2000 and Oklahoma was finalizing a return to national prominence. They were hosting Nebraska who had been a fixture in the top 5 for much of the 1990s. Nebraska was ranked #1 in the national polls and OU had climbed to #2. For the first time in a long time Norman (Oklahoma) felt like the center of the college football universe. My older brother (Jim) had transferred to OU and insisted that my younger brother (Tim) and I come to the game if at all possible1. After Tim’s high school football game on Friday night, my dad filled my mom’s suburban with gas, gave us each $100 bill and pat on the back for good luck that we could get into the game. Tim agreed to use his post game adrenaline to drive the first leg of the trip, but ended up driving the whole 6 hours plus. The next morning, we both got “in” to the game. I purchased my ticket about 30 seconds before kickoff, after convincing a lady that she had two options. She could wait for the $200 she was asking for, or she could take my $75 and neither of us would miss seeing the first quarter of the game. She reluctantly agreed, but she got me back when she realized that I did not have exact change. She got the whole $100 bill. I was able to find Tim just moments after entering. He was walking away from the fence which enclosed the stadium. A graduate student from India had accepted Tim’s $100 in exchange for his Student ID, as long as he promised to immediately return it through the fence, around the corner from the turnstiles.
All of this is (unnecessary) preface to the story that we heard from another guy who had stayed with so many of us the night before, sleeping on the floor of the house my brother shared with 5 roommates, just off campus.
THE GREATEST TICKET STORY OF ALL TIME2
Don was an alumni of OU who was old enough to remember, and long for, the glory days that no one knew would disappear for 15 years. He was also unmarried at the time and, though adventurous, he was not immune to financial realities. He arrived in Norman with two tickets that he had somehow procured before we all knew what this game could mean. As he was walking around the stadium prior to the game, he realized that he was holding in his hands what could possibly amount to several months rent, and a car payment. As he considered how easily he could watch the game on television (not always the case in those days), he decided that being *in* Norman for the game was enough for him, and that if OU lost and he hadn’t taken the money, he would be in despair. He sold the tickets.
With a pocket full of cash, Don started to make his way to a local establishment where he could get a good seat and drink Dr. Pepper and watch the game with rowdy locals. The pocket full of cash and the pit in his stomach turned his mind to micro-economics. Sure, he had sold his two tickets at high demand, but what was not in such high demand was single tickets. He found a motivated seller and purchased a single ticket that allowed him entry and to remain “way ahead” financially. As Don turned again toward the stadium, his pulse quickened. He noticed the panic in peoples eyes as they held up their fingers hoping to enter the game. “OK,” he thought, “that was easy enough, maybe I can flip this ticket again and still get in.” With the comfort of already having once resigned himself to possibility of the sports bar, which didn’t seem too bad with his new slush fund for Dr. Pepper and nacho platters. He found another buyer, and made another profit.
Bound again for the sports bar, Don began to feel in the air what Tim and I had felt. Things were getting crazy. People had not felt this in Norman for a long time.
Everyone was clamoring to get into this game. Don, now cash rich, began to assess the fact that he had driven 4 hours, with two tickets, to see a game that EVERYONE wanted to see. He was now “on the outside” quite unnecessarily.
He turned again for the stadium. Like a casino tourist trying to be clever and soberminded, he kept his “winnings” in one pocket and his “gambling budget” in the other. “If I can get a ticket for X dollars, then I will go in. Nothing more than $ X.”
He found a ticket, made the purchase and considered himself done for the day. “Boomer Sooner,” he thought, “what a day to be alive!” He was drunk with adrenaline from the buying and selling. He did not know what hit him when a wealthy alum, walking near him, realized that he was one ticket short of getting all of his guests into the game. He offered Don more, much more, than he had in either pocket for his one single, last pass into the historic game. Before he knew it, Don had acquiesced to avarice, or simply lost his head. The game was about to start and he was now standing on the concrete outside of Oklahoma Memorial Stadium, like a 1980s stock exchange worker at the end of a big day, he wondered if the small fortune that he had amassed over the last several hours had really been worth his now frayed nerves and emotional exhaustion.
Don made his final turn towards the sports bar, knowing in his heart that he would probably just wander instead back to the little house off campus to watch the game alone, waiting for his friends to return from the stadium.
In his malaise, he looked up to the sky as he heard the rumble of the crowd anticipating the opening kick-off. His day “on the trading floor” was playing tricks on his mind. He saw a single piece of ticker tape trickling in the wind, down, down, down from the heavens. When it was still yet 50 feet overhead, Don couldn’t believe his eyes. “That looks like a ticket!” He glanced around feverishly to make sure that no one else had seen it, and then he followed it like a child watching a butterfly, until it lighted just before him on the empty sidewalk. He snatched it up, said a prayer, and sprinted back to the entrance gate. There was no longer a line of people trying to get in, there just a kind lady who smiled and said, “you’re just in time.”
Don genuinely wondered if he might be dreaming, or hallucinating. He did not have time to ask questions, he rushed to the seat that was indicated on the stub. When he arrived, the gentleman to his left said, “Just made it! Do you mind me asking if you bought your ticket at the last minute?”
With sweat streaking down the side of his face, Don said,
“Sir, you will never believe where I got this ticket.”
The man smiled and said,
“Man, I am so glad that you came in with the ticket, instead of selling it. When I realized that I had come into the stadium with 1 unused ticket in my pocket, I walked up to the very top row and dropped it over the side. I hoped that someone who really needed it would find it and come in and not simply sell it.”
Don was flushed with guilt and gratitude, he fumbled through an incoherent explanation of how he had sold his own tickets, and then bought and sold one (a few more times over), and that he had made money, and that he was more than willing to pay for this ticket.
“Please let me pay your for this, you made my day… you made my year!”
“Don’t even think about it, you made mine,” was the man’s reply.
These two new friends watched their beloved Sooners score 31 unanswered points to triumph over the hated Huskers. OU would finish the season with a record of 13-0, an Orange Bowl victory, and a National Championship.
That is the greatest game day ticket hustle story that I have ever heard.
Yes the 3 Shaw brothers names are Jim, Tim, and Ben. My parents claim it was accidental that all of our names almost sound the same. They did not think through the nicknames for James, Timothy, and Benjamin.
I heard this story first-hand the day of the event. It happened 25 years ago, so I had to fill in many of the details. However, it very well may be that were you to hear this story today from Don himself, the circumstances could be even more amazing and hard to believe. I tried to keep it as true to the circumstances and narrative as I can remember. The most important details or intact and completely true.