Loran - Smith

Loran

In the early days of the Super Bowl, Miami was a frequent host city for the big game. A popular spot for high end guests was the Jockey Club, which was developed and owned by a onetime UGA football letterman by the name of Walter Troutman.

Walter was a roommate of the late Bill Hartman, who lettered for the Bulldogs in the days of Harry Mehre and became the backfield coach for Coach Wallace Butts. Bill also owned the National Life of Vermont agency in Athens and enjoyed a laid-back lifestyle to the fullest: Read the Athens Banner Herald and the Atlanta Constitution in the mornings over breakfast; to the office in the Southern Mutual Building by 9:00 a.m. followed by coffee at the old National Bank of Athens at 10:30 a.m. and lunch—usually the Athens Country Club—at noon. Dinner at the Country Club was Hartman’s primary dinner venue in the evening.

The afternoon was free for business calls, golf, or UGA football practice. When he retired from active coaching in 1957, Hartman became chairman of the Georgia Student Educational Fund but returned to coaching as a volunteer coach (tutoring the kickers) for Vince Dooley as long as that practice was allowed by the NCAA.

In the Seventies, Bill arranged for me to stay in a guest cottage at the Jockey Club, which enabled me to take in a couple of Super Bowl’s, which my budget otherwise would not have allowed for making the trip. You could book reasonably priced airline accommodations, and tickets to the Super Bowl cost only $12.00, believe it or not.

At the time, and I guess it is the same today, every player, coach, and certain administrators in the league were allowed to purchase two tickets at face value. As the game became more popular, travel agents and tour packagers initiated a scalping plan for those players and assistant coaches’ tickets. Tack on $50.00 to a $25.00 Super Bowl ticket and the owner of the tickets netted a hundred bucks for his two tickets.

For years, with my NFL connections, I was able to get tickets for friends. Then one day an executive with the Dallas Cowboys told me as he handed over four Super Bowl tickets, “Do you know what kind of favor I am doing you? You have no idea what I could get for these tickets!”

Then when tickets cost $500.00 apiece, I had to tell my son that we had been priced out of the Super Bowl business. At that point, the tickets went up $100.00 dollars a year, and we began to watch the game on TV.

For next weekend’s game, if you could find a ticket that was issued by an NFL club, the cheapest ticket would have cost you $2,000.00. On the secondary market today, those tickets would cost over $4,500.00. The highest ticket was priced at $55,000.00.

Who would pay that kind of money to see football’s ultimate championship? If you own a $65 million Gulfstream continued from page

jet, which costs between $3,000 and $4,000 per hour to operate, what’s a measly $50,000 dollars for a football ticket?

World Series tickets are no bargain in case you are interested. Last year, a regular priced ticket was $975.00 for games 1 and 2. If you preferred tickets behind home plate, you had to fork over as much as $17,820 per ticket. Fans with tickets behind home plate are like football aficionados who would pay $50,000 for a Super Bowl ticket. They have a hanger somewhere to park their G650 Gulfstream.

I once knew a football coach who scalped sideline passes. Nothing like turning a profit on a ticket that cost the hustling vendor nothing. When someone asked him about what he was up to, he came with this disclaimer: “Not me. I gave a couple of tickets to a good friend who must have sold them.” It is easy to understand that. You do a friend a favor, and you have no control over what he does when he becomes a sub-contractor. However, that was not the real story.

For events in the Coliseum at Rome, do you reckon they used some type of ticket for admission? Was there scalping back then? Nothing new under the sun, you know.