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October 13, 2009

<font color="#009900">SPORTABOUT:</font> Business as usual

By Tom Daniels

The glamour of the gridiron continues. The clanging of the bucks may be making a louder noise than the cheering. The N.Y. Giants will be playing in a new stadium next year. In order to buy a ticket you must buy a PSL, or personal seat license. This allows you to get your season tickets that you have been purchasing for the last 60, 50, 40 or however many years. The PSL will cost between $1,000 and $20,000 dollars per seat and does not include the cost of your ticket.

You read that correctly, you must pay for the right to buy tickets. Kind of like paying the bank for deposit tickets. The people who will get this money are multi-millionaires, the Mara family and the Tisch family. The fact that you sat through 15 consecutive seasons (1964-1979) without a playoff appearance, in heat and snow doesn't matter. The fact that you bought your tickets when they played at the Polo Grounds, Yankee Stadium, Shea Stadium, The Yale Bowl and the Meadowlands doesn't matter either. When Michael Crabtree holds out for more money or Brandon Marshall dogs it for a bigger check, bless them. They are just working on their first million, they weren't born that way. The have-not-a-million should be given preference to the want-more-millions.

One last example. A service group that bought tickets for over 50 years got their PSL bill. It was over $100,000. There will be no Giant games for a lot of school age football players, needy children and terminally ill people this organization helped with football tickets. You don't spend a few hundred grand for the rights to help people.

The sad part is, we will continue to watch football. We will continue to root for our teams. But it will never be same. My New Jersey friends would say nothing personal, just business.

This will be coming to a college stadium soon. Bull Gators and Golden Chiefs will find their loyalty tested by an even bigger check.

Like selling groceries or cars, sports is big business, mega-business. The NFL is worth in excess of $32 billion dollars with a GNP that probably ranks in the top 10 among non-oil producing nations. And you need a thousand dollars from me to buy a seat.

When you watch the Yankees play in the playoffs and perhaps the World Series, keep an eye on the empty seats behind home plate. They cost $1,500 for a regular game, what could they cost for the playoffs? Don't they realize people with that kind of money are already in a skybox.

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