Scalping
A freshman has been evicted from Krzyzewskiville for scalping his spot in Cameron on Craigslist. And while I had a brief chuckle envisioning the Duke defrocking ceremony ("Please remove your half basketball headgear. Gentleman, commence the Hosing of the Body Paint.") I wouldn't bother mentioning it, except it brought forth a vignette from my own past.
My freshman year of college, I sold the best Duke-Carolina seats I could ever hope to have.
Let me explain. My four years in Chapel Hill were among those where the CAA was constantly tinkering with ticket distribution. Perhaps everyone's was. It could be and endless cycle of waffling from free-for-all camp outs to orderly morning lines to lotteries and back for the entire history of the university. I don't know. But my freshman year, the policy was Friday camp outs beginning at noon outside the Dean Dome, with tickets distributed Saturday, about a month before the actual games. And being ensconced in Ehringhaus as I was that year, I was at every camp out, though for the life of me I never remember actually sleeping at one of them.
That policy was changed for the Duke game. As a gift to seniors, for that game they wouldn't have to camp - they instead could show up on Friday, pick up a voucher for their place in line, and show up Saturday morning to collect their ticket. Underclassmen would instead camp out from Friday until Sunday morning, when they would get their tickets.
Well, that was too much for me and my friend. This isn't Durham, with its lax 1 out of 12 in a tent line checks and ethernet in the lampposts. This was a parking lot in January, around the beginning of midterms for the seats already picked over by a year of students. Instead our plan was to just saunter down Sunday morning and get in the back of the line. If we got tickets, great. If not, well they went to better fans than us.
We got tickets.
In fact we got great tickets. Apparently, more seniors had picked up line vouchers than had actually collected tickets Saturday morning. But the best seats had been already allotted based on the number of line vouchers given out, and they had been separated from the tickets to be disbursed Sunday morning. These unclaimed tickets were then tossed back into the general ticket population some time on Sunday. At random. Of course we didn't know this when we meandered to the back of the line and waited to see if we were going to get tickets. We we just happy to get anything, and it wasn't until we were headed back to the dorms that we looked to see what we got.
We were holding in our hands the passes to Section 110, Row D, Seats 1 and 2. Right behind the Carolina bench.
These were obviously the best Carolina-Duke tickets we were ever going to get in our natural lives. And we were thrilled to be going. You couldn't have bought that pair from us for all the money in the world. But a funny thing happened on the way to March. My friend and I recieved an invitation to travel with the team to the Women's ACC Tournament in Charlotte.
For various reasons I won't bother going into, this was not an offer we were in a position to turn down. And to be honest, we didn't really want to - we'd been going to the women's games as faithfully as the men's, and the team, fresh off the national championship was a thrill to watch. But the tournament was, as always, the week before the men's, and the same weekend as the Duke game. Best tickets I was ever going to see, and I wasn't able to go.
We ended up selling the tickets to my friend's brother, a true blue Carolina fan who had graduated the year before. (And I mean true blue literally, as he was on Franklin Street for the National Championship two years earlier, and when drunkenly asked by a guy carrying Carolina Blue house paint whether he could paint him blue, drunkenly assented.) I think we got something like forty dollars for the pair, as it wasn't about the money. UNC won the game going away, in the penultimate game of the Pete Gaudet Era and the last home game for Stackhouse and Wallace. We spent the weekend hanging out with the JV cheerleaders and the band as the women's team knocked off Duke to win the ACC. I don't regret my decision in the slightest, but can't look at the seats behind the bench during a Duke game without a slight twinge.
Before I gave up the tickets though, I went down to the local Kinko's and had the guy behind the counter make a color blowup of the ticket - I still have it to this day. The guy behind the counter acted like it was the most natural request in the world.
My freshman year of college, I sold the best Duke-Carolina seats I could ever hope to have.
Let me explain. My four years in Chapel Hill were among those where the CAA was constantly tinkering with ticket distribution. Perhaps everyone's was. It could be and endless cycle of waffling from free-for-all camp outs to orderly morning lines to lotteries and back for the entire history of the university. I don't know. But my freshman year, the policy was Friday camp outs beginning at noon outside the Dean Dome, with tickets distributed Saturday, about a month before the actual games. And being ensconced in Ehringhaus as I was that year, I was at every camp out, though for the life of me I never remember actually sleeping at one of them.
That policy was changed for the Duke game. As a gift to seniors, for that game they wouldn't have to camp - they instead could show up on Friday, pick up a voucher for their place in line, and show up Saturday morning to collect their ticket. Underclassmen would instead camp out from Friday until Sunday morning, when they would get their tickets.
Well, that was too much for me and my friend. This isn't Durham, with its lax 1 out of 12 in a tent line checks and ethernet in the lampposts. This was a parking lot in January, around the beginning of midterms for the seats already picked over by a year of students. Instead our plan was to just saunter down Sunday morning and get in the back of the line. If we got tickets, great. If not, well they went to better fans than us.
We got tickets.
In fact we got great tickets. Apparently, more seniors had picked up line vouchers than had actually collected tickets Saturday morning. But the best seats had been already allotted based on the number of line vouchers given out, and they had been separated from the tickets to be disbursed Sunday morning. These unclaimed tickets were then tossed back into the general ticket population some time on Sunday. At random. Of course we didn't know this when we meandered to the back of the line and waited to see if we were going to get tickets. We we just happy to get anything, and it wasn't until we were headed back to the dorms that we looked to see what we got.
We were holding in our hands the passes to Section 110, Row D, Seats 1 and 2. Right behind the Carolina bench.
These were obviously the best Carolina-Duke tickets we were ever going to get in our natural lives. And we were thrilled to be going. You couldn't have bought that pair from us for all the money in the world. But a funny thing happened on the way to March. My friend and I recieved an invitation to travel with the team to the Women's ACC Tournament in Charlotte.
For various reasons I won't bother going into, this was not an offer we were in a position to turn down. And to be honest, we didn't really want to - we'd been going to the women's games as faithfully as the men's, and the team, fresh off the national championship was a thrill to watch. But the tournament was, as always, the week before the men's, and the same weekend as the Duke game. Best tickets I was ever going to see, and I wasn't able to go.
We ended up selling the tickets to my friend's brother, a true blue Carolina fan who had graduated the year before. (And I mean true blue literally, as he was on Franklin Street for the National Championship two years earlier, and when drunkenly asked by a guy carrying Carolina Blue house paint whether he could paint him blue, drunkenly assented.) I think we got something like forty dollars for the pair, as it wasn't about the money. UNC won the game going away, in the penultimate game of the Pete Gaudet Era and the last home game for Stackhouse and Wallace. We spent the weekend hanging out with the JV cheerleaders and the band as the women's team knocked off Duke to win the ACC. I don't regret my decision in the slightest, but can't look at the seats behind the bench during a Duke game without a slight twinge.
Before I gave up the tickets though, I went down to the local Kinko's and had the guy behind the counter make a color blowup of the ticket - I still have it to this day. The guy behind the counter acted like it was the most natural request in the world.
--T.H. Friday, March 03, 2006
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