HOW To Cook Your Golden Goose: One day, closer to sooner than later, the sports world is going to run out of morons, those with money.
Then what?
It increasingly appears as if the Jets were party to a marketing fraud designed to sell their most expensive PSLs. David Findel, a big-talking New Jersey guy with previous ties to Jets players and administrators as a mortgage broker — and an apparent relationship with Woody Johnson — last October made a big splash for himself and the Jets. Findel was the “winner” of the Jets’ PSL auction, from which he purchased — claimed to have purchased — the two best seats, for $400,000!
Preposterous. Yet, the media — print, TV and radio (stand and be counted, Craig Carton) — fell for it. And the Jets played along with it. Why not? It made for the kind of publicity that might stoke PSL sales.
Even when The Post soon after revealed that Findel had creditors on his tail, that he owed big money, the Jets allowed the public to believe that he’s their out-front, No. 1 PSL owner. When one of Findel’s creditors asked how he could spend $400 grand on seats (tickets not included) when he owed his firm a fortune, Findel, according to that creditor, said it was all just a publicity stunt.
Two weeks ago, Findel, 44, suddenly closed his office, leaving 100 employees in the dark and on the street. This week, he was indicted, charged with $11 million (and counting) in bank fraud.
Following the indictment, the Jets said they’re no longer associated with him. They wouldn’t say whether Findel had paid for his seats, but let’s all take a wild guess.
Yet, since October and right up to this week’s indictment, if you wanted to consider buying Jets PSLs, the team would have allowed you to further consider that a wealthy businessman already had spent $400,000 for just two PSLs. So hurry, hurry, step right up, we’ll sell your four at half the price!
Recently it was revealed that the Redskins, who sell out their park (unlike the Jets and Giants they don’t yet sell PSLs, thus they haven’t had 20-year waiting lists vanish in a snap) nonetheless sold thousands of tickets to tickets brokers, presumably at a personal profit for both insiders and outsiders.
But every team is now attached to at least one ticket scam. The NFL has become a clip joint.
In the history of the world, there has never been a graph with a line on it that points straight up. Yet big time sports operate on the reverse premise: For every 10 fools who no longer can take it or spend it, another 10 will enter.
That’s true, but only to a point. And we’ve reached that point.
This recession was supposed to have proven that greed kills. Yet, the sports world — one that’s supposed to imbue fair play, mutual respect and good faith in our kids — is, more than ever, predicated on a con, a fix, a bait-and-switch.
One moment, commissioner Roger Goodell is supporting PSL extortions as good investments — an absurd position given that buyers have no way of even knowing how much the tickets will cost down the road — the next moment, he’s expressing his concern that so many teams are facing TV blackouts because ticket sales are way down.
Still, he has the nerve to boast that most teams’ ticket prices have held steady. He fails to mention that the sale of those tickets has grown crooked.
This is a time when the NFL should have done something real, something genuine — like cutting the cost of must-buy preseason game tickets, demanding the elimination of extortions that force fans who want to buy tickets to one or two games to purchase tickets to others.
There’s no good time for teams to lead with their greediest sides, but to do so during a calamitous economic period makes for particularly ugly and long-term senseless business, the kind that allows customers the opportunity to learn to live without you, to get out and stay out.
Meantime, where are Goodell’s expressions of regret for generations of Jets and Giants patrons — tens of thousands of through-good-and-bad-times folks — who are being displaced by PSLs? It’s as if those who helped the NFL grow and thrive can now go to hell.
But where does one go to be treated better?
The Yankees are still not embarrassed that tickets to their first season in a new, taxpayer-funded stadium with fewer seats were so obscenely priced that a first-place team played to nearly 10,000 empty seats on beautiful weekends. They’ve attached a per ticket, per game, non-refundable “handling fee” — $6 for the vast majority — to postseason tickets.
With a must-purchase of all potential home games, 11, just the handling fee for two upper deck seats will run you $132. That’s not handling, that’s stealing.
But who’s going to stop them? Bud Selig, who last year warned owners against ticket greed? As the Yankees made clear in invoices, this theft is sanctioned by MLB! Thus, the Yankees are able to both pass the buck and pocket it.
NFL openers aren’t even close to sellouts? No fooling? Must be the recession. Yeah, that’s it, the recession.