Since 1961, Bruce Birns’ family has had season tickets to the Giants. He will have them again this year in the inaugural season of the new Meadowlands — a stadium he has seen and calls “spectacular.”
“From a vantage point, the seats are spectacular from the upper deck to the mezzanine,” Birns said Saturday at Radio City Music Hall. “It looks beautiful, it looks clean and the staff and service was exceptional.”
Birns and others were at Radio City on Saturday for a fan forum with NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, who chatted with fans of NFL teams from the Northeast. According to the Giants season ticket holders following the session, the commissioner addressed such issues as the 2014 Super Bowl coming to New York, guaranteed player contracts and the importance of having the league become even fan friendlier.
Another new Giants season ticket holder, Eliot Hamlisch, said when Goodell was asked what kept him awake at night, the commissioner’s reply was complacency and collective bargaining. Birns, a prosecutor who attended Fordham law school with John Mara, called it “an amazing forum.”
As for the Super Bowl coming to the area, there were different interpretations to Goodell’s comments.
Hamlisch said it might happen. Nardi said Goodell talked about how having the game would help two New York teams, but that the commissioner said a question is whether fans will want to spend money for expensive Super Bowl tickets to be outside in potentially bad weather.
Birns said Goodell “was totally non-committal” about New York landing the game.
As for the new stadium, Birns wasn’t the only one who had high praise for the new building.
New Giants’ season ticket holder, 15-year-old Ryan Nardi, who has been to the arena for a lacrosse game and said “the food was great,” is ecstatic to have Giants tickets.
“We’ve been waiting for a long time.”
But Nardi said he knows ticket prices have skyrocketed since the introduction of PSLs.
“I don’t run the business of the family,” he said. “It’s an investment basically.”