Please make sure you read our Giants blog, Glauber's blog and my blog this week.
Below is a story that will be on the Giants blog also. But sometimes my stuff will land there and not here. So read early and often. If I blow the page views title for January because of this, so be it. I'm a team player.
Many frustrated fans have weighed in on last week's column about the Giants' Super Bowl ticket lottery, through which about 3,000 of the team's 20,000 season ticket accounts scored the chance to buy two tickets to the big game.
Based on the response I've gotten, it seems as if the percentage is even lower in real life - or perhaps it's just that the winners don't have any reason to complain to me.
I spoke to one fan whose father bought season tickets in the late 1940s, but who is 1-for-4 in Super Bowl lotteries, winning only after the 1986 season.
Mike Gelbaum of Oceanside called to report that he has controlled seven season tickets since 1961 and an eighth for a decade or so, but he is 0-for-4 in lotteries.
Gelbaum said he is "not angry at all,'' opting for a realistic approach: "What am I going to do, fight City Hall? The Super Bowl is not for the fans. If it were for the fans, the season ticket holders would be rewarded, the ones who loyally sit there in the cold for all those two or three minutes of commercials.''
Loyalty has its limits for Gelbaum. He said if the Giants sell personal seat licenses when their new stadium opens in 2010 - neither they nor the Jets have said whether they will - his days as a season ticket holder will be over.
"If I had the money, they'd need a gun to get it from me,'' he said.
Comments (1)
My friend's father won two tickets in the lottery. He's had season tickets since the Giants were at the Polo Grounds. After pricing out the flight, hotel, ground transportation, and food, he figured it would cost $8000 for two people to go. Hence, the tickets were sold to a broker and his dad it taking his mother to Italy for three weeks this summer with the profit.
I still wonder when the conference championship games will be played at neutral sights. There has to be some point when the NFL can make more money this way than letting the highest seeded team host the championship game on one week's notice. Right now this idea makes no logistical sense, but who knows what the future holds.