12B
April 8, 1988/University Daily Kansan
CHAMPS!
Tickets were one tough item
Students dealt with prices while scalpers watched for police
By Ric Brack
Kansan staff writer
Tickets for the NCAA Final Four games were sold for $50. At least that's what they cost the first time they went on sale.
Kansas City, Mo., police said undercover officers arrested 47 people for scalping during the tournament. The people were asking anywhere from $200 to $1,700 for the tickets.
Sgt. John Lepage, who was involved in the undercover operation, said he had heard of some prices as high as $4,500 a ticket.
Press reports from other parts of the country said tickets were scaled for as much as $3,000 in other states
that had schools reach the Final Four.
Bob Frederick, KU athletic director, said he received a phone call from someone who offered $150,000 for 150 tickets. Lepage said he thought that offer could have come from a Texas organization that ran advertisements in Kansas City-area newspapers in an attempt to buy blocks of tickets. He said several of the people arrested for scalping were from the Houston area.
Lepage said his department seized more than 100 tickets, which will be used as evidence.
Included in the number arrested for violating the Kansas City, Mo., scalping ordinance were three
basketball coaches.
Don L. Rockstad, a University of North Dakota assistant coach; Ronald E. Anderson, a Montana State University assistant coach; and Jerry Olson, head coach of Iowa Wesleyan, an NAIA school, were arrested April 1, Lepage said.
Kemper Arena, where the tournament took place, can seat 17,500 people. According to Jim Marchiony of the NCAA, only about 16,000 tickets were sold. About 1,500 seats were reserved for members of the National Association of Basketball Coaches, the media and NCAA corporate sponsors.
Fans scanned the parking lot outside Kemper Arena in hopes of buying tickets for sold-out Final Four games.
Before tickets were sold to students, about 500 were reserved for traveling members of the Athletic Department, basketball coaches and staff, the chancellor's office, the governor's office and other state and national officials.
The University of Kansas, like the other three schools competing in the tournament, was allotted 1,625 tickets.
KU students got only 238 of the tickets, according to the KU ticket office. Of those, 114 were allotted through a lottery system, and 107 tickets were sold to students who lined up outside the ticket office after the Jayhawks earned a Final Four berth. The remaining tickets were sold to student employees of Allen Field House.
The rest of KU's allotment was reserved for faculty, staff, coaching staff, parents of the players, the band, cheerleaders and donors to the Williams Fund. About 3,600 people gave money to that fund last year.
Frederick said his office received about 3,000 requests for the 800 tickets that he distributed to Williams Fund donors. Because of the large number of requests, assistants had to do the dirty work of telling people there were no tickets remaining. Frederick said many called him back immediately after talking to an assistant.
"Everybody had a reason why they needed a ticket," Frederick said. "I heard everything from 'This would be the perfect gift for my husband's 50th birthday' to 'I've never missed an NCAA tournament.'"
The NCAA had its own lottery last fall. An estimated 3,500 tickets were sold nationwide, Marchiony said.
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