S-TICKET TO FANS
Last updated: 9:45 am
June 29, 2008
Posted: 4:14 am
June 29, 2008
EVERY time I hear that New York is a very tough media town, that draft picks and free agents should take care, I want to laugh. And then, forgive the indelicacy, but it applies, I want to puke.
The media in this town - print, TV and radio - have for years allowed the local teams and their Manhattan-based leagues to get away with systemic, broad-daylight rip-offs and holdups of their most devoted customers without even offering brief, token protest.
New York's teams can fleece and gouge with impunity. Certainly, they don't have to worry about the media standing up to shame or even embarrass them. The media see no rip-offs, hear no rip-offs and speak no rip-offs.
And now, with the Giants and Jets on the verge of the greatest shake-down in this region's sports history - the extortion of tens of millions of dollars through an extortionist's invention called "personal seat licenses" - a large seat rental payment on top of season ticket payments - the media's virtual silence again can be relied upon.
All NFL teams, Giants and Jets included, have no trouble signing unproven or age-worn free agents and speculative draft picks to $40 million contracts, but they need you to pay the mortgages on their new palaces. But only because they know they can get away with it.
Annual NFL revenue streams are more like tidal waves - billions in rights from four TV networks, tens of millions in local and national radio rights, hundreds of millions from satellite TV and satellite radio.
Billions in merchandising sales and the sale of merchandising licenses, even cuts from sales on home shopping networks. Hundreds of millions in parking fees and eight-bucks-a-cup beer sales. Billions in ticket sales - must-buy, full-price exhibition games, included.
And now its teams are demanding double rent - pay or get out - many more millions from their most loyal patrons, some over three and four generations - to finance their new luxury box-lined mansions.
The Giants - and soon, the Jets - tell us that PSL money will be applied to the cost of their new ballpark. Funny, when you and I, already living in a reasonably nice home, can't afford to buy one of those nice, big, new ones, what do we do?
We don't buy it! We stay put! We don't buy what we can't afford. Imagine that!
