One hour and three blocks from the biggest Northwestern win since 2000, two Chicago businessmen reminisce about the days of Michael Jordan.
“When Jordan was here, it was way good,” says Reggie Davidson, who smiles coyly when asked his name. He brags about the $7,500 he once made at a Chicago Bulls game.
The 33-year-old black man has short dreadlocks, a silver stud earring and a puffy white coat, and he paces in front of the Central Street El station.
“With the man gone, you gotta take what you can get,” explains James Jackson, a 47-year-old who makes between $40,000 and $50,000 a year tax-free. He also smirks when giving his name.
Jackson hurries to open a door of the Central Street El stop as a sea of purple and red spills onto the sidewalk. Then he goes to work, telling each fan he sees about the six $40 tickets to the NU game he’s scalping for double face value.
Jackson, a black man in a leather jacket and a dark Yankees hat, with spots of gray in his light beard, just drove from South Bend, Ind., and has $600 in his pocket from the Notre Dame-Purdue game earlier in the day.
Davidson has $700 from the 41-16 Boilermakers blowout, and he says he spent the entire week at Wrigley Field and U.S. Cellular Field without watching a single pitch.
The entrepreneurs are in Evanston tonight for the same reason as a black man in a dark hooded sweatshirt and ripped varsity jacket who calls himself Dog.
“This is a blockbuster,” Dog says of the game against No. 7 Ohio State, as he frantically surveys Central Street, asking everyone he sees in red if they need tickets. “I’m holding four tickets right now, $125 each. Of course these are going to sell. People are coming from Ohio State without tickets. This is a blockbuster.”
Dog ignores a Buckeyes fan who walks through the street yelling at his buddy that the toughest job in the world has to be selling tickets at a Wildcats game.
For NU players, this is a night they’ll remember forever. For NU fans and Evanston residents, it’s the most exciting time of the year.
For Dog, Davidson, Jackson and the dozens of other ticket scalpers who crowd the El stop, line Central Street and surround Ryan Field, it’s probably their second or third event of the day. And it’s a way to put food on the table now that MJ’s gone.
STREET STRATEGIES
“I’m doing it to support my fucking kids,” Dog said without a hint of a smile on his face. He never smiles, and he’s always serious when it comes to scalping.
Dog had just come from the Cubs game against Atlanta and planned to work the Bears game against Philadelphia on Sunday. He expected to bring in $2,000-3,000 that weekend.
And he wasn’t alone in his endeavors.
Dog said he works with 25-30 other scalpers outside Ryan Field before every game. When one scalper finds a buyer, two or three other scalpers provide backup to make sure the customers find what they’re looking for.
“We all come from Chicago — south, east, west, everywhere,” Dog said.
The system of sharing clients in a large group is not always in place at other stadiums, such as Penn State’s Beaver Stadium in State College, Pa.
“We won’t work together, but we’ll drive here together,” said Bob Johnson, a black 30-year-old Pittsburgh native, who was dressed for the 50-degree weather in a dark blue hat and a bulky, hooded army jacket. He was scalping tickets just 100 feet from Joe Paterno’s statue at the front entrance of Beaver Stadium before the NU game.
“I meet other scalpers from Pittsburgh at the games and tailgates,” Johnson said. “We’ll share a car to come here, and the owner of the car will charge something like $20 a person.”
Johnson’s strategy in scalping against NU on Nov. 6 was to buy extra tickets from fans for $5 and charge face value — $46 or $51 — or below. Johnson expected a profit of $100-200 by the end of the day.
That strategy works for scalpers at NU, even when they don’t have the luxury of the rare Ryan Field sellout against Ohio State. Contrary to popular belief, scalpers don’t need a sellout to have a successful night.
“Some of my scalping buddies tell me they would much rather the Arizona Cardinals be terrible than good,” said economics Prof. Stephen Happel of Arizona State University, who has done several studies on ticket scalping as a profession. “Then people are dumping their tickets at very low prices, and there are always people that want good seats so they’re willing to pay for them.”
All scalpers say they’re in a tough business. But there’s always money to be made, whether Dog needs to feed his kids or Johnson needs to pay his bills while attending ITT Technical Institute in Pittsburgh.
“When we held the NBA All-Star Game here in 1995, there were all kinds of professional scalpers here — about 100 of them or so that just travel the country most of the year going from one event to another,” Happel said. “Some people told me that these guys make a couple of hundred thousand dollars on up.”
WHAT IT TAKES
Ticket scalpers know what they have to do to succeed, and they know they have to work well with people as much as in any other profession.
“You gotta communicate good,” Johnson said. “I just try to be nice and courteous. That’s all you have to do.”
Two Penn State fans with extra tickets approached Johnson about 90 minutes before kickoff, asking how much Johnson was offering.
In an almost sweet voice, Johnson said he was buying for $5.
“That’s all?” a fan asked, surprised. “OK, we’re going to see what else we can get.”
“Thank you very much,” Johnson replied as the fans walked off.
Besides treating potential customers with respect, Johnson understood he was dealing with an open market and basic economic principles.
“You need to have a quick mind in the sense of being ready to pull the trigger,” Happel said. “You can’t be sitting there, jacking around, trying to decide if you should buy or not. And I think you have to be a person that’s prepared to take losses.”
A scalper really is an entrepreneur in the truest sense of the word.
“It’s just a matter of trying to read the market,” Happel said. “If you’re a good ticket scalper, you know the times to buy and the times to sell. People who are very good at it develop a sixth sense on how the market’s going.”
Scalpers should always remember their goal of providing a convenient service to customers, Happel said.
And scalpers who are successful and follow the basic principles of economic markets usually end up helping customers with lower-priced tickets rather than hurting them by ripping them off.
“The thing you have to realize is scalpers basically hold prices down rather than jack prices up,” Happel said. “Scalpers hold prices down in the long run because they provide more competition. They give people more choice.”
JUST LIKE JAYWALKING
The legality of ticket scalping is left to the discretion of each state, but Illinois law clearly says all scalping is illegal, even the selling of tickets under face value.
So it’s no surprise that Davidson, who has been scalping for 15 years, has been caught many times by the police.
“I can’t count the number of times I’ve been arrested,” Davidson said. “But would you prefer I sell tickets or that I sell drugs?”
Most scalpers see arrests as part of their profession, a common bump in the road to making money and providing for customers.
“It’s basic commerce,” said Paul, a white scalper in Minneapolis who rides around the Metrodome on a bicycle in his brown leather jacket. “I’ve been arrested a few times, but I don’t care. It’s worth it. It’s like jaywalking.”
Paul, who’s studying to get a real estate license and asked that his last name not be revealed, said he’s angry about scalping laws and the problems they pose for buyers and sellers.
“From a fan’s perspective, they’re the enemies, the ones in the box office,” Paul said. “Scalping laws hurt fans. The ticket people in the box office are
the biggest scalpers of them all. It’s just couched under different words.”
Besides the fact that scalpers see arrests and fines as mere nuisances, a reason for the openness of ticket scalping could be that some scalpers don’t know the laws exist.
“It’s not illegal,” insisted Dog, who has been scalping for 20 years. “The cops don’t mess with us.”
But Daniel McAleer, assistant chief of NU police, said there are efforts on Saturdays to curb scalping.
“I don’t think it’s a fair assessment to say that we leave them alone,” McAleer said. “We’re aware that there are issues as far as ticket scalping is concerned. We try to deal with that as best we can based on the staffing levels we have.”
McAleer said scalpers on NU property can be arrested for criminal trespassing or ticket scalping violations.
He also said the department catches at least three scalpers a year who are wanted in other districts for scalping.
But catching scalpers is not the main goal of NU police at football games.
“There’s a limit to how far we can patrol the area around the stadium to deal with those types of issues,” McAleer said. “Our first priority is the safety and security of those attending and participating in the game.”
Mark Wesoloski, director of ticket operations for NU, said the university works hard to stop scalping on school property because it takes away from ticket sales.
But off-campus scalping is difficult to handle.
“We can only really control what happens on university property,” Wesoloski said. “We can’t really control what happens down at the El station.”
TOUGH Biz
Max Waisvisz was a 12-year-old paperboy when he discovered scalping at an Illinois high school basketball tournament in Champaign, Ill.
And the 40-year old hasn’t stopped selling tickets.
He was the ultimate scalper, someone with regular clients at every event.
“I would just stand in the middle of the pit, and people would come straight to me to deal with me because they would always know that they were getting a legit product,” Waisvisz said. “Oh yeah, they knew me. I’m surprised I don’t have a statue down there.”
Waisvisz made the transition to ticket brokering in 1986 with Mr. Max’s Tickets in Champaign. In 1993 he moved to Chicago and opened Gold Coast Tickets, a ticket brokering company still in business today.
But Waisvisz missed his clients in Champaign.
“It was hard for me to leave there, because I felt like I was obligated to all of these customers that were always coming to me,” Waisvisz said. “At first, I wanted to always go back to sell tickets. It was just the fun of it, just going back there and doing it.”
Waisvisz used his success from brokering to invest in real estate. But he remembers how difficult it was to be a scalper, even with all of his regular clients.
“It’s a very tough business to make money on the street,” Waisvisz said. “Most of the time I made money was going up to Chicago and doing Wrigley Field.”
The difficulty of scalping was apparent on Central Street as game time neared on Oct. 2.
Thirty minutes before the kickoff of the Ohio State game, Jackson inched his way toward Ryan Field with a worried look on his face.
The scalping veteran of 32 years still had the six $40 tickets he started with at the beginning of the day. And it didn’t look good.
If only the Cats had MJ.
Reach Teddy Kider at [email protected].
