Claim Jumping

Almost thirty years ago to the day that the San Francisco 49ers became an honest to goodness powerhouse, when Dwight Clark came out of nowhere to catch a pass that looked for all the world like it would sail out of the end zone but instead carried them to the Super Bowl, the team apparently wants to resurrect a tactic that some original 49ers – those Gold Rush fellows – used over 160 years ago.  It was called claim jumping and it involved a lowdown blackguard taking over a mining site that had been claimed previously.

The 49ers announced that they will be instituting something called a stadium builder’s license (SBL) for season tickets at their new Santa Clara stadium.  No this isn’t the state license that those fellows pouring concrete and running electrical wire are required to hold in order to erect the stadium.  This is a shakedown that football teams have been employing for years that requires fans wanting to buy season tickets to pay a fee for the rights to buy tickets.  So before you even shell out a single penny for your tickets you have to buy the rights to get to buy the tickets and the rights are wrong, financially speaking.

In the case of the 49ers if you want some of the better seats in their house you’ll need to take out a second on your own house because the SBLs will run between 20,000 and 80,000 dollars – per seat.  So a couple wanting to buy a pair of tickets will have to pony up essentially the down payment on a home just so that they can buy 10 tickets per year to watch live football; and two of those games are exhibition games which as a former season ticket holder I hated having to buy. 

Some current season ticket holders were invited by the 49ers to put down a deposit on seats at the new stadium that would be comparable to the good seats that they now have at Candlestick Park.  They probably knew going in that they would be hit with a usury license fee but in their worst nightmares did they expect tens of thousands of dollars?  The local news showed some forlorn fans leaving the 49er office shrugging their shoulders and saying essentially, “It was nice while it lasted.”  And for some fans it lasted a long, long time, going back to the 60s when the 49ers were still at Kezar Stadium.  These are the fans who earned the nickname Forty Niner Faithful, the ones who stuck with the team through years of misery, then reveled in the glory years and continued to hold on during the last decade when the team plumbed the depths.  These are the fans that loyally went to a leaky, crumbling dump called Candlestick and supported their team only to have their good seats pulled out from under them because they won’t be able to afford the SBL.  Their claims were jumped and those seats will likely go to some corporation who will give them out as perks to empty suits who don’t know a gridiron from a waffle iron. 

And the team is proud of this.  A fellow named Al Guido, the Vice President of New Stadium Sales and Services, crowed, “You have the ability to transfer it down to your family, you have the ability to transfer it down to friends, colleagues; you have the ability to sell it on the open market. I think that's just a huge benefit."  I don’t know where you’ve been Al but that’s the way it’s always worked.  I got my first season tickets 30 years ago when a colleague transferred me the rights to a pair of seats he owned (I gave up my tickets years ago when my son’s college tuition took precedence over football tickets).  Guido did mention that the 80,000 dollar seats apparently come with perks like food and drink.  I should hope so.  If I paid that kind of money for a football ticket I’d be doing one hell of a lot of drinking.  At those prices it should be a full blown orgiastic bacchanal complete with wine, women (or the gender of your choice), banned, controlled substances and song.  In fact the only way I would pay a fee of any price just for the right to buy tickets would be in the midst of a purple haze (with apologies to Jimi) of heavy drinking and drug use.  There is a thing called principle after all.   

In all fairness, and this is the only fair aspect to this story, the team is only charging those amounts on the best seats in the stadium (but every seat will carry an SBL).  And they aren’t the first team to charge license fees.  When the Raiders returned to Oakland from Los Angeles in 1989 the team charged license fees and incurred the wrath of season ticket holders when the stadium didn’t sell out and fans could walk up to the ticket booth and buy an individual game seat and avoid the fee.  I despised Al Davis for doing that to loyal Raider fans.  The Cowboys, the Giants and the Jets all have brand new digs and they charge license fees.

But just because there’s precedent doesn’t make it right.  Even the worst end zone seat will likely carry an SBL of thousands of dollars.  This essentially prices out the family.  Assuming the lowest SBL is 3000 dollars it would cost a family of four, 12,000 dollars just to buy the seats; “Say Junior if you’re planning on going to college I suggest you get a paper route."  But look at the bright side.  This bit of extortion will probably keep out the riffraff making it a family friendly environment that you won't see any families at. 

Football was once the blue collar sport, playing second fiddle to baseball.  It was a rough and tumble sport that attracted hardy fans who would sit in the cold, the rain, the wind and the snow, who would keep dry with a rain suit and warm with a flask of whiskey to fortify some watery hot chocolate in a Styrofoam cup.  Football has become, as I’ve said before on this blog, a glitzy, overdone, extravaganza catering to rich guys and corporations.  And now the 49ers, like the more disreputable of their namesake of 160 years ago, are jumping the claims of their most loyal supporters.