If so, then you're in luck and may be able to afford season tix at the new Money Pit.
BR,mD

Prices May Send a Giants Fan to the Exit

By HARVEY ARATON
Published: August 1, 2008

The 20-page, full-color brochure resembles a stylish sales pitch for a vacation-land time share, which at least entitles purchasers to take off their shoes and go to sleep a few nights each year.

Lou Palma, 75, a longtime Giants season-ticket holder, at home in Montclair, N.J., with the team’s marketing brochure. It explains the higher ticket prices in anticipation of the move to a new stadium for the 2010 season. “Ethically, it stinks,” Palma said.

What the Giants are mailing to season-ticket holders is an opportunity to merely sit, and sit outside, and occasionally in the bitter cold deep into the night, via a come-on with a cover embossed with a glove hand holding up the Super Bowl trophy through a horizontal blue strip with white block letters.

“Own It,” it says, but here’s what that means: “Own It, or Out.”

Not the trophy, not the team, not so much an uncombed hair on Eli Manning’s head. Just what Giants fans believed they had already sacrificed more than enough for — a seat inside a football stadium, albeit a posh new one that none of them asked for or, considering the consequences, will probably prefer.

Show football fans the architectural eighth wonder and they’ll say, very nice, we will be out here in the parking lot until kickoff, in our metal folding chairs, grilling hot dogs and burgers on grandpa’s old hibachi.

“Twenty-five years people are waiting for a seat in Giants Stadium, dying to get in,” said Lou Palma, who lives in the same town as I do, Montclair, N.J., although we had previously known each other only by reader e-mail.

He is 75, a former union lithographer, a gourmet cook by avocation, a passionate sports fan who is furious at the fan-gouging sports world in general and the Giants in particular, with good reason. He is one of the die-hards who got into Yankee Stadium 40 years ago, followed his team to the Yale Bowl and Shea Stadium and stayed in, for the last 32 in Giants Stadium, without complaint.

“There is nothing wrong with the place we’ve been playing in,” Palma said. “Why the heck did we have to move in the first place?”

To keep up with the Eagles, the Redskins and the Jerry Joneses, the Giants would say, even if it means discarding devoted fans, as in the case of Palma, who has resigned himself to the Giants, while still “we,” moving next door in two years to a $1.6 billion luxury palace without him.

•

Over breakfast this week, he laid the brochure for the purchase of Giants personal seat licenses on the table and said: “I’m not going to sit here and tell you that football hasn’t been important to me and my family, but I don’t want to do this and not just because I basically can’t afford to. Ethically, it stinks.”

In some ways, Palma feels as if he raised his adult sons, Mark and Jeff, in Section 112 of the lower stands, bonded with them, cheered with them, jeered with them, from the four choice-location seats that became such prized family heirlooms he had them inserted into his will as part of their inheritance.

Granted, he got the tickets 40 years ago because he had, during his days in the printing business, struck up a close, enduring friendship with the Giants’ long-ago defensive back and current broadcaster, Dick Lynch, who in turn introduced Palma to the late Tim Mara one night at P. J. Clarke’s in Manhattan. But Palma never left during the lean years, and might even have talked himself and his sons into cobbling together $700 per ticket per game in the new stadium for the equivalent seats that he said this season will cost $100 per.

But $80,000 in four installments for the right to pay a staggering ticket markup in the midst of an economic downturn? He could go to Europe and live lavishly, or finance his grandchildren’s college educations. After all these years, all the money spent, he was put on the clock, given a month to respond, to peel the sticker containing his personal information, attach it to the application on the interior back cover and surrender to a $371 million fan-fleecing scheme.

•

When I asked Palma about the option to buy lesser seats for a cheaper seat-licensing fee, he shrugged. “That’ll be the boys’ decision,” he said. “I’m out.”

In a telephone interview, Mark Palma said he had not yet discussed that with his brother. “I do want to look at it long-term, and not make it an emotional decision,” he said. “But I always assumed we’d have these great seats, and to go sit in the upper deck, well, you start to think, ‘I do have a flat-screen TV at home.’

“And I don’t think that I’m owed anything, but I do feel for my father. He always believed the Giants and the Maras were about football and the fans. He paved the way for us and he’s wanted us to share it with our families. And now, he gets this.”

He gets a brochure in the mail and turns to Page 6, to a glittering new stadium set against the nighttime Manhattan skyline, with the accompanying caption, “There is no sports franchise in the world with a greater history than the New York Giants, and no sports franchise has more loyal fans.”

And Lou Palma says, “Where is their loyalty to me?”



http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/01/sp.../01araton.html

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