When I happened upon Natasha Cranfil on Monday, she had been parked for three hours in a 15-minute loading zone outside Pepsi Center. She, like me, was waiting for Nuggets playoff tickets to go on sale.
That’s what I love about an unofficial group I hereby dub the Nuggies’ Nosebleed Brigade. We come from all over the metro area. Most of us have never met. Yet we share a perspective about professional sports:
You root with your presence, not your pocketbook.
Cranfil, a 21-year-old security guard, worked 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday, then beat it over to the arena for the 5:30 playoff ticket sale. “I heard they got sold out last year,” the Littleton woman said.
They did. And fast.
This year, aficionados of the cheap seats caught an unexpected break when only a few dozen showed up at the box office, instead of the hundreds who packed the place in 2005.
Still, Cranfil took no chances. She and her boyfriend went to 13 regular season games. They never got into a corporate box. They paid their way, sat where they could afford to sit and enjoyed.
Standing nearby, Cathelyne Burgener and James Hollibaugh didn’t know Cranfil, but they knew exactly where she was coming from. The three reveled at the sight of free pizza and bottled water distributed by the Nuggets’ staff. They hammed it up with the Nuggets’ “Supermascot Rocky” when he visited the vestibule.
“We’ve been to eight games this year,” said Burgener, a behavioral therapist from Boulder. “The team is great. I love to watch Melo. We always stood in line for the $10 tickets. Except for the time a guy came up to us in line and offered to sell us his lower-level seats. He wanted $40 apiece. We paid him $25.”
Ah yes, the thrill of the deal. I’ll never forget the night I lowballed a guy who had extra tickets he hadn’t paid for. He finally gave them to me free. For members of the Nuggies’ Nosebleed Brigade, this is the equivalent of a game-winning fall-away jumper that swishes through the net at the buzzer.
There’s also nothing like sticking it to Ticketmaster, Hollibaugh said.
“You have to pay a service fee, ” he said. “You have to wait online. Then, they cut you off. I’m here for spite.”
Actually, he was there, like the rest of us, for tickets we could count on.
Monday afternoon, an eBay affiliate sent an e-mail alert about Nuggets’ playoff ticket scams. One of the hints that you were being hustled? “Multiple misspellings” in the offer. So please, folks, don’t buy online tickets to the “Cola Center” to see “Carmel Anthony.” Still, if you’re so lazy that you’ll send a money order to an anonymous source with a Russian Internet service provider, the Nosebleed Brigade doesn’t need you at courtside.
No one at the Pepsi Center box office had to worry about fraud.
“I like leaving with the tickets in my hands,” Cranfil explained.
There is something palpably old-school about not waiting several days for tickets to arrive in the mail.
Even if you can print them from your computer, sports tickets are not supposed to be flimsy 8 1/2-by-11 sheets of paper that droop in your hands. They’re supposed to be elongated little poster board rectangles, as tight as six-pack abs.
They allow you to savor slam dunks and blocked shots, not make money.
That’s why it fries Burgener’s bacon each time she goes to a game and sees seats that have been sold, but are empty.
“The game starts and there’s nobody there,” she said, shaking her head in disgust. “If I had those seats, I’d be sitting in them.”
And in the spirit of the Nuggies’ Nosebleed Brigade, cheering herself hoarse.
I found only one guy at the Pepsi Center on Monday who intended to resell his playoff tickets after he bought them. Others I talked to were like 32-year-old Tracy Pittman of Denver.
“I come to watch,” Pittman said as he headed for the counter to pick up five seats for himself, his brother and “a couple of buddies.”
“I’m a fan.”
Jim Spencer’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He can be reached at 303-820-1771 or jspencer@denverpost.com.
