Can You Even Give Rangers Tickets Away These Days?
title>Untitled Document
Blue Shirt, White Elephant
Has anyone noticed that you can't give Rangers tickets away in this town? It was a nauseous omen manifested post-World Series. That's when, through a series of "mouse clicks" and "key strokes," I was gifted with seats. The goods arrived in the mail?actual tickets with the generic TicketMaster 1970s dot-matrix font all over them. These tickets look quite sad when held next to the sepia-toned, four-color-illustrated placards that are issued to Rangers season ticketholders.
Months later, as I was a holiday conscript bound for Central Ohio (now home of the Columbus Blue Jackets), the pair of Rangers tickets in hand could not be used, thanks to my ill-fated westward mission. For two weeks I offered them to everyone from police cadets to Canadian architects to pizza delivery guys to Irish betties at Lucy's to ham-and-egg Williamsburg sandbaggers. The latter: a bespectacled bunch who still decry "organized sports" as being detrimental and contrary to the precepts of Eugene Debs?their personal version of Wayne Gretzky, I reckon.
Actually, a century ago it was Debs himself who summed up the Rangers' current condition when he said, "I prefer to rise with the ranks and not from the ranks." I told them this. They did a double take, scratched on the eight and left the bar without buying me another cider.
Not only did no one want hockey tickets, many of the refusers didn't even know the Rangers existed. This should be a red flag for the front-office dwellers of one of the NHL's original six franchises. Of course, the league has now multiplied five-fold in some sports marketing Book of Genesis expansion program that is certainly leading nowhere but the late chapters of Revelations. But for residents of this town to not know the local NHL franchise?sheesh over here, I began to feel like the Jason Robards doctor guy halfway through The Day After. As for the Garden as a venue, well, it is the anti-Wrigley Field axiom in action?on corporation letterhead, the Rangers games are always "sold out," so there is no need to market the team, win or lose, to any kind of grassroots support or younger fan base. For all we know, the late John Houseman is running the team from his glass tower at Penn Plaza, looking out over stacks belching methane flames from FIT to Herald Square and back as antigravity vehicles soar off to Teterboro, which should, in this futuristic sketch, be an airport renamed "JFK Jr."
Maybe it's the fact that the Rangers started out the season as a revived Rye Playland Fun Show. Out of the gate, The Captain's Return became the news peg, marketing hook, the must-see tv for the corporate skulls who spend a few minutes rinkside and then bolt for Greenwich just as Adam Graves breaks out across the blue line four minutes into the second period. Would decent New Yorkers do this same thing to, say, Brian Dennehy in the middle of the second act of Death of a Salesman? The Rangers are, after all, playing "on Broadway," as the ancient, Taftian sportswriters insist.
So the Rangers have gradually collapsed under their own weight and age with half a season remaining. They routinely drop games to expansion squads like the Thrashers. They're from Atlanta, and recently the Rangers became yet another New York team that "can't beat Atlanta." Will the Knicks turn the treble and lose to the Hawks? Yawn. Theo Flury could act as the resident house afire for only so long. Now he's back to his quiet duties as Joe Strummer lookalike and Clash karaoke host.
So the decent redline 300-level chairs were burning a hole in my pocket. They'd been awarded to me by a ticketholder who named his cat after Mark Messier, then found himself moving to Connecticut as a producer drone for that now-famous sexual-harassment sports television sweatshop known as ESPN. But, at gametime, I, too, had to leave town, and as a former ESPN employee, I was looking for women to sexually harass while on leave in Columbus.
Freezing to death on Ave. B, with my shoulders hiked above my skull, I recalled an ancient species of Rangers fan who dwells within the hallowed walls of Mona's Bar. In I went. The fan was not there. The bartenders were idle, had no answers, no envelope, no pen and really no hope, much like the Rangers, sinking to the bottom of their division. Around the corner to a bodega, where one envelope costs nine cents. I got change from my Kennedy half-dollar (a nice tip for the Mona's bartenders) and stowed the tickets within, with a Happy Chanukah message scrawled on the back of my "business" card. The nine-cent envelope full of Ranger tickets was nonchalantly stashed next to the dusty Mona's cash register with Scott's name on the outside. No reassurance from the bar staff that the envelope would in fact not be used to relight the pilot in the old coal furnace in the cellar.
Ranger fan Scott played in a punk rock act called Iron Prostate and conventional wisdom is that it was indeed Scott who taught the famous George Tabb everything he knows about being famous and punk rock. If anyone could use the Rangers ducats, it was this lad, who had saved many a conversation at Mona's by speaking the language of the underground "sports fan."
Did he receive the tickets and enjoy the game (a loss to Atlanta)? I have no answer to that, and forthcoming it ain't. I leave the answer suspended among secrets known only to the hod-carriers of Easter Island or at least the former New York Cosmos equipment manager.