Las Vegas Bowl not exactly a sellout for scalpers

I NEED TICKETS.

A stout and rotund man who said his name was Mark was wearing a Super Bowl lanyard around his neck with a placard that said he needed tickets to the sold-out Las Vegas Bowl. On back of the placard was a Sam Boyd Stadium seating chart.

Mark wasn't a Utah fan or a Brigham Young fan. He had all the tickets he needed. The sign on the placard, like his name, was disingenuous.

It seemed a lot of Cougars fans and Utes fans had cousins or church elders who couldn't use their tickets on the 50-yard line. So they sold them to Mark for a song and around $20.

Mark's objective was to resell them for more than he had paid. He wasn't having that much luck.

It seemed the BYU fans already had their tickets. Some Utah fans needed them, but they weren't even offering face value.

There were more scalpers than usual on Russell Road. I even saw one on Stephanie Street, which is on the other side of Boulder Highway from Sam Boyd Stadium.

"Who needs tickets? Who needs two? Who needs four? Who wants to sit with the players and get autographs during the game?"

A car window was rolled down. An inquiry was made. Mark told a family of four that he just so happened to have four on the 50.

"How much?"

"Talk to me."

The dad said he would pay $20 each for those four seats on the 50 that cost $100 per copy.

Mark said he didn't speak that language, not even with traffic thinning with kickoff drawing near.

"I would have taken $50 (each) and not even blinked," he said. "But that (stuff) is an insult to me."

Another gaggle of red-clad Utes fans strolled by.

"C'mon Utah, pretend it's Michigan. Y'all paid good for Michigan."

Mark, who owns a towing business in Compton, Calif. — he was wearing a towing jacket that had his real name on a patch — said he was in Salt Lake City for the Michigan game. Mexico's national soccer team was playing there that weekend. So was Taylor Swift.

"Taylor Swift was a $400 get-in. That was a great weekend," Mark said.

Mark was one of the first ticket scalpers I encountered on Saturday morning. I had tried to talk to a guy in an Ohio State sweatshirt who was selling on the corner of Boulder and Russell in the Taco Bell parking lot. His partner said to scram. He told me to go up by the soccer fields if I was going to write down names.

That's where I met Mark and Money and Mingo and Spooky and Phil. These guys were totally cool; they had style. They were more hospitable to the football fans than the greeters are to Walmart shoppers.

Magic told me he has a real job, that he's a financial advisor. He has clients and everything, he said. He has a son who plays football at Washington State and another son who is the nickel back for Oklahoma.

He showed me a picture of his boy who plays for the Sooners, and that I better believe he was going to the playoff game against Clemson. And, no, he wouldn't be on the outside of Sun Life Stadium trying to turn a tidy profit on a couple on the 50 when fireworks went off above the rim of the stadium, signaling the start of the game.

By that time Saturday, Phil had dumped his tickets and had switched to unlicensed T-shirts. After the Las Vegas Bowl, he was headed to San Diego for the Chargers game, and on Sunday night, Motley Crue was playing a gig at San Diego State.

"Motley Crue is good (for T-shirt sales)," Phil said with a confident wink. "They're on their last run, you know."

Somebody said the second quarter was starting and that Utah was way ahead. Mingo was happy. He had bet the Utes on the money line.

Mark still had that four-pack on the 50 and two $275 suite passes that he had tried to unload on consignment. He said he had made around $400 — enough to pay for his gas and his hotel room and a couple of hands of blackjack.

"Win some, lose some," he said.

He was sitting on a barrier that was preventing late-arriving fans from parking on a swath of dusty road fronting the soccer fields. A guy in BYU gear climbed the curb in his SUV and parked there anyway. Mark told him he had the (guts) of a lion.

Mark still was sitting there, talking about the (guts) of lions, when another late-arriving football fan pulled up.

"How much to park?"

"Twenty bucks."

Mark was only joking. But when the guy and his buddy got out of their car, one had three fives and the other had five ones. They handed Mark the money.

Mark hesitated before putting the money in his pocket.

He asked the men if they needed a couple on the 50, but they said they already had tickets.

Magic and Mingo and Spooky sidled up. They were counting money; they were almost out of tickets. They had done OK, they said. But not great. Sometimes a sellout is not all it's made out to be, at least not for those on the outside of the stadium trying to hustle a buck.

I bumped fists with the ticket scalpers, and then I started for my truck.

"You goin' to the game?" Spooky called after me.

He said he had a single on the 50, and that he would make me a hell of a deal.

— Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him: @ronkantowski