Upper-deck seats have long been the gateway to fandom — including for several members of Sports Business Journal.
Upper-deck beginnings
Bret McCormick
I was fortunate growing up to have an uncle with Charlotte Hornets season tickets: four seats in the second-to-last row at the top of the 24,000-capacity arena, which was then the NBA’s biggest basketball-specific venue.
I watched Muggsy Bogues, Larry Johnson and Alonzo Mourning through the two shared pairs of binoculars we brought to every game, cheering timeouts that brought a local businessman dressed in a suit and tie out onto the court so that he could rip off back handspring roundoffs down the floor. We knew it was coming and it was still amazing.
My cousin, Sam, and I roamed the relatively unsecured mezzanine area. Those seats were the first place I ate a jalapeno, placed atop lukewarm nachos.
The Coliseum’s heyday is far enough in the past now to qualify as “a simpler time.” It was torn down in 2007, its seemingly endless upper deck a relic of 20th-century venue design. It was bittersweet to see it go; beyond the Hornets memories were plenty of ACC conference tournaments and my high school graduation.
But we live in a time when watching a game live through a pair of binoculars simply doesn’t make sense anymore.
Battle scars from the top row
Tom Friend
Just because they’re called “nosebleed seats” doesn’t mean you should actually bleed up there. But they can be hazardous to your health.
Twice I’ve left the upper deck battered and bruised (or at least my ego, in one case). I’ll first take you back to around the 1970s, when my uncle from Philadelphia invited me up from D.C. every year for the Redskins-Eagles game at the Vet. I’d take the Amtrak and, for my first ever game there at the age of 12, I wore my Redskins jacket, my Redskins hat and my Redskins belt. Dumb idea.
My uncle’s seats were in the Vet’s upper level, where I saw no women or police — just grown men side-eying my outfit. Before long, I was being pelted with ice cubes, with one of the sharp edges flicking off my cheekbone. Sonny Jurgensen had my back, leading Washington to an easy 28-7 win. The following year at the Vet, I wore a plain jacket and plain hat.
It was always my preference to sit in the upper deck for football. You get the all-22 perspective from above. But I took it to an extreme about a decade later. The Skins were hosting the 1982 NFC Championship game at RFK Stadium against the Cowboys. My dad found me tickets in the lower deck, but the view was just meh. So I climbed to the upper deck and sat down on a slab of concrete in the absolute last row of the stadium. Phenomenal view. But, in the final quarter, Dexter Manley deflected a screen pass that Darryl Grant returned for a game-clinching TD. I jumped up and smacked my head on an RFK Stadium overhang behind me.
Cheap seats, priceless memories
Ben Fischer
When my brother Will and I were growing up, it wasn’t the size of our hometown (Marietta, Ohio, pop. 15,000) that bothered us. It was the isolation.
We were nearly 2 1/2 hours to the closest major league city, Pittsburgh, which meant going to sporting events was a rare, special occasion. Once we both had driver’s licenses, it dawned on us: We could go to Pirates games ourselves. Unlike Dad, we didn’t care if we got home at 2 a.m. Several times in the summer of ’98 and ’99, we drove to Three Rivers Stadium. We bought tickets in the upper deck and sometimes had a rather large section in the 500s virtually to ourselves. (The Bucs finished 33 games behind in ’98, and 18 1/2 games out in ’99.)
There was virtually no demand for these seats. I remember paying less than $10 at least once. We’d keep score of meaningless games, enjoying the weather, enjoying each other, and we could do it on teenagers’ wages. The seats were awful, but to a 16-year-old, the affordability, simplicity and independence it afforded me were well worth the trade-off. A few years later, PNC Park opened, supply and demand leveled out some and the prices were never the same. Today, even after 22 losing seasons and my brother’s death, those Three Rivers memories bond me to this team.
