Club Seats Undercover: A Nobody Hangs With the Somebodies at Nationwide Arena

By Steve Sirk
Columbus Wired Columnist
12/21/02

The phone rang at 10:06pm on Tuesday night. “I’m about to go to bed so I can only talk for a second,” said my good buddy Flick, a man whose gift for non-stop commentary on even the most insignificant aspects of existence made that claim seem dubious at best.

“Are you covering the Jackets game Thursday?”

I informed him I was.

“Do you have to do a game story?,” he inquired. “Or do you want to go undercover and write a story about sitting in the $128.00 club seats I got from work?”

Of course I’ll go! I couldn’t believe my luck. Here was a chance to swing with the well-heeled and to immerse myself in excessive swankiness. After all, we’re talking $128.00 per ticket!

“Actually, it’s $128.50 this year,” he corrected. “They went up fifty cents.”

A four-tenths-of-one-percent price hike for the financial elite? That’s unconscionable! Everyone knows that if you cut ticket prices for the wealthiest 1%, the money they save will be used to provide common folks with better-paying jobs, which will allow them to purchase more Nash jerseys and Stinger plushes, which will increase revenue to the point that ticket prices will fall for everyone, meaning every man, woman and child in the hockey-loving public will be better off for it. Or something like that. I mean, it’s worked so brilliantly for the government and all.

“Uh, see you Thursday.”

*****

Due to the fact that, during rush hour, vehicles progress through the Columbus roadways no faster than a lump travels through a boa constrictor’s digestive tract, there was little time to spare after parking in the VIP garage attached to the arena. Flick & I briskly walked to the private entrance, where we given only a cursory once-over by security as we presented our $128.50 tickets. We were also given a coupon good for a free puck after the game. I don’t think it was so much that they thought that Club Seaters would throw them on the ice if they were handed out beforehand, but more that we just couldn’t/shouldn’t/wouldn’t be bothered to lug around 6 ounces of vulcanized rubber for two-plus hours. It would be like being burdened with a second cell phone or something.

We got to our seats just in time for the arena to go dark for pre-game introductions. Our seats were at a table on the club concourse. The table was no bigger than a pair of fast-food trays, but it did contain a rather sweet mini-flatscreen television unit. The table and chairs were of sufficient height to give an unobstructed view of the ice, even if the people in the next row down were standing. What the Perch of Privilege lacked in elbow room, it made up for with visual splendor.

The seats were located just under the mid-level video wall that rings 3/4 of the arena. Having all sorts of flashing and blinking lights in my periphery made me think I was in Vegas. I quickly snapped out of that delusion when I realized that our waitress had way too many articles of clothing on and that the drinks were far from free. As one would expect, satisfying one’s thirst or hunger on the club level is a pricey proposition. I ordered chicken quesadillas ($8.50), a side of onion rings ($5.75) and two Aquafinas ($3.50 apiece). This is precisely why Dave Weissman doesn’t give me a Columbus Wired expense account.

The game got underway and Flick and I, as we are wont to do, immediately latched on to something as inconsequential as Calgary’s road uniforms and treated it as seriously as anything discussed on Crossfire. But this wasn’t so much a debate as it was unanimous commiseration. We both hate it when teams create black uniforms just for the sake of appearing in rap videos. We both agree that the flaming horse thingamabob on the front is utterly lame and that the “flaming C” on the red jerseys needs to come back. We also thought it odd that the “A” on the jersey of each assistant captain was the original Atlanta Flames logo. It would be like the Brownie Elf showing up on a Ravens jersey. Not cool.

We missed the Jackets’ first goal of the game, not due to blabbing, but due to the fact that that’s when our food arrived. Forsaking the thrill of a lamp-lighter in order to receive delivery of an $8.50 quesadilla...so this is how the other half lives.

The mini-flatscreens would prove quite useful in this situation and throughout the night in general. It was tremendous to have access to the Fox Sports Ohio feed so one could get an up-close look at all the slo-mo replays after goals and during stoppages in play. Well, that’s what Flick & I used the screens for. In addition to the Fox Sports Ohio feed and scoreboard feed, one can also watch any number of NHL games being played throughout North America, or even TBS Superstation’s airing of that riveting bartender epic “Cocktail”, starring Tom Cruise.

Sadly, I am not making that last sentence up. In the level in front of us, someone had their screen tuned to “Cocktail.” $128.50 for a hockey ticket, and some doofus is glued to the umpteenth watered-down TBS re-airing of a lame-o movie. This prompted Flick to make many loud and unsolicited comments, such as “I bet the bartenders in Cocktail could have sold a lot more drinks if they didn’t (mess) around so much”, or “I’d be pretty pissed off if I ordered a drink and had to wait through a 20-minute production.”

Another screen in front of us was tuned into an NBA game. How anyone could have the speed, skill and passion of a live NHL game right before their eyes, yet opt to watch the boring, plodding, free-throw-contest-at-the-end NBA on TV is beyond me. Taking another peek, I noticed that it was the Lakers that were on national TV. Lord knows when the guy might ever get another chance to catch the Lakers on the tube this year.

After the Jackets closed out a 1-0 lead in the first period, Flick and I decided intermission would be the perfect time to do some mingling. Upon wandering the carpeted concourse, it became increasingly apparent that we were in the The Land Of Garish Sweaters. Men and women alike were dressed in sweaters that even made a fashion ignoramus such as myself cringe. Some sweaters had designs that strained the eyes. Others contained a hodgepodge of colors found in lesser-visited slices of the color wheel. And still others gave off that “your-nutty-aunt-and/or-senile-grandma-made-it-for-you-for-Christmas-so-now-you-have-to-wear-it” vibe. I’m talking dangling fuzzballs and that sort of stuff. Maybe I would have understood had we come across a herd of senile grandmas beaming with pride. No, I think there’s something about Caucasian affluence that makes the awful sweater a perfectly acceptable garment, be it worn properly or merely tied around the waist or, heaven forbid, the neck.

We eventually made our way to an open railing that provided the perfect bird’s eye view of the concourse below. And with this view, we came to the realization that birds, and only birds, have any idea as to how rampant male pattern baldness is in our city. As we surveyed the pedestrians below, we were shocked at the regularity with which we spied deforested scalps.

“Do you think that guy has any idea how bad his comb-over looks from this angle?” I asked Flick as I pointed out a man with three wispy strands cemented across his otherwise barren skull.

“I dunno,” he replied. “But check this guy out.” He pointed out a man with only the slightly thinned- out spot on the crown of his head. “His days are numbered and he probably doesn’t even know it yet.”

It’s not that we were ripping on the bald folks (except for the comb-over people), but we were just astonished at how glaring an otherwise rarely-noticed physical feature became from that vantage point. We just couldn’t look away. That’s not to say that there weren’t other physical features that were even more captivating when taken in from this high-altitude viewpoint, but the less said about that in this article, the better.

We made it back to our seats just in the nick of time for the second period faceoff. It was a thrilling period that saw the Jackets assert their will over the Flames while opening up a 3-0 lead. In between cheering Columbus and jeering Calgary, Flick and I engaged in many hockey discussions, such as the injustice of the Colorado Avalanche firing Bob Hartley, who was sipping champagne out of Lord Stanley’s Cup a mere 18 months ago. His crime was...what? Losing in the conference finals last year? Coaching a winning team this year? But ever since setting up shop in the Rockies after bidding au revoir to Quebec City, the franchise has never finished anywhere other than the top of their division. Maybe the thin air has caused all those Denverites to forget that winning is a thrill, not a birthright. I’ve always admired the Avs as a team, but if they think a 10-8 record is suffering, I hope they learn what true NHL suffering is. I hope they become the Islanders.

All of this hockey talk got me wondering if the other denizens of the club level were as into the team, league and sport as we were. With an exciting game going on, surely there’d be a lot of hockey chatter during the second intermission, right?

To test this theory, Flick and I embarked on an eavesdropping mission. We randomly selected five group conversations and casually sidled up alongside the participants. Here are the five conversations we overheard:

1. Some chubby weenie in a bad argyle sweater bragging about how he bought a second house on his street. From what I could tell, he had been invited over to the neighbor’s house some time ago, and liked it so much that he bought it when they moved.

2. Something about an anaesthesiologist. I think there was a new one at the hospital or something. Both guys were wearing pagers, so maybe they were doctors talking about a new co-worker. Whatever it was, it sure as heck wasn’t hockey talk.

3. A group of guys spewing a lot of technical computer jargon. One of them had to go back into the office after the game to check and see if the new gateway was up and running. He was planning on leaving after the second period, but the seats are so cool that he decided to stick around for a little bit longer.

4. HOCKEY! Granted, I cheated on this one as most of the guys were actually wearing Blue Jackets stuff, so I had a hunch. Nevertheless, they were talking hockey, even if they were just inexplicably rehashing the Krzysztof Oliwa vs. Lyle Odelein locker room fight from two years ago.

5. A group of guys talking about (what else?) OSU football. This was an interesting conversation in that the one guy knows a guy who has worked as a doorman at a hotel for 12 years and he knows a guy who can get him Fiesta Bowl tickets for $500. However, these tickets might not be worth $500 if it’s just to sit in the end zone, so he may talk to another guy who is selling better tickets for $1000 apiece, which would be “a better value.”

So there you have it. The eavesdropping experiment netted one outdated hockey conversation out of five chattering groups.

The Aquafinas caught up to me before the start of the third period, and as I adjourned myself to the men’s room, Flick offered the following food for thought: “When you get into the bathroom, see if you notice anything weird about the set-up.”

As I walked through the door, I spied three things cramped together side-by-side. From left to right, they were a sink, a urinal, and a second urinal. It didn’t take long to figure out the design flaw Flick had picked up on. In between the two urinals was a privacy divider that separated Peeing Man A from Peeing Man B. Yet there was no divider between the urinal and the sink. So Peeing Man A had no protection on the left side from an encroaching handwasher.

I relayed my findings when I got back to our table.

“I just don’t get it,” Flick said in an exasperated manner. “From a sanitary standpoint, it makes no sense. You’re protecting the urinals from any cross-splashing, yet you’re leaving the sink totally exposed.”

I pointed out that people who can afford club seats probably didn’t get to where they are by peeing willynilly in random directions, so I didn’t really see a sanitary issue. But I just thought it was odd that they would afford the two peeing guys privacy from one another, but subject Peeing Guy A to the comfort zone infringement of an interloping handwasher who may or may not have wandering eyes.

“Yeah,” he agreed, “as if just because one guy’s zipper is zipped up, looking is any less gay.”
Our attention was diverted from the bathroom conversation by the action on the ice. In what was probably the most exciting sequence of the game, the Jackets killed off a full two minutes of a 5-on-3 power play, and then proceeded to spring a breakaway as Hannes Hyvonen and Derrick Walser escaped from the penalty box. The roar of appreciation for the penalty kill gave way to screams of anticipation for the breakaway. Walser’s shot went high, which set up a series of three booming checks along the boards as Calgary desperately tried to clear the zone. The noise reached a fever pitch when Tyler Wright treated Oleg Saprykin like a crash test dummy as he tried to advance the puck along the wall. The club seats certainly provide an awe-inspiring spot to really soak in the noise of the crowd, even if little of that noise is being generated by those around you.

Just when I thought the evening couldn’t get any more exciting, it was revealed by Flick’s co-worker, who was also at our table, that a stripper was making the rounds on the club level and handing out VIP passes for a local gentleman’s club. I suppose if you’re looking for rich guys who like to throw their money around, the club level at a Blue Jackets game is the place to solicit customers. Neither Flick nor I personally got to see this stripper, but his co-worker informed us that her name was Hope and that “she had kind of a big butt.” He also produced some of the VIP passes she was handing out, which featured a scantily-clad temptress and declared that the pass was good for, and I’m quoting here, “one free entry.”

A half a million stripper jokes and bloody on-ice skirmishes later, the final horn had sounded and the Jackets had triumphed 3-0. My club seat experience was everything I’d hoped it to be. From a fan’s perspective, it is by far the ultimate viewing experience. The seats are high enough to get a great view of the ice, but low enough that you can still read the names on the jerseys. And the mini-flatscreens are too cool for words. I wish every fan could get a chance to watch a game at Nationwide Arena in such style. From a sociological perspective, sitting in the club seats is just as lame as you’d imagine. I’d rather be surrounded by the hockey nuts in Section 214 any day, where nary a real estate deal is discussed, unless it involves Luke Richardson foreclosing on an opposing forward’s goal-front property.

As we walked out, Flick provided one last morsel of food for thought: “How big of a (jerk) would you have to be to take one of these tickets to Wendy’s? Can you imagine handing a $128.50 hockey ticket to a minimum-wage employee just so you can get out of coughing up 99 cents for a cup of chili?”

He paused for a moment.

“Although I suppose that would in effect lower the price of the ticket to a more reasonable $127.51.”