UCLA Ignored Ticket Options : Rose Bowl: Bruin officials say they sold large block to booster because they feared financial losses.

UCLA officials, facing heavy criticism over the sale of 4,000 1994 Rose Bowl tickets to one booster, said Thursday they agreed to the transaction because they feared a potential “financial disaster” if those tickets remained unsold.

But many who were subsequently unable to get tickets when the demand exceeded the supply labeled the decision premature because:

--UCLA sold the block of tickets Dec. 2, 30 days before the game.

--The Bruins’ eventual opponent, the University of Wisconsin, had not even been determined at the time. When the Badgers clinched the Big Ten spot on Dec. 5, ticket demand skyrocketed.

--UCLA had options to offer unsold tickets to season-ticket holders, to its Big Ten opponent or to the Tournament of Roses Assn. If none of them were interested, UCLA almost certainly would have been granted permission by tournament officials to conduct a public sale.

At the time, UCLA still had about 5,000 of its allotted 41,586 tickets, priced at $46 each.

Instead of pursuing those options, UCLA officials sold 4,000 seats that day to Angelo M. Mazzone III, a booster and former athletic department official who had indicated that he would make a sizable contribution to the school’s athletic scholarship fund.

Mazzone got his tickets, and UCLA got a $100,000 contribution.

Since that was reported Thursday, there has been an angry reaction from UCLA season-ticket holders complaining about preferential treatment for Mazzone, and from Wisconsin, where about 1,000 fans were deprived of tickets they had been promised from ticket agencies. A Wisconsin lawyer has been threatening to file a class-action lawsuit since early April.

At UCLA, season-ticket holders were offered an opportunity to buy one Rose Bowl ticket for each season ticket held. They were told to send in money to UCLA for any additional tickets requested and, if extra tickets were available, they would be allowed to buy them.

But in early December, many season-ticket holders received letters from the school, stating that all available tickets had been sold.

“I can’t even tell you how outraged I am,” said Dan Rothmel, who has had UCLA season tickets for nearly 20 years.

Rothmel, president of a catalogue company in Los Angeles, makes a $300 donation each year to UCLA for the privilege of buying season tickets.

“If I treated my customers the way they treat us, I would be out of business in two weeks,” Rothmel said.

Wisconsin fans were similarly upset to learn that one person was able to buy such a large block of tickets.

“I was told that there was just no possible way that the Wisconsin fans were going to be able to buy blocks and the only way to do it was to go through the ticket brokers,” said Charles Mazursky, a Westwood lawyer who graduated from Wisconsin in 1963.

Said Joseph D. Mandel, vice chancellor of legal affairs at UCLA: “I don’t believe there was preferential treatment, although, in hindsight, it may have turned out to have been preferential. On more than one occasion in the past, we have been stuck with an allotment of tickets.”

The previous year, Mandel said, UCLA was unable to sell all of its allotted 1,000 tickets for the Rose Bowl game featuring Washington and Michigan.

“We were burned financially,” Mandel said. “Now, 1,000 tickets is not a huge number, but any number is painful in this day and age when you’ve got a cumulative deficit.

“Given that deficit and given the experience of the last few years, there was a considerable level of anxiety that we would get stuck with the tickets. At that point, still unaware of our opponent, the athletic administration got quite nervous.”

Enter Mazzone, who has strong ties to UCLA athletics. He was the football team’s equipment manager as a student. He continued to work for the athletic department while attending law school and even after graduation. Mazzone was associate athletic director-business manager before leaving the school in 1982.

Attempts to contact Mazzone were unsuccessful.

“Anthony is a lover of UCLA who has purchased smaller blocks of tickets in the past,” Mandel said. “He has done so to help avoid financial danger for the school.

“Only Angelo knows his motivation in this case, whether it was to protect the school from financial disaster or whether he was some visionary who knew that Wisconsin was going to get in and that the fans would be in a frenzy for tickets. I think it was just another gesture on his part to assist UCLA and enable us to cover ourselves in the event the demand was not there. He took those tickets off our hands.”

There are a lot of people in Wisconsin who would have been thrilled to have those tickets.

James A. Olson, a Madison, Wis., lawyer, is considering a suit against UCLA because of the school’s failure to make its excess tickets available to Wisconsin fans.

In a letter he sent to potential partners in the suit, Olson said:

“We asserted that UCLA refused to provide excess tickets to the University of Wisconsin and had allotted an excessive amount of tickets to the UCLA athletic department. Furthermore, we made specific reference to the ‘sale’ of 4,000 tickets to an individual anonymous donor and the fact that UCLA’s listing of the purchaser as a ‘donor’ implies that something above sale price was donated.”

Mandel responded by saying that it is not UCLA’s responsibility to compensate any losses suffered by Wisconsin fans who could not get tickets.

Mandel concedes that Mazzone’s contribution was certainly a factor in making the tickets available to him.

“We were told that he would repeat the practice he has done in the past to be generous with our endowment fund,” Mandel said. “There were no negotiations. It wasn’t like, ‘To get this amount of tickets, you have to do this.’ But we would be breaching our fiduciary duty to the taxpayers if we did not take advantage of (the contribution).”

Athletic Director Peter Dalis called Mazzone’s contribution “a lasting legacy for our endowment fund and our future scholarships.”

Said Mandel: “Why should our athletic director have said to Angelo that his offer was awfully nice, but we should make additional tickets available in case someone may have an aunt coming out from Wisconsin. UCLA did the understandable thing, consistent with the law, and with good fiscal practices.”

Bob Rosenzweig, UCLA’s acting vice chancellor for university relations, agreed.

“We didn’t know how things were going to end up,” he said. “The feeling was, it was the prudent thing to take protection at the front end.”

Mazursky, the Wisconsin grad from Westwood, said if one person controls the market, he can dictate the market price.

“And I have no doubt that that’s what happened here,” he said.

So will steps be taken to prevent this type of transaction in the future?

Pacific 10 Conference officials say that the Tournament of Roses’ longstanding policy regarding distribution of tickets should not be changed.

“I think it’s important that maybe we don’t overreact too much in this situation,” said Jim Muldoon, assistant commissioner of the Pac-10. “The ticket situation that is there has been in there for years . . and over the course of time has proven to be pretty good.”

Jack French, the Tournament of Roses’ executive director, agreed.

“All of a sudden there’s a flaw, which is really an aberration, and there’s a lot of reaction to that,” he said. “When things settle down, in the ensuing years, things will balance out.”

But officials of the Big Ten Conference are not so sure.

“The only thing I can say is that we have asked for some relief in that area in terms of trying to get more (tickets),” said Mark Rudner, assistant commissioner of the Big Ten.

The parties will discuss ticket distribution at a meeting May 18.

Rosenzweig says UCLA will also investigate its ticket situation.

“We are going to take a hard look at ticket policy,” he said. “Nobody is happy about how things worked out this year. We feel badly people from Wisconsin didn’t get tickets. Hopefully there are ways this can be avoided in the future.”