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OSU season ticket buy is a question of ethics
By Dennis J. Willard
Beacon Journal staff writer
Published on Sunday, Jul 13, 2008
COLUMBUS: On a pleasant summer day in 1987, Richard Celeste held a news conference at the governor's mansion in Bexley to announce he would not be a candidate for president.
I had just started a job as a stringer at the Statehouse for the Youngstown Vindicator and this was my first assignment.
A day earlier, the State Highway Patrol would have taken one look and tossed me from the manicured mansion lawn.
Suddenly, I was a credentialed reporter.
Working for the Vindicator meant membership in the Ohio Legislative Correspondent's Association (OLCA), an organization started in 1893 mainly to distinguish between reporters hired by legitimate newspapers and posers flacking for lobbyists and special interests.
Among the many things I didn't know at the time was being a member of OLCA gave me access to buying season tickets for Ohio State football games.
My wife and I had recently graduated from Ohio State, paid our dues to join the alumni association and had been told we would be able to buy tickets to one game a year.
I began rationalizing with a series of thinking errors that went something like this: I covered the Statehouse and was not a higher education reporter, and I was already inherently biased as a scarlet and gray-bleeding alum.
So where was the harm?
I bought the tickets.
A few years later, a friend and a fellow Buckeye-loving alum named Paul listened to me brag about my season tickets and asked me a simple question: Why are you so special?
In a calm voice, absent rancor, Paul said the university wouldn't offer the tickets to me if they didn't want something in return. Politely, he left the word ''dummy,'' off the end of the sentence.
By this time, I had witnessed the lobbying efforts of Ohio State during budget hearings where lawmakers and the governor make a wide range of choices that affect the university's bottom line, ranging from state aid to caps on tuition increases.
I didn't have a good answer for Paul, so I never bought the season tickets again.
In 1993, I was bureau chief for a chain of 20 newspapers in Ohio and we began aggressively writing about Ohio State paying to send a large contingency of state lawmakers and public officials to the Citrus Bowl in Orlando that year.
This was during E. Gordon Gee's first run as the university's president. The school would pay for the airfare and the hotel rooms and meals and supply tickets as the genial host at the great bowl party.
These stories eventually played a role in Ohio State changing its policy on freebies. Now, lawmakers must pay for the tickets.
One day, in the midst of the reporting, I received a telephone call from Steve Sterrett, an OSU spokesman.
He informed me the university had checked and noticed that I had purchased tickets in the late '80s as a member of OLCA.
Sterrett told me the exact years, two or three as I recall, where I sat in the stadium, how much I paid for the tickets and then he asked whether I thought I was being a hypocrite.
I told him I should never have bought the tickets, but I was naive and stupid, and his phone call was vindicating my decision to stop.
Each year since, sometime in March, the mail comes carrying a fat packet from the Athletic Ticket Office with an application for season tickets.
I always open the letter and scan the games to see which teams are coming to Columbus. Every other year, the tickets are particularly alluring, with Michigan at home as the exclamation point.
And then I do something that my three children, born in Columbus and raised as Ohio State fans without ever going to a Michigan game, think is crazy.
I toss the application into the wastebasket.
Dennis J. Willard can be reached at 614-224-1613 or dwillard@thebeaconjournal.com.
COLUMBUS: On a pleasant summer day in 1987, Richard Celeste held a news conference at the governor's mansion in Bexley to announce he would not be a candidate for president.
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