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THE PRESS

Football Tickets

Harvard and Dartmouth played to 30,000 persons this year, as against 57,000 a year ago, and the attendance was greater than at many other college games of similar appeal. Tickets were priced at four dollars to which the government tax was added. It was too much money for Harvard and Dartmouth men to pay, no matter how much they desired to attend. The evidence surely pointed to the necessity for lower priced tickets, more in keeping with what the alumni could spend.

The two athletic associations ten days before the game considered the advisability of grading the ticket prices for the game so that no Dartmouth or Harvard man would be deprived, because of a high ticket cost, of watching the play. It was desirable that this be done, but the mechanical difficulties involved in the short time available were too great to be overcome. Every Harvard and Dartmouth man would have had to be notified of the price reduction, and the athletic associations would have had to set up the intricate machinery of exchanging tickets for a lower price classification and actually reallotting all seats. Certainly different price arrangements will be made another year.

It is possible that even for a two dollar ticket there is no such demand for football games this year as there was in other years. Sports psychology from the standpoint of tickets is peculiar. There is feverish excitement and mad ticket hunting only when tickets are scarce. The Holy Cross game was an example of that last year. Three days in advance of the game 40,000 tickets had been sold. Seventeen thousand tickets were purchased between the Wednesday and Friday noons preceding the game. Notwithstanding the fact that announcement was made then that the game was sold out, there were ten thousand persons gathered at Soldiers Field at game time, trying to purchase tickets.

If it suddenly strikes alumni and football enthusiasts that to go to football games is the thing to do, rather than the thing not to do, the late season games at the Stadium may find tickets less plentiful on game days than has been the case so far this year. H. A. A. News.

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