ShareThisFrom section 335 of the Georgia Dome, high above the court in the massive stadium's third and loftiest level, you can see forever -- or at least as far as the inner sanctum of what used to be the most exclusive party in college sports.
Ed Gardner has found it easier to get tickets to the Final Four -- this year will be his fourth trip in the past eight years -- than the ACC Tournament, but when the league announced last month it would sell tickets to the public for the first time in 43 years, the North Carolina fan made plans for Atlanta.
"When they went on sale, we just planned on Monday morning being one of the first people to call," said Gardner, who lives in Denver but did his medical residency in Chapel Hill, where he also met his wife. "I know they're not all sold out, but we were ready to call first thing Monday morning."
So without donating a single dime to the UNC booster club, Gardner obtained a pair of what used to be the hardest tickets in college basketball merely by placing a call to Ticketmaster and became one of many first-time tournament attendees this week.
From 1966-2008, the only way to get into this tournament was to be an athletics donor of some significance. In 2009, anyone with $336 to spend can come on in and have a seat. Unfortunately for the ACC, there may not be many willing or able to spend that much this week.
The morning before the tournament began, Ticketmaster had third row, center court seats available in the third level (Entire sections of that upper ring were empty in Thursday's first round). Want 15 seats together? No problem. You and 14 of your closest friends can attend an event that has been invitation-only for four decades.
Eight years ago, the ACC packed the Georgia Dome and set multiple conference-tournament attendance records -- 182,525 for the tournament, 36,505 a session, 40,083 for a single session.
But with less than 28,000 ticket books sold this season, the ACC is going to be hard-pressed to approach those numbers. Not that the league is complaining. Any average more than 23,745 would still be the largest since the last time the tournament was here.
"I really think you have to call this a success, too, considering where we are at this given time and the numbers compared to our normal numbers," ACC commissioner John Swofford said.
No one could have predicted that when the league brought its biggest road show back to its most capacious venue, Georgia Tech would be the worst team in the league.
No one could have predicted, after the success of 2001, that the economy would be in shambles, with consumer confidence so low that not even ACC basketball could pry dollars out of wallets.
This bid was extended in 2000, before expansion was really on the radar, but it sure seemed prescient when the 2001 tournament was a success and downright visionary when the league added Boston College, Miami and Virginia Tech a few years later.
The worry at the time was that the addition of three schools to the conference would exacerbate an already exorbitant demand for tournament tickets.
Perhaps that's the case in Greensboro, where the arena holds less than 24,000 and the four North Carolina schools alone could fill the building.
But there were less than 150 fans in the entire 300 level when the tournament opener between expansion teams Virginia Tech and Miami tipped off Thursday, the echoes of tournaments past losing out to the echo of the public address system.
There are certain to be more for later rounds but at least one fan couldn't give away his tickets Thursday.
Phil Chambless, a Virginia fan from Atlanta, was selling his two books of tournament tickets outside the Georgia Dome on Thursday but couldn't find any takers. He then tried to give them away, unsuccessfully before giving up and heading inside.
Even if attendance is down, first-time attendance must be up. The advance public sale gave basketball fans that never thought they would see an ACC Tournament game live their first chance to see 11 of them this year, like the Gardners, or their sixth, like Peggy Franco.
Franco had been to five ACC Tournaments, but she figured she had seen her last.
A Maryland fan whose husband went to Georgia Tech and whose daughter lives in Atlanta, Franco figured it was worth the trip when tickets went on sale.
"We probably weren't going to come," said Franco, who lives in Severna Park, Md. "If I had heard there weren't any tickets available, we wouldn't have come. The last time we tried to go was in Washington (in 2005), and we don't donate to the school or whatever, and it's so expensive.
"This is the first time we've paid face value."
(Contact Luke DeCock at luke.decock@newsobserver.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
columnMust credit The News and Observer of Raleigh, N.C.
