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USC ticket holders file suit over handshake deal
Five men claim new administration isn’t adhering to arena seating agreement
CommentsA group of South Carolina basketball season-ticket holders has sued the university, claiming the athletics administration failed to honor a seat-licensing agreement fans made with the previous administration when the arena opened in 2002.
The five plaintiffs bringing the suit, filed Thursday at the Richland County Courthouse, say they had handshake deals with former athletics director Mike McGee’s staff that called for them to pay premium fees on their courtside seats for five years.
Beginning with the 2007-08 season and continuing for as long as they held the seats, the plaintiffs — all longtime members of the Gamecock Club — say they were not to pay any additional fees other than maintaining their giving levels and paying for the cost of the tickets, the suit alleges.
But when season ticket renewal forms went out last year, the plaintiffs were assessed a $1,500-per-seat fee in order to keep their seats. Three of the men paid the premium but want their money refunded.
All of the plaintiffs are asking to keep their seats under what they claim were the agreed-upon terms, while seeking attorney’s fees and other damages.
Although the deals were struck with officials no longer at USC, Joe McCulloch, attorney for the group, called on USC’s athletics administration to do the right thing.
“I’ve represented the university in the past. I represented them for many years, and this lawsuit is such a simple matter of doing what’s right. A deal’s a deal,” said McCulloch, former associate legal counsel at USC.
“It’s a shame that fan loyalty has been depreciated in value by the university.”
USC spokesman Russ McKinney said the university had not seen the suit as of Friday afternoon, but declined to comment further.
Former USC ticket director Chris Massaro said an arrangement in which premiums would cease “would run contrary to everything that was done by Mike McGee,” who discontinued lifetime Gamecock Club memberships and imposed premium fees in the club-seating areas at Williams-Brice Stadium.
“We sold with the intention that the premiums would last for as long as the building did, the same way we did with the football stadium with the Zone tickets and the same principle we applied to the 200 and 600 levels (at Williams-Brice),” said Massaro, Middle Tennessee’s athletics director.
“When you provide meals in the McGuire Room and those kinds of things, we needed some kind of annual revenue flow from the boosters,” Massaro added. “So our Founders Club (first eight rows) and courtside seats, there was always the intention of an annual revenue, an annual seat premium.”
John Yenco, a 1986 USC graduate who gives at the Silver Spur level, agreed to pay $44,000 in premium fees for his four courtside seats — $5,000 per seat the first season and $1,500 per seat the next four — after meeting with an official before the arena was finished.
“It strikes me as amazing that in 2008 that we’d still be doing handshake deals for these kind of dollars,” McCulloch said. “But the fact is that is the way the McGee administration did these things.”
Barton Dumas, the owner of the Keg O’ Nails restaurant who has two courtside seats across from the visitor’s bench, said the university reneged on other promises to Founders Club members and courtside seat-holders, including free tickets to USC women’s basketball games and first dibs on concerts and other events at the facility, which is now called Colonial Life Arena.
Both Yenco and Dumas said they remain Gamecock fans and plan to continue attending games. Both men kept their seats last season while USC officials looked into their claims.
“We’ve been trying to work it out with (USC) since the beginning of basketball season last year, but nobody wants to acknowledge in the Gamecock Club that’s there a problem,” Yenco said. “We felt the only way we could get something resolved was to get an attorney involved.”
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