A Brief History — and Scary Future — of Gatecrashing
The following is bonus content from my book, Ticketless: How Sneaking Into The Super Bowl And Everything Else (Almost) Held My Life Together.
I am far from the first person to sneak into sporting events. The term “spin-move” is mine, but “gatecrash” is more common. Paradoxically, however, the definition of “gatecrash” tends to include more than crashing a gate and running in. We tend to think of gatecrashers as tricksters — dressing in disguise, or using some sort of ploy, to convince stadium authorities that they belong inside.
On the other hand, my spin-moves usually were what you’d associate with actually crashing the gate: just running in, with security knowing full well that I was doing so.
And yet, around the fraternity and in my own mind, to “spin-move” meant to craftily get away with something. For example, with Mom’s Weekend approaching, the fraternity president said at our weekly meeting, “We need to make this place look good.” Someone responded, “No problem. We’ll just spin-move it.” We hastily emptied the trash bins of beer cans, hid bongs in closets, and flattened the comforters on our beds.
It would be impossible to compile a definitive list of history’s greatest crashers, but here are some of the highlights I’ve found.
We don’t know exactly how many gates James Leo “One Eye” Connelly crashed, but it seems safe to say the number is in the triple digits. (Here’s a much more detailed look at his career.) My favorite story of his took place before the Jeffries-Fitzsimmons heavyweight title fight on Coney Island on June 9, 1899. According to the Milwaukee Journal, One Eye apparently flashed a phony deputy’s badge to the head usher and said, “Sheriff’s Office sent me. I’m to keep out any fakers that come around posing as deputies.”
“Bully for you, sport,” the head usher said, while letting him in.
According to the same newspaper, at a University of Illinois football game in 1924, he showed up wearing overalls and carrying a paint bucket. He painted parking lines on the street, then approached a ticket taker and asked, “What else do I paint?”
“Don’t ask me,” the ticket taker said, “go in and ask the boss.”
Hyman “Pinky” Ginsberg is another all-time great (more HERE). He crashed just about everything: boxing matches, football games, even the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. He also crashed 44 World Series games, and described his first to the Associated Press: “I came from a poor family and didn’t have the 50 cents for a ticket. I bought six newspapers for two cents each, wadded them up, and started a fire. When the guy on the gate ran out to put it out, I went in.”
I’ve found only two published books on sports gatecrashing.
In No Ticket? No Problem!, “Professor” Scott Kerman pretends to teach a class on methods for getting into sporting events and mixes in his own stories. One of his methods was to hang out with the stadium vendors and ask the head vendor if he needed an extra hand. At the 1992 Super Bowl, for example, Kerman became a peanut vendor for all of about 10 minutes, then ditched most of the peanuts and found an empty seat.
Another method involved calling a stadium before an event to find out the name of the public relations manager, the director of guest services, or the vice president of business operations. He would walk up to the media entrance, and when security told him he wasn’t on the list, he’d say, “Oh, so and so told me to meet him inside.” Usually, he was let right in.
Confessions of the World’s Greatest Gate-Crasher, by Dion Rich (as told to Charlie Jones), recounts Dion’s stories sneaking into the Super Bowl almost every year, other major sporting events like the Olympics, and high-profile social events like the Academy Awards.
Before the 2002 MLB All-Star Game, he “found an area where the fans had to go outside the ballpark to smoke … It was completely closed at one end, with about an inch or so between the fence and the stadium. When I walked around to the other end, lo and behold, I found a gap of six to eight inches.”
You can guess what happened next.
My second-favorite gatecrash of all time took place during Super Bowl XLV in 2013. Two Savannah St. University students, Joseph Christian Roberts and Malachi Youngblood, filmed their sneak through New Orleans streets that had been barricaded, around security checkpoints, into the bowels of the Louisiana Superdome, and eventually onto the field.
Chris Chase of USA Today criticized them for violating the “gate-crasher omertá” by publicizing their secrets. Going public, according to the story, means a weakness is identified in stadium security and a hole is closed to future crashers.
That code doesn’t exist, and never has. Dion Rich himself said in his book, “A crash is a failure if it doesn’t culminate with exposure on television, in a newspaper, or in some other publication covering the event.” (One Eye and Pinky both kept scrapbooks of newspaper clippings that mentioned their names; Kerman wrote a book and did interviews on National TV.)
That code is based on the premise that if a gatecrasher tells his story, a weakness in stadium security will be strengthened. But as I learned when I was a ticket taker myself, ticket-checking and stadium security are separate entities. Gatecrashers can usually pass through security checkpoints, just like everyone else, then bypass the ticket check without one.
What will force security to improve is the inevitable tragedy that will occur at a sporting event.
Security at American sports venues these days checks up on little more than the obvious: loud, drunk people; fights in the stands; a beeping metal detector at the entrance. Holes in the system are everywhere, and someday, someone with bad intentions is going to buy tickets to a bunch of events in a row at some stadium or arena. Over many weeks, that person will identify what security overlooks. Then, after enough study, that person will bring a gun or a bomb to a big game. And it’s going to be bad. It’s going to rip our collective hearts out.
Security at airports didn’t clamp down until after 9/11. Security at stadiums has certainly increased since then, but because people in charge of security are perpetually a step behind, only after a horrific attack will anything change meaningfully. Then and only then will American stadiums get serious, like their European and South American counterparts.
I can see them installing fingerprint scanners, voice-and-ticket-activated turnstiles, and facial recognition software when the technology becomes seamless enough (if it isn’t already).
I hope that, somehow, ticket checks remain distinct from security at stadiums so the pastime of gatecrashing can live on despite enhanced security measures. But I’m not optimistic.
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My favorite gatecrash story ever, “Gatecrasher in Paradise,” appeared in the April 1992 edition of Golf magazine. Derrik Woodbury describes how he snuck into the third round of the 1971 Masters at Augusta National. He traversed a snake-infested swamp, dug a hole under a fence, was seen and kicked out by a cop, then dug another hole farther down the fence, but wound up on the wrong side of the 11th fairway, where patrons weren’t allowed.
His only chance was to run across the fairway, blend in with the crowd, and hope no one noticed or cared. He made it across and thought he was safe. Then two security guards lifted him by the shoulders. They dragged him to their makeshift holding cell: a station wagon. They locked him inside.
Through the wagon’s windows, he saw “the magnificent beauty of the rolling terrain, the azaleas and dogwoods in full bloom, the immaculate grass of the tees, fairways, and greens.” They let him go after the golfers finished their rounds.
Twenty years later, he and his father went to The Masters, with tickets, and he “marveled again at the manicured grounds and the natural beauty of the setting.”
“It was very special,” he concluded. “It was not the same.”
