Michael Martocci, 54, and Barry Liben, 61, were huge New York Giants fans growing up, but had always been satisfied watching away Giants games on TV, despite being in the travel business together.
In spring 1990, however, the two, who live in northern New Jersey, noticed that their favorite team was going to play the defending Super Bowl champion 49ers in San Francisco the first Monday of December.
They decided to do something they felt had not been tried: arranging a big trip of Giants fans to San Francisco to take in the weekend and the clash of the 10-1 titans.
“It wasn’t like today, where people know how to get tickets and book bulk travel,” Martocci said.
“We lucked out,” he added. “It was a great game” — the 49ers won 7-3 — “and it turned out they played in playoffs a month later, so we did it again. We filled it up both times, and we have never looked back.”
The two men, partners in the Tzell Travel Group, became a vital part of a travel niche that now draws many older lifelong fans across a range of sports. They formed a subsidiary, Big Blue Travel, and arrange trips to every Giants away game, whether 100 miles away in Philadelphia or 3,000 miles on the West Coast. The event usually starts with a cocktail party the night before and includes a tailgate party featuring one or more former Giants players. Those players are retired, as are about a third of the Big Blue travelers.
As fans become more attached to their favorite teams, pro and college, and those who grew up during the sports boom of the 1950s and 1960s reach retirement, the sports road trip has become a staple of fandom, and numerous pro teams and colleges are involved in the arrangements.
Sometimes teams will hold a block of tickets, knowing they can sell them at a premium to the more fervent visiting-team fan groups, like those of the Giants and the Philadelphia Eagles. Notre Dame, among college teams, has a national following, said a spokesman, John Heisler, and like other schools, helps travel agencies arrange travel for away games.
Big-time college football is perhaps the most prominent place where faithful fans gather week after week, away or home. When he died at age 91 on Nov. 21, 1998 – while he was in the stands at the USC-UCLA game — Giles Pellerin had seen 797 consecutive University of Southern California football games, both home and away. In those 62 years, starting when he was a USC sophomore, he traveled 650,000 miles and spent more than $85,000 to see his beloved Trojans, his family said.
James Thompson, the sports fan travel expert for About.com, said more and more, visiting fans want to travel to games, and given the expense and the time commitment, the regulars tend to be retirees.
“It is not that college football is an old person’s game, but that it tends to be more than just the experience of going to the game,” he said. People will spend weekends, possibly combining the stay with other tourist activity. Big stadiums are all wheelchair-accessible, so mobility is not an issue, and while senior discounts aren’t the rule, there is often some kind of special treatment if the retiree is an alumnus, maybe a parking perk or a party invitation. After all, loyal fans may be good bets for an eventual bequest.
Thompson thinks those who want to travel to the University of Mississippi for a game get the best experience.
“They tailgate at a place called the Grove, where people are not allowed to have electric grills, so it takes it back from modern times,” Thompson said. “You go and there are three generations, from grandpa on the grill, parents making sure everyone has drinks and kids running around. It transcends time.”
He said the best tailgate food was at Louisiana State in Baton Rouge, known for scores of people making jambalaya or pigs on spits. The University of Georgia, though, he said, has the best near-stadium food choices. “The food in Athens is just getting better and better,” Thompson said.
Martocci of Big Blue Travel said he, too, often saw three generations of fans on his trips. The crowd does skew male, he said, but the teams are trying to attract women to games, and his events and trips encourage women to come.
In smaller places, retirees can get almost personal treatment at sporting events. For the last 25 years, residents of the Pines, a retirement home in Davidson, North Carolina, have traveled in small buses to see basketball games at Davidson College, about a mile away. According to the Davidson assistant athletic director, James Hendricks, about 75 Pines residents come for every home basketball game and about 40 come for the women’s games. Many stay courtside after the games to hear the radio announcer John Kilgo, a retired Davidson employee himself, interview Bob McKillup, the coach.
Betty Hoover and Peggy Coppom are twin sisters who attended the University of Colorado in Boulder for only a year — 1943 — but started going to the Buffalos’ home football and basketball games then and haven’t stopped.
The 91-year-olds had separate season tickets when they were married, but moved to seats together when their husbands died. They estimate they have missed only a dozen home games in 72 years, sometimes attending with grandchildren or even great-grandchildren.
Similarly, G. Holmes Braddock, 90, can’t get enough of his University of Miami teams — in his case football and baseball. He has had season tickets for each since he was a 21-year-old freshman at the University of Miami in 1946 and has missed only 12 of 431 home Hurricane football games since then. Braddock, who in his 38 years on the Miami-Dade school board is generally credited with spearheading desegregation there, retired about 20 years ago from his life insurance business and only then started going to more away games.
Braddock says he doesn’t tailgate either before or after games, however. “I am there for the game,” he said. “I sit on the end of the aisle and don’t let people go in or out during a play. Those people are being rude.
“I don’t get up and miss anything either,” he added. “If I have to go to the bathroom, I can at least wait until halftime.”
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