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T A B L E_T A L K Olympic Village: All the news on everything that skates, skis or slides at the Nagano games R E C E N T L Y The fastest man on ice
Retro burger
CBS drops the ball in Nagano
Stoned on ice
Apres moi, de luge
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HOCKEY STARS & SCALPERS | PAGE 2 OF 3 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Bob said the members of his profession -- "it's a fraternity, we all know each other" -- preferred to call themselves "brokers," not "scalpers." "I have my own business in the States. Everybody knows me -- I don't need to advertise." But he's pretty contemptuous of most of his colleagues. "Look, 90 percent of the guys standing on the street hustling -- we call that 'grinding' in the business -- have drug, alcohol or gambling problems." A single father raising two kids, he described himself as a "middle-level" guy, in between the major players who sit at desks and "make millions" and the riff-raff street hustlers. "I do both," he said. "I can hustle on the street, but I've also got a conscience. The big guys hire me because they know I'm fair and I'll work hard. These street guys are supposed to get a third of what they get, but they'll lie and take another third." Aha -- that explained why I kept hearing "supervisors" asking their shifty-eyed underlings, "What'd you just sell? Is that all you got for it?" It was a bit like pirates dividing the loot -- you had to keep one hand on the cutlass at all times. Does he have any ethical problems with doing what he does? "My only ethical concern is to be honest. I won't tell a customer a seat is good when it isn't. Look, when we were working Minnesota Twins games, they used to accuse us of driving up prices. But there were only 10,000 people at the games! We can't buy 40,000 tickets. Yeah, sometimes we get a lot of tickets, and then it's a monopoly. But it's supply and demand. If nobody wants to buy them, I get stuck with them." His business fluctuates wildly, just like the stock market that it so closely resembles. "Some days we sell 400 to 500 tickets. Today we sold 40 or 50. My top day, I sold 1,500 tickets in one day, myself, at the Atlanta games. Overall I sold $500,000 to $1 million there." How much does he make a year? "I don't want to say that. I do very well." Six figures? "Yeah." Bob has a good face, unlike most of the trolls hawking tickets, who are strictly minor thugs out of "Brighton Rock." And his Brooklyn-style street smarts are kind of endearing, although his Harvey Keitel-does-Milton Friedman rap didn't entirely convince me. Still, it seems hard to argue that he was doing anything more unseemly than a CEO cornering the market on copper. A more modest Olympics occupation was held down by a cheerful young American woman I met named Heather, who was pulling a cart full of USA Today papers behind her down freezing Chuo-dori. Her brother, who lives in Japan, had told her about the job. "I make a dollar a paper after I sell 50," she said. "It's really hard work. But I get to be here." Complaining of a hangover, she took up her post on a major intersection near 30s, an always-jammed expat/foreigner/Olympic-maniac bar. 30s is a pizza and beer joint, packed with raucous, good-natured Swedes and Canadians and French and Americans and Germans and Norwegians and a few adventurous Japanese -- the women smiling at their own boldness. Outside, the rain had thinned out the usual mob gathered around the Pin Man. Before going in, I stopped to examine the display and listen in on a conversation the Pin Man was having with a colleague. "What was it -- shrapnel?" I heard him say to the other guy. "No, it was good stuff," the other guy replied. What arcane language was this? The longer you stay at the Olympics -- my two-week sojourn puts me in a class shared by few spectators, most of whom are here for a week tops -- the more it seems that the Olympics are a modern version of the great medieval pilgrimages to Santiago de Compostela or Canterbury. They have their holy relics (the medals), their saints (the athletes), their evil bishops (corrupt figure-skating judges) and a vast, unruly array of camp followers -- suppliers, vultures, groupies (well, maybe they didn't have those in the 14th century) and assorted other practitioners of Olympic sub-economies. And one of the odder of those economies is the pin-trading industry. At every Olympics, hundreds of little pins -- the kind you stick on your lapel or your cap -- are manufactured by the official Olympic committee, the sponsoring city, corporate backers, teams and numerous other entities. People avidly collect, trade and sell these pins -- and many people make a living off of them. The Pin Man was just one of dozens, if not hundreds, of people selling pins all over Nagano. The mostly Japanese crowd gaping at his display was usually the biggest, however -- whether because of location or the quality of his merchandise, I couldn't say. He was selling pins from 1,000 to 5,000 yen each (about $5-$25). That seemed somewhat extortionate, so I asked if he would bargain. He eyed me with distaste. "What do you want to buy?" he asked. "And how much? If you just want to buy one pin, no -- my prices are good. I don't need to bargain." I said I had never looked at pins before and didn't know anything about them. His colleague took me in hand. "See -- this one is a team pin, from the Puerto Rican team. That's a good one to trade. You buy it and then try to trade up." I told them I'd look around and come back. (His prices, it turns out, are competitive -- and he has a lot of stock from the nine previous Olympics he said he had worked.) I never did find out exactly what "shrapnel" was -- presumably it's junkie knock-offs. Inside, 30s was the usual mob scene. Four young women -- two Canadians and two Brits, the Canadians in full national regalia with flags and Canada sweatshirts -- were sitting next to a rowdy, happy table of Swedes. The Swedes, in even fuller regalia -- troll-like floppy top hats painted yellow and blue, hockey jerseys, painted faces, huge flags -- were boisterously singing drinking songs and merrily teasing the Canadian women. Sweden, the defending Olympic champion, was playing Canada that night. "We will be drinking again after tonight!" howled a Swede, whose table had wisely ordered an enormous keg of beer with its own tap. "You'll be crying!" yelled one of the Canadians back. It was all in good, tipsy-at-3-p.m. fun.
N E X T+P A G E+| The dark side of Japan's cohesive culture |
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