Letter to Game Time fans from Dave Checketts

By Brad Lee
The following is an openly fake letter to St. Louis Blues fans from Dave Checketts, chairman of the Blues.

Dear fans,
This week, we as an organization took a large step forward in our continuing journey to regain your confidence. And your money. Readers of Game Time, I’d like to take this opportunity to be as honest as possible with you, our diehard, get-a-life, potentially unstable hardcore fan base.

I’m not going to bullshit you. I want people in this town to spend more money on my team. We know you’ll be here most nights. Hell, you’re here tonight along with probably thousands of empty purplish seats (by the way, who picked the colors for this place?). We sold a little more than 9,000 tickets Tuesday night for the Toronto game. Damn pitiful showing. And it’s got to improve. I am not going to start flying coach and I didn’t marry some spoiled woman whose father invented the discount store. So this thing has to start making money, and soon.

As you already know, we’ve rolled back season tickets 8 percent across the board. Odds are you have or are interested in those $7 seats. We’re keeping those, you cheap bastards, but they’re still going to be as far away from the ice as possible. The only way they could be farther from the ice is to be on 14th Street or on the roof. Your ticket may cost as much as your beer for now, but that’s probably going to change. More on that in a minute.

The fact that we’re rolling back prices less than a year after we raised them could be interpreted as an admission that we made a mistake. But that would be like saying the big oil companies have made a mistake pushing their profits into the billions of dollars.
Remember when gas seemed expensive when it was $1.50 a gallon just a few years ago? And then it hit $3 a gallon in the last year. Earlier this week it dipped under $2 and everyone was smiling at the pump for a few days. Now it’s back up to almost $2.20, which is still a lot better than $2.50 or more. We’re using the same strategy, and it’s SWEET!

We raised ticket prices an average of 10 percent over the summer. Fans stayed away and we’ve only recently seen decent crowds on nights when we didn’t retire a number or give away thousands of pounds of chicken strips. We realize we’re losing our asses even with a pretty competitive team, so we lowered the prices 8 percent and voila! Suddenly we’re friends of the fan again! I’m a goddamn hero. It’s genius, really. I’m glad I thought of it. This weekend I’m going to cut my kids’ allowances to zero for a few days and then give them back 75 percent.

What I didn’t tell everyone is that we’re raising concessions, parking and souvenirs for next year. We’ll have more people in this place, we might as well cash in on them. Mark my words, no free food day next year.

So faithful GT readers, I know you guys are smarter than most of the people in this place. You guys don’t cheer that douche bag with the towel. You wait for stoppages to go back to your seat so I don’t need to rehire those “extra” ushers. I thought I should speak as plainly as possible to you jaded bastards who know we’re full of crap anyway. Plus, I thought we should get this positive publicity out there before we trade away some of your favorite players later this month. You know and I know, we ain’t making the playoffs. So a little good news now will hopefully go a long way.

Thanks for taking the time to read this message. And remember, we’re committed to winning a championship. And more importantly, you can renew your tickets tomorrow.

Dave Checketts