James Bradshaw writes:
>   Could someone provide the particulars for this year's Beanpot
>tournament?  I'm interested in the venue/time/ticket availability
>and any additional information for the games on February 10th.
 
Ah, the Beanpot - THE social and college hockey event of the year in Boston.
It is the only time during the year that college hockey is the lead story on
all three major tv stations during the 6:00 and 11:00 news.  Unfortunately,
it is the only time that quite a few people in the area make the effort to
come out to see a college hockey game, but we'll forget about that for now.
 
The Beanpot is played in the Boston Garden on the first two Mondays of each
February, although in 1978 the Great Blizzard forced the second night of
games to be postponed to early March.  Feb. 6, 1978, was the day the
blizzard began, yet still 11,666 fans showed up to watch Harvard beat
Northeastern in ot, 4-3, and BU hammered BC, 12-5.  These fans left the Garden
to find that T service had been brought to a grinding halt by the storm, and
many had no way home - at least several hundred and maybe a couple thousand fans
were forced to spend several nights inside the Garden as it continued to snow
for days.  The Championship was postponed to March 1st, when BU beat Harvard
7-1 in the only Beanpot game ever played in March.  And it was sold out.
 
This year's 40th Beanpot will be on Mon Feb 3 (NU-BU, Harvard-BC) with game
times likely to be 6:00 and 9:00 (not sure yet which game is first) and Mon
Feb 10 with the consolation at 5:00, championship at 8:00.  Somehow Merrimack
got scheduled to host Maine on championship night...that will be the only
Merrimack game I will miss this season.
 
Unless you know someone at one of the four schools, you can forget going to
either night.  The Beanpot has been sold out literally since 1979 and there
are virtually no tickets available to the general public.  When you subtract
tickets that go to each of the four schools for sale to their season ticket
holders and then to the school's population, tickets for the VIPs of which
there seem to be more and more every year (and never enough seats), and tickets
that each player requests for his family/friends/neighbors/etc., I believe the
Garden box office is left with nothing.  Basically, the Garden is divided up
into four chunks and that's where the 14,448 tickets go.
 
In the next couple of weeks, each of the four schools will start to sell their
tickets, so your only hope is to go to one of the schools on the day they
put them on sale to the general public (and maybe camp out) or have someone
you know with season tickets at one of the schools go down and get some; season
ticket holders get to buy theirs earlier than the general public so they're
almost guaranteed seats.
 
However, since the Beanpot is the hottest ticket every year in the city of
Boston (except for maybe Red Sox/Bruins playoff tickets), everywhere along the
line from the Garden to the schools people are grabbing tickets off the top
for themselves and their friends, so there are still not many seats available.
 
I don't mean to sound negative, but you and anyone else interested in going
deserve to know what you're in for as far as procuring tickets.  If you don't
already have a set means of getting seats, it will be nearly impossible.  And
if you are lucky enough to get tickets, they're worth their weight in gold
around here.
 
TV coverage of the Beanpot is very good, btw, NESN carries the two semifinal
games Feb 3 live and will probably beam them around the country as they have
done in the past.  WSBK-TV 38 carries the championship live and with WSBK
being one of those superstations like WTBS, many people with basic cable around
the US should be able to see the game.
---
Mike Machnik        [log in to unmask]       [log in to unmask]