Unused ticket to Big Shootout: Priceless

ROBERT TURBEVILLE
ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE

John Strange has one of the hottest box seat tickets around -- Arkansas vs. Texas, Section F, Row 2, Seat 10.
It's on the west side of the stadium, around the 35-yard line behind the Razorbacks' bench. And the face value is, get this, $6.
Yes, $6, just a little more than a burger meal at a fast-food restaurant.
Can you buy the ticket for $6? No way.
Would the ticket get you in the gate at the Cotton Bowl? No way.
But to at least one college football fan, the ticket is priceless.
Strange's ticket is from the Dec. 6, 1969, Arkansas-Texas game, the Big Shootout. It's unused, the product of a winning poker hand at a Stuttgart duck club the evening after the game that matched No. 1 Texas and No. 2 Arkansas in Fayetteville for the national championship.
Strange isn't sure what the ticket, which has been in a frame for 30 years, is worth. An employee at Hobbytown USA, a west Little Rock memorabilia store, estimated the value at $500 without even looking at it, though he said that value would surely rise on an Internet auction site such as eBay.
Strange, a 58-year-old furniture salesman from Little Rock, won the ticket in a low-stakes poker game at Paradise Hunting Club from Robert Paul Wells, then the owner of a furniture store in Paris.
Wells thought he had a winning hand, so he anted the pot with one of the unused tickets. What he didn't know was that Strange had better cards.
"I saw that ticket and said, 'Well, let me just have that. You keep your money,' " Strange said. "We weren't playing for much.
"I just put it in one of those $2 frames and stuck it in an office I got. I'm not really a collector, but things that prove to be keepsakes like that, you hold on to them."
John Paul Wells, Robert Paul Wells' son, went with his father and mother to the Big Shootout. He also accompanied his dad to the hunting club and saw the poker game.
"Chism Reed, the president of the Razorback Club, he was from Paris, and my dad got these tickets from him and didn't use all of them," said John Paul, who now has the furniture store in Paris.
"Dad's sick in the hospital, but I asked him about this [Wednesday]. ... He threw down one of the tickets because he thought he had a winning hand. He was about half-disgusted, but he didn't think he was going to lose. My dad's an excellent poker player, but John had a [a better hand]."
So Strange got the ticket. Robert Paul Wells said his father had "four or five" more tickets left over that he didn't use, but he has no clue what happened to them.
"If I find out they're worth a lot of money, I may start digging around," Wells said, laughing. "I probably took them to a high school game trying to get in."
But Wells isn't mad that his father lost the ticket. When he was 11, Strange gave him a Chick Majors duck call valued, he said, between $500-$1,000.
"I figure it's all panning out and pretty even," Wells said.

This article was published on Friday, December 31, 1999

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