Tickets to Duke home games at Cameron Indoor Stadium are among the most coveted in college basketball or any sport for that matter. With a capacity of just 9,314 the supply is not nearly enough to meet the demand for tickets. Everybody is aware of Krzyzewskiville (thanks to ESPN) that is used to award students a block of seats. For non-students and those without connections (former players or celebrities) scoring an elusive ticket is nearly impossible unless you are willing to spend several hundred dollars per game and occasionally four figures for the annual UNC game.
A small portion of the ticket allotment is available for purchase as season tickets, but as Duke’s official site notes they are sold out. The only individuals who are allowed to purchase the tickets (when they are available, which is rarely) are those in the Iron Dukes club (a group of donors/boosters) with the current minimum donation to get a ticket being $7,000 and even that may not get you a season ticket if another Iron Duke with more time on the list has donated a similar amount. Consequently season tickets are a highly coveted commodity and just as season tickets for NFL teams are passed down from generation to generation so are some Duke season tickets.
Unfortunately, sometimes the transition from one generation to the next does not always happen as smoothly as you would hope. The latest example of that is a family in North Carolina that is fighting over their deceased father’s tickets in court. Katrina Dorton, a Duke graduate, filed a lawsuit today against her sister, brother-in-law, and Duke University based on what she claims was a “fraudulent transfer” of her deceased father’s two season tickets. She claims that the transfer occurred without the consent of her father or the other family members.
According to the lawsuit John Dorton, the original holder of the season tickets, transferred the tickets to Gordon Caudle (Katrina’s eventual brother-in-law) in July 2008, but was “ill and unable to act for himself” making the transfer invalid. Katrina’s lawyers have argued that because the Iron Dukes allow transfer of season tickets only to family member and Caudle was not a family member at that time (he married Katrina’s sister Sophia in September of that year) the agreement should be invalidated. The Caudles eventually returned the tickets to John Dorton for the rest of his life (he died in January 2010) and he again signed them over although Katrina claims that her father did not have the capacity to make decisions by himself at that time.
According to reports, Katrina has contacted Duke about the matter and while the school reportedly admitted that it had made an error it said there was nothing it could do to rectify the situation. Both sides claim to have made multiple attempts to settle out of court, but now Katrina is seeking to void the prior agreement and have the tickets transferred to her. While some might consider this petty bickering that stretches beyond the bounds of good taste it appears that both sides feel differently as Katrina’s lawyer Randall Roden stated, “They’re good seats in Cameron. That’s a big deal in anybody’s book.” We cannot imagine that Duke wants this type of press and suspect that many of the Iron Dukes will be casting a wary eye at whomever occupies those two seats in the future.