Brandon Bardenheier has been a Rams season ticket holder since 2010. He thought he received a gift from the team for being a loyal customer when he went through his mail earlier this week. According to Espn.com, he discovered it was actually $25,000 worth of lower-bowl tickets to the team’s Dec. 13 game against the Detroit Lions.
“I thought it was a koozie or bobble head or something,” Bardenheier said. “They take good care of the season-ticket holders, so sometimes they’ll do something fun like that. I opened it up and sure enough, there were two very, very large stacks of tickets bundled up. I thought for some reason they were letting me upgrade my seats. I thought I’d hit the jackpot.”
Bardenheier realized there were far more than the three season tickets he owns. He and his wife counted the tickets and found that there were about 300 in the stacks.
Each ticket had a sticker price of $84 and was located near the others in the lower bowl of the Edward Jones Dome. Bardenheier called the Rams, but the team’s offices weren’t open. So he took to Reddit to solicit opinions.
“People on Reddit said I could keep them. But even if I could, I wouldn’t. That’s not the way my mom raised me.”
Bardenheier, who named his 2-year-old son “Deacon” after Rams Hall of Famer Deacon Jones, returned the tickets to the Rams on Friday and was rewarded with lower-level seats to today’s game against the San Francisco 49ers.