The parking lots around Cardinals Stadium – as 63,400 people found out for the first time on opening day last month – blanket the former West Valley cotton fields like a giant jigsaw puzzle of hot asphalt polygons. Walking from Lot H, the designated free parking zone, to the stadium gates nearly a mile south can make you feel like you’re trudging across a massive global warming test site designed to measure the urban heat-island effect on the average pair of sneakers. But for a few hearty entrepreneurs, the parking lots surrounding the brand new stadium represent a land of opportunity, and they look to veil the biggest gold mine since a certain lost Dutchman stashed his booty among the Superstition Mountains.

“Section 424, row B,” calls out a hefty ticket scalper in a Cardinals-red tshirt. “Who wants ’em?” A ticketless fan approaches timidly, but when the potential customer is finally forced to admit he doesn’t have anything close to the $125 the scalper’s demanding for each of the nosebleed terrace seats, he’s impolitely told to keep walking.

“If you’re embarrassed about what you got in your wallet, don’t embarrass me,” the scalper hollers out above the crowd, as the strapped fan slinks away in shame.

Although reselling tickets for any amount of profit is legal in Arizona (scalpers are only forbidden from selling within 200 feet of the event facility), most event-goers are accustomed to seeing scalpers operating on the downlow, flashing their wares like counterfeit Rolexes and muttering a terse, “Need tickets?” only to those who dare look them in the eye.

But around Cardinals Stadium, with season tickets long sold out and even individual tickets to home games growing scarce, scalpers swaggeringly hoist the bright red and white strips of cardboard like Willie Wonka holding up the last of his Golden Tickets.

The team may well be starting with one of the more promising lineups in its hexed history, but it’s the $455 million Cardinals Stadium, also set to host the Rolling Stones as its kick-off rock concert in November, that’s clearly the star of the season. With its retractable roof and first-of-its-kind retractable football field – not to mention a wide grassy strip in front custom-made for tailgate parties – the stadium is drawing thousands of new fans to Arizona football, and a whole new customer base is looking to make a connection with the parking lot scalper. Some virgin fans are ill-equipped to deal with the brusque wheeler-dealers in the asphalt jungle, who can often seem as bullying as a lunchroom full of Nelson Muntz’s.

“People don’t like to haggle with them. It’s just like going to Mexico,” says Pete Nowell, a Cardinals season ticket holder and a rare longtime fan. So to nab those hard-to-find seats – without dealing with the hard-sell attitude – many are turning to the Internet and sites like eBay or StubHub, where those prized tickets can be had with a few quiet mouse clicks. And, of course, a good chunk of change. Nowell, a 47- year-old collections agent who’s also been building a nice little side business as an eBay seller – primarily of spare Cardinals tickets that he procures from fellow season ticket holders when they’re unable to attend a game – says he’s already seeing tickets that originally sold for $80 fetching upwards of $250 to $300 online. Even parking passes, issued free to season ticket holders, are going for an average of $35 a piece.

“Last year, it was hard to even give Cardinals tickets away,” says Nowell with a laugh. “I had extra 50-yard-line tickets to one game, and the most someone was willing to offer me was 10 bucks a piece. I just kept ‘em in my pocket. “This year, though, I should make a whole ton of money off my tickets. With the new stadium, all bets are off.” Nowell got his first taste of success in the ticket reselling game when he unloaded a pair of upper deck tickets to the last Super Bowl he had bought for face value – “two of the worst seats in the house,” he admits – for a whopping $4,500. With Cardinals Stadium set to host the Super Bowl in 2008, the Glendale resident is hoping to make an even bigger killing on his home turf.

“Super Bowl tickets are always hard to come by,” he says. “But you can bet I’ll be looking for ’em.” Nowell claims he’s still just a hobbyist when it comes to ticket reselling, but a number of savvy sports and entertainment watchers in the Valley have already made the leap from casual seller to professional ticket broker, or “secondary market” dealer.

Zach Schneiderman, a sharp 26-yearold college grad who got into scalping six years ago in Wisconsin and now co-pilots a licensed two-man operation in Scottsdale called One Ticket Broker, Inc., compares his chosen occupation to a stock broker.

“It’s a lot like the stock market,” he says excitedly. “Prices for tickets change by the minute, and you never know what you’re gonna get on any given day.” In place of the NYSE floor, however, most ticket brokers battle on Saturday mornings outside the arena box offices and online, where fellow brokers list their available tickets on databanks like the one run by Chicago’s Event Inventory. They race to be the first to secure eligible buyers.

“The funny thing about this business is it really is a level playing field,” says Bob Bernstein, CEO of the Scottsdalebased eSeats, which claims on its Web site to list the world’s largest online inventory of secondary market tickets. In reality, Bernstein confesses, they’re all bidding on the same supply of seats. “No company has better access than the other when it comes time to buy tickets.” Occasionally a broker will scoop up a few too many tickets to a game or concert than it can sell by the event’s date (one local dealer admitting he took a bath on Neil Diamond tickets), and sometimes a sleeper phenomenon will catch all but the luckiest resellers off guard.

“We were all surprised by the ‘So You Think You Can Dance’ tour,” Bernstein says.

Many rock concerts are break-even investments. “You might make a $5 profit on Korn tickets,” says Michael Morris, whose Glendale-based company, R.B. Tickets, resells between 400 to 700 tickets a month. “Their fans simply don’t have the money to pay any more than list.” And even reliable sellers, in both sports and entertainment, can suddenly turn sour. Right now, Barbra Streisand and Chicago Cubs tickets are considered atypically risky buys. Still, the biggest challenge for professional ticket brokers is overcoming the negative stereotype of the shady scalper who trolls the parking lots hawking overpriced – and sometimes duplicated or counterfeit – tickets to events.

“Personally, I’m offended when I go to an event and I’m assaulted by those people,” says Morris. “They’re the reason a lot of fans and promoters consider everyone who resells tickets the scum of the earth.”

Schneiderman agrees. “Our business is not looked highly upon, because people relate it to the guy they see on the corner, waving tickets around,” he laments. “But it’s a regulated business. We pay taxes. We’re members of the Better Business Bureau, and we have an office where people can come and pick up tickets – or come back to, if they have a problem.” Indeed, professional ticket brokering is now a $10 billion industry, according to the 190-member National Association of Ticket Brokers, a regulating body based in Washington, D.C. upholding a strict code of ethics and responsible for investigating and resolving disputes between buyers and sellers.

“A lot of people are shocked to hear there even is a regulatory agency for this business,” laughs Schneiderman. “But there is.”

Recently, ticket brokering received another boost in legitimacy from an unlikely source when Ticketmaster, once ticket reselling’s most vocal opponent, got into the secondary market itself. AOL, another leading source for primary ticket sales, is also launching its own reselling service, and sports organizations and entertainers ranging from the Cubs to Britney Spears have even inked official partnerships with national ticket reselling networks like StubHub. Such endorsements help elevate the public’s perception of the ticket broker as more than just a scalper with an office, and lend credence to claims that they’re filling otherwise-empty seats with enthusiastic fans, who in turn buy concessions and merchandise – in addition to boosting the old applause meter.

Still, when pressed, even the most legitimized broker admits to a certain undeniable kinship with the average parking lot huckster.

“It’s funny,” says Bernstein, who’s built his eSeats into a million-dollar business now allowing him to travel the world, taking in all the events on his family’s wish-list. “But when you look at the top ticket brokers in town” – Bernstein name-checks Tickets Unlimited, Western States and Ticket Exchange as among his top competitors – “we’re all the same guys who were running around in the parking lots when we were teenagers.” The game, however, is bigger.

Bernstein has one high-rolling client he says spends thousands a year attending every Dave Matthews concert in the world. But in the end, it’s all about matching the highly sought-after tickets with the fan who wants them the most.

“You meet a lot of people, you get to hear some great stories, and you get the satisfaction of selling a great pair of tickets to somebody who normally wouldn’t get a chance to sit in a great seat,” says Schneiderman.

“That’s the one thing that never changes.”