Hoofing it.

• Author: Schley, Stewart
• Position: TicketHorse - Company overview

While the rest of us were watching last season's NFL playoffs in blissful ignorance of business matters (except for maybe that $100 bet you had on the Colts-Patriots over/under), Brian Kitts was busy tapping keystrokes into a notebook computer while the game appeared on TV in the background.

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The Kroenke Sports Enterprises marketing guy was trying to come up with a name for an in-house ticket sales operation that one day might supplant Ticketmaster (you know, those people with an uncanny gift for turning a $15 ticket into a $21 ticket via the black magic of incomprehensible surcharges).

Kitts was looking for a memorable name, something including a reference to a likeable animal. He tore through the obvious list, but no luck. Ticketdog, Ticketmonkey, Ticketchicken (thank goodness for that) and more already were scooped up, the Web addresses associated with the names long gone.

On a whim, Kitts typed the word "Tickethorse" into a Web browser, pressed the "enter" key, and discovered, to his amazement, that nobody had reserved the Web address associated with what seemed like an obvious--well, if you're going the animal route, that is--brand name. The next day, KSE's executive vice president Paul Andrews pondered the name for a while and made a spur-of-the-moment pronouncement: "I said, 'Kids, it's brilliant,'" recalls Andrews.

Thus was branded the latest in a string of homegrown sports-business ventures cooked up at KSE. The House that E. Stanley (Kroenke) built is all about old-fashioned, control-your-own-destiny ownership.

KSE owns its own entertainment and sports buildings (Pepsi Center, Dick's Sporting Goods Park and the Paramount Theatre); its own TV network (Altitude Sports); its own teams (you know them) its own retail operations (Altitude Authentics) and now, its own ticket-sales enterprise, the newly launched TicketHorse (www.tickethorse.com).

It's partly about gaining control of revenue sources, and partly about extending a coddle-the-customer philosophy espoused by Andrews, who started out peddling tickets over the phone for the Nuggets.

Something about having loosely affiliated agents in another city answering the phones and talking to KSE customers rankles Andrews, who still mans the phones on occasion to talk to ticket buyers. (And to help them deal with crisis moments, like the time a season-ticket holder called to say the bar code on his Avalanche tickets had been eroded to an incomprehensible blur after...