49ers Fans Hit Town : Waves From San Francisco Roll Into Hotel to Build Up Steam for Game

The other Disneyland-area hotels have seen all this before. But the Alicante Princess in Garden Grove opened only last June, so this was new and a bit surprising.

“These people are crazy,” said doorman Pat Gleeson. “It’s going to be crazy in there tonight.”

Gleeson had been out front Saturday morning and afternoon to see some of the buses roll up to the hotel’s door. Out came wave after wave of San Francisco 49ers fans.

These were the real fans--the ones from San Francisco and thereabouts. And not just your regular pro football fanatics. These were the kind who shape their lives around the season’s schedule.

They had returned to Orange County for one reason only: The 49ers had returned--to play the hated Los Angeles Rams.

That was still about 24 hours away, however. “They headed straight for the bar as soon as they had the bags in the room,” Gleeson said. “They went right for the Bloody Marys.

“They’ve got their colors on already. It’s not like they’re waiting for Sunday,” Gleeson said. He pointed to his gray-and-black uniform. “They see my jacket and go, ‘Whatta ya guys have Raider colors on for?’ And they’re serious.”

(Any similarity to Los Angeles Raiders team colors is purely coincidental, Gleeson said.)

How serious do these fans get? This serious:

Carol Lee Toner, who will be 73 in two weeks, was wearing a 49ers button (which was the size of a salad plate) pinned to her blouse (which was the correct shade of 49ers scarlet) over which hung her 49ers necklace charm (which was the correct shade of 49ers gold).

“Want to see my 49ers garter?” she said.

Sure.

She balked. “Really, they’re panties, and I don’t dare go that far.”

Not that Toner won’t go far for her team. She lives in Eureka, 230 miles north of San Francisco, yet she has not missed a 49ers home game in 13 years, she said.

“This year we’re going to every game. We’re going home from here, then Miami, then home again, then Milwaukee and New Orleans--is it Milwaukee, then New Orleans or New Orleans, then Milwaukee?”

“Milwaukee, then New Orleans,” said her husband Frank.

“I’d like to add,” he said, grinning, “that she does talk about other things besides football once in a while. But not during the season.”

Are they ever home?

“We were home two days last week,” Carol Toner said. “That’s OK,” she added. “We have an answering service.” Clients of the couple’s tax and bookkeeping service eventually can reach them that way.

Excuse her, she said, but she had to get moving. “I have some Tampa people to make a bet with on the game.”

“Los Angeles,” said her husband. “You’re in the wrong city.”

Never mind. Just watch for her on TV, she said. “The one who’s going to shout the loudest, that’s me. I didn’t bring my 49er finger, though.”

And come on up for a party later, she added. “I brought dip and vodka and chips and salami. . . .” And she was gone.

There were more on the way, however. About 150 rooms had been reserved at this hotel alone.

Carol Avalos, who operates Carol’s Classic Cruise and Travel in Martinez across the bay from San Francisco, was waiting for the next busload so she could hand out game tickets and room keys. The trip was costing each fan between $214 and $249, she said.

Is is hard work shepherding such zealots?

“This is fun,” she said. These are her kind of people. She spent $10,000 adding a room to her house for the sole purpose of creating a 49ers shrine.

In it she has her 49ers Super Bowl plaques, her chair shaped like a 49ers helmet, her 49ers phone, her 49ers clock, her 49ers radio and all the odds and ends that the profit motive can dream up.

She says she could be the concessionaires’ poster girl. “I go to the game and they come looking for me,” she said.

Yet her passion pales beside her husband’s, she conceded. He has a 49ers cap with so many pins “it weighs about five pounds.”

Five pounds?

“Five pounds!” Avalos was given a four-pound camera to heft and compare. “Yeah, I’d say about five pounds. I can’t even wear it. It hurts,” she said.

Her husband built a barbecue for tailgate parties that is so big it has to be towed like a trailer. It is licensed by the Department of Motor Vehicles as a trailer. “We roasted a whole pig on it,” she said.

Avalos said the hotel lobby may seem sedate at the moment--mid-afternoon--but frivolity would build by night and peak at the game. Then, if the 49ers win, it would be a lively, perhaps rowdy, flight home.

“And we’ve never seen them lose--never down here in L.A. We’re 5 and 0,” she said.

But what will it be like on the plane if the 49ers do lose?

“Talk about silence. You could hear a pin drop.”