Super Bowl Hype Reflects a Tale of 2 Different Cities : Mood: Like its team, San Diego clamors for respect. But San Francisco, used to attention, is quietly confident.

Perched on their respective harbors, they are like civic jewels in the Golden State’s crown, port cities of great beauty and great promise, cities that have remained livable while much of urban America appears in rapid decline.

And now professional football organizations from San Diego, which fancies itself America’s Finest City, and San Francisco, which lays claim as The City, have ventured to South Florida to settle Super Bowl XXIX and the bragging rights--and endorsements--that go to the winner.

Back home, the Chargers and 49ers left cities that are playing out the drama in decidedly different ways, ways that are as different as the two California cities themselves.

One city is liberal in politics, self-confident, a grande dame of world cities, European in charm, fogbound, home to Dianne Feinstein and the beat poets, the West Coast base for the peace and gay rights movements.

The other is conservative in politics, diffident, a newcomer to the ranks of big citydom, Middle American in style, sunstroked, home to Pete Wilson and Dr. Seuss (the late Ted Geisel), the West Coast base for the U.S. Navy and a bastion of the anti-illegal immigration movement.

San Diego, a newcomer to the national spotlight, has gone giddy with Super Bowl fever. A team that was picked to finish last in its division is on its way to the biggest game of them all, for the first time in its history.

The sometimes forgotten city in the nation’s southwest corner figures it has finally made the big time. Sample headline in the San Diego Union-Tribune: “Super! San Diego shares top billing.”

About 68,000 fans jammed into San Diego’s Jack Murphy Stadium to welcome home their heroes after the game in Pittsburgh that clinched the Super Bowl berth. A cigar butt that dropped from the lips of running back Natrone Means was later given away as a prize by a radio station. The City Council renamed a downtown street Bolt Street, after the team emblem.

Lightning bolts and banners and signs adorn buildings and cars throughout the county. Media cheerleading has been nonstop and unashamed. The San Diego Opera chorus recorded the Charger fight song.

The San Diego Museum of Art put up a banner outside its entrance emblazoned with the words “A Real Masterpiece” and adorned with a lightning bolt. Ministers of all faiths are preaching “Go Chargers” sermons.

“I’ve never seen the city go as batty as this,” said Neil Morgan, associate editor and senior columnist at the Union-Tribune, and a San Diego newsman since 1948.

“It’s like the whole city is one continuous high school pep rally,” said writer and Sierra Club official Lori Saldana.

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In San Francisco, the mood is subdued. Not smug, mind you, but quietly confident in the way that aristocracy is confident.

As befits a sophisticated city with a tradition of winning and world attention, there has been little public outpouring of support for the 49ers. After all, this is the 49ers’ fifth Super Bowl in 13 years and, so far, they have won every one of them.

“I think people have gotten a bit complacent about the success of the team,” said Steve Abramowitz, producer at radio station KYCY, which calls itself Young Country and now has been renamed Steve Young Country after the 49er quarterback.

“The first time you get there, the first time you do anything, it’s more exciting,” said Sue Hoffman, secretary of the San Francisco chapter of the 49ers Booster Club. “It’s really unfortunate the town is not more excited.”

Ron Martin, the chapter’s president, is headed to Miami for his fifth Super Bowl. But despite his own enthusiasm, he was unaware of any events being staged this week so that 49er fans can root for the team.

“We’ve had four (Super Bowl victories), so people are kind of standoffish a little bit,” he said.

Although San Franciscans are too tactful to mention it, there is an explanation for the disparate reactions in the two cities that transcends their NFL histories, an explanation more involved with Zeitgeist than touchdowns.

Simply put: San Francisco has been there--politically, culturally, economically--and San Diego has not.

“San Franciscans do not have to prove anything to anybody,” said George Mitrovich, president of the City Club of San Diego. “Their city is recognized as one of the great cities of the world. San Diego is a city that throughout its history has had an extraordinary inferiority complex because until very recently it really didn’t matter as a city, except as a place where admirals and generals went to retire.”

Said Steven Brezzo, director of the San Diego Museum of Art, “San Diegans are starved for recognition.” Said Steven Erie, political science professor at UC San Diego, “San Diego is the Rodney Dangerfield of American cities.”

Of course, San Francisco was not always so complacent about the annual game with the Roman numerals.

After the 49ers won their first Super Bowl in 1982, the city was ecstatic. More than 500,000 people lined Market Street for a parade to welcome the team back from its victory over the Cincinnati Bengals.

And true fans say they will be enthusiastic supporters when XXIX begins.

“I think that San Franciscans have a tendency to get excited at the proper moment, to cheer at the proper moment,” said John Marks, president of the San Francisco Convention and Visitors Bureau. “It’s a sophisticated audience and is more urbane than many audiences you might find in San Diego.”

Lest he be accused of snobbery, Marks added, “By the way, I happen to love San Diego.”

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In what has become a cliche of pre-Super Bowl hype, newspapers in the competing areas have exchanged a few intrastate insults.

The San Francisco Chronicle, in the lead of a front-page story, called San Diego bland. The reporter apparently had not tasted the chili verde at Chuey’s Mexican Cafe in Barrio Logan or seen the new “Much Ado About Nothing” at the Old Globe Theatre in Balboa Park.

The (Oceanside) Blade-Citizen riposted that the Golden Gate Bridge is an “ugly, rusty thing held up by wires.”

But aside from such witticisms, this Super Bowl has had less of the up-your-municipality stuff than previous contests.

For one thing, as California historian Kevin Starr notes, there is not a history of rivalry between San Diego and San Francisco.

While others probe differences, Starr sees similarities. Both cities are mission cities, both have military and maritime traditions, both have great universities and public parks, both were leaders in the slow-growth and environmental movements, and both have made a fetish of lifestyle.

Alonzo Horton, the founder of modern San Diego in the 1870s whose name graces a downtown park and shopping center, was a San Franciscan. Both cities had world expositions in 1915 that created architectural landmarks.

There is no disloyalty attached to a resident of one of the cities expressing admiration for the other. Former San Diego Mayor Maureen O’Connor, a native San Diegan and die-hard Charger fan, keeps an apartment on Nob Hill in San Francisco and a home in Point Loma in San Diego.

Both cities were boom towns, although the booms were a century apart. San Francisco was settled by Easterners who quickly replicated the cultural amenities they left behind; SanDiego is the product of Midwesterners and Southerners more content with hearth and home.

San Francisco was founded on the wealth that flooded in from the 1849 gold rush, hence the name of the team. San Diego, which had a mere 3,500 residents when San Francisco was already world-famous, is a classic product of post-World War II watch-us-grow expansion, which it has only partly succeeded in slowing.

At the last official count (1990), San Francisco had a population of 723,549 and was stable; San Diego was 1,110,549 and growing.

When all is said and done, San Diego and San Francisco have something in common that is perhaps far more powerful than their differences: a similar enmity toward Los Angeles.

Although the civic abhorrence has its political, cultural and economic facets, it is most apparent on the sporting front. When the Raiders play the Chargers in San Diego, the Police Department has a standing order for twice as many officers to patrol the game.

“San Diego and San Francisco both define themselves against Los Angeles and the sprawl, the unchecked growth, the rush and the turmoil, and the sometimes vulgarity of that great city,” said Starr, named the state librarian by Gov. Pete Wilson. “Both have always known that they did not want to become Los Angeles.”