Countywide : Do-or-Die Rams Fans Back Team

Charles Adair remembers going to San Francisco several times over the past two decades to watch the Rams play the 49ers, but the experience wasn’t always pleasant.

“When we would win, we would have to take off our (Rams) hats because they would be so rabid,” said Adair, 73, who has held Rams season tickets since the team came to Southern California in 1946 and moved to Anaheim in 1980.

This year, Adair and his wife, Ruth, will still be in danger of being targeted by irate 49er fans. The only tickets he could get are in the 49ers’ section, and he doesn’t plan to disguise his loyalties.

He and other die-hard Rams fans will trek to Candlestick Park wearing the Rams colors and blowing the Rams horns.

Adair, like other members of the Rams Booster Club, is confident that the team, often the underdog, will come through this time as they face the 49ers for the National Football Conference championship. He is among 30 club members who will fly to San Francisco this morning.

“Every year I get so disappointed when I had to see someone else go to the Super Bowl,” he said. “I never lost faith. I’ve never failed to attend their games. I got distressed, but we still went.”

Joan Ann Faria, who has held a season ticket for 18 years, is even more confident that the long wait will at last be over.

“This is the finals, do or die!” she said. “I’m so excited, I can’t even think. . . . It’s awesome.

“Everyone makes fun of the Rams,” she said, but “it’s deja vu time. We’re going to New Orleans.”

Faria was among those booster club members who traveled to New Jersey last weekend to watch the Rams beat the New York Giants, 19-13. Ever the enthusiast, Faria said that game was at times a harrowing experience.

One Giants fan, she said, took off an article of clothing each time the Rams scored. “By the end of the game he was naked,” she said.

In San Francisco, Faria doesn’t expect fans to be quite so extreme, but there still could be problems.

“Forty-niner fans are vicious,” she said. “It’s just us and 50,000 of them.

Adair recalled the early days of the Rams, when they played in the Los Angeles Coliseum. He was there in 1946 when the Rams played their first game after moving from Cleveland. He has been a season ticket-holder ever since.

Adair was among those who went to the Super Bowl in 1980, when the Rams lost to the Pittsburgh Steelers. But his seats were in the upper reaches of the stadium, the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. “It was a high disappointment because we were the No. 2 team.”

For Faria, who bought a $350 scalped ticket for the game, the Rams’ Super Bowl loss to the Steelers was heartbreaking.

“We were having the best time until Terry Bradshaw connected with Lynn Swann,” she said. “I cried and cried for two or three days.”

Faria predicts that it will be different this year. She attended a practice before the Giants game last week.

“They were so fluid,” she said. “They all played so well. You know the difference. Everyone on the sidelines knows. You just know. You got the sixth sense, like a mother always knowing if her kids are doing anything wrong.”

Longtime fans are making tentative accommodation plans in New Orleans, even talking with 49ers booster club members about taking their hotel rooms or airline tickets. Both Faria and Adair plan to go, even though the total cost could exceed $1,500.

“If you go this far, how can you not go all the way?” Faria asked.

One 22-year Rams season ticket-holder won’t be in San Francisco for Sunday’s game. He will be at home, rooting for the 49ers. D.H. (Doc) Needham, who sells real estate from Thousand Oaks, held season tickets from 1959 to 1981, when he started rooting for San Francisco.

Needham, 67, switched his allegiance because he was upset by the way the Rams team was being run and by the owners, particularly Georgia Frontiere.

“She just started ripping the team apart by getting rid of some players,” he said. He said he would stay with the 49ers “as long as she owns the team and runs it the way she does.”

He picks the 49ers on Sunday by 10 points.

For many Rams loyalists, thoughts in the past few days have been almost solely on Sunday’s game. Adair, owner of a chain of furniture stores in Orange and Los Angeles counties, said that he has talked about it quite a bit with his employees at work.

“They know I’m going,” he said, “and they know they’d better root for the Rams.”