Legion of Fans Not Ready to Bolt Their Chargers : Football: Booster club for the NFL team is surviving the hard times.

They know purgatory. They hope, they suffer, they wait.

They call themselves the Charger Backers, and they pay their $10 dues. Oh, have they paid their dues to support this football team.

Their membership has been sliced in half with the Chargers’ recent decline, and although it appears to be a requirement, gray hair is not a prerequisite for admission.

Those loyalists who do remain meet regularly to talk Charger football--win or lose.

“You think we’re crazy?” said Elsie Bell. “There are a lot of other people out there whose elevator doesn’t go all the way up to the top, too. But let me tell you, they will be sorry when we get a winner.”

Their optimistic vigil demands strength of conviction. They support the Chargers, but the Chargers do not always support them.

The team not only stopped financially subsidizing the Backers’ annual kickoff banquet, but it put an end to it in 1985 after indicating the players were too busy preparing for the season to participate.

“It was more of a sense of priorities,” said Bill Johnston, Charger director of public relations. “The team wants to win and concentrate all its efforts in doing that, and that’s what it’s trying to do. The kickoff banquet was a celebration of sorts, and the team hasn’t had anything to celebrate. We want to wait and give fans a team to be proud of.”

Chargers owner Alex Spanos, however, has never attended a function sponsored by his team’s booster club. Club members stopped sending personal invitations a few years back after he failed to answer requests.

“We’ve invited him to many of our things,” said Virginia Connoley, who is on the club’s board of directors. “We used to write separate letters, separate invitations to his family, and none of them have ever come.”

In addition to their annual golf tournament, harbor cruise and last week’s alumni dinner, the Backers gather Friday before each home game in San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium.

“I asked Coach Al Saunders at one of our meetings if he could get Spanos here,” said Don Blake, who is on the Backers’ board of directors. “Saunders said, ‘I promise you I’ll have him here.’ But the poor guy got fired before he had a chance to ask Spanos.”

The Chargers, meanwhile, have their problems with the Backers. They have been disappointed with the Backers’ reluctance to become a more aggressive fan club. They find many members unwilling to change.

They even have discussed internally the possibility of starting an additional support group. The new fan club would cater to high-powered businessmen, draw on a younger clientele, and become more involved in promoting Charger activities.

“The board of the Backers right now is not the funnest group to be around,” said Mary Cook, who is on the board of directors, and who remains one of club’s most active participants. “Everything’s always this is the way it was, this is the way it is. There are a lot of loyal fans in the club, but there are some things that maybe could be changed.”

The Backers have have been following a football team that has failed to make the playoffs since 1982. They have been asked to embrace three different head coaches and three different general managers since Spanos purchased the team in 1984.

“I have served my time in Anzio, so I have served my time in hell,” club member Jim Guay said. “But this is right there in second place.”

In the past 4 1/2 years the Chargers have posted a 21-45 record. The only guarantee they can count on is that season-ticket prices will be raised in 1992, and most of the Charger Backers are season-ticket holders.

“I know a lot of people are upset and have given up their season tickets,” Connoley said. “They’re just tired. But the team has become a part of my life, and I’ll hang in there with them.”

Despite the team’s failings in recent years, more than a 100 club members like Connoley persist in paying $7.25 for lunch before each home game to hear Coach Dan Henning, a pair of Chargers and the opposition’s director of public relations speak.

“They are stuck with us whether they like it or not,” Lotta Cross said. “I adopt them when they put that uniform on; they’re my kids.

“Just because they don’t do everything you want, doesn’t mean they’re not your family anymore. I get mad when anybody boos them. I’ve never booed anybody--except the referees--in my life.”

Something as minor as poor play will not shake Cross’ resolve. She has been there in the stadium parking lot to send the Chargers on their way for each road game for the past 20 years. And she’s been there upon their return--no matter the hour of the day.

“I’ll tell you how loyal some of these fans are,” linebacker Billy Ray Smith said. “We got in from New York this past Monday sometime after one in the morning and I get off the bus and there’s Lotta standing there and waving to us.

“That blew my mind. I mean I don’t know if I’d show up at that time of the morning at the stadium if the disciples were getting off the bus and Jesus was the head coach. I mean that’s a tough call.”

They are dedicated to the cause and they are passionate about their hometown team. But don’t mistake their support for blind allegiance.

“I think we need to get rid of the coach and most of the coaching staff,” said Blake, who has challenged Henning at the weekly luncheons with tough questions in the past. “You know, that guy’s bad news. I like him as a person, but there’s no discipline on this team.”

Elsie Bell parks herself up front listening to Henning each week. “I just kind of sit there and snarl at him,” she said. “He thinks he fools the people. When we turn Henning off, we’re going to get another Coryell.”

Ron McEachern may not be as vocal as his fellow club members, but at a recent luncheon he could not agree with all of his fellow club members. “I hope Henning doesn’t lose his job. He probably will because public pressure will do him in, but they’ve got to stick with somebody.”

Jack Sumner nodded in agreement. He was McEachern’s guest for the afternoon, and he was a member of the Falcon Fan Club in Atlanta when Henning was the team’s coach. “I think Henning has the best offensive mind in football,” Sumner said. “Atlanta would have been better off if it had kept him.”

Walter Low, who has been on the board of directors since the club was founded in 1961, said, “sometimes I think they change head coaches too often. I think the team would mature better if they got a good stable coach and a good class of assistants to help him. I think we’ve changed head coaches too often.”

They are fans, they have their opinions. “Don’t you think the problem with the players is they don’t fear Henning?” Bob Hiltunen said. “When someone jumps offsides or anything like that and they put the camera on Henning, it’s like ‘Who gives a damn?’ You see other coaches jump around and get mad and it’s like he’s petrified.”

They eat together, they talk, and sometimes they argue. But they wear blue and yellow garb. The women sport lightning bolt earrings. The men don Chargers baseball caps.

“If you’re retired,” Guay said, “you can come here, or you can sit at home and watch the mailbox.”

Doris Anderson attends the luncheon, she said, “because we think they’ll get better. . . . They can’t get any worse.”

They come, they say, because they love football. Some come to hear the head coach tell them things they don’t believe they will find in their newspaper. Some come for the companionship. The important thing is, they are here.

“It’s our team,” said Laurene Ontjes, who chairs the luncheons with Low. “We’re here to stand behind them. We know they’re going to come out of this and be a good team.”

They listen intently to the promise of better days ahead.

“As I remember,” Hiltunen said, “Saunders was the one who could really puff you up.”

Saunders knew how to say what the people wanted to hear. Henning is different.

“There are a number of people in there who are going to be frustrated,” Henning said. “They are going to have a roller-coaster perception of things. They are going to get very high and excited with wins and very low and depressed with losses.

“It’s hard to explain things to them with that wide range of emotions. It can become uncomfortable for them as well as for me. But it’s a good group. You get the pulse of the San Diego populace--maybe a little overblown and maybe a little underblown sometimes, but you get it.”

Henning has been forceful, entertaining and informative in his weekly presentations to the Backers. He said he has been impressed with the quality of questions, especially from the large number of women who attend the luncheon. Two weeks ago he spent more than 30 minutes responding to the Backers’ questions.

“I think if those people are going to spend that amount of time to come over to the stadium,” Henning said, “it probably means they’re going to interact with 10 or 12 people during the week in a heavy discussion about the Chargers. If I can inform those people--and I don’t pull any punches--then I think everybody will come out ahead because of the experience.”

The Backers have never really embraced Henning, but they fawn over the players. They have their favorites like Gill Byrd, and they have become downright giddy over the rise of John Friesz.

“When things are going bad you still know these people are going to be behind you,” Byrd said. “Now that’s what I call fans .”

There are Backer T-shirts that sell for $8. There are regular newsletters, and prizes are given away at each luncheon. Winning, however, is what makes the Backers swell with pride. Given the chance, they would spend each of their Fridays on their feet clapping for their heroes.

“I can tell you this much,” Rita Kallett said. “It’s heaven when we beat the Raiders.”

They are not thrilled with the Chargers, however, when they lose. They have a stake in the outcome of each game. They believe they are a part of the Charger organization. Most of them have owned season tickets for years, and as bad as things might go, they will not surrender to despair.

“You can remember the feeling you had when we had a winning team,” said Patti Dill, who was wearing a homemade lightning-bolt T-shirt. “You remember Dan Fouts, Charlie Joiner, Kellen Winslow and Hank Bauer and standing in the middle of the night waiting for them to come back from Miami. Or standing in the rain when they returned from that oh-so-cold game in Cincinnati.

“It’s like high school. You support your team win or lose. And this is San Diego’s team, and this is where I grew up.”

The Backers have been there from the beginning with the Chargers. They were organized to support the players, coaches and staff who didn’t know anyone in San Diego upon the move from Los Angeles. They visited the injured players in the hospital, and found employment in the off-season for those who needed it.

They took trips to away games, and when Air Coryell took off, they were there side-by-side with the biggest names in the game of football. They have experienced all that is good with being the member of an exclusive club.

“The glory days will be back,” McEachern said. “It’s just a matter of when. You’ve got to hang in there. It gets tough, but what are going to do? Support the Raiders?”