WORLD CUP USA ‘94: QUARTERFINALS : Southern Comfort : In Orlando’s Fair City, the Festive Irish Fans Found a Home

Two days after Ireland had been eliminated from the World Cup, Danny McFadden was still in Orlando, Fla., drunk as a skunk down at Katie O’Brien’s.

It was midafternoon, Wednesday.

McFadden was clad in an Orlando Police Department uniform shirt and, well, he was sort of handcuffed.

Seems McFadden had shackled one of his hands and then lost the key.

“Know any locksmiths out there in L.A.?” he slurred into the phone.

McFadden thought he was on a radio talk show and wanted to inform the other coast what a great time the Irish were having in Orlando.

“All you listeners in L.A., this city is the best, the cops are the best,” McFadden blathered on.

Orlando and the Irish, of course, have a history dating back, oh, weeks now.

If nothing else, the World Cup has been an interesting experiment in cultural cross-pollination.

The Russian team trained at a community college in Aptos, Calif., eight miles south of Santa Cruz. You imagined the team bus passing UC Santa Cruz and the following exchange:

Russian: Nice school. What is nickname?

Translator: Banana Slugs.

For a time, the Romanians roamed Irvine, in which no borough of Little Bucharest is known to exist. The Bulgarians trained at Southern Methodist University in Dallas; the jet-setting Saudis dropped the Louis Vuitton at Catonsville) Community College in Baltimore; the Germans set their watches to the cafeteria clock at Hinsdale Central High in suburban Chicago.

Some pairings worked out better than others. The Russians were largely kept under wraps and not allowed so much as a dip in the blue Pacific.

“They were mysterious,” said Dale Murray, the Cabrillo College athletic director who served as team liaison. “I had very little interaction with the players, by design. They chose not to use our lockers. They changed clothes at the hotel and their bus drove right up to the practice site.”

At UC Irvine, the Romanians brought their own chef.

“They were pretty demanding,” Paul Hope, the university’s facilities coordinator, said. “They were very good people, but they wanted the field watered prior to practicing, something that we never do. One day, one of our guys had to go out and hand-water it. Those kinds of things. Pretty picky, but they’re a world-class soccer team.”

The Romanian team stayed at the swanky Newporter Inn in Newport Beach and quickly took to the Southern California lifestyle.

Although their fans were greatly outnumbered during Rose Bowl games, Romanian players went out of their way to thank their small but devoted following.

“The feeling here is very good here for us,” Gheorghe Hagi, the star Romanian forward, said. “Everyone who surrounds us has been very supportive. Many teammates have remarked that once they step on the field they feel like they are at home.”

Of all the team-city pairings, however, perhaps no two took to each other as did the Irish and Orlando.

There are really no ethnic or logical connections. So few Irish reside in the area that the Orlando/Orange County Convention and Visitors Bureau could not break down the demographics into percentages.

In fact, Orlando was nervous when the World Cup draw handed it games featuring the party-hearty Irish and Dutch teams.

But fears were unfounded.

“Months before, we heard about there being violence, rioting, cars overturned,” said Petra Leonard, an Irish bartender from New York who came south to tend bar during the World Cup. “They talked about spending money on tanks. I think they were confusing all of Europe, thinking the English (hooligans) and Irish are all the same.”

After Ireland’s second game at Orlando last Monday, a 2-0 loss to the Netherlands at the Florida Citrus Bowl, dozens of fans of both teams exchanged caps with Orlando officers.

The partying was heavy but seldom destructive.

Wit Tuttell, public-relations representative for the visitors’ bureau, estimated that Orlando absorbed 45,000 tourists during the World Cup.

“These were not exactly typical visitors,” Tuttell said. “It was not families seeing theme parks. But if you owned a bar, you did much better than expected.”

Tuttell said about 2,000 kegs of beer flowed at Church Street Station during the competition.

McFadden, a transplanted Irishman who works as a horse-and-carriage driver in New York’s Central Park, said he was personally accountable for many of those kegs.

Somewhere along the way, he exchanged his shirt and caps with an Orlando cop. Then, McFadden ended up in handcuffs.

“It’s been a fantastic party, unbelievable,” McFadden said from his bar stool at Katie’s.

“I can’t believe it’s coming to an end.”

* SPECIAL REPORT: A look at the nine U.S. cities and venues that have played host to a record-setting World Cup ’94. Section W, immediately preceding Sports