September 2010

Season-openers always bring such optimism, which is usually tempered by the time I deal with the stadium hassle to find a parking stall and completely destroyed by the time the 49ers trudge into their locker rooms with another halftime deficit...

Hello,

I'm a long-time ticketholder and appreciate your efforts to make the gameday Candlestick experience as good as it can be, considering the stadium is an antiquated facility limping along on its last legs well past its life expectancy.

The past couple of seasons, the organization has implemented a number of policies, all designed for us to be "good fans," including asking us to wear silly ticket lanyards, entering the stadium 75 minutes(!) prior to kickoff and the ability to alert security about "bad fans" via text. To this point, I've followed these rules when required, and casually ignored them when I can (like the lanyards). I know you want to control the gameday experience as much as possible, but passive-agressive campaigns like Coach Sing telling us how much he likes the color red in the stadium during pregame warmups and imploring us to fill the stands with our red colors to ensure that we're purchasing our 6 dollar hotdogs and 10 dollar beers at your concession stands an hour prior to kickoff tend to be insulting to ticketholders who were able to successfully file in to the stadium mere minutes before kickoff during the Super Bowl era.

With that in mind, I have a couple of requests that could make the gameday experience more enjoyable for FANS, as opposed to making things more convenient (or cost-effective) for the organization.

1) Hire more security at the entrance gates and make the stadium entry process quicker. This is a YOU problem and fans shouldn't be required to wait in long lines more than an hour prior to kickoff because you are only staffing a handful of pat-down security personnel at each gate. Last I checked, there were plenty of people looking for work in the Bay Area, and the hourly cost of staffing one yellow-jacketed security officer is roughly the profit margin on a couple of hot dogs and a beer. And if Coach Sing likes the color red so much during pregame warmups, he can stare at the red plastic seats in the upper deck. I'd like to believe Coach Sing has better things to occupy himself with (like how he's going to keep his job beyond this season) than how many people are cheering for David Carr as he plays long-toss with Alex Smith during warmup drills.

2) Enforce your "good fan" standards in the parking lot. Look, I love music as much as the next guy - but there has to be a cap on the noise level from our fans in the lot. Last night, in section Q, we were bombarded with "old skool" jams from a bunch of clowns who set up a PA system - and a deejay in their stall. Despite being at least a dozen stalls away, we could barely hold a conversation without getting blasted in the ears with LL Cool J, Michael Jackson and Prince. This kind of thing happens throughout the lot, and over the past couple of years it has become widespread and unavoidable. I have the common sense and decency to expect that fellow fans don't want to be subjected to my playlist of Judas Priest and Iron Maiden, but since my portable iPod speakers are drowned out by all of these doofuses' sound systems, I can't even listen to my own music in the lot. Tailgating at a Niner game doesn't mean I have to listen to 50 Cent's "In the Club" every hour while some hack deejay with a microphone tries to turn the parking lot into a Snoop Dogg video. This parking lot shouldn't be a battle to decide which fan has the loudest stereo while the dividing line between Raider Nation and Niner Empire becomes increasingly blurred.

I hope you take these suggestions and give them some thought. Your prime demographic - guys like me, who have jobs and purchase season tickets and parking passes despite year after year of on-field futility - is becoming increasingly irritated with rules and regulations that don't seem to address anything that enhances our gameday experience.