Hard-core Redskins fan Martha Fish, center, and her husband, Richard DeGaetano, left, attend a warm-up party before the game in Tampa. (Nate Parsons - The Washington Post)

By Carol Morello
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, Jan. 16, 2000; Page A14

TAMPA, Jan. 15 – It was as much a moment to reflect as to rejoice.

When the Redskins scored a field goal halfway through the second quarter today, Martha Fish looked up at the cloudless sky over Tampa's Raymond James Stadium and mouthed a message to the man who bestowed on her season tickets and a passion for Washington's team.

"Dad, this one was for you," she whispered, willing her thoughts across the ether to Charles Dworin, whose spirit surely was tuning in to the face-off with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. It is a ritual she has repeated after every Redskins score during the hundreds of games she has attended in good seasons and bad.

Fish, 54, a retired Montgomery County administrator, was among about 650 Redskins fans who paid $499 each for a game ticket and a seat on one of four chartered planes that brought them to Tampa to cheer on the Redskins.

On a plane filled with hard-core Redskinites, who proudly wore their allegiance on their sleeves and their ear lobes and their cheeks and even their rear ends, Fish looked almost understated. A cap and a pair of socks were her only talismans.

But the gold sock on her right foot and the maroon sock on her left were very, very special. They belonged to her dad, and he used to wear them every game day until he died in 1987. Now Fish hauls them out for every game, whether she is attending a home game or watching an away game on the 54-inch television the Gaithersburg woman bought to see the Redskins and the Wizards as close to life-size as possible.

"There's no bigger Redskins fan than her," said her husband, Richard DeGaetano, a real estate agent who met his future wife when he sold her a house and noticed she had listed season Redskins tickets on her financial statement.

"I've always wondered whether he married me for me or my tickets," added Fish, 54, her face betraying no sign that she was joking. "And I will always have a doubt in my mind."

The last few years have been anguished and turbulent ones for many Redskins fans. Six seasons without a trip to the playoffs. A move to a new stadium. The death of the team's longtime owner. A two-year wrangle over who would own the team. Then a stadium name change and the sacking of front-office staff.

But Fish typifies the fans for whom winning and losing any given game or season, or changing team owners and stadiums, is almost beside the point. For these die-hard fans, sticking with the Redskins is a birthright they were bequeathed and expected to honor.

"It's genetic," said patent lawyer Jay Wenzel, who flew to Tampa today on one of the chartered planes. Wenzel's grandfather bought season tickets in 1937 and willed them to Wenzel's mother, who in turn left them to Wenzel. In 47 years, he has not missed a single home game – some 360 games, he calculates.

"It hasn't been hard," he said of the team's playoff drought. "The first 25 years I was going to games, they didn't win a season. This seven-year stretch was nothing."

The two season tickets Fish holds were initially purchased by her father in 1937, the Redskins' first season.

Her father, who owned a Dodge automobile dealership in the District, took her mother to most games. But when their three daughters became teenagers, he started rotating the tickets among the girls to encourage and develop their loyalty to the team.

The lessons soon became second nature. Fish's younger sister decided to attend college at Arizona State primarily because former Redskins player Bobby Mitchell was hired as the university's football coach.

But none loved the Redskins more than Fish, the middle daughter, and both of her sisters knew it.

When their father died, her sisters wrote letters relinquishing all rights to the season tickets so that they could be recorded in Fish's name.

And they remain in her name, even after she married DeGaetano in 1989.

"Everything else is community property," she said. "But not my season tickets."

DeGaetano, a New York native, started life as a Giants fan.

When he started dating Fish, he quickly discovered her deep roots with the Redskins.

"We'd been dating a month when she took me to a game," he recalled. "She walked down the aisle ahead of me, and I watched the usher hug her. It was the same usher who had been seating her since she was 17. He was her mom's and dad's usher. And all around us were other second- and third-generation families of Redskins fans. Everyone seemed to know each other."

Only illness has kept Fish from attending a home game. She was there, in her seat in the upper tier of the corner end zone, in years when it seemed to rain every game day and in years when the Redskins couldn't get a break.

She never boos. When other fans do, she stands up and chastises them.

She joins in every cheer. And when the fans around her aren't cheering loudly or lustily enough, she jumps to her feet to egg them on.

At one game with the Chicago Bears earlier this season, three young Bears fans sitting near Fish watched her lead her section in a series of cheers, then stood and bowed to her. "I wish you were my mom," one of them told her.

She starts every game believing the Redskins will win.

"And I have never left a game before it's over," she said.

"Well, once in a while you do," her husband corrected. "I do the driving, and I make you leave earlier sometimes."

"And I won't speak to you all the way home when you do," she said. "The whole evening is ruined."

"I'm not allowed to criticize them," he said.

For Christmas last year, DeGaetano gave his wife a quilted Redskins jacket. In the pockets, he slipped a pair of diamond earrings.

He knows that, next to her family and the children she tutors in reading at South Lake Elementary School in Montgomery Village, nothing is more dear to her heart than the Redskins.

Fish has tried to inculcate her two grown sons with an equal love of the Redskins. When she dies, they will inherit her tickets.

Asked whether her sons love the Redskins as much as she does, Fish pursed her lips and paused for several seconds.

"They love the Redskins" was as far as she would go.

For one flickering moment after the Redskins lost to the Buccaneers, Fish declared the team's errors "unforgivable." Then her anger evaporated.

"That's too harsh," she said as she left the stadium amid fireworks celebrating Tampa's victory.

"The season is over. But the Redskins aren't over. I'll be back next year. The Redskins will be back, and they'll be better than ever."