SANTA CLARA — Hold on, they told him. Eddie DeBartolo is on his way.

Dave Rahn, dying of cancer in a San Diego hospital room, hadn’t responded in hours. Hadn’t spoken. Hadn’t opened his eyes.

“Hold on for Eddie D,” he said, barely audible.

Those were Rahn’s last words. But the former 49ers publicity assistant did as his boss instructed, one last time, and survived past his doctor’s prediction so that DeBartolo had time to fly across the country for a proper goodbye.

“When Mr. D got there, he came in the room and he grabbed Dave’s hand. And he just told him how he loved him and how it was going to be OK and how it was time for him to let go,” Holly Rahn recalled, her voice catching.

“Dave squeezed his hand. I don’t remember if he said anything or if he just opened his eyes. But he knew.”

Rahn died Sept. 18, 2014. He was 50.

Not long after that, his wife did an Internet search with a question that will be asked a lot this week: What will it take to get Eddie DeBartolo Jr. elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame?

Holly’s answer comes Saturday, the eve of Super Bowl 50 in Santa Clara, when 46 football writers gather in a conference room to address DeBartolo’s fate as the lone finalist in the “contributor” category. That designation is for individuals who “made outstanding contributions to professional football in capacities other than playing or coaching.” DeBartolo, 69, needs at least 80 percent approval in a simple yes-no ballot.

The voters will consider his 23 years as owner, during which time the 49ers won five Super Bowls, appeared in 10 conference title games and reshaped how pro teams spend on things such as player salaries, travel accommodations and training facilities.

They must also factor in DeBartolo’s legal trouble, an issue that stymied his three previous trips as a Hall of Fame finalist. DeBartolo was forced to relinquish control of the 49ers to his sister, Denise DeBartolo York, in 2000, after pleading guilty in 1998 to a felony charge of failing to report an extortion attempt in Louisiana.

Here’s something else voters can consider: the wishes of Holly Rahn and Sandy Fontana and Dee Solomon and Jeff Fuller and the countless others who continue to benefit from DeBartolo’s unseen legacy. Some of their stories have never been told; they talked for this article only in hopes of boosting his chances of enshrinement in Canton.

“When Mr. D talks about it being a family, it truly was a family,” said Joe Montana, 59, the Hall of Fame quarterback. “There are guys that he takes care of, and has taken care of, that nobody even knows about. From injuries to helping families that are suffering, he just does not forget.”

In the line of duty

Jeffrey Fontana was 10 days into his job as a San Jose police officer when he followed a car into a quiet Almaden cul-de-sac. It was supposed to be a routine traffic stop, but the driver was wanted on previous warrants. So he shot Fontana dead. “A heinous, brutal, senseless crime,” a Santa Clara County judge called it at the sentencing.

The murder took place Oct. 28, 2001, about 4:30 on a Sunday morning. Monday night, Sandy Fontana, the officer’s mother, heard a knock on the door of her Woodside home. “Eddie was there,” she says now, fighting back emotion. “You don’t know what that means to this day.”

Officer Fontana was 24 years old. DeBartolo arrived unannounced after hearing the news at home in Tampa, Florida. He rushed to a plane and arrived in time to help arrange dinners for the Fontana family all week and sit for hours with the grieving parents.

Sandy Fontana should have known better than anyone that DeBartolo did this kind of thing. She helped him do it for 23 years. Fontana started with the 49ers as a “runner” late in the 1984 season, doing various errands in advance of Super Bowl XIX.

The 49ers beat Miami in that game played at Stanford. Weeks later, at the party to hand out Super Bowl rings, DeBartolo approached the new low-level employee as if her name was Montana, not Fontana: “Hi, Sandy, how are you doing?” Then, turning to her husband: “Tony! Nice to finally meet you!”

Fontana laughed at the memory. “He knew my husband’s name,” she said. “I’d been there for five months.”

Over the years, Fontana’s duties grew to include human resources and other aspects of business operations, which under DeBartolo could mean anything. Every year at Christmastime, she worked with him to send a dozen long-stem roses to the players’ wives. If the player wasn’t married, the roses would go to his mother.

It wasn’t just players. Staff wives got flowers on birthdays, wedding anniversaries and other special occasions.

“I had four children born during the time that I was a San Diego Charger. Not once did my wife ever get a ‘congratulations’ or flowers or whatever,” said former linebacker Gary Plummer, 56, who played for the 49ers from 1993-97. “I signed with the 49ers and the next day there was a bouquet of flowers — I mean the most immense bouquet I’ve ever seen in my life — welcoming her to the organization.”

Fontana recalled that whenever the 49ers reached the Super Bowl, DeBartolo scheduled activities for the wives and children — garden district tours in New Orleans, the Everglades when the game was in Miami, etc. — so that they had something to do while players prepared for the game. He set up video game arcades in the hotel, no quarters required.

DeBartolo had learned these lessons from his father, a real estate magnate: Treat your employees like family, pay them handsomely, demand loyalty. There were only two ways to make him angry, Fontana said. One was betraying his trust. “And if he wanted something, you needed to get it done,” she said. “Even the impossible.”

DeBartolo’s motives weren’t entirely altruistic. DeBartolo, like coach Bill Walsh, believed that a key to the 49ers’ success was keeping players focused on football. Staffers such as Fontana were entrusted with making sure real life never interfered with the X’s and O’s.

But sometimes the kindness came from nowhere.

“Eddie befriended many people, including a young man who had muscular dystrophy,” Fontana recalled. “And he would fly him and his family out for games and they would sit in one of his suites. He talked to our orthopedic surgeon to see if there was anything to be done for this young man’s legs so that he could walk again. And nobody ever heard those things.”

Eddie and Freddie

Edward John DeBartolo Jr. was born Nov. 6, 1946, in Youngstown, Ohio. His father grew the family fortune by helping to invent the suburban shopping mall and, by some estimates, his personal fortune soared to more than $2 billion.

Edward Jr. graduated from Notre Dame in 1968 and worked in the family business for a while. But he wanted to carve his own niche. So in January 1977, when a football executive in San Francisco called Eddie Sr. asking if he might be interested in buying the 49ers, it was Eddie Jr. who called him back instead.

At 30, he became the proud owner of an NFL franchise.

In those early days, DeBartolo was about as popular as his nephew, Jed York, is now. Near the end of DeBartolo’s first season as owner, a fan spit in his face from 3 feet away. “And I mean a big ol’ hocker,” DeBartolo told Sports Illustrated in 1990, still cringing. “I was so steamed and so frustrated. I didn’t know what to do. And all I could think was, ‘What the hell am I doing here? I could be back in Youngstown, playing golf.’ “

In this cauldron, a long-lasting friendship was born: Freddie Solomon, acquired in a 1978 trade with the Dolphins, arrived as the self-sacrificing player DeBartolo wanted. So team-oriented was the receiver/returner that when every other passer was injured for the ’78 season-finale, he stepped in at quarterback.

As Solomon’s last act, in 1985 he taught a rookie named Jerry Rice how to steal his job. “He knew Jerry was there to replace him,” former running back Roger Craig said. “But he still helped him as much as he could.”

In sum, Solomon was DeBartolo’s kind of guy.

They became so close that while most of the players called their owner “Mr. D,” and still do, Solomon called him “Unc” — as in uncle. When DeBartolo happened to move in 2000 to Tampa, Solomon’s hometown, their friendship blossomed anew.

“Freddie and Eddie reconnected and it was like they had never had any time apart,” recalled Dee Solomon, the receiver’s wife of 34 years. “They just had a very unique bond.”

But in April 2001, Solomon was diagnosed with colon cancer. And DeBartolo did what the receiver did on the football field: Anything he could, even if it meant driving 40 minutes to take Solomon to his doctor’s appointments.

“We’re not talking about just picking up the tab. We’re talking about picking up the patient,” recalled former 49ers executive Carmen Policy. “He’d drive Freddie to chemotherapy, wait with him the entire time, and then drive him home.”

This was no small thing, in DeBartolo’s case.

“Eddie might be a touch of a hypochondriac,” Policy said. “So to sit with him through a process like that? Surrounded by others who are also going through it? This was a work of mercy.”

The saga played out quietly, with only a handful of people from the 49ers’ inner circle aware of Solomon’s increasingly grave condition. Dee said DeBartolo did more and more as the situation turned dire, sometimes sitting by Solomon’s bedside for hours.

“It was knowing that he was there that gave us the support we needed to keep going,” Dee said. “You don’t always have to say anything. Just knowing that someone is there means everything to you.

“Mr. DeBartolo was hurting, too, of course. It was hard for him. It was hard for Freddie. But they were part of each other, and that helped them be there for each other.”

Dee’s voice caught. She needed a minute.

“Eddie always called Freddie the ‘Quiet Warrior,’ because he would do everything he could for somebody else,” she continued. “You need to know that you have somebody in your corner when you’re going through these hard times.”

Dee Solomon said she still gets regular calls from DeBartolo. He calls to check up, to see if she’s doing OK. They get together in person at least once a month.

Suffice to say, she’ll be monitoring the Hall of Fame voting closely.

“I know if Freddie were here, he’d be out there picketing if he could,” Dee said. “That was one of the things he wished had happened (while he was alive), so he could be part of it, so he could help celebrate.”

A promise fulfilled

Jeff Fuller didn’t bother trying to get up. He knew it was bad. So did DeBartolo, who bolted from his luxury box and followed the ambulance as it made its way from Stanford Stadium.

“He was the first one in the hospital room when I was there,” Fuller, 53, recalled last week. “And he told me how much he cared about me. He let me know that I wouldn’t be alone going through this battle.”

Fuller paused.

“And I haven’t been.”

The helmet-to-helmet collision with New England Patriots running back John Stephens on Oct. 22, 1989, left Fuller with two fractured vertebrae and torn nerves near his shoulder and neck. He remains partially paralyzed, unable to use his right arm.

The end of his promising football career came at Stanford Stadium because there were still questions about the safety of Candlestick Park five days after the Loma Prieta earthquake.

Fuller was 27 at the time and a man that Ronnie Lott — a true authority on the subject — considered one of the hardest-hitting safeties in the game. The fifth-round pick from Texas A&M was in his sixth season.

“He was just a marvelous player,” Policy said. “Tough. Played the position perfectly. He was on his way to being possibly one of the two or three best safeties in the game.”

DeBartolo sat with Fuller at the hospital on that first night, and they both cried. At the time, the NFL had no provision for handling such debilitating injuries. So the 49ers owner winged it: He paid Fuller’s remaining contract in full for the 1990 season, even though the safety was finished and even though DeBartolo was under no legal obligation to do so.

After that, DeBartolo essentially signed him to a lifetime contract. He contributed to an annuity that would pay Fuller $100,000 a year.

The phone calls? Those are just a bonus.

“I talked to him less than a month ago. He just wanted to know how I was doing. How my family was doing. What I was up to. How the NFL was treating me,” said Fuller, who lives in McKinney, Texas. “For him to pick up the phone and want to know those things just gives you an idea of how much he cares.”

The question is why DeBartolo continues to do so now, long after the games have been played.

“It’s the right thing to do,” he replied via email this week. “I mentioned this in 1977 when we bought the team that I was going to run the 49ers like a family rather than a business. Really, it’s all I know.

“My father started our company in the ’40s, and he based what he did on treating everyone like family. It was the same when we had five employees as it was when we had 15,000. Everybody in the family knew if they needed anything, they could come to us. I carried that philosophy on to the 49ers. My players, my coaches, anyone in my 49ers family — they mean the world to me, and I would do anything to help anyone in my family.”

A bedside vigil

When doctors told Dave Rahn he had 72 hours to live, he still brought his laptop to the hospital.

“He wanted to make sure his wife would get a last paycheck,” Plummer said. “He was very concerned about what Holly was going to do if he passed away.”

Rahn spent 16 seasons with the 49ers, mostly as a public relations assistant and the team’s director of travel and team services. Even in his second career as a concert tour manager for Fleetwood Mac, Sheryl Crow and Lionel Richie, the voice in his head was usually Mr. D. This is how Holly Rahn, who met Dave in 2009, got to know DeBartolo — through her husband’s constant stories about her old boss.

“Dave was very well liked in the music industry and he always attributed that to Mr. D,” Holly recalled. ‘He’d say, ‘He’s the one who really taught me how to treat people and respect people. Just trying to be helpful and opening your heart to people.’

“I just remember hearing that he treated everybody the same. It didn’t matter if you were Jerry Rice or the receptionist. You were thought of. You were appreciated. And I think that says a lot.”

Holly didn’t meet DeBartolo in person until after Dave’s Stage 4 melanoma diagnosis. She watched DeBartolo calmly directing life’s two-minute drill, calling doctors, arranging for specialists, flying out for visits and calling. Always calling.

“He’d call Dave, but then he’d call me. Because he knew as the woman, I was always divulging much more information,” Holly said. “So he’d call back and say, ‘Holly, what’s really going on?’ “

Rahn had a knack for outliving projections, but things looked dire enough by the summer of 2014 that there was a party at Plummer’s San Diego home to celebrate Dave’s life — a funeral for the living.

By this time, Holly had spent so much time at the hospital that she began dreaming of becoming an oncology nurse. “There were so many amazing people who were in our health care (system),” she says now. “I wanted to be one of those people.”

Rahn held on for three more months. But the end came quickly. When he went to Scripps Green Hospital in La Jolla, for what he thought was a last-ditch treatment, the doctors took one look at his vital stats and gave him 48 hours to live.

Plummer, who served as the liaison between the family and the 49ers, sent out a text alert. The first person to call him back was DeBartolo, from Tampa.

“He told me he couldn’t get there until the next morning,” Plummer said. “And so he said, ‘Do you think he’ll make it?’ And I said, ‘I’m going to make sure that he’s going to make it.’ “

“So I went into Dave’s room and I said, ‘Eddie D is on his way but you have to hang on for him. Can you hang on? … I’m telling Eddie D right now that he’s not coming unless you promise him that you’re going to hang on for him.

“And the last words — and I’m about to cry — his last words were “Hang on for Eddie D.” And it was more of a mumble — hngonfrEddieD — but those were the last words that he ever spoke.”

Plummer and Holly slept in chairs in the hallway, keeping a vigil. They were there when DeBartolo arrived.

“For most of us, as sports fans, our favorite movie of all time is ‘Brian’s Song,’ ” Plummer said, referring to the 1971 film about Chicago Bears teammates Brian Piccolo and Gale Sayers. “Well, ‘Brian’s Song’ paled in comparison to Eddie D sitting there next to Dave Rahn.

“He stroked his hair. He held his hand. He told him how much he loved him. Told him how he’d been a son to him. Told him how they couldn’t have won those Super Bowls without him. … And for two hours, he was just positive and optimistic and complimentary and full of hope. It was what everyone in that room needed.”

Rahn passed the next morning. When DeBartolo and Holly walked to the parking lot, he turned to her and said he knew that she wanted to go to nursing school. He’s now paying her full tuition.

“I’m here in the oncology department, on the same floor that Dave passed on,” she said. “Mr. D changes people’s lives. He inspires people to want to be better and do better.

“The influence he has spreads as the people he touches strive to do so. And then it has the ripple effect. That is what Hall of Fame is, right? Someone who has the made the world a little better and continues to do so.”

Follow Daniel Brown at Twitter.com/MercBrownie.