Before Snapdragon Stadium and Viejas Arena, before Steve Fisher and Rocky Long and the Final Four and Aztec FAST and NIL and revenue sharing and conference-hopping, San Diego State sporting events could be dismal.
    Chet Carney made sure they were never dull.
   The burly super-fan attended San Diego State basketball and football games with a singular goal: To get fans as excited about the Aztecs as he was. Even if it meant sprinting and cartwheeling and finishing it off by doing
the splits.
   Carney, a San Diego native who watched his beloved Aztecs rise to unprecedented athletic success during his half-century of fandom, died this week at his home in Encanto. He was 70. No cause of death was immediately known.
   Dressed in custom SDSU jerseys and a hard hat — and sometimes wearing overalls — Carney was one of the Aztecs’ most vocal supporters for decades. He led “1-2-3 Aztecs” cheers during games and encouraged basketball fans to put their fingers in the air during free throws “to help tip it in.”
   When the shots fell, Carney would bellow to the crowd: “Look what you
did!”
   A graduate of Crawford High School, where he was a cheerleader and football player, Carney enrolled at San Diego State in the late 1970s after attending a community college. He was an SDSU yell leader for the 1978-79 athletic year.
   In the early 1980s, SDSU officials asked the newly graduated Carney — Chet was short for Chesley — to lead cheers from the field during football games.
   “They gave him a PA system and said, ‘Go for it; we need something a little more exciting for football,’ ” said Don Jones, Carney’s former teammate on the SDSU cheer team and a lifelong friend. “We’d be down 63-14 (to BYU), and he’s trying to get fans to do more cheers.”
   When that ended, Carney became a (very) unofficial cheerleader for the school he loved. He sat in the student section for men’s basketball games, rooting for the Aztecs and yelling at opposing players alongside members of the pep band.
   One night, Carney stepped onto the court, sprinted across it and began to do cartwheels; he finished with what Jones called “a half-split.”
   It was a simpler time. Carney was dressed so officially — well, officially enough — that security didn’t stop him.
   “I don’t think anybody told him to do it; I just think nobody told him not to do it,” Jones said.
   SDSU didn’t make the NCAA men’s basketball tournament between 1985 and 2002. Some nights in the late 1980s and 1990s, Carney’s performance was the highlight of the game.
   Carney stuck with San Diego State during those hard times and, later, was a witness to some of the greatest moments in the school’s athletic history.
The Aztecs’ 2023 trip to the NCAA championship game in men’s basketball surprised even him.
   “It’s one of those things that when it occurs, you can’t believe it, but you enjoy how it feels,” Carney told the Union-Tribune that year.
   “So, yeah, they’re in the Sweet 16. OK, we’ve done that before, that’s nice. They’re in the Elite Eight. Really? OK.
   “They’re in the Final Four? OK, stop this. We’re in the final two? Um, just a minute now. I’m going to check to see if I’m actually believing what’s happening here.”
   The superstitious Carney would not travel to watch the Aztecs. SDSU basketball’s coaches, first Fisher and then Brian Dutcher, made sure he had tickets for all home games.
   No mascot, Carney was a three-dimensional person with a wide array of interests.
   Retired after working for the city and county, Carney race-walked half- marathons throughout the West, paddle-boarded and crocheted everything from hats to wine holders. He danced to old-school R&B while wearing roller skates. He once played the washboard with a zydeco band. He never owned a TV.
   When animals dug up some of the plants outside his home, Carney converted some old bathtubs into makeshift planters and dotted them around his property. He often took train trips to Los Angeles for the day, just for fun.
Carney hiked Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania for his 60th birthday, texting updates to friends in San Diego from his old T9 flip-phone.
   “Who does that?” said longtime friend Sarah Eishen, who met Carney when she was a trombone player in the Aztecs’ pep band.  “The loss is immeasurable. Everybody dies, but Chet just seemed immortal.”
   San Diego State was Carney’s biggest love. Former SDSU cheerleader and longtime friend Linda Hastings threw Carney a 70th birthday party at her Point Loma home a month ago; predictably, many of those in attendance were friends he knew from SDSU. When Hastings played a video message from Carney’s former cheerleading coach, he began to cry.
   “What made Chet special was the passion that he put towards his events, and the roots of being an Aztec were the deepest for him,” Hastings said. “He wasn’t just there for the wins. He was there because he was an Aztec and he was going to do his part to support the team.”
   So when Carney wasn’t in attendance for Tuesday’s men’s basketball game against Wyoming at Viejas Arena, his friends feared the worst. A trip to his home the following day confirmed those fears.
   Days later, Carney’s friends still talk about him in the present tense. “He’s just this presence, and he has such an energy and positive aura,” Hastings said. “There are certain people on the earth where you say, ‘That person’s special.’ Chet is definitely one of those.”
   San Diego State will hold a moment of silence for Carney before Wednesday’s women’s basketball game against Colorado State and the men’s Feb. 14 game against Nevada.
   Funeral services are pending. Carney, who was an only child and single, was preceded in death by his mother, Jane.
   Asked how Carney would like to be remembered, Eishen said: “As an Aztec. Not for life, but for eternity.” “He made everything he touched, every person he interacted with, better,” she added. “There’s never been anybody like him, and there will never, ever be anyone else like him.”