Soccer gives world a kick.

Byline: Ron Bellamy / The Register-Guard

THE NON-FAN'S lament about soccer - "Wake me when somebody scores" - has new meaning in this World Cup.

Now, you have to set an alarm clock just to watch the games.

The United States team plays its first game of the 2002 World Cup at 1:55 a.m. PDT on Wednesday against Portugal in South Korea, in a contest that will be televised live on ESPN2 and Univision (cable 52 and cable 20, respectively).

The word "live" doesn't describe most of us at 2 o'clock in the morning. (The telecast will be blessedly replayed at noon Wednesday on ESPN2.) A few years from now, sports historians will be tracing the curious interest in soccer among West Coast insomniacs.

To ardent soccer people, of course, a World Cup schedule heavy on games bunched between midnight and dawn merely adds a little challenge to their most thrilling sports event. They stay up late. They get up early. They program VCRs.

And they have some feeling for what it was like in Senegal last week, when that nation's team upset France, its former colonial ruler. They understand why, in Sweden, the laws were changed for the World Cup to allow beer to be served in pubs before 11 a.m.

To soccer people, it makes perfect sense that in England, the Anglican Church revised its schedule of Sunday services to accommodate the World Cup, while in the same country 27 men facing outstanding arrest warrants turned themselves in so that they could serve their jail time before the World Cup started.

"You know how when there's an afternoon football game here how, how dead the town is," mused Bill Steffen, Oregon's women's soccer coach. "Well, picture that across a country, everybody glued to the television sets. ...

"It's your country against all these other countries in the dominant recreational entertainment vehicle. Soccer in some places is as big as television. It's amazing the depth. It affects peoples' lives because it's so important."

Case in point: Steffen's mother-in-law is visiting from South Africa. "All she wants to do is watch the games," he said. "And this is a woman who has no other idea about sport. I mean, she doesn't know who Shaq is. But yet she knows the backup goalkeeper for Nigeria."

Another case in point: Only one time have I seen my mother in tears after a sporting event. She just doesn't care. She is, after all, the lady who once visited Candlestick Park during football season, looked out at the teams below and asked loudly enough to be heard four sections over, "Which ones are the 49ers?"

But she's from Germany, and my father was from England, and when England defeated Germany on a controversial goal in the 1966 World Cup championship game, mom cared about the outcome. And not even a savvy husband such as dad could contain his joy, even when the rest of us could see that that gloating was ill-advised, maritally speaking.

FOR CASUAL SPORTS fans, Steffen offers a primer on what to watch in the World Cup, even if through bleary eyes:

The skills of the players, who are phenomenal athletes. "For somebody to strike a ball 70 yards and have it end up five yards from where they intend is amazing," Steffen said. "The next amazing thing is somebody who has a ball kicked to them from 70 yards away and can control it and play it so quickly."

Strings of passes, ever faster, moving toward the goal as tension builds. (Watching Brazil defeat the USA in the World Cup at Stanford, Calif., in 1994, I was struck by how a large field becomes small because of the speed of the game; TV doesn't do that justice.)

The passion of the athletes, for whom wearing the jersey of their nation in the World Cup is an intense emotional experience, set against the backdrop of an event that has deep history (both athletic and nationalistic), and the passion of the fans.

The individual flair of the athletes, so creative both because of the enormousness of the stage and the difficulty of getting the ball into the goal. "In basketball, you don't score this time, you'll score the next time," Steffen said. "Whereas in soccer, if you don't score this time, you don't know what chances you'll get."

The 32 countries in the World Cup are divided into eight groups of four teams. In the first round, each team plays the other three teams in its group. The top two teams in each group advance to the single-elimination second round based on a point system - three for a win, one for a tie. The title game is June 30.

Games to watch, Steffen said, include any matchups in the powerhouse "Group of Death" - Argentina, England, Sweden, Nigeria - and games involving always-entertaining Brazil. The USA, Steffen said, has tough going to round two; underdogs against Portugal, the U.S. team will later face host South Korea and probably must beat Poland for a chance to move on.

This is a thrilling event, and these games are very meaningful, and the whole world is watching. Whether you can use that as an excuse for falling asleep at your desk during the day is quite another matter.