GOAL : With Tens of Thousands of People Playing the Sport, Soccer Serves as a Cultural Bond Linking the Diverse Communities of Central Los Angeles

In Bell Gardens, Peruvian and Bolivian soccer players, decked out in brightly colored uniforms, zigzag across the grass to the shouts of “Tirale! Tirale!” --”Pass it! Pass it!”--as a ball whizzes downfield in one of hundreds of weekend games in the area’s Latino leagues.

In South-Central, a team of Ethiopians battles a group of Koreans in the city’s Los Angeles Municipal Soccer League. Several miles away, boys and girls play together on one of the 50 soccer teams in the Watts Friendship League.

And on the Eastside, 38 Mexicans and Central Americans, fresh from church services across the street, crowd onto a dirt-and-grass corner of Belvedere Park for a pickup soccer game. Undeterred by a lack of gear, they use trash cans for goal posts. Some take off their shirts and play in slacks and dress shoes.

“This is the main game we have,” said Ramon Paredes, 33, who came to East Los Angeles five years ago from El Salvador, as he rested on the sidelines.

Soccer is booming in Central Los Angeles, with hundreds of teams and tens of thousands of people at all competitive levels playing year-round. The area is also home to some of the best high school and college teams in the state.

“Basically, we’re talking about 50,000 to 60,000 people playing every weekend,” said Alfonso Arias, who has covered the local soccer scene for 30 years for La Opinion, the major Spanish-language newspaper in Los Angeles.

Aficionados say the sport is bound to receive a boost when the United States hosts the 1994 World Cup, the international soccer championship that dwarfs the Super Bowl and World Series in terms of global interest. The finals will be played at Pasadena’s Rose Bowl in June.

But soccer is more than just a sport. It is a cultural bond that links the diverse communities of Central Los Angeles.

“Here we don’t distinguish one person from another. We’re here to enjoy ourselves and forget about everything else,” said Samuel Ramirez, 28, an immigrant from Guadalajara, watching a recent game at Belvedere Park.

The players, from La Luz Del Mundo church, were Salvadoran, Mexican, Guatemalan, Colombian and Nicaraguan. Every Sunday after services, about 150 members of the congregation gather at the park. Wives, grandparents and children, dressed in their Sunday best, watch the action from the shade. Vendors work the crowd, hawking everything from tacos to chicharrones to pupusas.

Soccer was brought to Central Los Angeles in the 1950s by Mexican immigrants, Arias said. He and other local observers say the sport has easily tripled in size in the last decade, fueled by waves of new immigrants who have brought their love of the game with them.

The diverse teams include immigrants from such countries as Ethiopia, Belize, Turkey, Korea and Iraq. “For us, it’s very, very popular,” said Sam Lee, manager of Pacific, one of seven Korean soccer teams playing in the city.

In addition to pickup games, there are recreational teams for adults, teen-agers and children as young as 5. Then there is the club scene, which features the more serious competitive play, including semiprofessional teams sponsored by local businesses. The club teams take in players of all ages, including college and high school students who stay in shape by playing on the teams when they aren’t competing for their schools.

Oswaldo Williams, 16, captain of the Bell High School soccer team, is a star player for the Aztec Heart Surgeons club. “It’s an opportunity to keep playing all year,” said Williams, who would like to study computers at UC Santa Barbara after he graduates in 1994.

Although soccer crosses ethnic and racial lines and is increasingly popular among suburban youngsters, nowhere is it bigger than in the burgeoning Latino community.

“Wherever there’s a patch of grass, we play,” said Frank Rojas, head of the South Gate-based California Soccer Assn., which represents 1,100 Latino teams with about 20,000 players from the Eastside to South-Central to Bell Gardens.

To cover the action, La Opinion publishes a section each Friday featuring many of the teams.

Those teams play in leagues with names such as Simon Bolivar, Abraham Lincoln, Omega, Mexico and Santa Fe. Many of the leagues organize their own tournaments with corporate sponsors such as Budweiser providing prize money. Players represent nearly every country in Central and South America. Teams are often divided along country lines, and in some cases, even by towns.

“We come here because we have family and friends. . . . It’s only natural that we play here together,” said Edgardo Villanueva, 42, of Boyle Heights who plays on the Zacatecas team, which is named after the Mexican hometown of all the players.

With soccer so popular in Central Los Angeles, it is not surprising that the area is home to some of the state’s best high school, college and club teams. For instance:

* East Los Angeles College’s soccer team, which has won two state championships, is undefeated and ranked No. 1 among California junior colleges by the state Athletic Bureau of Community College News and Sports Information. The school has had the state’s only team to go undefeated in a season--24 wins in 1990. And that year, Coach Orlando Brenes became the only person to coach a community college to a state championship and a high school team (Bell Gardens) to a Southern Section title in the same year.

* Garfield High School, with five city titles to its credit, has won more Los Angeles city soccer championships than any of the 49 competing schools in the school district. Garfield won the first city soccer title in 1972, when it beat archrival Roosevelt High School, 1-0. The defending city champion and Watts Summer Games champion, Garfield will be considered the team to beat when it takes its 17-game winning streak into the start of the high school season that begins Thursday.

* Cal State Los Angeles won its fourth California Collegiate Athletic Assn. title Oct. 28 with a 3-1 victory over Chapman College. The Cal State L.A. team is ranked sixth in the nation by coaches among NCAA Division II schools.

* Bell Gardens High has won two Southern Section soccer championships. The school has also won the Whitmont League 10 out of the last 12 years and qualified for the CIF playoffs each of those 12 years.

* The Aztec Heart Surgeons Soccer Club, which includes youths younger than 17 from the Central and Eastside areas, last month placed eight boys into a state Olympic development program, which takes the top players from different leagues and prepares them for national and international competition.

Despite its success, soccer in Central Los Angeles has been virtually ignored by the mainstream news media. Part of the problem is that soccer has been viewed as a foreign sport, local observers say, and players and coaches have had to deal with discriminatory attitudes.

“When we first started playing here, people called it a ‘wetback sport,’ ” Arias said.

The first Latino league in Los Angeles, the California League, started in 1958 because Mexican players were discriminated against and were required to have green cards to play in the city’s only other league, said Joe Capusetti, 65, who helped form the California League.

“They just didn’t want any Mexicans to play,” Capusetti said of the Greater Los Angeles Soccer League, which was started in 1946 by European immigrants. He said only one Mexican team, Pan American, was allowed in the seven-team league.

Tony Maregon, 72, denied that there was any discrimination and said the green card rule was a suggestion by the Immigration and Naturalization Service that was never enforced. “In my personal opinion, there was no discrimination against any Latino player,” said Maregon, a native of Spain. “(The Latinos) weren’t happy playing with the European teams because they were a minority. . . .they wanted to be among their own.”

The California League began with seven predominantly Mexican teams, Capusetti said, but grew to 17 by the end of the first year. In 1960, it started seven teams for boys younger than 17. He said many of those youths went on to play on the first teams at Roosevelt and Garfield high schools.

Tony Criteli, soccer coach at Garfield High for 25 years, said it took three years of intense lobbying before the Los Angeles Unified School District started soccer competition in 1972. “It was only natural for us to start the game here,” Criteli said, recalling how supporters argued that the city’s immigrant Latino students needed equal athletic opportunities.

“I kept telling people: ‘It’s the No. 1 sport in the world. Why doesn’t it get a little respect?’ ” said Criteli, who coached East Los Angeles College to its first state championship in 1975. “They thought I was some sort of radical.”

But times have changed, coaches and observers say, mainly because of the sport’s growing popularity among all ethnic groups in the inner city and the suburbs. “I think there’s more respectability to the sport because more quality athletes--basketball players, baseball players--are gravitating to it,” said Bob Oseguera, who is an assistant coach at Bell Gardens High and East Los Angeles College.

Said Arias: “A lot of Anglos started playing the game. And they stopped calling it a wetback sport.”

With its growing popularity at the high school level, soccer has provided college scholarship opportunities for star players. Brenes, the Bell Gardens and East Los Angeles coach, is one example. “My parents couldn’t afford to pay my way to college. I had to do it on the soccer field,” said Brenes, who as a student was captain of the 1975 state championship team at East Los Angeles College.

Brenes, 37, a native of Costa Rica who moved to the United States as a child, received a soccer scholarship to attend Whittier College and went on to earn a master’s degree in public administration. He fulfilled his longtime ambition when he returned as the soccer coach of East Los Angeles College and led the team to its second state championship in 1990.

“We have brought a lot of recognition to the community,” Brenes said. “We’re representing our community in a very positive way.”