U.S. OLYMPIC FESTIVAL : Not Easy to Fathom Though Fun to Watch : Team handball: Combining chaotic elements of several sports, it has spectator appeal.

The really great thing about team handball is that few people understand the sport but most enjoy watching it anyway.

Denny Fercho used to be one of those people.

He and his brother were watching on television in 1984, when the Olympics were in Los Angeles.

Cool game, they thought. Let’s try it.

So they did--right there in the family room of their Camarillo home.

Mom and Dad weren’t around, of course. They might have objected to the couch being one goal and the cupboard across the room being the other.

Their sister wasn’t there, either. She might not have let them borrow her coveted plastic red ball.

The brothers, then teen-agers, played one-on-one, grappling on the floor until their knees burned.

“Great games,” Fercho said.

And typical of a start to a handball-playing career.

Typically atypical.

Consider Tim Flaherty’s story: He was a football player at Moorpark College when he first heard of the sport. Somebody had posted a flyer on a school bulletin board and Flaherty had a friend who wanted to give it a try.

Flaherty said he would tag along when his friend went to a tryout.

The friend was a no-show. Flaherty tried it anyway. “I got hooked right away,” he said.

Ditto for James Cox, who was looking for a sport in which he could “accomplish something on an elite level.” He decided to try team handball after watching games at the 1991 Olympic Festival in Los Angeles.

Cox, a former water polo player at Buena High and Ventura College, now has witnessed handball in three Festivals--the one in Los Angeles, and those he has participated in as a goalie the past two years.

Fercho, Flaherty and Cox all helped the West team defeat the North, 19-14, Wednesday in the Olympic Festival bronze medal match in the Washington University Fieldhouse.

Jim Hop and Mike Hurdle, two other local players, were among the West’s top players until its final game. Hop, from Camarillo, and Hurdle, from Reseda, were sent home Tuesday by U.S. Team Handball Federation officials after a disciplinary hearing.

A source close to the situation said Hop, Hurdle and Darrell Hubbard, a backup goalie for the West, violated team rules during a late-night Fourth of July celebration.

Hop, a member of the U.S. national team, scored 18 goals--the second-highest total in the tournament--through the West’s first three games.

With Fercho playing the equivalent of a basketball point guard, the West led from start to finish by controlling the tempo of the game against a much-larger and more-physical North squad.

“We wanted to move the ball from side to side quickly so we could get them moving and open some holes,” Fercho said. “When we did, we got some good shots.”

Good shots meaning the kind that go in.

Every shot, it seems, is violently contested, Defenders body-check and grope at any offensive player making a run at the goal.

When they are able, shooters must squeeze through thin seams in the defense to take off-balance shots. But if they manage to get one off at close range, the goalie must guard an area 6 1/2 feet high and almost 10 feet long.

Informational brochures, a must for any first-time spectator, describe team handball as a combination of ice hockey without sticks, basketball with a few too many players and water polo on hardwood.

All true. Just add a couple of dashes of soccer and rugby.

What it is, by all accounts, is organized chaos.

The game, played on a rubber floor 59% larger than a basketball court, is contested in two 30-minute halves. Each team is allowed seven players on the floor, provided none have drawn a penalty for a particularly rough foul.

The clock runs even when the ball goes out of bounds. Time stops only for injuries.

Players, some from only a few feet away, sling a projectile slightly smaller than a volleyball at speeds upward of 50 m.p.h. And a goalie’s only pads are under his shorts.

For basketball fans, there are free throws, fast breaks, screens, steals, dribbles, traveling and charging.

For soccer fans, there are goals, throw-ins, goal-throws, yellow warning cards and red disqualification cards.

Fercho, 24, belongs to the 20-member U.S. national team. He already has been told he will be making a trip to St. Petersburg, Russia, later this month to take part in the Goodwill Games.

Cox, 28, who has made significant strides as a goalie despite relatively little experience, still has “another level to go” before he is national team material, according to Coach Rod Oshita.

As for Flaherty, he has a reputation of having a good time playing sports he has never tried before.

Before playing quarterback for Moorpark College in 1982 and ‘83, Flaherty was studying religion, first at Our Lady Queen of Angels, a seminary high school in Mission Hills, then at St. John’s seminary college in Camarillo.

“I’m 34 years old and just out here having a good time,” he said.

So, too, was a crowd of several hundred spectators--even if they didn’t truly understand what they were watching.