Cup Mania Ends Soccer World’s Doubt About U.S.

It was the World Cup the world had had its doubts about, staged in the only nation on earth that supposedly didn’t give a hoot about the sport. But as the clock ran out Sunday on the raucous, filled-to-capacity finale between Italy and Brazil, it was the United States that scored the upset in the planet’s eyes.

As the old-moneyed streets of Pasadena swarmed body to body with conga lines of soccer fans, the championship playoffs that had set world records for skepticism topped the popularity charts instead. Movie stars jockeyed with Mexican laborers for a berth in the Rose Bowl. Scalpers were hawking tickets marked down to $1,000 a pop.

Arnold Schwarzenegger and Vice President Al Gore and Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian premier, were there. So was a New York construction worker bearing a three-foot-tall statue of St. Anthony of Padua. There were girls from Ipanema and Mercedes Benzes wrapped in Italian flags. There was a guy dressed as Uncle Sam, begging for tickets.

Every third person on the face of the Earth--an estimated 2 billion viewers--was believed to have watched Sunday’s playoff game, which was beamed by satellite to 120 nations. No other event--not the opening ceremonies of the last Olympics, not the Royal Wedding, not the landing of the first man on the moon--has ever been seen by so many eyes at once.

Attendance, too, was unprecedented, despite the stiff ticket prices. In all, the 52-game series drew about 3.5 million fans, surpassing previous World Cup attendance records. For soccer enthusiasts, the biggest surprise was that two-thirds of those tickets were sold in the United States, a nation notable mainly for its tepidity toward the sport.

“This has been fantastic for this country,” said Bob D’Alessio, a native of Italy who traveled from his adopted home of Florida to be at Sunday’s game.

“It’s not just the foreigners who have been buying the tickets. When you look around, you see a lot of kids in the stands. Those are the ones who will keep it going.”

Soccer, wildly popular in most of the civilized world, has historically been a sports stepchild in the United States. It is baseball that has been this nation’s “national pastime” and football that has aroused the passions of its fans.

So when it was announced that the 1994 World Cup would be played in the United States, the world reaction was skeptical; even after the games opened June 17 to huge crowds, one international sports columnist gently mocked the indiscriminate cheering among Americans for “a game they do not understand between two nations of which they have not heard.”

It didn’t help that an American football hero was arrested for a double murder on the opening day of the event. As that case unraveled live on national TV, the split was a metaphor for Yankee tunnel vision--here was America riveted to O.J. Simpson, and here was the rest of the planet glued to the World Cup.

But as world enthusiasm mounted, sports fans looked to their roots, and Southern California’s immigrant communities rallied en masse. Businessmen from the suburbs showed up at the Rose Bowl with their faces painted to look like the Swedish flag. High school kids in Huntington Park rioted in the streets when the Mexican team took to the fields. Central American housekeepers--whose nations were not even among the 24 who competed in the games--packed the stands anyway, rooting for whatever Latin American team was in town.

And die-hard Americans found that they, too, could cheer, after the U.S. team scored a surprise victory over Colombia and made it into the second round.

The momentum built despite suffocating heat, scandal and tragedy. At one game, the temperature on the field at the Rose Bowl soared to 120 degrees. Another saw Argentine soccer star Diego Maradona stuck in the stands after banned drugs were found in his system. Still another game began with a moment of silence in memory of Andres Escobar, the Colombian player who was assassinated in Medellin after the top-ranked team returned home in defeat.

In another country, perhaps, interest would have dropped off as the one team after another was eliminated. But, oddly, fans only cheered harder as the finalists were winnowed down to two.

As Sunday’s game got under way, aerial views of the stadium were patchy with the bright colors of the Brazilian and Italian flags; but a close inspection revealed that the Rose Bowl crowd was as polyglot as ever.

Tom Langan, a 39-year-old writer from Dublin, came toting a sign that said “Brazilians are Irish with tans.” Arturo Cerna of El Salvador--waving a sign pleading, “TICKETS?”--worked the crowd outside the stadium while yelling at the top of his lungs: “Salvador, Brazil! Salvador, Brazil!”

The massive, inflated black-and-white soccer balls bedecking the stadium were covered with the scribbled graffiti of a hundred lands: Javier Correra, Guayaquil, Ecuador. Brigid, Paris. Wakko, Japan. Sergio Santini, Roma. Meanwhile, as the band struck a pre-game chorus of “La Bamba,” scores of gyrating fans were joined by a couple dressed in the day’s most cross-cultural garb--giant ersatz cans of Coke.

“I love events, I’m partial to decadence,” said Eric Squire, a University of San Francisco law student who ducked out of a bachelor party at dawn to make his plane down to Sunday’s game.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Most Americans don’t realize that, and they won’t until it’s over. You don’t get this sort of genuine enthusiasm at any U.S. sporting event.’

Despite a sellout crowd at the 91,794-capacity Rose Bowl, demand for tickets persisted well beyond kickoff time. When the series opened, tickets for the last three games were available only as part of a package that cost up to $2,500; individual tickets did not go on public sale until July 5. Face values for tickets to the final game ran from $180 to $475, but they swiftly disappeared, and prices began to inflate.

As game time approached Sunday, ticket holders milled around the stadium entrances, hawking extras at 200% markups, then dropping their prices as the morning waned. By the game’s end, Pasadena police reported, eight people had been arrested for scalping outside the Rose Bowl.

Fans, meanwhile, held out for last-minute bargains, hoping that the scalpers would get desperate after kickoff.

“Maybe, after the game starts, I can get a ticket cheap,” hoped Tato Duran, who paced outside the stadium with a Brazilian flag around his waist.

“What else can they do with them? Eat them for lunch?”

By game time, however, it was clear that, as with so much in America, the tickets were going where the money was. As play got under way, scores of fans who were not lucky enough to get them clamored around a TV in a booth outside Gate A, straining for a glimpse of the action.

At one point, a dozen fans pushed over a trash can and climbed on top, just to get a better look at the game on the small screen, while a gaggle of drum-beating Brazilian fans danced around the can.

While thousands more meandered around outside the stadium, looking lost, the stands within the Rose Bowl were studded with celebrities--Gore, Schwarzenegger, former President George Bush, actor Dustin Hoffman.

Though the championship of the world was at stake, the mood at first was less raucous than at some earlier contests, perhaps because of the hoity-toity crowd. But when Italy’s Roberto Baggio overshot his penalty kick in the game’s key, final moment, soccer’s legendary passion overcame even the blue-blood set--fans on both sides burst into tears and began to sob.

Before then, Andrew Bettene, a San Francisco resident who is a native of Sao Paulo, Brazil, attributed the relative restraint to the “big-money crowd.”

“I paid $450 a piece for these tickets. Big-money people don’t make big noise. If you want to see the excitement, check out the TVs in some of the local bars.”

Indeed, even before the bars on Old Pasadena’s Colorado Boulevard opened at 10 a.m., the lines were already a block long. As those without big money and hot tickets settled for small screens and cold beer, every club and restaurant on the historic thoroughfare filled to capacity.

Mike Mendoza, 27, of Whittier, joined a group of cheering Brazilian fans inside the 35er bar. He said he cheered first for the United States, then for Mexico and finally for Brazil to “support my Latino brothers.”

Meanwhile, inside Q’s, 10 billiard tables sat abandoned as the crowd watched a bank of TV sets tuned to a Spanish-language station.

“It’s the Old World versus the New World,” exulted Bill Martin Jr., 29, of Downey.

“It’s the Americas versus Europe.”

The bar crowds--who celebrated prodigiously but peacefully last week after Brazil won the semifinals at the Rose Bowl--continued the tradition of affable revelry as Sunday afternoon wore on. Colorado Boulevard was partially blocked off as hordes of triumphant fans continued to pour into the street hours after the game ended, kicking soccer balls three stories into the air, gyrating down the sidewalks in impromptu conga lines, beating drums and breaking into wild renditions of Brazil’s national dance, the samba.

Three hours after the final soccer kick at the Rose Bowl, people were still arriving in Old Pasadena--about 20,000 by 7:30 p.m. Rafael Jacinto, 29, of Scottsdale, Ariz., was so exhausted from partying that he lay flat on his back in the street, using a Brazilian flag as a beach mat, and weakly tooted a horn.

“I’m dead tired,” he said. “I’m going to rest a little bit, then I’ll party all night.”

At one point, revelers marched down Colorado Boulevard with a half-block-long green-and-yellow banner, the Brazilian colors. The banner soon became a rope for a giant game of tug-of-war, and finally, the crowd began ripping it to pieces for souvenirs.

Joining the crowd was Macsuara, 36, a shaman from the Kadiweu tribe in the Amazon region, who had reportedly blessed the team before before their first playoff game in the U.S. Wearing a head dress of toucan and macaw feathers, his face striped with paint, he shook a metal rattle as the crowd danced around him.

Some fans spritzed the crowd with champagne from the balconies as shirtless young men waited, open-mouthed, below. At one corner, two women appeared in a second-story window wearing one yellow “Brasil” T-shirt with two holes cut for their heads.

“Ole, ole, ole, ole--Bra- sil ! Bra- sil !” the crowd yelled.

Meanwhile, law enforcement officers--who patrolled Old Pasadena aggressively during the past month for violations of alcoholic beverage control laws--maintained a close watch. By early evening, 44 people had been arrested on charges ranging from assault with a deadly weapon to gambling and reckless driving and public intoxication, according to Pasadena Police Cmdr. Mary Schander.

Both on the streets and in the stadium, security was the tightest yet for this World Cup, with uniformed police officers stationed every 20 feet in the bowl. Several hundred sheriff’s deputies, on foot and horseback, patrolled the crowd, some of them with video cameras.

Security preparations, 18 months in the making, had been considered of paramount importance. U.S. apathy notwithstanding, soccer fans in other countries have been known to let their passions get the best of them, and past games have erupted in lethal rioting.

But as game after game passed without serious incident--no matter how agonizing the defeat or how thrilling the victory--the 1994 World Cup gradually became notable for its paucity of hooliganism.

“It’s fun. No one’s giving us a hard time,” said Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Joe Martinez, as he kept tabs on Sunday’s Rose Bowl crowd.

Amid the revelry, the biggest question was whether soccer mania might finally catch on in the United States.

“Soccer brings everyone together,” exulted Meire de Farias, a 28-year-old teacher from Sao Paulo, as she threw her arms into the air and danced her way out of the stadium after Brazil’s victory.

“I hope the Americans will come to love soccer like we do.”

Brazilian columnist Alberto Helena Jr. remained skeptical, but predicted “at least an incremental interest” in the sport.

But Magid Mazen, an Egyptian who now lives in Boston and who traveled across the country with his 11-year-old son to see the game, was substantially more optimistic.

“It was the United States that won today,” Mazen said. “Soccer has been born in the United States . . . (and) what makes me happiest is my son is here to share this with me. He is going to be a soccer fan and his children will be soccer fans.”

Diane Bishop, a Beverly Hills fan, agreed. “I hope it takes off now, and I think it will,” she said.

Either way, Bishop added, she is sorry to see the World Cup come to an end.

“It has been a great party,” she sighed. “The rest of the summer will be pretty boring after this.”

Times staff writers Tina Daunt, Shawn Hubler, Patrick J. McDonnell, Edmund Newton, Thomas S. Mulligan and Vicki Torres contributed to this report.