OUT OF THIS WORLD

PARIS —  OK, so you have two choices. This is the first:

You can listen to a foreigner tell you why soccer’s World Cup is the No. 1 sporting event on the planet. You can read a few sentences, yawn and turn the page.

What does he know, anyway?

And this is the second:

You can listen to a dyed-in-the-wool, flag-waving, native-born, mom, apple pie, three-computers-in-every-house and Seinfeld-reruns-forever American tell you the same thing.

Would you pay any more attention then?

Would it finally sink in that perhaps there is more to this soccer business than a bunch of people with strange-sounding names from stranger-sounding places kicking a ball about until they fall exhausted with the score still 0-0?

I doubt it, but we’ll give it a go. First, the foreigner.

“I remember being mesmerized on a school trip to Lyon when I saw the Brazilians play for the first time,” he said. “For 90 minutes, I sat and marveled at these magicians: Pele, Vava and someone called, I think, Pepe. It was the first time we had ever seen anyone ‘bend’ a football.”

Any idea yet who this foreigner might be? No? Well read on.

“I remember when we got back to Val d’Isere, we all tried to do the same.”

But France’s Jean-Claude Killy was never destined to make it as a soccer player. Instead, he became a triple gold medal-winning skier at the 1968 Grenoble Winter Olympics. The sport of his childhood never left him, however.

When, as president of the Albertville Winter Games in 1992, he was called on to select the final torch bearer to light the Olympic flame, he knew exactly whom to choose.

“We needed to attract the world’s attention,” Killy said.

Naturally, that ruled out every baseball, basketball, gridiron football and hockey player ever to pick up a mitt, a ball, a helmet or a stick.

So Killy selected Michel Platini, former French national soccer star, future French national coach and current World Cup ’98 co-chairman.

“Everyone was touched by Michel’s participation, and his photo with the Olympic flame appeared in all the papers,” Killy said. “Football is far and away the world’s No. 1 sport.”

OK, so you’re not convinced. And you don’t want to be inundated with all the dreary statistics: the millions who play the sport, the cumulative billions who will watch France 98, the global reach and economic clout that soccer has.

You’ve heard it all before and you’d still rather go and see a Dodger no-hitter--a game, by definition, in which nothing happens, the very criticism so often leveled at soccer’s scoreless ties.

So forget the foreigner.

Listen to this guy instead. He’s named Steve, not Jean-Claude or Michel. He was born right in the good ol’ U.S. of A. In Salt Lake City, in fact.

At the moment, he makes his home in Agoura Hills. He might even be a neighbor of yours. He has a wife, Sheri. They have three kids--Brandon, Emily and Trevor. Not a Predrag, Goncalino or Lothar among them. All-American kids with All-American names.

Steve has a master’s degree in education from Stanford. He’s not some hayseed off the farm deluded by the bright lights of the big city. He has been around. He’s worth listening to.

So ask Steve Sampson, the U.S. national team coach, what brought the meaning of the World Cup home to him.

“I’ll never forget being on the team bus and going from downtown Pasadena en route to the Rose Bowl, with thousands and thousands of people walking to the stadium dressed in red, white and blue, with drums and with their faces painted with stars and stripes,” he said.

“The bus had to go so slowly because there was such a huge crowd trying to express its enthusiasm and excitement for the U.S. team going into the Colombia match. We had all anticipated that because of the Latin-American influence in Southern California, the vast majority of the fans would be there rooting for Colombia.

“But in fact it was just the opposite. I think two-thirds were there to root for the Americans. And they were more boisterous than ever before. They were chanting, ‘U-S-A! U-S-A!’ It seems like the patriotism really came out that day.

“I’ll never forget the moment after the game when the players really didn’t want to leave the field. They wanted to enjoy the moment and to soak up that wonderful moment and wonderful event of beating Colombia and basically assuring ourselves of going to the second round.”

So you can’t really reduce a World Cup to simple numbers, can you? In the end, it isn’t even about how many fans attend or how many dollars are earned or how many games are won or lost.

In the end, it’s about human emotions on a planetary scale. It’s about passion and patriotism. It’s about people coming together from all walks of life and all cultures and all economic strata.

On the surface, it’s about chasing a leather ball around a grass field for 90 minutes and winning a world championship. In reality, it’s about mankind celebrating one of the few things that it has in common, along with music and art and literature. It’s the world’s game and the world’s language.

Here’s another American, one you could watch compete in France if you dragged yourself out of the isolationist closet that all too many U.S. sports fans so sadly still inhabit.

Listen to goalkeeper Kasey Keller going to bat for the sport he loves.

“You can’t really understand what the World Cup is unless you’ve lived in Europe or South America,” he said. “It is the pinnacle of everyone’s career. Something that every kid is striving for from the moment they’ve watched their first game.”

France 98 will be Keller’s second World Cup after Italy in 1990, when he was a backup goalkeeper. This time, he will start.

“In ‘90, I really didn’t know what I was there for,” he said. “We were a bunch of amateurs going to something that we had heard of or seen on TV and thought was a great thing.

“In ‘94, it was at home and [was] put on with the American flair that only we can put on. But this [France 98] is in a football nation in front of the European fans. It’s going to be the experience of a lifetime.”

One that will bring a smile to the face of at least one aging skier.

“If football is to remain a sport that dreams are made of,” Killy said, “this World Cup should celebrate youth. So that the dream continues, as it does for us, the not-so-young, who still get immense pleasure from harking back to the days of our footballing youth.”