Offside

This game they call soccer gets more bizarre by the day. Other sports have their peculiar people, but soccer seems to go out of its way to find odd characters and curious quirks. Here are a few of the more strange goings-on that have attracted headlines around the world so far this year: * The Spanish club Deportivo La Coruna got more than it bargained for when it signed Uruguayan striker Sebastian "El Loco" Abreu, and perhaps his nickname should have been a tip-off.

Some people should know when to shut up. I've always found Reggie White of the Green Bay Packers to be a good person to interview. He's intelligent and accommodating. At the Super Bowl he was great all week, even indulging a TV type who was asking such pointless questions as "What's your favorite kind of cheese?" But now I never want to hear another word from White. Not one.

1. Question: Jimmy Johnson has Craig Erickson backing up Dan Marino in Miami, but what does he think about the drop-off in quarterback talent around the league? Answer: "If you're going to have a winning football team, you have to have a winning quarterback," Johnson said. "That's the starting point, the number one spot. It doesn't have to be a Pro Bowl quarterback, but he has to be good enough to make plays and avoid the bad play.

Nigeria's Olympic soccer players have a proposal for Johannes Bonfrere, the reluctant coach who quit the Nigerian team for five weeks this spring in a dispute over back pay owed him: Will he accept gold as payment instead? With their second stirring 16-minute rally in as many games, Nigeria's "Super Eagles" became the first African nation to win a soccer gold medal Saturday by upsetting Argentina, 3-2, in a wild, controversial final before a sellout crowd of 86,117 at Sanford Stadium.

They went down fighting--and for once, they weren't fighting each other. For the Netherlands World Cup team, that was a considerable achievement. Not as great a feat as getting to the final would have been, but exiting on a sad yet harmonious note will have to stand as Holland's crowning achievement in the 1994 tournament after its 3-2 quarterfinal loss to Brazil on Saturday at the Cotton Bowl.

Through the past few years, football teams visiting Denver usually have been concerned with getting beaten by either John Elway's arm or John Elway's feet. The Chargers found a new way to lose Sunday afternoon. They lost to John Elway's mouth. The Rocky Mountain Mouth pitched a siren song at the Charger defenders, exciting rather than lulling them. In fact, it excited them so much that they lost a very big game, 16-10, for seemingly the littlest of reasons. Offside penalties. That's right.

Any football fan watching the Denver Bronco-New England Patriot playoff game here Sunday must have told himself: These teams are alike in just one respect. Neither one can beat the New York Giants. Put together, they probably couldn't beat the Giants. The Broncos were only good enough to eliminate the Patriots, 22-17, because the Patriot defense quit playing on the play that won it.

When state lottery officials began devising a marketing plan to attract customers to their new Lotto game, flashy television commercials with action shots of smiling sports stars seemed like a natural. After all, Californians might want to pick the uniform numbers of their favorite professional athletes when they plunk down their dollar bills and select their entries next Tuesday when the lottery kicks off its legal numbers game, called Lotto 6/49.

Chargers running back Gary Anderson turned his USFL jitterbug into NFL acceleration Sunday afternoon. "When Gary came to the sideline early in the game," said Chargers offensive backfield coach Earnel Durden, "I told him he was making too many moves and was dancing too much when the pursuit was closing in. I told him to get up in the hole." Anderson has the moves and body control of a dancer, and Durden says he has the "acceleration of a jet." In the Chargers' 30-10 win over the Denver Broncos Sunday, Anderson ran, hurdled, slashed and danced his way to his first 100-yard game in the NFL. "Keep jumping over tall buildings," Chargers running back Buford McGee yelled to Anderson as they passed one another in the locker room.