A L S O _T O D A Y World Cup scenes By Matthew McAllester Passion and indifference mix in rural France World Cup From the stadium to the bar stool, watch for our ongoing reports T A B L E_T A L K How much should a plane ticket cost? Where can travelers get the best deals? Share your tips and tales in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Hog heaven By David Kohn At the Memphis World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest (07/03/98) Mondo Weirdo Nude Beach of the Week Readers bare all on an isolated Maui beach -- and in the heart of Munich (07/03/98) Yankee, go home! By Michaela Griffin Being an American expatriate in Beijing was great -- until the president's visit (07/02/98) Jazz swings into Beijing By Dan Ouellette Even better than President Clinton, jazz in China is spreading a message of liberty (07/01/98) Among the hooligans By Ethan Zindler World Cup scenes: Threat and theft among the hooligans in Lens, France (06/30/98) Browse the Wanderlust Postmark archives		The Cup runneth over and over _______________WORLD CUP SCENES: PROFESSIONAL SCALPERS AND AMATEUR PARTYERS CONVERGE IN MARSEILLE. BY ETHAN ZINDLER - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - MARSEILLE, France; June 27; Italy vs. Norway: World Cup ticket scalpers, or "touts" as the British call them, are a unique breed of cretin. They are the first to greet you at the rail station upon arrival at any of the outlying French host cities. As I get off the train in Marseille they crowd the platform, offering tickets to tonight's round of 16 match for five times their face value. Tout headquarters seem to be along the Champs Elysees, just below the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. At any hour of the day or night you'll find them with a cell phone to their ears, pacing up and down the grand walkway. The average tout consists of the following: buzz haircut, polo shirt, shorts, sunglasses, waist pack, sunburn, terrible teeth and a cockney accent. These weasels make a fortune off people's die-hard passion for the game. They prey on widespread ignorance about ticket availability for the matches. During the months prior to the Cup, there was tremendous controversy over ticket distribution. French organizers set aside a full 60 percent of all the seats for sale to French citizens. Another 17 percent were given to sponsors, Fifa (the international governing body of soccer) and other VIPs. That left a mere 23 percent of the tickets for supporters of the 31 other participating countries. Fans in England, the Netherlands, Germany and elsewhere were furious. And recognizing a hot-button political issue, so were their elected officials. Ticket distribution was not just unfair, they said, but illegal under European Union law. After all, if all citizens of the E.U. belong to a common open market, don't they each have equal rights to the tickets? In January, after prodding by British officials and others, the E.U. threatened the French Organizing Committee (CFO) with a massive fine if it didn't take immediate steps to rectify the situation. In response, the CFO announced its intention to sell 160,000 additional tickets directly to E.U. citizens via a special hot line. On April 22, the phone lines opened, and what followed was nothing short of chaos. British fans placed 15 million calls. Two million calls emanated from tiny Belgium. The Dutch phone system collapsed entirely under the volume of outgoing calls to France. British television ran stories of heartbroken fans. One had taken the day off from work to hit the redial button thousands of times, then given up in frustration. Another had managed miraculously to get through, then been unable to purchase tickets because she didn't have the proper credit card (Mastercard is one of the event's sponsors). The committee had assigned only 90 operators to field incoming calls and, of those, 30 were assigned exclusively to fulfill French requests. Reporters trying to reach CFO officials through their office switchboard that day received busy signals. It seems committee staffers were themselves placing hundreds of outgoing calls to the ticket hotline, clogging their own system. Within two weeks all 160,000 of these emergency tickets were sold, and as of the beginning of the Cup all 2.5 million seats were officially claimed. But that was by no means the end of the story. Thousands of fans, including large Belgian, Brazilian and Japanese contingents, flew to Paris for the Cup only to find that tickets promised them by their tour operators did not exist. One hotel had to call police to calm an irate crowd of Brazilians whose tickets for the opening match had not appeared. An American tour company had 15,000 tickets to late-round matches stolen from its company safe in Paris (what they were doing with so many tickets in their possession is still unclear). And an executive at ISL, the sports marketing agency that handled ticket distribution for the CFO, was arrested by French cops for selling tickets on the black market. In short, the entire process has been a disaster. Conventional wisdom is that finding a ticket to a match is nearly impossible. Thus the vermin with cell phones along the Champs Elysees routinely sell unsuspecting Nigerian or American or Dutch supporters tickets at triple, quadruple or 10 times face value. But right before game time you can often find the same touts or a local trying to unload seats at face value -- sometimes for even less. You would think this was the case only for obscure matches (how many people are dying to see Saudi Arabia square off against South Africa?), but there were plenty of tickets available on the street for France's opening game of the tournament -- and it's the home team. The other day I took the metro to Paris's Parc des Princes with hopes of paying a little less than double price to the Nigeria-Bulgaria match. Instead, I was able to buy one of the best seats in the house -- for less than face value. Inside, a young American couple told me they'd shown up at France's game against Saudi Arabia the night before and bought two "Presidentiel" seats -- at cost -- from a tout. They ended up sitting three rows behind Michel Platini, French football legend and head of the CFO. (Last Friday at the England-Colombia game, 50 unsuspecting members of the English rabble bought black market seats and were startled to find themselves sitting in a VIP box adjacent to Prince Charles and his son Harry.) How can this be? Here's one theory: French citizens and others hoarded tickets, buying more than they needed under the assumption that they could resell them at tremendous profit. Then came the deluge of media coverage detailing the shortage of tickets. That deterred the casual fan who might have caught the train from Antwerp, Barcelona or Milan to Paris, Toulouse or Marseille for a game. So long as you're patient and willing to wait until just before game time, you can find an affordable ticket. But even three weeks into the tournament, most fans still don't know this. At the Nantes train station before the USA-Yugoslavia game, foot traffic on the platform slowed to a crawl as touts and ticket seekers haggled. A few moments later, two American college boys rejoiced, "We got tickets!" They had bought seats for 700 francs (about $115) apiece, or double face value. Later, outside the stadium, those same seats were available for less than half of face value. N E X T+P A G E | Losing the game but winning the party! - - - - - - - - - - - - PHOTO BY ETHAN ZINDLER Top: A Norwegian fan partying in Marseille lands in the arms of a human trampoline.