Order by something I don't want to select?

[Magic2K2]

I have a table something like this for all intents & purposes:

id, date, player, opponent, time
1 1/1/07 joe jeff 8:00
2 12/31/07 joe jeff 7:00
3 1/1/07 bob jim 7:00

Now I can search the table using date and I need to return an output like:

bob 7:00
jim
joe 8:00
jeff

Looks easy, but bear with me. I want to return the results 2 rows per record as you can see above so I use a UNION query:

(SELECT player AS name, time FROM table WHERE date = '1/1/07') UNION (SELECT opponent AS name, '' AS time FROM table WHERE date = '1/1/07')

The problem is I want to keep Bob & Jim together and keep Joe & Jeff together while sorting by time! Since time is selected as '' (empty string) for the 2nd of the two players, I cannot do this because it will output like this:

jim
jeff
bob 7:00
joe 8:00

Now it would be easy to do if I were to just select id in each query and order by id, however I would rather not select additional columns. The reason is that this query is part of a very intricate program which takes each selected column and uses that in the output and I don't want to output id so I only select the columns I want to output. For the same reason, I select '' AS time for the 2nd player so the output isn't repetitive. I'm thinking I may have to modify the whole script though given this dilemma. Any ideas before I go ahead and do that? Thanks!

[longneck]

you need to do this in your host language