Only the uninitiated would mistake this scene for a beer commercial. Actually, it’s just another day in the sand for one of the fastest growing professional sports in the world, beach volleyball. This summer in landlocked Atlanta, the sport makes its debut as an Olympic medal event, along with women’s softball and mountain biking (page 78). Next week in Baltimore, the U.S. team – three pairs of men and three of women – will be finalized on courts hard by the Chesapeake. What started in southern California has now spread around the world. Besides the men’s and women’s tours in America, there’s now an international circuit. Brazil fields the best foreign team; the girl from Ipanema is now a slashing spiker.
It’s too late to get prime tickets for Atlanta; the event was one of the first to sell out. Spectators will see a game rather different from traditional six-man volleyball. There are only two players on a beach team; each covers half of an 1,800-square-foot court while battling deep sand, gusty wind and the Atlanta heat (page 79). Weaknesses are quickly exploited. “The players are like sharks on blood,” says Mike Whitmarsh, a 6-foot-7 former pro basketball player who partners with 6-foot-4 Mike Dodd on a team known as the Twin Towers. Whitmarsh loves to stuff opponents at the eight-foot-high net; his block is called the Whitwall.
It’s not always clear whether the fans are drawn more by the action or by the beautifully sculpted, scantily clad bodies. Promotional fliers for tournaments tout “beach-bound bombshells and hardbodies.” Inevitably, this emphasis on washboard bellies and perfect pecs has led to sniping among the players. At the moment, some of it is focused on Holly McPeak, a 26-year-old star from Los Angeles, who has already qualified for the Olympic team. Rivals, though not for attribution, call her “The Body Nazi” – deriding her 1,500 daily stomach crunches and her visit to a plastic surgeon for breast enhancement – and argue that she is undermining their status as serious athletes. In fact, though McPeak cuts a glamorous swath in the sand, her torso is interchangeable with pretty much any of the others on display. “I’m not out there to get looked at,” she insists.
Perhaps not, but don’t tell the corporate sponsors, who decorate the competitors as if they were Indy race cars. Of course, the placement of company logos poses a problem in a sport where clothing is kept to the barest minimum. The solution: armbands, stitching across the rump, even temporary tattoos. The women players have made an uneasy peace with the notion that the promoters are essentially selling sex. “If the idea of chicks in bikinis gets them out here, they’ll stay once they see us play,” says Christine (Schaef Dog) Schaefer. And they do stay. On a recent Sunday at California’s Hermosa Beach, 3,000 people jammed around center court to cheer, not leer, at the women’s final. “If I just wanted to see pretty girls, I could come to the beach any time,” says George Good, 49, of Hawthorne, Calif., who has followed the tour to Florida.
Many fans prefer the women’s game to the men’s, which tends, much like men’s tennis, to short bursts of action – serve, return (“bump”), set, spike, score. The women’s game features longer rallies and involves enough strategy that some teams have hired coaches, once a heresy on the beach. The women’s complaints parallel the early days of the women’s tennis tour. “We do the same job as they do – we should get paid the same,” says Liz Masakayan, who’ll vie for the Olympic team with her partner Angela Rock. Women’s purses are only about one quarter of the men’s.
In the early days of the sport, players found compensation where they could, often with free samples from the game’s beer and liquor sponsors. Today even the fans swig bottled water instead of beer and lather on high-digit sunscreen rather than coconut oil. “There used to be more of a party atmosphere,” says Kiraly, who chose volleyball over a medical career after winning gold medals with the U.S. indoor team in 1984 and 1988. “There’s too much at stake now.” Volleyball has been very, very good to him. On the beach tours he has won more than $2.5 million, and he earns another half million annually from endorsements. Now that he’s 35 and the father of two young children, Karch calls himself “the most tamed spirit on the beach.”
But for all its buffed-up professionalism, beach volleyball remains – much like its winter counterpart, hot-dog skiing – a sporting refuge for free spirits. “You can express yourself in this sport,” says McPeak’s Olympic partner, Nancy Reno, 31, who wears a signature tie-dyed bandanna over her unruly hair. (She’s readying a red-white-and-blue tie-dyed bikini for Atlanta.) Reno put a Ph.D. in animal biology on hold to play ball on the beach, but has found time for mountaineering treks to Nepal and a sojourn to Alaska to help clean up after the Exxon Valdez oil spill.
But free spirits are not always compatible. Earlier this year, Reno and McPeak captured an automatic Olympic spot by dominating the international tour. But then they went through a patch of poor play and Reno dumped McPeak (the same thing happened in 1995). “Chemistry can go bad,” explains Reno, who will play out the U.S. season with Karolyn Kirby, a former partner. But McPeak and Reno qualified for Atlanta as a team; they either play together or not at all. “It will all come together at the Olympics,” says Reno. McPeak is far less confident: “It’ll be hard not to let it affect me.” But in the meantime they’ve given sportswriters a good story.
The men also have their sniping. Much of it is now aimed at beach legend Sinjin Smith. At 39, he’s the oldest player in the game. His team won a spot in Atlanta by joining the international tour, which was boycotted by all the other top U.S. men, who consider the quality of play inferi- or. “Because of this we won’t have the strongest Olympic team possible,” says Kiraly. Smith and his partner Carl Henkel didn’t help their case by losing their four matches the last time they played on American sand. Smith blames injuries and fires back, “What’s their problem? I feel good enough to compete against anybody.” And, thank you very much Mr. Speedo, he looks good enough to compete against anybody, too. This summer, for the first time in Atlanta’s history, the beach will be the hottest place in town.
