THE SEOUL GAMES / DAY 6 : U.S. Comes Back to Beat Argentina in Volleyball

Humility not being the long suit of California volleyball players, it’s not surprising that a semblance of poise was still evident after the U.S. men’s volleyball team spotted Argentina the first two games Thursday, losing 15-11 and 15-11.

“We weren’t really sweating it,” said team captain Karch Kiraly after the U.S. rallied to win the last three games, 15-4, 17-15 and 15-7.

That wasn’t Kiraly’s exact quote. His phrasing was much more colorful and completely unusable in a family newspaper, but the drift was that the U.S. never felt out of control, even down, 0-2, to a team that was hitting the ball like Jose Canseco in batting practice.

Over the last four years, the U.S. players, all but one products of Southern California volleyball courts, have developed a winning habit and attitude. Until proven otherwise, they are the world’s best team, 3-0 in the Olympic pool play and seemingly headed for a gold-medal showdown against the Soviet Union Oct. 2.

The Soviets, 2-0 going into Thursday night’s match against Korea, are the tournament’s only other undefeated team. Argentina is 2-1.

Thursday’s script, the U.S. spending the first two games ducking the bombshells of Argentine outside hitter Raul Quiroga, a 6-foot 6-inch power forward type, merely served to earn the U.S. team more TV time.

Had the U.S. won the first two games, NBC’s directors probably would have been scrambling to find a more exciting events to show their viewers.

Instead, it was TV showtime in the Hanyang University Gymnasium, the U.S. home boys battling back and winning hearts and Nielsen points.

Had they lost this one, the U.S. would have been in danger of blowing that gold-medal date, expected to be against the Soviets. The sport’s two powerhouses may have had to meet earlier in the medal round.

The U.S. wants to play the Soviets not in an earlier round, but in the big game, as Kiraly said, “Because that’s the funnest time to play those guys.”

And these guys just wanna have fun, even if it makes life more difficult for U.S. Coach Marv Dunphy.

Thursday’s victory was a case of Dunphy borrowing a page from the Charlie Dressen textbook. Dressen was the old Dodger manager who would tell his players “Just stay close and I’ll think of something.”

Dunphy supplied the match’s coup de grace sending little (5-11) utility man Eric Sato into the fifth game to serve match point. Sato sizzled an ace that dove just inside the back line as the Argentines elected to pray it would sail long.

But Dunphy’s master stroke came earlier, in the third set with the score 4-4. The low-key U.S. coach changed setters, sending Jeff Stork in for Ricci Luyties. Stork, who hadn’t yet played in the Olympics because of a back injury suffered September 8, immediately served five straight points and gave the U.S. a 9-4 lead.

Stork set Steve Timmons for a kill to open the rally, Timmons scored on a block and Craig Buck hammered back-to-back kills. Stork’s ace made it 9-4.

“Serving has always been one of my strong points,” Stork said. “You get back 30, 40 feet and just bomb it.”

The key substitution seemed to change the U.S. chemistry. Kiraly’s and especially Timmons’ spiking came alive and the Argentines gradually came unglued. They committed an unforgiveable eight service errors in the fourth game, including two when they were down 16-15.

According to Kiraly, it was merely a matter of wearing down the Argentines, who have less top-to-bottom talent than the Americans.

“Number 9 (Quiroga) always gets hot,” Kiraly said of the 6-6 Argentine killer. “But he can’t stay hot five games. He made some critical errors.

“Big hitters are terminators. Eventually they’re going to terminate (a point) with big errors. He’s always come through with some key hitting errors. It’s really hard to shoulder the burden for five sets. You have to swing hard to terminate a play, and he might’ve gotten tired.”

The Argentines led in the fifth set, 5-3, but could score only twice more, once on a Buck error.

“We weren’t that crisp on offense, from the first point to the last point,” Kiraly said. “They seemed to be reading our setters’ minds. We should be getting a lot of one-on-ones, and when we do, that’s (an) automatic (kill). But we rarely went one-on-one.”

In other words, on a less than scintillating day for the Americans, they still managed to pull out a very important victory.

“The Americans burn on the field,” the Soviet coach has said. “They have a fire in their work.”

They also have a collective confidence, bordering on cockiness, probably a byproduct of having dominated the world competition since 1984. Or maybe it’s a distinctive trait picked up on the beaches of So Cal.

“Do we look cocky out there?” Kiraly asked earlier this week, in answer to a question about team attitude. “We don’t concern ourselves with image. Starting in 1981 it took seven years work to get to where we are now. We still have that desire, that hunger. Success hasn’t come to us overnight.

“We want to maintain that hunger. We’re certainly not here for show. We’re certainly not going to back down, but we’re not concerned with image.”

If the U.S. was confident of rallying from 0-2 against Argentina, that might be because they have done it before. At the 1985 World Cup in Tokyo, the U.S. came back from 1-2, fought off match point at 14-10 and won the final game 15-11.

But the U.S. is 4-0 over Argentina over the last four years, and an American loss Thursday would have been surprising.

“Early on,” said U.S. middle blocker Bob Partie, “no one was making what I call the grovel plays, getting down on the floor. We were just going through the motions. Karch was doing his darndest to get us going, but it wasn’t working. Then Jeff came in and showed us.”

Stork, a former Pepperdine All-American, isn’t exactly an unknown. He has been the team’s starting setter the last three years, and was all-tournament at the recent Savvin Cup in the U.S.S.R.

But since suffering a pinched never in his back in a pre-Olympic warmup match in Japan, Stork has been spending his workout time in the trainer’s room. He didn’t practice with the team the six days before the Argentina game, but he had the green light to play Thursday.

“We just needed to make a change,” Dunphy explained. “He’s a great server, and he set a little quicker tempo.”

The first two games were an exhibition of home run-hitting by Quiroga, slamming wonderful sets by Waldo Kantor off the U.S. mat.

“He’s a good enough hitter to take what we give him,” Kiraly said. “We’ve scouted them a lot. We know from the back row he hits cross court. We took that away and he hammered it down the line several times.”

Partie, who had his sideburns trimmed more than once by Quiroga kills, said, “He’s one of the best hitters in the world.

Facing a killer of this caliber, and a team as dangerous as the Argentina, you’d think the U.S. would have come out firing, but you would be wrong.

“I think we were a little overconfident,” Dunphy said. “I think we woke up a bit. We were waiting for the Argentinans to make errors, we were waiting for them to lose. Believe me, we won’t do that again. That’s not a problem.

“They (U.S. players) know how to take it to another level, how to respond.”

As the valiant Quiroga said, “The U.S. is able to maintain its concentration as well as any team in the world.”

They’ll test their concentration level Saturday against France and Monday against Tunisia before getting into the medal round.