U.S. Game Is Basking in Sun Again

Quiz: Name a sport that was invented right here in the good old U.S. of A. that we let get hopelessly away from us until there were times we were no better than 10th in the world at it.

Baseball? Naw. Baseball was probably invented by the Egyptians or the Phoenicians or somebody. We always played it better than anyone else on the planet anyway--with the possible exception of the Dominican Republic.

Hockey? Uh-uh. The Canadians invented it. They exported it but didn’t let go of it altogether.

Basketball? You’re getting warm. We invented it but never really lost an international competition till 1972, when the Soviets won at Munich with the help of a little bizarre timekeeping.

No, the easy answer is volleyball.

It’s kind of been the orphan of American sport. We found it on our doorstep in 1895 and took it in grudgingly to keep it around as sort of a scullery maid, a Cinderella to do the housework and sit by the fire and take the leavings from the family table of sports.

It occupied a place in public esteem somewhere between horseshoe pitching and fly-casting. Not a real sport at all, a kind of camel sport, a cross between a horse and a goat.

It had no heroes. It had no Magics, no Babes. Hardly anybody in it changed his name to Abdullah or got to be known as the Manassa Mauler or Sultan of Swat. It was a mix of tennis and tumbling. It was fun to play, exciting to watch, but the guys who could play it went into basketball or football instead.

In this country, it had the back seat all to itself. It had all the glitz of kayak pairs.

Which was fairly distressing, because in other parts of the world it ranked with hockey or basketball. There, they went, if not crazy, at least wildly enthusiastic about the sport.

GIs took it with them in World War II, largely because they found themselves in places where they didn’t have any football fields or baseball diamonds or even golf courses or basketball courts. For volleyball, all you need is a net and a ball and a rope. You can play it anywhere.

It was kept alive in this country on the beaches. It became a widely popular sand-and-sea game on the strands of the Pacific, something to do while you were waiting for a wave with some shape to it or for sunbathers with ditto to arrive.

The Japanese made an Olympic sport of it in 1964, when they were the host country with the option of adding two events to the Games’ schedule--their other was judo.

This didn’t exactly put a glass slipper on the game in America, but it got the attention of the Olympians.

The trouble was, Americans were terrible at it. We were 15 years behind the Soviets in technique and experience. We got blown out of the Olympics. We were lucky to win a game.

The Soviets won the gold twice, in ’64 and ‘68, the Japanese in ’72 and the Poles in ’76. We couldn’t even win a medal.

This is the best thing that can happen to a sport. Have the Soviets excel at it, finish down the lists to the Communists, any Communists.

Volleyball became respectable. Authorities began to comb the beaches from San Diego to Santa Cruz. They found, as it happens, the best players in the world.

Steve Timmons was one of them. A 6-foot-5 rawboned giant with the long arms and big hands of a mule skinner, he had been a crack backcourt man in basketball till an injury to his spine convinced him to go to a true non-contact sport.

Timmons and Karch Kiraly (pronounced Kur- eye) became the Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig of the rejuvenated sport, the home run hitters. They won the 1984 Olympics but since the Soviets weren’t there, the world wanted to put an asterisk after it.

But in 1988, Timmons, Kiraly, Craig Buck and company left the Soviets for dead on the hardwood court at Seoul. They barely lost games--only four--and never matches as they swept through the competition to a second consecutive gold.

A curious thing has happened to beach volleyball. Weekend players have become international celebrities. Sponsors have become enchanted with the identification. Beach volleyball has sold more rum than putting an umbrella in the glass.

The game has become a staple on cable TV where the couch potatoes in blizzards in Duluth or Dubuque have loved looking in on a sporting event on the beach at Ipanema with all those spectators in bikinis putting on suntan lotion instead of Chapstick.

Volleyballers still do not get $11-million contracts, they cannot afford to give each other Rolls-Royces. But nobody says, “Volleyball? What’s that?” anymore.

No longer do our best players have to go to their 9-to-5 jobs first, lock up the office when the stock exchange closes, take off the button-downs and the three-piece suits and go down to the beach for an hour or so and try to pick up a game before the sun goes down. Volleyball is finally truly American: You can make a living at it.

For instance, this weekend at the Hermosa Beach strand, Timmons is host of the Foot Locker Beach tournament, a volleyball tournament of 32 women’s collegiate teams from Southern California.

It is being taped for national telecasting. It is not a jiggle show, 100 Charlie’s Angels. Volleyball now holds its own in TV ratings. The sun-and-sea backdrop doesn’t hurt a bit, and it’s as easy on the eyes as Graf-Sabatini.

Have we reclaimed our own sport? “We hope to keep the team somewhat together through Barcelona in ‘92,” Timmons says. “Ten years ago, that wouldn’t have been possible. We’re in a position to compete for athletes, now that volleyball is an attraction on its own.”

Volleyball has come back where it started. That’s good news. Otherwise, to get even, we’d have to learn to dance sitting down and beat the Soviets at it to save face.