Dodd Has a New Partner, Outlook : Volleyball: She is ready to make a run at the top after winning partnership with Silva eroded.

Rumors and whispers. Back-stabbing. Successful marriages broken to pieces. Heroes and villains.

It sounds like a soap opera plot.

But if you ask Manhattan Beach’s Patty Dodd, it’s the way of life on the women’s professional beach volleyball tour.

Even the Colombian-born Dodd, a five-year veteran of the booming circuit, has trouble keeping up with who’s playing with who these days.

“I call it ‘As the Tour Turns,’ ” Dodd said. “We have girls who play one tournament with each other and then switch partners.”

Television revenue has driven up the purses on the women’s tour. Consequently, the desire to win has increased dramatically.

And players have begun shuttling around between partners, searching for that winning combination.

“It’s distracting, and in some ways I think it hurts the level of competition in the sport,” Dodd said. “Players are looking for the right chemistry, but they’re not staying together long enough to get to know their partners.”

Dodd, 26, finished her first week of practice with her new partner, six-foot Jeanne Reeves from Pacific Palisades. This weekend’s John Shaw Open at Manhattan Beach will be the tandem’s third tournament together.

But having to break in a new partner wasn’t Dodd’s idea.

Once again, Dodd has found herself stumped by the Teammate Shuffle. When Jackie Silva--the tour’s No. 1 player--dumped partner Janice Opalinski two weeks ago after a tournament in Fresno, Silva picked San Diego’s Karolyn Kirby as her new teammate.

Dodd had played with Kirby all season to that point.

When Kirby phoned Dodd to break the news, Dodd’s options were limited. A first-rate player herself, Dodd could have made some phone calls to some of the tour’s hottest players--Linda Chisholm-Carrillo, Kathy Hanley, Lori Kotas and Gail Castro among them.

“But I didn’t think it was ethical to go to somebody whose team was already set,” Dodd said. “The timing was just horrible.”

Instead, she called Reeves, a former indoor teammate of Dodd’s at UCLA, in the Italian professional league and in the erstwhile Major League Volleyball circuit with the Los Angeles Starlites.

A rookie to the beach, Reeves is tall and quick, has a first-class serve and a solid all-around game. But it will take her a while to become comfortable with the strategies of the two-player beach game.

Reeves is an assistant volleyball coach at UCLA and was busy on a recruiting trip when Dodd called. So the two played tournaments in Laguna Beach and Honolulu without practicing.

“I’m looking at it as an investment in the future,” Dodd said. “Jeanne’s a rookie, but I think in the long run she’s going to be as good as anyone.”

This month’s switch wasn’t the first time Dodd has been burned by partner changes.

Last year, she and Brazil’s Silva were the tour’s top team, winning 13 of 15 tournaments. The low-key Dodd and the mercurial Silva had some personality conflicts, but there was no doubting the duo’s success on the beach.

The fellow South Americans swept through the tour’s early schedule, winning often and easily. They were still winning as the tour wound down, but the scores were becoming closer and Silva was growing increasingly frustrated.

Silva dropped Dodd before the season’s last event and won the finale with Rita Crockett-Royster.

“We had different ways,” Silva said. “It had gotten to the point where we couldn’t talk, either on or off the court.”

In some ways, Dodd still hasn’t gotten over that split.

“At first, it really, really hurt,” she said. “Even now, when I think about it, I’m still hurt. I mean, I see Jackie every weekend on the beach, and sometimes we play against each other.”

Still, Dodd has no hard feelings. She said she thinks she understands Silva’s motives.

At the time, Dodd was getting involved with the politics of the women’s tour, attending meetings of the Women’s Professional Volleyball Assn. board.

Dodd said that Silva might have become jealous of her partner’s involvement with the board and might have felt that her interests weren’t being met through Dodd’s representation.

Dodd also said that Silva--who has won 17 of the tour’s past 21 events despite having four different partners--might have been motivated by a desire to be alone at the top.

“When Jackie dumped me, we were tied for No. 1 in prize money and points,” Dodd said. “By getting rid of me with one tournament left, she was No. 1 by herself.”

Dodd was able to recover from the blow by regaining a measure of success with Kirby and by falling back on the happiness of her three-year marriage with Mike Dodd, Manhattan Beach’s veteran beach champion.

Five-and-a-half years ago, at a weeklong U.S. Volleyball Assn. indoor tournament in New York, the lanky Mike Dodd approached the then-Patty Orozco to introduce himself.

“It was a party-type atmosphere,” Patty Dodd said. “There was a lot of socializing. After they were done playing, the guys would come out and look at the girls playing.”

The two began dating and were married two years later. The shared profession has made for a happy marriage.

“On weekends, we’re both traveling, so I’m not sitting at home waiting for Mike to come home,” Dodd said. “Time goes by faster. Pretty soon, it’s Sunday night, and we’re looking forward to seeing each other at the airport. It’s very healthy for the marriage.”

Mike Dodd’s other passion is golf and his wife is thinking of buying a set of clubs to pursue that sport with him. The couple lived in Italy for eight months in 1985, where they played the indoor game, so Patty Dodd keeps her husband happy with her mastery of Italian and Colombian cooking.

“He golfs, I cook,” Dodd said. “He’s not too picky about what he eats, so we stay happy.”

She was born Nubia Patricia Orozco, and she grew up in the quiet Bogota suburb of Santa Barbara, Colombia.

At 16, she was already a two-time most valuable player of the Colombian national volleyball team.

Today, Dodd considers Manhattan Beach her first home. But her family still lives in Colombia she often misses her homeland’s tropical weather and the warmth and grace of its people. The Dodds will go to Colombia for Christmas this year.

But Dodd doesn’t miss her native country’s problems with the cocaine trade.

“It upsets me very much,” she said. “I lived there for 17 years and I never saw cocaine in Colombia. But I have seen it here. The reason for all the problems there is because people are willing to buy the drug here.”

Dodd doesn’t like what has happened to the fiber of Colombia’s society because of cocaine trafficking.

“The value of life goes down,” Dodd said. “People start fighting for territory and money. The very few get rich and everyone else gets poorer.”

She is considering an application for American citizenship this summer because her new home offers her comfort and security.

“I’m like an adopted Manhattan Beach person,” Dodd said. “People respect each other more here because of the social laws and rules. I can walk on the street and not have to worry about having my purse snatched.”

For most of the year, Dodd teaches kindergarten to Hispanic youngsters at Felton Elementary School in Lennox. She knows three languages--English, Spanish and Italian--and is studying for her master’s degree in special education at Loyola Marymount.

At UCLA, Dodd earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology. She was also a two-time All-American in volleyball.

Along the way, she met Reeves. She’s hoping that her new partner can help her find some stability in the soap opera swirl of today’s beach tour.

“You’ve got to treat your partner just like a marriage, and stick with them through thick and thin,” Dodd said. “People that originally teamed up could have been great if they would have just stuck together. You’ve got to give it a chance.”