Smith, Stoklos Win Volleyball’s Triple Crown

Long after the final spike, Sinjin Smith sat signing autographs and posing for pictures with kids, both big and little.

Smith is the senior member of the professional beach volleyball tour. Thirteen years ago, at the age of 20, he would play for six-packs of beer. Saturday, he and partner Randy Stoklos played for and won $70,000 in the $150,000 Cuervo Gold Crown at Mariner’s Point.

By defeating Tim Hovland and Kent Steffes, 15-6, in a championship match witnessed by about 8,000 spectators, the pair became the first team in history to win all three Gold Crown events in one season.

And with each victory, each autograph, each picture, Smith realizes he is becoming a bit of a celebrity, something he never envisioned in 1977 when he first started playing professionally. Smith hasn’t lost his appetite for making his living knocking a volleyball over the net. It gets more fun each year.

“You know,” he said, “it can be more exciting now than when I started. People want our autographs. We’re stars more than we’ve ever been. We’ve earned respect all over the country for something we enjoy doing, playing volleyball.”

Stoklos and Smith have been partners for nine years, which is as good an explanation as any why they continue to win more than any other team. It is all about familiarity and teamwork. Smith plays his steady, consistent game, keeping points alive with digs that sometimes make you rub your eyes. And Stoklos just hammers away with his patented “Kong Blocks” and crunching spikes.

So when somebody suggested Saturday to Stoklos that $70,000 wasn’t bad for a day’s work, he responded: “No, it’s not bad for a day’s work, but it’s a culmination of 10 years of work and nine years of playing with Sinjin Smith.”

After that much time, a team knows how to do the little things. Saturday, they forfeited their seventh match after Karch Kiraly and Brent Frohoff forfeited theirs against Hovland and Steffes because Frohoff had sustained a back injury earlier in the day.

Under the round-robin format used, the top three teams moved into the championship round, with No. 1 advancing straight to the title match and Nos. 2 and 3 playing off for the other berth. The forfeit by Kiraly and Frohoff clinched the top spot for Hovland and Steffes and made the seventh match for Stoklos and Smith meaningless. So they elected to rest for the semifinal playoff, in which they wound up clubbing Kiraly and a hobbled Frohoff, 11-5.

Stoklos didn’t react favorably to the forfeit by Kiraly and Frohoff, saying it was a conspiracy by the two teams to make it more difficult for him and Smith to win the tournament. Frohoff answered by saying: “I just wanted to save my back for that game. If he can’t understand that, he’s not a human being.”

Said Kiraly: “Seeing Brent incapacitated out there just shows how paranoid Sinjin and Randy are.”

Are they?

“Wouldn’t you be paranoid?” Stoklos asked.

His point was that the top-seeded team always has to look over its shoulder at the rest of the pack to see who’s closing in. This time it was Kiraly-Frohoff and Steffes-Hovland.

When all the politics were complete, the volleyball was entertaining, though not particularly suspenseful. Kiraly and Frohoff took a surprising 4-2 lead in the semifinal, boosted by Kiraly’s high-speed serves. But midway through, Frohoff jumped a bit too vigorously for a spike, and he played the remainder of the match at half speed.

The final wasn’t much different. With help from Smith’s skyscraping serves, Stoklos and Smith took a 9-0 lead and then worked their way to the victory. Stoklos put pressure on Hovland and Steffes throughout the match with powerful blocks. At 14-6, Hovland hit his spike a few feet past the end line, and Stoklos and Smith had their triple crown.

“I think that’s the best I’ve seen them play since the world championships against me and Mike (Dodd) four years ago,” said Hovland, whose team earned $15,000 for second. “They were the better team today.”

For Stoklos and Smith, there have been so many victories, but both admitted this was special. Achieving something that no one has accomplished felt pretty good.

“You win and you win and you win,” Stoklos said. “What else can you do? That’s what you can do, play like we did right there.”

Said Smith: “It’s the highlight in my career. To be able to pull it off three different times. The odds were definitely against us winning.”