Fortune Steps Into New Role for ’92 Team : Volleyball: Former Laguna Beach High standout will replace Kiraly at outside hitter on U.S. Olympic squad.

In only four years, Scott Fortune’s Olympic moments made a drastic change.

He helped run statistic sheets at the 1984 Summer Games in Long Beach, watching as Steve Timmons and Karch Kiraly led the U.S. volleyball team to its first gold medal.

In 1988, he was a role player on the U.S. gold-medal team, pounding the final kill in the championship match against the Soviet Union.

“I figured there was no way I would do it in 1988,” said Fortune, 26. “I figured I would have to wait until 1992 to go to the Olympics.”

But Fortune, a former standout at Laguna Beach High School and Stanford, is far from a rookie when it comes to international play.

He has turned down six-figure contracts to play in Italy and has survived four difficult years with the U.S. national team.

He will have a new role on the 1992 U.S. team, starting at outside hitter in place of Kiraly, who decided to skip the Olympics to play on the pro beach tour.

Fortune has been reunited with some teammates from the 1988 team, including Timmons, Doug Partie and Jeff Stork.

“It takes a lot of pressure off me to have six solid players around me,” Fortune said. “I won’t have to be the workhorse I’ve been in the past.

“But there will be more pressure on me in other ways. I’ll get every serve, and everyone will be judging my game. They will ask, ‘Can he do that as well as Karch used to?’ ”

Kiraly and Timmons left the national team in 1989 for six-figure contracts in the Italian professional leagues.

Other players followed.

Fortune stayed.

For the next two years, he was the only player remaining from the 1988 team. Younger, inexperienced players joined the team. Fortune was named the captain. Suddenly, he was the leader.

The U.S. national team struggled the next two years, losing to experienced world powers such as Italy, Cuba, Brazil and the Commonwealth of Independent States. They also dropped matches to such upstart teams as Japan and China.

Fortune nearly quit the national team after the 1990 season, a year the United States struggled in the World League and finished 13th at the world championships in Brazil.

“I was on the edge,” he said. “I was ready to go play professionally in Italy. But I decided I wasn’t going to quit.”

Although Fortune didn’t quit, U.S. Coach Bill Neville did. Stanford’s Fred Sturm, Fortune’s college coach, replaced Neville in January, 1991.

The U.S. team slowly showed signs of improvement. The Americans placed third at the 1991 World Cup, then upset Italy in a World League match at Irvine. Still, they weren’t consistently beating the top teams.

“I guess I saw all the highs and lows with this team the past four years,” Fortune said. “In the last year and a half, the younger players have come together and developed into good international players.”

With veterans such as Timmons, Stork and Partie returning, Fortune figures the United States has a good shot at winning an unprecedented third consecutive gold medal. With the veterans in the lineup, the United States was 10-2 in the World League’s regular season.

“We have a big challenge ahead of us,” he said. “Teams like Cuba and Italy have been together for years, and we’ve been together only a few months. Everyone wants to stop us from getting a third gold medal.”