Olympic-Caliber Craziness : Volleyball Standout Samuelson Brings the Offbeat to Barcelona

For a rare moment, Bob Samuelson is at a loss for words. He’s trying to remember the craziest thing he has ever done, and he is completely lost in thought. If the guy had eyebrows, they’d be furrowed right now.

“The craziest thing I’ve ever done,” he mumbles to himself. “Hmmm. That’s tough. The craziest thing . . . “

There were the times when he was 12 years old, when he used to take his mother’s car out for 3 a.m. joy rides.

There were the various insanities he enjoyed with his best friend Tony Rusen, his volleyball teammate at Pierce College and later at Cal State Northridge: an epic barbecue sauce squirt-bottle war in an Arby’s parking lot, a high-speed chase with cops in Samuelson’s square-back Volkswagen, a failed boating expedition that left them marooned on a deserted island for three days, an all-out brawl in an Indiana hotel room sparked when Samuelson whipped a half-full beer can at Rusen’s head, a drunken scuffle at a Northridge party that ended with Rusen’s dart stuck in Samuelson’s hand.

Then there was the time Samuelson led the U.S. national volleyball team on a naked hike up a volcano in France. Or the time he organized a naked cliff-jumping expedition for the squad during a trip to Finland.

Team Unity Through Nudity, he called it.

Suddenly, Samuelson’s eyes light up. The raconteur is ready to go. Words begin to cascade from his mouth. Sound effects too. When necessary, he bounces out of his chair for a visual demonstration of his story.

“OK, I got one. I don’t know if it’s the craziest, but it’s crazy. I was playing eight-ball in this Tokyo pool hall--it’s just me, my friend Trevor and about 150 Japanese businessmen--and Trevor calls this ridiculous two-cushion bank shot. So I’m like, ‘Get the hell out of here.’ I told him I’d drop my pants and go home if he made it. So the (guy) goes dink --and he makes the damn thing. So I go all right, schwoop and whip my clothes off. So there I was, this six-five bald guy running through the streets of Tokyo in his underwear, like WAHOO! These Japanese people were looking at me like I was the weirdest guy they’d ever seen.”

Samuelson pauses. A grin creeps across his face.

“Wait a minute,” he says. “What am I saying? I was the weirdest guy they’d ever seen.”

But as the U.S. Olympic volleyball team entered its final months of preparation for Barcelona, Samuelson--who will turn 26 the day of the U.S.-Spain match--was practically well-behaved. Sure, he still left stink bombs in his teammates’ rooms, and arranged 4 a.m. wake-up calls for them, and occasionally stole their beds.

But only occasionally.

As the Olympics drew near, Samuelson got serious. He cut down on junk food. He cut down on beer. He didn’t karate-kick anybody, or slam tennis balls into anybody’s face, or get into any dart fights.

“I feel like such a conformist,” Samuelson said last week after a practice in the Federal Building at Balboa Park. “I eat the same thing for breakfast every day--yogurt and granola. I practice from eight to 12 in the morning. I go to bed ridiculously early, because I’m so tired. I go surfing in the afternoon. I think that’s my only individuality left--surfing. That and my tattoo.”

Yes, a tattoo. On his right ankle, a skull and crossbones with a blue Mohawk haircut.

Yes, a Mohawk. Samuelson likes Mohawks. When he spray-painted a graffiti rendition of his grandmother on the wall of his room, he gave her an orange-and-blue Mohawk.

Yes, his grandmother. Spray-painted on his wall. Right next to Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols, some dinosaurs, Bart Simpson, the cast of Bonanza, Mars Blackmon, a “Crack Kills” poster, Winnie Mandela, and a Sports Illustrated photo of a 6-foot, 5-inch, 220-pound volleyball player as bald as the cue ball Trevor used for his two-cushion bank.

Yes, a 6-5 bald guy. That would be Bob Samuelson, conformist.

Samuelson began losing his hair after graduating from Playa del Rey’s Westchester High in 1984. He learned that he has alopecia universalis, a rare condition that causes all the hair on the body and scalp to fall off.

Thus, his inability to furrow his eyebrows.

For a while, Samuelson clung to his few remaining tufts of hair, shaving them into arrows, gecko monsters, peace signs, Nike stripes. (Yes, gecko monsters.) But eventually, Samuelson accepted his shiny pate as yet another mark of his distinctive personality, like his size-14 feet or his strangely coiffed tattoo.

“Bob’s supposed to have no hair,” Rusen said. “He’s a unique guy. He should have a unique head. With hair, he’d look like a total goofball. Then again, he is a total goofball.”

Growing up with his mother in Kansas City, Samuelson went way beyond goofball. He was completely out of control. He drank. He says he tried every drug imaginable. He got into fights. He skipped school. When he didn’t skip school, he usually did something to get himself sent home. Unless he just got up and left.

“I got into trouble every single day,” Samuelson recalls. “I was just the worst kid you can imagine. I was a nightmare.”

His mother, Karen Prassos, finally ran out of patience. She sent Bob west to live with his father, Robert, a third-degree black belt who ran a karate school in Playa del Rey.

“I just laid down the law,” Robert says. “I said, ‘Hey, this is the way it is.’ Bob toed the line.”

Under his father’s watchful, no-nonsense eye, Samuelson developed into a basketball standout at Westchester High. He enrolled at Pierce hoping to transfer to Syracuse, dreaming of the NBA.

But during his first year at Pierce, Samuelson took a volleyball course and fell in love with the sport.

“I thought he was a madman to give up basketball,” Robert says. “I mean, I like playing football on concrete. I thought volleyball was a wimp sport. But he thought he could dominate, so I wasn’t going to stand in his way.”

After his sophomore season as an outside hitter, Samuelson was named junior college player of the year, an honor he shared with Rusen, a 5-7 setter at Pierce. But while the odd couple played brilliantly together at Pierce and later at Northridge, they behaved awfully together.

There’s competitive, and then there’s over-competitive. Samuelson and Rusen are hyper-competitive.

“We could be playing tiddlywinks, and we’d start whaling on each other,” says Rusen, who has broken several knuckles punching walls after losses, and once broke his foot kicking a curb. “We were wild guys, and we had wild tempers.”

Once, Samuelson was suspended from the Pierce team for trying to karate-kick Rusen during practice. He earned another hiatus for ripping his shirt into shreds after a loss. They were both booted for kicking the team’s Batman bop bag until it exploded. (Yes, a Batman bop bag. Don’t ask.) And then there was that juice machine in Pomona. . . .

“Yeah, Coach wasn’t at that game, and Bob and I kind of erupted a brawl,” Rusen says. “I mean, it was wild. The entire gym broke out in a riot. And there in the back of the gym, you see Bob, pounding the . . . out of this fruit juice machine, because he knew we were gonna get kicked off the team again. Everybody kind of stopped fighting and watched this huge bald guy demolishing this juice machine. Crazy night.”

Samuelson, of course, blames Rusen for his checkered disciplinary history. And you’ve got to admit--his record has improved dramatically since he joined the Rusen-less national squad in 1989. No suspensions. No punitive benchings.

“The only time I’ve really gotten in trouble was after the dart thing, and that was Tony again,” Samuelson says.

“We’re sitting there playing darts, and I start throwing darts at Tony’s feet, you know, joking around. So he winds up like he’s going to throw a dart at my head. So I go after him to grab him, and he takes the dart and goes HWAAAHHH right through my hand! So I go zzzhup and pull it out, and I’m spurting blood all over the place! Coach was not pleased. It’s kind of hard to explain why you were stabbed with a dart.”

Samuelson may have harnessed his temper somewhat, but he hasn’t lost his competitive fire. Even during practice, leading the U.S. reserves in a scrimmage against the starters, he argues calls (“WHAT?”), bellows at his teammates (“HELP ME!”) and calls time outs to psych up the scrubs.

In Barcelona, Samuelson will be America’s first man off the bench, playing behind 1988 gold medalists such as Steve Timmons, Doug Partie and Jeff Stork. His role is simple: fire up the team--and the crowd--with a big kill, a big block, a big serve. Inject emotion. Make an immediate impact.

“Sure, I’d like to start, but coming off the bench is better than not coming off the bench at all,” Samuelson says. “I can’t complain. The guys ahead of me are better than me. And I like coming in and getting everyone pumped. It’s perfect for my personality.”

After Barcelona, Samuelson plans to try the Italian professional tour. It’s tough to picture this cross between Ilie Nastase and Bull from Night Court in a Venetian gondola, or a Florentine museum, or the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

But Samuelson figures he will get along fine.

“They’ll love me there,” he said. “How could they not love me? I always get along with everyone. A guy can be the weirdest guy in the world--so what? I’ll still like him.”

Samuelson pauses again. Another mischievous smile crosses his face. “After all, I’m the weirdest guy in the world too,” he said.