This Beach Boy Is Different

One reason I like beach volleyball is, I see it as a last stand of the California lifestyle in sports.

The sport was spawned here, nurtured here, flourished here. Originally, it was something surfers did between waves. But it just grew and grew until it began to acquire a life of its own and, in many cases, began to overshadow the conventional form of the sport.

Besides, there are all those big, gorgeous hunks playing it. They look like what we conceive California beach bums to be.

You may remember, if you grew up in the East, we always had this image of California athletes, largely sustained by the USC football squads that used to come back there to chew up Eastern powerhouses, that they were all big, blond, beautiful specimens who were two inches taller than than the rest of the country, weighed 20 pounds more, ran two seconds faster, swam to Catalina every morning, threw the discus 300 feet and the javelin over the horizon, made up 70% of the Olympic team and 50% of the All-American team and married movie stars.

Reality set in when we moved out here and saw it was a stereotype, but I swear when I go down to catch beach volleyball, these impressions all come flooding back.

Take Kent Steffes. He’s arguably the best beach volleyball player in the world today. You look at him and you know he couldn’t be anything but a world-class athlete and a Californian--6 feet 4, blondish, tawny eyes like a prowling cat’s, golden tan, body as hard as a banker’s heart.

Kent is as California as a Klieg light. But he’s not alone. Every beach volleyballer from the Babe Ruth of the sport, Sinjin Smith, to Randy Stoklos to Karch Kiraly look as if they were cast for the part.

These other players sometimes accuse Steffes of not being properly deferential to those who pioneered and built the sport. Smith jumped off bridges, so to speak, to make beach volleyball the multimillion-dollar sport it has become. Steffes, on the other hand, is resentful of any hyperbole. He says the sport should stand on its own now, shuck its bikini-contest past and take its place with big league dignity.

Steffes is not your basic laid-back, go-with-the-flow, California beachcomber, anyway. He is aggressive, pugnacious. He goes through life like he goes through a volleyball match--on the attack.

He is as conservative politically as the Wall Street Journal, which he reads religiously. He’s as Republican as Calvin Coolidge. He plays the market and listens to Rush Limbaugh. This involves him in some lively debates with the beach culture but Steffes thrives on going for the spike there, too.

At 25, he is the youngest ever to be No. 1 in the sport. He is unusual in that he doesn’t do it with a power game. He leaves that to his partner, Kiraly. Steffes plays the kind of game in which he refers to himself as a “junk pitcher” or a “knuckleballer like Phil Niekro.” If he were a batter, he’d be Tony Gwynn. Or Wee Willie Keeler. He, too, tries to “hit ‘em where they ain’t.”

Although the crowned heads of the sport decry his lack of a sense of responsibility to the game they built, Steffes says he is promoting it in his own way. He believes he is leading his sport into a new century that could be its golden one.

Beach volleyball is a strange sport. Can you imagine baseball, in order to accommodate television, restricting its games to seven innings, or declaring two outs an inning? Can you picture football agreeing to play only three quarters?

Not likely. To be sure, some sports have changed their basic parts to better fit the the requirements of TV.

Take tennis. It brought in the tiebreaker in 1964, bringing relief for TV networks from the dreaded 22-20 sets that hindered the major championships. Pancho Gonzalez once defeated Charlie Pasarell at Wimbledon, 22-24, 1-6, 16-14, 6-3, 11-9, to give you an idea. It’s rare that a set goes beyond 7-6 now.

Basketball used to have a center jump after every basket. Now, they don’t even have one to start the second half.

But no sport has done more to tailor its dimensions to the little black box than beach volleyball.

Volleyball is an American invention, a six-man court game dreamed up in Holyoke at the turn of the century and played indoors on a hardwood floor under a net eight feet up. Beach volleyball is a California invention, a two-man court game played outdoors on sand, in sun.

The California game, like most California inventions, from drag racing to supermarkets to drive-ins, swept the country. The rest of the United States couldn’t always duplicate the Pacific seashore and the palm tree backdrop. So they’d truck in a load of sand, hire a collection of hula girls, hang a net and play away. Part of its charm is, you’ve put a little Santa Monica in Cleveland. You’ve imported “Beach Blanket Bingo” for a day.

Whereas both versions of the game originally were best two-out-of-three games--a game is 15 points and a two-point or more lead--beach volleyball discarded that in favor of a one-game match. And that one game can last no longer than an hour. No attrition game, no dreary succession of side-outs for the beach game. You stop when the hourglass runs out, no matter what the score.

If the purists are dismayed by all this, Kent Steffes and his beach buddies are jubilant. They consider three-game matches medieval--like 24-22 tennis sets.

Steffes and partner Kiraly, the Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside of beach volleyball, will be favorites in the $750,000 Miller Lite U.S. Championships at Hermosa Beach this weekend. This is one of the Grand Slam events of the volleyball tour, kind of the game’s equivalent to golf’s Masters.

NBC’s cameras will be there and will have no trouble picking out Steffes. He’ll be the one making it look easy, with the body of a Greek god and the moves of a guy who just showed up in a checkered suit and carrying his own deck.