Volleyball Gets Its Own Magic

For the life of me, I cannot picture him playing basketball for Bobby Knight in the NCAA tournament. Not with that goatee of his. Not with that tattoo on his leg of a skeleton spiking a volleyball. Not with that other tattoo wrapped around his arm--the snake. Oh, yeah. Sure thing. I bet Knight wishes all of his players could look like this.

It doesn’t matter. The game became volleyball, not basketball, for Lloy Ball. He stands 6 feet 9. He was an All-American high school basketball player from the cornfields of Woodburn, Ind., population 2,100, who was one of those hoop-happy Hoosier youths in the same recruiting class as Eric Montross and Damon Bailey, pursued by coaches coast to coast.

“How can you say no to Bobby Knight?” asked Lloy’s incredulous father.

But the kid did.

Lloy, the boy with the snake on his arm.

(It wards off evil, he says.)

He gave up basketball, just like that. And took up volleyball, full time. A game at which, by virtue of his height and position, he could become “the Magic Johnson of volleyball,” according to one of his coaches. Another one believes Lloy Ball could have the kind of impact on this sport not seen since Karch Karaly, who more or less was the Johnson of volleyball.

But why? Why, of all balls, volleyball?

“Oh, man, I don’t know,” Lloy Ball says. “Guess I broke the mold.”

He could have been out there hooping with the Hoosiers. The state university sent its private jet for Lloy. He can still envision the IU insignia on the tail as he watched the plane taxi along the runway. He still remembers its single stewardess as gorgeous and generous. Remembers being taken to Knight, of whom he still professes to be “in awe.”

Just not enough to play ball.

No, Lloy had another coach in mind. There was this guy upstate in Ft. Wayne. The one who had been so successful running a volleyball program at the Indiana Purdue branch up there. The one he called Dad.

Arnie Ball couldn’t understand it a bit. IPFW volleyball over IU basketball? Had his son gone nuts? Not go to Bloomington to be an Indiana Hoosier along with Bailey, the state’s “Mr. Basketball”? Not go man the front line, especially with Montross crossing up everybody by enrolling at North Carolina? Did his boy love him that much? Or maybe he disliked basketball that much.

No, couldn’t be that. For as soon as Lloy had led his father’s team to the NCAA final four of volleyball for the third time in four years--this is the only Division I sport the school plays--what did he go out and do? Broke his finger so he could barely play. Busted it in a pickup basketball game--doing a dunk.

Not Lloy’s smartest move.

“Yeah. Not too brilliant on my part,” he agrees.

Having just turned 23, he could be in the NBA right now, or even be a fifth-year senior on the Indiana team. He is not. Ball is a setter playing volleyball in the Pan American Games here, the tallest one this side of Wilt the Stilt. Thus the allusion by the U.S. coach, Fred Sturm, to a volleyball-playing Magic Johnson, because guys this size are blockers or hitters, not setters. It’s like Magic being a guard.

Breaking the mold.

The Argentine people call him “Joy Ball.” That is how they pronounce his name. (Named for a grandfather named Lloyd, Lloy dropped the last letter to be unique.)

An overflow crowd of 8,000 came to see the home team Wednesday against the Americans and was rewarded with a victory in straight sets. They also pointed fingers at Ball’s tattoos and sat transfixed with his every move.

“Joy Ball!” more than one would cry.

He is a long way from Woodburn. The town is surrounded on three sides by corn, as Ball verbally paints it, and farming, like basketball, is the staple of life. But today he makes his home near the South Mission district of San Diego, and his laughter was loud and long after he proclaimed, “Hey, I’m officially not a Hoosier redneck anymore.”

Hey, I say, Larry Bird was one.

True, says Lloy Ball, but his volleyball stunk.