Karch Deluxe : Despite Political Harangue Over Control of His Sport, Kiraly Takes Aim at His Third Olympic Gold Medal

He is to beach volleyball what Michael Jordan is to hang time, given his collection of AVP MVP awards--four in a row, five overall--his tour-leading career earnings of $2.26 million and counting, his 116 tournament victories and his nomination by Volleyball magazine as “Most Important Person” in the first 100 years of the sport.

At 35, Karch Kiraly would be the undisputed king of beach volleyball, except for one thing.

Nothing is ever undisputed in beach volleyball.

It has been that way since the sport turned pro in the mid-70s, when players competed for little more than free beer and the major controversy was: OK, who gets the bigger mug?

Today, there are millions of dollars at stake, national TV time up for the grabbing and, in a first, Olympic medals to be awarded this summer. Beach volleyball will make its Olympic debut in Atlanta, not as a demonstration curiosity but as a full-fledged medal event for men and women.

For a sport with a rowdy, renegade, pass-the-lime-slices image, this ought to be a time of healing and bonding, of collective pride and unity, of hands-across-the-sand-divots. Of course, it isn’t.

A political power struggle between the two bodies attempting to police men’s beach volleyball, the U.S.-based Association of Volleyball Professionals (AVP) and the Federation International de Volleyball (FIVB), came close to rendering this week’s U.S. Olympic trials at Baltimore meaningless, with Kiraly and other top AVP players spending most of 1994 and 1995 boycotting the qualifying process before the

AVP finally capitulated last summer.

Kiraly has been a visible, voluble spokesman for the AVP side of the dispute, which he describes as “a rivalry just as intense as the one between CART and the owners of the Indy speedway.” That feud resulted in two separate 500-mile races being held on Memorial Day weekend.

The AVP isn’t likely to break away and start a second Olympics but the AVP players were given only one choice--Atlanta or bust--and reluctantly acceded to all the FIVB’s qualification demands.

“There was no compromise,” Kiraly says bitterly. ‘We had to accept all the FIVB’s edicts. The only question was whether we were going to accept them or not.”

Those edicts included:

--The top-ranked U.S. team on the FIVB tour bypassing the trials and automatically qualifying for the Olympics. That would be the team of Sinjin Smith and Carl Henkel, who have yet to win a tournament together and, in Kiraly’s words, “are obviously not one of the best eight teams this country has to offer.”

--The second-ranked U.S. team on the FIVB tour receiving a free pass into the semifinals of the trials while all AVP teams must play up through the preliminary rounds. The trials will send two more teams to represent the United States in Atlanta.

--AVP players being required to participate in FIVB events to earn points that would qualify them for the trials. This was the issue that triggered the boycott. Jump tours? At worst, Kiraly considered the demand treason; at best, inconvenience. Sixteen of the 18 FIVB events are played outside the United States.

“We’re the host country and here we were being forced off U.S. soil in order to qualify,” Kiraly says.

Or, forced to skip an AVP event in Belmar, N.J., for an FIVB tournament in Hermosa Beach, which is how Kiraly earned his qualifying points last July.

A seemingly petty squabble over qualifying points and sites was merely a front for a much grander contest--control of a sport pioneered by the AVP and only recently co-opted by the FIVB, which governs the global indoor game and long viewed the beach game as a sideshow.

“I certainly think it’s ironic that beach volleyball was first played in the 1930s in Santa Monica and tournaments of a high caliber have been happening in this country since the 1940s, and the FIVB, for many years, has ignored beach volleyball,” Kiraly says. “The FIVB, and the USVB [United States Volleyball], for that matter, thought beach volleyball was a lesser form of the sport.

“But once the sport broke in this country and became professional and began getting national TV attention, suddenly it became of great interest to those who had treated it with so little respect.”

Consider the reaction to Kiraly’s decision to bypass the Olympic indoor volleyball tournament in 1992 to stay on the beach. At the time, the establishment view held that Kiraly was (a) unpatriotic, (b) mercenary, (c) lazy, (d) more consumed with the Kiraly family bank account than continued glory for the old red, white and blue.

With Kiraly, the United States had won the gold medal in the 1984 and 1988 Olympics.

Without him in Barcelona, the United States placed a highly disappointing third, finishing behind Brazil and the Netherlands.

Karch would have made those digs that cost us the semifinal against Brazil, went the cry.

If only Karch hadn’t let us down, echoed the chorus.

“I’m happy with my decision,” Kiraly says four years later. “I have no regrets at all. I informed the team three years before the Olympics that I was retiring from indoor. It’s not as if I left six months before the Olympics and left them with a gaping hole to fill. I retired in July of ’89. The Olympics were July of ’92.

“I saw very little of the Olympics, because I was busy with the beach tour at the time. But what little I saw, I don’t know if I would have made a difference. I wasn’t willing to put the three years [of preparation] in. You want to have the 12 most dedicated players out there.”

Kiraly saw beach volleyball as the future--certainly, his financial future. He is a veteran of pre-gold medal U.S. indoor volleyball, when he and his teammates slept on the floor of a vacant condo while training in Point Loma, scrounging free meals at the home of the occasional U.S. volleyball supporter.

The beach, however, promised paychecks, which meant down payments and groceries. Hard to keep them down on the floor after they’ve seen Manhattan Beach and six-figure purses.

By Kiraly’s estimation, “I would have missed seven or eight years of playing on the [beach] tour if I had gone for the ’92 Olympics. I missed three full beach seasons in ‘82, ‘83, ’84 and half-seasons in ‘85, ‘86, ’87. I didn’t want to put the beach off any longer.”

And now, the Olympics have followed Kiraly to the beach. Unexpectedly, he has an outstanding chance at a third Olympic gold medal--he and Kent Steffes are the AVP’s top-ranked team, having won six of 10 events so far this year--but just as suddenly, he finds his beloved beach overrun and crowded.

Now a new rival tour cramps the AVP, enabling an old rival, former partner Smith, to waltz into Atlanta while Kiraly and Steffes grind their way through the rank and file this week in Baltimore.

Smith, swinging through Europe on the FIVB circuit, decided to stoke the coals already smoldering stateside via phone from a seaside resort in Alanya, Turkey.

“We did compete to earn our way into the Olympics,” Smith said. “We could have qualified one of two ways. One was through the international tour. The other was through the trials. What we did was open to all potential Olympians. I elected to make the Olympics and see the world at the same time.”

Kiraly asserts that Smith took the easy way out by joining what he considers an inferior tour and fashioning a No. 1 FIVB ranking against the kind of teams the AVP spits out of its tournaments every Friday.

“It would be nice to have the strongest U.S. teams possible in the Olympics,” Kiraly says. “Sinjin and Carl have never won a tournament together--Carl has never won a tournament--and Sinjin last won one in early ’93.

“Unfortunately, we’re not going to have the best teams in Atlanta. And that will make it a little less likely for the U.S. to win three medals.”

Said Smith, “I don’t understand the complaints. The trials in Baltimore are pretty forgiving for the top teams. It’s double elimination in the early rounds and double elimination in the final four. You can lose in the prelims, you can lose in the semis and still make it to the finals.

“As Americans, we had two paths to the Olympics. . . . As a country, we’re very, very lucky.”

To be continued in Atlanta, no doubt, assuming Kiraly and Steffes don’t pull a Detroit Red Wings-type flop in the next few days.

“Our big hope is to get to the Olympics and win the first beach volleyball gold medal--if we can make it,” Kiraly says. “There are a lot of good teams here. . . . A couple weeks ago in San Diego, we got upset and finished fifth.”

Even on the beach, uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.