All Sunny for Beach Volleyball

Volleyball is a game that’s as old as basketball, older than pro football, as American as the banjo, as balletic as a Bolshoi.

Every sports honk knows who Dr. James Naismith is. He invented basketball, right? Put a peach basket up and away he went. But how many have heard of William G. Morgan? He invented volleyball at about the same time and in almost the same place, Holyoke, Mass. Both of the inventions were in YMCA gyms.

They each wanted a sport that didn’t involve contact or brute strength. Naismith’s sport double-crossed him as soon as they invented the moving pick, the elbow to the groin and the zone press. Morgan’s sport was slower to gain acceptance.

It was not till 1964 that it became an Olympic sport. It was a six-man (or six-woman) court game played on hardwood floors across an eight-foot net. It became enormously popular abroad, particularly in Asia and Eastern Europe, but it was an honor without profit in its native country.

Then, an extraordinary thing happened: For some reason, young Southern California beach bums, eager to while away the hours when the surf sets were low, decided to work on their tans by erecting volleyball nets on the shoreline. They marked off the courts with rope, lathered on the suntan oil--and a whole new sport was born.

It was a two-man sport versus the six-man version, and it was played barefoot in swim trunks by hunks with drop-dead good looks and bodies by Michelangelo. It was attended by young women in bikinis so that it looked in full sunlight like a scene from “Beach Blanket Bingo.” All it needed was Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon.

It not only swept the country, it swept the world. Rio De Janeiro fell in love with it. Even the girls from Ipanema became setters and spikers.

It was thought you had to have the Pacific Ocean on your left to play this light-hearted offshoot of the game. It was just part of the Southern California littoral, like the grunion. But they reckoned without TV. It peeked in on this setting, and the world was hooked.

To the utter astonishment of the sport, the game was imported to such unlikely places as Cleveland, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Grand Haven, Dallas and Austin. They didn’t need the beach at Santa Monica as long as they had a Great Lake or an Ohio River or just an empty lot by a freeway. They trucked the sand in and played away.

It was a natural for the yuppie market. Cuervo Gold quickly jumped aboard. So did Miller Lite. Bottled water suppliers followed. It was a frat-house, sorority-sister sport as far removed from black-eye, split-lip, torn-ear sports as a prom from pugilism.

It even had its built-in heroes. Sinjin Smith had a name and a game you couldn’t soon forget. It was played by guys named Randy, Kent, Scott, Karch--tall, tanned, handsome, muscled. It looked like something out of Universal--”Gidget Goes to the Net. “

And now--a little fanfare music, professor!--it goes Olympic!

It took baseball about 80 years, basketball 40, indoor volleyball 65, but beach volleyball got in after less than three decades as a legitimate, recognizable sport. And baseball and basketball had to undergo a probation period as a “demonstration” sport in several Olympics. Beach volleyball didn’t, exempt because the parent sport is already accepted.

Much is made in these upcoming Atlanta Olympics of the geriatrics explosion, which bids fair to make the meets look like a complicated old-timers’ game. You half expect Jim Thorpe to show up. There’s Carl Lewis, he’s almost 35. Mary Slaney is 37. Linford Christie is 36. So is Johnny Gray.

And now there’s the grand old man of volleyball, Mike Dodd. When Mike first came upon the game, it was just kind of a seashore alternative to building sand castles--and just as lucrative.

Mike is 38, old as Olympians go. But he began playing beach volleyball as soon as he could walk. And old volleyballers, like old golfers, make the toughest competitors. If Mike Dodd were in baseball, he’d be a leadoff man or a good glove man. If he were in football, he’d be a free safety. Mike goes to the ball, and it’s as hard to get it past him as it was to get a line drive past Willie Mays. When the ball comes down, he’s under it. There are some games when he is horizontal more than he’s perpendicular.

Dodd thought he would make his living playing basketball. He was a good enough point guard to captain the San Diego State team and get drafted by the Clippers. The Clippers did him a great favor: They cut him. He had to turn to volleyball.

The beach game was only then beginning to flower. It was still played for dime-store trophies and a gorgeous tan, just a Sunday afternoon frolic for the sun worshipers of Santa Monica. It was advisable to hold onto your day job.

“Guys took jobs bartending, modeling, stuntmen, acting, lifeguarding--anything that could free up our beach time,” remembers Dodd.

But the graph kept growing steadily upward until 1982, when Dodd was able to sign on with an Italian professional team in Milan, where he stayed for four years, coming home in summer, solvent, liquid, able to return to his true love: the sand game.

To everyone’s surprise, that beach game swept the world. “I think it was the ambience,” Dodd recalls. “I mean, we were a beach party. We were what everybody longed for, envied: the Southern California beach culture. People saw it on television and they wanted to be part of it. I mean, you didn’t have to block any 400-pound linemen or get tackled or get a finger in your eye or a baseball in your ear. You were having fun between swims.”

Sponsors fought to get in on the act. Sand traps were set up outside warehouses in Boulder, Colo., and were sellouts. Dodd was soon amassing the lifetime earnings of a pro golfer--$1,489,407 by last count.

Dodd and his Olympic partner, Mike Whitmarsh, 33, have been dubbed “The Sunshine Boys,” but Dodd thinks he knows why beach volleyballers last longer. “It’s the sand. It’s a much more forgiving surface than wood or concrete or clay. There are no anterior cruciate ligament injuries. The worst you can get is a sunburn.”

The best you can get is a gold medal. I can see the title now: “Gidget Goes Olympic” or “Gidget Gets the Gold.” Starring Fabio.