HITTING THE . . .BEACH (SORT OF)

The 1997 World Championships of Beach Volleyball, brought to you via the unlikely cease-fire alliance of the Federation Internationale de Volleyball (FIVB) and the Assn. of Volleyball Professionals (AVP), open today missing only one thing.

The beach.

Land-locked Westwood, where a crushed-ice margarita is as close as it gets to saltwater surf, is the improbable site of these championships, courtesy of 2,700 tons of rented sand trucked in from Simi Valley and dumped all over the tennis courts at UCLA.

What, the AVP and the FIVB couldn’t agree on a beach?

“Hermosa?”

“No, Redondo.”

“How about Manhattan?”

“Huntington.”

“You’re out of your mind as usual. Newport.”

“Laguna!”

“La Jolla!”

“Enough of this already. Let’s just put the damn thing (dart thumps hard against a wall map of greater Los Angeles and vicinity) . . . at UCLA. All right. And we’ll need some sand. (THUMP!) OK, we truck it in from Simi Valley.”

Actually--and officials from the FIVB and AVP concur --there are practical reasons these first hands-across-the-net world championships of beach volleyball are being held on an artificial beach.

First, Nike, which is co-sponsoring the event, wanted it at the UCLA Tennis Center, where permanent seating and lights already exist and VIPs can be grandly entertained with no threat of sea gulls or sand fleas.

Nike, having brokered this four-day truce between the FIVB and AVP, was going to get what it wanted.

Second, the AVP’s attempt to hold its Grand Slam tournament at Manhattan Beach in June resulted in a snarl of citizens’ lawsuits and denied Coastal Commission permits, forcing the event to be moved to Hermosa Beach.

Third, have you ever tried parking at a volleyball tournament actually situated within a beach community--a practice sometimes referred to as the Miller Lite/AVP Park-N-10K Walk-Run to Center Court?

“Logistically, it’s very hard to set up a large venue on the beach,” says Sinjin Smith, president of the Beach Volleyball World Council for the FIVB. “Building one of those venues on the beach is not an easy task. In most of the beach communities, there’s not enough parking for five, six, seven, eight thousand people.”

“This is the future of sport,” says Karch Kiraly, member of the AVP board of directors. “We have 32 men’s teams and 32 women’s teams coming in for the championships, plus the four-man teams. Big events like this really can’t be held on the beach.”

In truth, getting the FIVB and the AVP to sign off on the playing site was the easy part of these negotiations.

Interrupting the ongoing FIVB-AVP struggle for control of the sport to bring these rival factions into the same event to compete for a singular world championship--that was the real artistry and finesse of the deal.

For those new to the feud, a bit of background:

The AVP, founded in 1983, organized the first professional beach volleyball tour, overseeing a 10-year boom in the sport that has garnered television and sponsor partnerships producing annual prize money of $4.5 million.

The FIVB, the governing body of international volleyball, noticed this boom, at first an American-only phenomenon, and tried to expand it worldwide by creating its own beach volleyball circuit in 1989.

Thus, unofficial territories were staked out--the AVP getting the United States, the FIVB the rest of the world. Conflicts developed when the AVP tried to branch out into foreign venues and the FIVB began restricting player movement between the tours.

When the Olympics added beach volleyball as a full-medal sport in 1996, the AVP and the FIVB haggled long and bitterly over the qualification process, which allowed FIVB players to qualify on their world rankings while AVP players had to earn their way in an Olympic-trials style tournament.

Once both sides congregated in Atlanta, beach volleyball took the Olympics by storm. The tournament was an out-of-left-field success, with NBC’s television audience proving a pushover for up-close camera shots of scantily clad suntanned athletes romping on the beach.

Too bad the Olympics come around only once every four years.

Noting that other Olympic sports plug the four-year gap with annual or biennial world championship events, the respective heads of professional beach volleyball, Ruben Acosta of the FIVB and Jerry Solomon of the AVP, decided to try to build on the momentum of ‘96, even if it meant agreeing not to disagree for a few days in September.

“The Olympic Games were evidence that the sports of volleyball and beach volleyball are growing in popularity throughout the world,” Acosta says. “Creating this event is a critical step in volleyball’s evolution as a participatory, spectator and corporate-supported sport.”

Angelo Squeo, the former Italian volleyball professional who now serves as the FIVB’s beach volleyball coordinator, recalls flying into Los Angeles in March for an ice-breaking meeting with the AVP’s board of directors.

“In the beginning, it was pretty hostile,” Squeo says. “In the beginning, they were, very, you know--how can I say?--they were afraid to see me there. They were a little bit afraid to say anything.

“Then I started to say this: ‘I’m here for you. I am here for the sport. I want to convince you this competition is worth it for you.’

“After that, we talked for an hour. I think we put the basis together then.”

Sports agent Leonard Armato, the former AVP executive director co-promoting the world championships, says, “We broke down the political walls. This really does take the sport to another level in terms of prestige. If most of your energy is taken up fighting, it’s difficult to make strides.”

Solomon of the AVP waxes less poetic when describing how the accord came to be.

The world championships, Solomon says, are simply “a result of Nike taking an interest in the event and seeing that if they were to get involved, they would have to have the best players in the world. They really had no interest in the event if the best AVP players were not invited.”

To say the event signals a truce is “a little broad,” Solomon says. “It’s an event we considered important. We saw it as good for the sport and good for the AVP and good for the AVP tour.”

While Squeo tries to shine a smiling light on this week’s happenings at UCLA, portraying the championships as peace in our time, to “put in the past all the disputes,” Solomon has adopted a wait-and-see approach.

“This is essentially a one-year deal,” Solomon says. “Let’s see how it develops. . . .

“I would love to see our sport do something similar to what golf and tennis have done--where the governing bodies control the Olympics, the Grand Slams and some kind of team cup competition, and the tour dictates the rest of the calendar year.”

AVP and FIVB officials will meet this week to discuss the future of beach volleyball and, to Solomon’s thinking, “this is probably where the game is going to end up anyway. I’d like to see us get there without shedding all the blood other sports have.”

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Championships at a Glance

* What--First World Championships of Beach Volleyball.

* Where--UCLA’s L.A. Tennis Center.

* When--Wednesday through Saturday. Qualifying is Wednesday (admission to qualifying is free). Format is single elimination.

* Who--Thirty-two men’s and 32 women’s two-player teams. Twenty-four teams in each draw got automatic bids. The eight others have to qualify. There is also a men’s and women’s four-player invitational.

* Tickets--Call Ticketmaster at (213) 480-3232, or UCLA’s ticket office at (310) 825-2101.