An Athlete With Real Drive

Yes, sports fans. Gabrielle Reece is off the beach and on the links. For the millions who’ve watched her professional beach volleyball career and been awe-struck by her sinuous 6-foot-3-inch physique, her athletics, her supermodel face, her record-breaking stats, her multiple talents as fitness guru and emerging presence on TV, this will come as a shock. Reece is giving it up for the next two years, during which time she will devote herself to a reclusive life of swings, chips and putts. In an experiment, she will be paid to prove that a female athlete can pick up the game of golf relatively late in life (she’s 30), and still become a star on the women’s pro golf tour.

Since January, she has practiced about six hours a day, hit 168,000 balls, developed a powerful swing and can hit her pitching wedge 125 yards, longer than most of the women on the tour and about as long as many of the male pros.

She says she’s figured out in this short time just how hard the game is going to be and just how much she needs to learn: “A lot. It’s so complicated--you have all these different lies: uphill, downhill, side lies, longer or shorter grass. And unlike volleyball or other sports, you can’t use size or strength to compensate,” Reece said in an interview at her Malibu home.

Until Jan. 24, Reece says she had never hit a golf ball. Never picked up a club. Never even considered playing golf, which by her standards seemed a pretty tame, mostly mental game.

Reece is physical--happy in motion but not standing still. Until a few months ago, she seemed content to be pro beach volleyball’s Queen of the Kill, a.k.a. the Big Girl in the Middle, the one who slams, blocks and smashes balls into opponents’ faces while sweating, grunting and shaking off sand--and somehow still looking like a bionic princess designed by animators for a Disney film.

Depending on which publications you read, she is also one of “the world’s five most beautiful women” (Elle, 1989); one of “America’s 50 Most Beautiful People” (People, 1993); one of the “Twenty Most Influential Women in Sports” (Women’s Sports & Fitness, 1997). She is Nike’s most successful female endorser--she’s appeared worldwide in TV ads and promotions and was Nike’s first female cross-training spokeswoman from 1993 to 1999. She has also been an international model and cover girl, a columnist for fitness magazines, a TV host (most recently on NBC’s “Gravity Games”) and risk-taker on MTV Sports, where she’s tried road luge, white-water kayaking, drag racing and skydiving.

Recruited from her Florida high school to play volleyball for Florida State University, Reece was discovered by the fashion world while a sophomore in college. Soon she was spending six months a year in class and in volleyball, the other six flying around the world modeling for the covers of Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, Elle, Mademoiselle and Shape, to name a few. “I did it to pay my bills,” she says, “but I never put any energy into it.” She walked away from modeling at 21, as soon as she could turn pro and earn a living through sports. “I didn’t need it any more. But the vision that had been created of me seems to persist.”

It certainly does. Dozens of Web sites set up by fans honor her physical charms. Reece seems to shrug them off. “People relate to you on whichever level they care to relate. I don’t criticize any of it.” But she learned long ago, she says, not to rely on something as superficial as one’s looks. “I decided at an early age to be authentic, to work hard at what I felt really passionate about, which is the training and the volleyball and the sports life. When you develop a skill of some kind, it’s an accomplishment you will always own that no one can take away.”

Put all this together and you have the image of an icon--a wholesome, hard-working role model who is also what many males describe as a “babe”--someone so respected and well-known that she could easily sit back and rake in big bucks regularly offered for the use of her image and talents.

A Humbling Experience

Why would a woman like this put all that on hold for a solitary life of putts and chips on a San Fernando Valley golf course for the next two years when she’s not even sure she can succeed at the game? “I like starting at the bottom,” she says. “You know how you sometimes ask for things quietly in your head . . . whether you pray or however you ask for a change to come into your life? When golf arrived, I thought here is the door I’ve been looking for. I had to walk through. It is the most humbling thing I have ever tried to do.”

What the public thinks about her switch is irrelevant, she says. Evolving as an athlete and extending her life in sports is her goal. She regularly refuses what some might consider irresistibly lucrative offers, like the recent one to do a daily TV show, because they don’t fit her life plan. On the other hand, “I didn’t want to be stuck saying, ‘I’ve always done volleyball and that’s how people know me, and I’m pretty good at it, so I’ll just stay there because it’s safe.’ ” But until the unexpected phone call came that turned her to golf, she had no idea what next step to take.

That call turned Reece into the sports world’s oddball update of Eliza Doolittle, plucked from her safety net of fortune and fame by a millennium Henry Higgins named Mitchell Stein. He’s an entrepreneur from the West Valley who says he loves golf and “thought it would be a blast” to “experiment” by trying to turn a nongolfer into a competitor on the LPGA tour.

Stein, a retired trial lawyer, says he heads a group of investors who are paying Reece “generously” for her time and efforts and are providing “everything she needs to become the best golfer she can be.” It is a calculated risk, Stein says, because “most golf pros get into the sport in their teens or even before. The conventional wisdom about golf is that it’s a game in which you must start young if you’re ever going to get anywhere.”

Chuck Montalbano, a former PGA tour player, is the golf coach Stein’s group hired to oversee Reece’s game. “It has happened about 10 times in the past 30 years that a guy got into golf as an adult and made it to the pro level,” Montalbano said. “In women’s golf it has happened more. Of course Babe Didrikson Zaharias is the prime example. She was a track and field Olympic athlete before she ever took up golf in her 30s, and then she became a golfing great.”

The immediate goal is to get Reece to qualify as a member of the LPGA, the women’s professional tour. Even great athletes don’t find such switches easy, as basketball star Michael Jordan proved in 1994, when he tried baseball and didn’t make it to the major leagues.

Stein thinks Reece can make the switch. But it’s a bit like owning a racehorse, or financing a Broadway musical, he agrees. “If you win, you win. If you lose, you lose. Either way, it’s gonna be great fun.”

For a woman like Reece, who had an insecure youth and has worked hard to get where she is, you might think the odds would pose too much risk. You’d be wrong. She calculated the odds of almost everything she’s done in life, she says. And no matter whether she succeeds or fails at golf, “accepting the challenge will ultimately mean I win.”

If this sounds a little Sunday-morning-sermon-like, it is. But that’s exactly how Reece talks, and apparently how she lives. “It’s all about knowing who you are, what you want, listening to your inner voice. Sure, I love volleyball.” And so far, she loves golf. “But what I love more than either is the rigid, disciplined life of being in a sport.”

Her height, which has pretty much defined her life, is both a plus and a minus in golf, she says. “It’s an advantage for distance. I can use it to hit the ball farther. But because my parts are longer, it could take longer to get [my game] tight and small and efficient.”

Montalbano says he’ll have her “spend the majority of her time practicing from 100 yards to the hole, her short game, putting, chipping, sand play and wedge play.” The success of the venture “depends on whether or not she can get the nuances” of play.

Reece lives up the Coast highway north of Pepperdine in an isolated mini-manse that overlooks miles of curvaceous coastline north and south, and the endless Pacific ahead.

The house is sand-colored inside and out, and Reece seems to match--tawny skin, casually pulled-back, sand-colored hair, no makeup on her face. “Makeup isn’t me. My whole thing is less is more. Even when I was a fashion model, photographers tended to want to take the clothes and makeup off, instead of putting it on.”

In person, Reece seems almost delicate, and not as tall as she actually is. No muscles ripple into view as she moves, in spite of the fact that she works out at Gold’s Venice gym about three hours each day before or after her six hours of golf, which leaves little time for much else.

At the gym, she works with a primary fitness trainer, a weight trainer, and a nutritionist who says Reece eats about six small meals a day to keep in shape.

Reece is rarely at home, except to sleep, a fact evidenced by the lack of personal touches in her home’s large rooms, which boast oversized seating that is upholstered mostly in . . . sandy beige. Reece married world-class surfer Laird Hamilton three years ago, but he’s following the waves in Hawaii these days, she says. That leaves Reece on her own much of the time.

Tumultuous Childhood

Reece was born on Long Island, N.Y., to a Trinidadian father and “an incredibly beautiful and athletic” mother, who was 6 feet, 2 inches tall. The couple separated before Gabby could walk. When she was 3, her mother took off to train dolphins in Mexico, leaving Gabby with neighbors whom she grew to love as family. Her father occasionally came to visit, but was killed in an airplane crash when she was 5. Gabby’s mother remarried, moved to Puerto Rico and sent for her when she was 7.

She was shipped off to her mom and stepdad’s new home, which the family soon left in a move to St. Thomas, the Virgin Islands. It may sound glamorous, she wrote in a 1997 book about her life, but she recalls their house as being isolated in a ravine and her days almost always spent alone. In seventh grade she towered over the other kids, couldn’t find shoes to fit her big feet except sneakers and already had an ulcer. After preteen years featuring many travels and moves back and forth, she settled into what sounds like a wild adolescence.

Through it all, she says, she learned she could rely only on herself.

Then she met the son of a clergyman, a boyfriend whose family took her to its bosom, introduced her to solidity and faith, and she learned that a life of self-reliance could also be one of accomplishment and inner peace. In the end, she says, she is grateful for all those turbulent times. “I would take those 17 uncomfortable years any time in return for what I learned, because I think all the difficulties gave me some OK ideas as to how I wanted to live my life.”

She wants to live it with as much longevity as she can get in sports, and she’s hoping golf will be the route. “But ultimately, at the end of the day, I want my power to reside not in my physical attractiveness or my strength, because that’s connected with youth.

“I want ultimately to rely on my spirit, on the good friends and relationships in my life. And on the fact that I’m really smart. I mean, who cares what strangers think of me trying to succeed at golf? Who really cares? Not me.”