Gold-Medal Winners Leaving the AVP Tour Acrimoniously

Dain Blanton and Eric Fonoimoana, gold-medal winners in beach volleyball at the Sydney Olympics, have left the Assn. of Volleyball Professionals and are expected to join the new Beach Volleyball America tour.

With the help of their lawyers, Blanton and Fonoimoana have been released from their AVP contracts after several months of acrimony and bitterness.

Blanton and Fonoimoana, who fought openly with the AVP last year in a dispute over qualifying for the Olympics, are strong additions to the BVA, which started last year as a women’s tour but will add a men’s tour when the season tentatively begins in April.

The move of Blanton and Fonoimoana to the BVA is the latest blow to the AVP, which was established in 1983 but has undergone several recent changes.

The AVP’s Marina del Rey headquarters have been closed and operational authority has been transferred to Wall Street, home of the venture-capital company that rescued the AVP from bankruptcy in March 1999.

Bill Berger, AVP chief executive officer, has been ousted, and power now rests with Spencer Segura, senior managing director of corporate finance at Spencer Trask Ventures Inc in New York.

“We’ve had our headaches with this thing,” Segura said. “We’ve tried to let [the AVP] manage it on their own. Only when we’ve had real problems have we gotten involved. Now we’re getting involved.”

Segura denied that the AVP, which has remained cash-strapped since being acquired by Spencer Trask and has yet to announce a schedule for the 2001 season, is on the verge of folding.

“It’s almost a break-even proposition,” Segura said. “We wanted to get really professional management in. I think in the long run we’re going to bring expert management to the company that hasn’t been seen by the volleyball arena. It’s so close to working, we want to keep it going.”

Segura doubted that the BVA would pose a threat to the AVP, even with Blanton and Fonoimoana.

“I think the AVP has a bigger following than the BVA,” he said. “If you ask any beach volleyball nut, they’ve heard of the AVP. They haven’t heard of the BVA.”

With a smaller court, a heavier ball and rally-scored matches, the rules of the BVA mirror those of international tournaments, including the Olympics.

Segura doesn’t foresee letting AVP players out of their stringent contracts to play in BVA events. If that’s the case, the BVA will have to use players who don’t belong to the AVP--Sinjin Smith, Carl Henkel, Kevin Wong, Rob Heidger, Jeff Nygaard and Dan Landry, among others.

The problem between the AVP and Blanton-Fonoimoana began last June. Blanton and Fonoimoana were suspended briefly by the AVP because they registered for an international tournament in Italy that was being played at the same time as an AVP tournament in Muskegon, Mich.

The only way to earn points toward Olympic qualifying was in international tournaments. Under the language of their contracts, however, Blanton and Fonoimoana needed permission from the AVP to compete in non-AVP tournaments.

The duo spurned the AVP, earned enough points to qualify for the Olympics and stunned the beach volleyball world by winning the gold at Sydney.

The animosity continued after the Olympics. A solution couldn’t be found . . . until now.

“Because we are out of our contracts, we are free agents,” Fonoimoana said. “They don’t hold us hostage anymore.”