Called to serve ... and spike

The skater bouncing off the bike-path wall is three concrete inches from meeting his maker and it’s wasted on me. I’m scanning the volleyball courts and hoping that one can give my partner and me a game. But with the exception of the pumped-pecs guy who just hammered one straight down, I’m seeing all the classic mistakes: straight knees on the pass, not squaring off on the set, no wrist on the hit, no understanding of how to make the wind an ally. But the balls are going back and forth across the net and this is beach volleyball.

Granted, it’s not what will be seen in Athens or on the Assn. of Volleyball Professionals tour or even at single-A competitions. But all the ingredients -- sand, sunlight, sea air -- that prompted turn-of-the-century day-trippers to set up nets on Santa Monica beaches and play the first games of beach volleyball are there. And I’m betting these modern-day players are just as happy about running and jumping and diving and not smacking into a hard gym floor.

But any illusions of softness end with the sand. The athletes who took the game from a laissez-faire afternoon in the sun to the see-saw marathons played by car headlights in the 1960s were in it for the explosive power that came with cocking your arm and sending the ball 65 mph. Along with the hard hitting came hard living (nail an opponent in the face with a spike and it was called a “six-pack,” and your teammate owed you the equivalent in beer). The game hasn’t gotten any easier, but the people who play it today are as likely to be Ivy Leaguers from New York as surfers from California. It’s a public sport with a private face. You are welcome to challenge anyone to play, but nowadays that could easily be an athlete on her way to the Olympics (top pro Misty May is famous for having been patient enough to play even novices), and you’re probably wasting her precious practice time. It’s good to seek out tough competition, better to look for about your level.

Which is my excuse for not jumping into any of those quartets dotting this Westside horizon. My partner is a volleyball Hall of Famer and I now have too many sand years to make them a challenge. Besides, there’s a kids’ game starting up, and they could probably use some old-timers to show them the way.

Sand warriors

To play on the beach, you’ve got to have bravado pumping through your veins. The uniform is a barely there bikini and love-handle framing trunks. The court size hasn’t changed in 100 years even though the predominant team size has: from six to two. (By 2002, the Olympics and the U.S. pro tour had gone to a smaller court for doubles play, but just about every public court out there is still 60 feet by 30 feet.)

At least the trash talk has been dialed down. I cite vintage Steve Obradovich: “You eat with those hands?”

You’re now more likely to hear platitudes (“Great shot”) or self-effacement (“Set you too tight. My bad.”) There’s even the temper-cooling etiquette of exchanging low-fives on side changes. Now if you want to get in your opponent’s head, it’s by clever wisecracks (When an opponent gives you a gift by serving into the net: “Thank you and Merry Christmas to you.”)

Mercy is not one of volleyball’s seven virtues, and the physics can take the blame. By the time the legendary Paul Johnson played the first recorded doubles games in 1915, it was apparent that getting four people together was easier than assembling 12. But now you’ve got this nucleus and another pair shows up and wants in, just how do you split the atom? The winning team holds the court and takes on challengers until there’s a new winner. So win or go home.

Beach volleyball appeals to the miser. The biggest expense, the poles and net, are provided in a number of beach cities. You can actually play beach volleyball all over the country, and every addict has their favorite story. Mine was playing doubles in a parking lot behind a bar in Savannah, Ga., where the sand was so powdery and the humidity so high that our legs looked like sugar-dusted churros.

Purchasing a ball is smart -- and can sometimes buy you a game (“You need to borrow my ball? Then I get to play.”). Get leather and never vinyl, and no one who plays sees much of a difference between Wilson and Spalding and Mikasa; the Wilson and Spalding balls are produced at the same factory in Pakistan. The majolica-colored balls used by the pros are a synthetic leather that’s soft and light and easy on the arms but makes you pay for the tiniest mistake.

You might also want to invest in a set of the rope lines used to mark court boundaries. It’s hit and miss which court sites will have lines. Both Sorrento beach, north of the California Incline, and the courts next to the pier in Santa Monica have them year-round, while it’s bring-your-own at nearby Will Rogers State Beach. If you like to hear your pennies scream, you can make your own by buying cotton or nylon rope and tying a leftover scrap of wood at each corner in place of metal stakes.

Professional volleyball is redwood country, but for amateurs the beach is still a land of opportunity: You can be short, wide, old or lame and win. Master some crucial fundamentals and exploit the opponents’ weaknesses. A simple game played by simple people, one sand sage is fond of saying. And he’s 80 and still playing well enough to win.

Getting your game

A lot of people have had some exposure to volleyball, maybe in junior high school or high school, although likely not at the level that club play has taken the sport. (Girls’ club volleyball is the biggest sport you’ve never heard of. At the Davis tournament last year, more than 30,000 girls participated, and they weren’t even on the top teams, which were competing at the Junior Olympics that week.)

In the old days, there was no way to learn the beach game except by connecting with better players. Or at least patient ones. Now there are classes and leagues and camps and private lessons. The city of Santa Monica has a great bargain under a program with the nonprofit Assn. of Beach Volleyball Coaches. In the summer, classes are $47 to $52 for eight weeks, about what it costs for one private session with a former pro.

At the higher end, Manhattan Beach charges $80 for residents and $86 for nonresidents for its eight-week series.

Even those with the faintest knowledge of volleyball should know the names Sinjin Smith and Randy Stoklos, who hold a summer camp for children and adults at “Baywatch” beach, a veritable Sahara of underutilized courts north of Will Rogers where the TV show was filmed.

“Baywatch” beach was also where Charlie Frank started his coed league, now the Amateur Volleyball Assn. Beach Volleyball League, 10 years ago. It has since moved to Sorrento, where doubles play is offered Monday and Wednesday evenings from 6 until sundown during the summer. The age range is early 20s to mid-40s, the level of player from rookie to advanced, and the atmosphere social, which “seems to mellow out the more intense players,” says Frank, and post-play might include margarita-aided game analysis at Marix Tex Mex in nearby Santa Monica Canyon. With this sort of mixing, no wonder “we’ve had six or seven marriages,” Frank says.

Beach bingo

In looking for playing time, know that not all beaches are created equal. Under the standard free-play etiquette, any team can ask for winners at any court. There, two things are likely to happen if you are a novice. You will be told that there are a dozen “waiters” ahead of you, when you can see maybe three -- a serious snub. Or you will be allowed to play -- only to be publicly humiliated.

Because of the league, Sorrento has a lot of free play on the weekends, particularly of the mixed variety, and can be a great beach for relative beginners. Conversely, it continues to be a practice site for top female pros coached by Jim Menges, who dominated the courts there on his way to winning the King of the Beach title in 1978.

There we watched Liz Masakayan and Linda Hanley hold “office” hours, as Hanley was fond of calling it, before the pair retired. There stalked the endless legs of Gabrielle Reece, before the four-woman tour collapsed and she found golf. Now it’s the AVP’s Annett Davis and Jenny Johnson Jordan, who this month upset the No. 1 team of Kerri Walsh and Misty May in the Manhattan Beach Open.

Volleyball is the only sport I can think of where you can get this close to the world’s top players as they practice (and learn by watching). I’ve played with men so revered in the sport that the names should have stopped me dead, but I wanted too badly to play. I’ve played against basketball All-Americans and Hall of Fame pitchers and college hockey stars.

Will Rogers State Beach has a large number of women’s nets -- and women pros. The men who come to practice there include Olympian Dain Blanton and current partner Jeff Nygaard. State Beach has a lot of prearranged games as a result and is not generally open to free play.

The Santa Monica Pier, on the other hand, is a caldron of free play that continues well into the evening even on weeknights and includes ABVC vice president and legal counsel Greg Venturi among its regulars. (There in 1975, Venturi and his partner, John Oppenheim, drew an unusually large crowd after they were challenged by a team Venturi didn’t know. Venturi and Oppenheim lost a gladiator-fought match, 19-17 -- to Ron Von Hagen and Bob Brunicardi, Von Hagen well on his way to becoming one of the greatest players of all time.)

Another inviting site for free play is in Ocean Park near Perry’s Pizza. It’s where the city classes are taught, which may explain why a lot of courts cook on the weekends. To the south at Playa del Rey is the only free public parking, which you would think would appeal to volleyballers. But its moonscape ambience draws little free play, though it is a competition site for the California Beach Volleyball Assn. Wind-whipped Zuma Beach, at the northern exposure of L.A.’s public sites, just doesn’t get the numbers, except at a relatively protected site near Guernsey Avenue, where a group of locals congregate and are open to free play.

I knew real estate was precious in the South Bay, but what’s going on in Hermosa Beach leaves me breathless. All it takes to tie up a court at the popular pier area is to stake your lines. You don’t have to actually be out playing. You don’t have to wait on the sidelines for the rest of your raggedy group to show. And no one else can play on that court.

“I think some people put in the lines and then go back to bed or go out for breakfast,” says pro Mary Baily, who recounts watching in growing frustration one recent weekend as a staked court lay empty for three hours. “We finally went all the way to 16th Street to play.”

When they’re not having to fume on the sidelines, the pros are heavy users of the Hermosa pier courts, partly because the deep sand makes for a tough workout. “If you can play at Hermosa, you can play anywhere,” says Baily. Manhattan Beach is also known for its deep sand, at the pier and at Marine Avenue, which get both free play and a lot of locals engaging in what Baily calls “friendship games.” Meaning that if you’re not already a friend, you’re probably not going to play.

Baily lives in Huntington Beach, where there are a lot of courts at the pier, but dirty, harder sand makes it a less inviting place to practice, especially when you put in the kind of time the pros do.

But top-ranked AVP players Tracy and Katie Lindquist practice there, as do pros from San Diego who come to meet the Angelenos halfway. But for clean, soft sand, it’s Newport Beach, says Bailey. Only problem is, there are poles but no nets.

One more expense.

The ancient ones

The Hize. The Mayor. Boots. A litany of the venerated ones at Sorrento. Don’t break until you see the shot, they chanted. They shamed me into stopping the Groucho Marx crawl and moving faster on defense.

They got me and others into games when we were too intimidated to ask. They cheered the crafty cuts and dinks. They yelled “ouch,” pretending those hits really had power. Their imprint is there no matter how the sands shift.

Dave Heiser, 80 years young, former vice principal at John Adams Middle School in Santa Monica, is still movie star handsome. He is the beach game’s angel, even though, he quips, “I lost two marriages to volleyball.” For decades he replaced the broken poles and nets at Sorrento and the old Sand and Sea beach club, a labor of love. He was an early proponent of “throw” ball. And a master at it.

Throw had a precedent. In the early part of the 20th century, all plays were made with the hands, or “thrown.” Over time that was outlawed; the player receiving serve had to pass the ball to the setter off outstretched arms formed into a flat plane, and sets had to fly off the fingers after only the briefest contact. Hits had to come cleanly off the palm or fist.

But if you could go back to throwing the ball, some aging players reasoned, then the game became more about finesse and guile and less about jumping high and hitting.

Throw got a foothold in the 1970s at State Beach, where even young pros such as Smith and Stoklos and Dane Selznick used it as a way of saving their shoulders. Now played with affection on some courts at State, the Sand and Sea, Sorrento and Ocean Park, in particular, it levels the field and adds years to what players in their 60s and 70 and 80s are saying is a lifetime sport.

A high-calorie-burning pastime that uses most of the major muscle groups, beach volleyball is significantly easy on the joints. “Shock travels up the body when you land,” says Dr. Lee Rice, a San Diego osteopath and longtime consultant for the U.S. national team. “Degenerative joint problems come with the repetition of landing in basketball and volleyball, and the higher the jump the stronger the gravitational forces. The softer the landing and the more you cushion it, the less the transmitted shock. Athletes are able to play competitive beach volleyball for their lifetime.”

Because it can be a strenuous cardiovascular workout and one that requires a range of motion, “slow warm-ups and stretching are important before and after the game,” Rice says.

Hit into the net to warm up the shoulder, jog slowly around the court. “I see players arriving at courtside late and they don’t take time to warm up, and that’s when you see the injuries,” he says.

Spiking and spiking

Venturi is reminiscing about the days when high school coaches would ban their athletes from playing the beach game.

“There was concern about drugs, the lack of control,” he says. But as much as Fox Sports Net would like you to think that beach volleyball is just one endless, breast-fixated party, the sport grew out of that long ago. It still has its vestiges: the Estero Beach tournament in Ensenada in late June, volleyball’s “Animal House,” for one.

But “the days when people would be falling-down drunk by 3 in the afternoon are over,” he says. And if those aging players are doing drugs now, it’s probably Botox.

Besides, just playing the game is about all the self-medication most beach fanatics need.

Lot cheaper too.

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Where the action is

1. Zuma Beach: Windy, windy, windy -- makes Chicago’s famed volleyball hangout at North Beach look calm. Courts at the south end get almost no doubles play; an outpost of two courts near Guernsey Avenue gets a mix of Malibu lifers and their friends from Ventura County looking for some action.

2. Will Rogers State Beach: Favorite stomping ground of old of the edgier, trash-talking crowd. Today there’s an air of gentility with the regular presence of Olympian Dain Blanton and partner Jeff Nygaard of UCLA fame, and visits by the dream team of George Roumain and Jason Ring. Gals, there are more than a fair share of women’s nets near the bike path. Courts near the parking lot are sheltered but there’s some coast highway exhaust to fret about. Because so many pros and locals converge here, not a lot of free play.

3. Sorrento: Sheltered beach with shallow sand makes it a great place for rookies and old-timers alike. Rich in history (the biggest names in the sport -- Ron Von Hagen, Ron Lang, Sinjin Smith, Jim Menges -- all held court here). Plus great views of the Gold Coast homes, including the Hiltons’ former manse (the sisters come from a long line of avid beach players) and the Peter Lawford estate (where Marilyn hooked up with the Kennedys). Top pros Annett Davis and Jenny Johnson Jordan practice here, but not at peak hours, which are weekday evenings and weekend mornings, when there’s lots of coed free play. Nets and lines in great condition, thanks to Charlie Frank, Lynn Anderson and the Amateur Volleyball Assn., which holds a league here.

4. Santa Monica Pier: Probably the best beach at honoring free play etiquette, including posted sign-up lists. It’s also urban gritty, from the sand to the noise from the pier to the wandering homeless who stop and gawk. The lights keep the caldron of play churning into the night. A favorite of some true volleyball lifers who have honed their shots over decades. Novices beware: Under the free play system, you need to win to stay on, so expect no mercy.

5. Ocean Park near Perry’s Pizza: Hot, hot, hot. Come early and expect to stay late as people matriculating from the city classes are there to play and play and play. Not the prettiest volleyball you’re ever going to see, but great if you’re a beginner. No lines, so bring your own.

6. Playa del Rey: Free parking and lots of it, but its exposure to the elements and lack of ambience don’t attract a lot of players, except during the numerous California Beach Volleyball Assn. tournaments held here.

7. Manhattan Beach: Santa Monica may be the Mother Ship, but Manhattan Beach is home of the granddaddy tournament of them all. Deep sand, both at the pier and at Marine Avenue, and lots of pros at practice. There’s some free play, but expect locals involved in “friendship” games to not be very friendly. And parking enforcement is even worse; you can collect a windshield of tickets in an afternoon.

8. Hermosa Beach: Don’t know how they’re getting away with it, but locals are coming early on weekends and staking lines at the pier courts, which holds them even if they’re not there. Pros are a big presence at the pier and at 16th Street, partly because the deep sand makes for a tough workout. At least the local real estate is pretty, even if you can’t afford it.

9. Huntington Beach: Dirty, hard sand at the pier, but you’ll still spot pros Tracy and Katie Lindquist, and pros from San Diego who come to meet the Angelenos halfway. Also, Butch May, father of No. 1 pro Misty May, is a regular.

10. Newport Beach: Clean, soft sand -- but it’s BYO Net.

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The summer sessions

Santa Monica: Eight-week classes for all levels Monday through Thursday evenings and Saturday mornings; advanced on Sunday mornings; $47 residents, $52 nonresidents; (310) 458-2239; www.santa-monica.org.

Manhattan Beach: Classes for all levels offered five nights a week; fee for two classes a week for eight weeks is $80 for residents and $86 for nonresidents. Summer session starts Monday. (310) 802-5400; www.citymb.info.

Hermosa Beach: Two-week classes for beginners (Monday and Wednesday evenings), intermediate (Tuesday evenings) and advanced players (Thursdays). Prices: classes for beginners are $65 for residents, $70 for nonresidents; intermediate and advanced classes are $85 for residents and $90 for nonresidents. Classes are held on south side of pier; (310) 318-0280; www.hermosabch.org.

Redondo Beach: Classes for beginners are held Tuesday evenings and Saturday mornings; intermediates on Thursday evenings and Saturday mornings. Eight-week classes cost $42 for residents, $47 for nonresidents. They are held at Knob Hill, which has just two courts, so class sizes are limited; (310) 318-0610; www.redondo.org.

Huntington Beach: No adult classes, but a large beach volleyball camp for children; (714) 536-5262; www.surfcity-hb.org.

Laguna Beach: Saturday morning classes at Main Beach run seven weeks and cost $70; (949) 497-0706; www.lagunabeachcity.net.

Amateur Volleyball Assn.: The group’s Beach Volleyball League offers coed doubles Monday and Wednesday evenings at Sorrento Beach in Santa Monica, $65 for eight weeks; (805) 557-0080, www.volleyballleagues.org.

Sinjin Smith and Randy Stoklos Beach Volleyball Camps: Two of the winningest players hold summer camps for children and adults at the courts north of Will Rogers on “Baywatch” beach. Prices from $25 to $250 for half-day to weeklong sessions; (310) 940-7166, www.beachvolleyballcamps.com.