Vollyball Goddesses

Another day at the office for Liz Masakayan and Karolyn Kirby, and they look a little tired. It's 8:30 on a Sunday morning at the end of August. Their motel wake-up call was late, so they had to hurry breakfast, hustle to the grandstand court on Manhattan Beach in Los Angeles, peel down to two-piece swimsuits, slather themselves with sunscreen and, against a light breeze, under perfect sunshine, start bumping a volleyball back and forth to each other. They are warming up for their semifinal match in the Reebok Nationals, the finale of the Women's Professional Volleyball Association tour. Across the net, Dennie Shupryt-Knoop and Deb Richardson are working on their serves.

On the promenade above the beach volleyball courts, three sailors in starched whites have stopped to watch. "Major babe alert," says one of them as they gawk with shameless delight at the four beautiful, nearly naked women who are about to go to work. I eavesdrop as the men argue their preferences according to body type and hair color. The options before the sailors are all appealing: Masakayan, dark and exotic, 5'8"; Shupryt-Knoop, blonde, athletically compact; Kirby, a beautifully proportioned 5'11", also with blonde hair; and Richardson, a lean and stretchy 6'1".

A few minutes later, as the game starts, Kirby stops the sailors' beauty-contest patter dead by skying off the sand to spike a ball (it's about the size of a man's head) with an explosive force that has to remind them of gunnery practice. The courtside spectators turn their chairs over to get out of the way of the vicious blast. The sailors look at one another as if they've just seen Shaq jam one. They laugh, exchange low fives and make their way onto the sand and into the grandstand to watch the rest of the game. Kirby and Masakayan (continued on page 124)Volleyball(continued from page 110) overcome their morning fatigue and take care of business in a hard-serving, sand-crashing, 15--9 win.

"I'm not sure what men expect when they come to a tournament," says Kirby after the match. "They may come for the bikinis, but they stay for the competition, and they go away with respect. When it's over, they know that what they've seen out here are not your average women."

That's putting it mildly. These women were scholar-athletes in college, and they have the strength and stature that goes with the title. Most of them hold other, full-time jobs--there are lawyers, personal trainers, entrepreneurs, real estate agents, interpreters, accountants, volleyball coaches, mechanical engineers, restaurant managers, actresses, teachers and city planners on the tour--and many have young children.

Dennie Shupryt-Knoop, a 39-year-old who runs a business from her home in Los Angeles, survived southern California's November 1993 wildfires, the January 1994 earthquake and the postfire mudslides. She gave birth to a daughter on February 11, 1994 and ten weeks later took fourth place with Deb Richardson in the Reebok Fort Lauderdale Open. Other than that, she's just out there getting a good tan, playing a game that most people think of as something to do until the burgers are finished grilling.

•

Beach volleyball began in California in the Fifties as casual pickup games on improvised courts at Malibu, State Beach and Laguna. Back then the serious athletes played for beach chairs and beer; the rest of us wandered into the games for something to do when we weren't surfing or swimming or frying on the sand. It was a gentler game then--like basketball before the dunk--and because most colleges had volleyball programs for women but not for men, the women in the beach games were often the only ones with any real hitting skills, finesse or sense of strategy.

Amateur tournaments sprang up along the coast in the Sixties and early Seventies, and by 1976 the level of play among the men was high enough to attract sponsorship for the first professional contest ever, in Pacific Palisades--total prize money $5000. Since then, the men's tour, under the auspices of the Association of Volleyball Professional, has exported this little piece of the California dream to cities, all over the country, where it plays to hundreds of thousands of fans, and on-to television, where it has grown into a sophisticated marketing entity that in 1994 attracted enough sponsorship money and TV revenues to offer a prize kitty of more than $4 million. The Women's Professional Volleyball Association, organized ten years after the men's tour, played the season for a total purse of slightly more than $600,000, the highest ever.

•

Money of course, has changed the game, but it hasn't changed the scene much. The beach at Manhattan is still a gorgeous swath, stretching north into the luminous glow where the bright sun hits the Los Angeles smog, and south to Hermosa and the ragged blue clifftops of Palos Verdes. By midnorning on Sunday of the WPVA final, the promenade above the beach is a river of walking, jogging, skating, biking flesh and summer colors. The grandstand around center court is full, and the beach is standing-room-only all the way to the tents representing the commercial tribes that sponsor the women's tour: Reebok, Coors Light, Killer Loop sunglasses, Chevrolet, Naya ("the goddess of bottled waters"). Admission to WPVA tournaments is free. Sponsors pay expenses, put up prize money and give away towels, water bottles and other beach paraphernalia in the hope they'll become logo-linked with this lifestyle sport, as the marketing people call it.

Just before 11 A.M., CBS cameramen take their places to prepare for a live national telecast, while the master of ceremonies introduces the finalists: Barbra Fontana, born in Manhattan Beach, is 5'6" and one of the tour's great defensive players. She's 29 years old and works as a lawyer. In 1994 she was president of the player-governed WPVA. Her partner, Lori Kotas-Forstyhe, is 6'1" and 36 years old. She's a durable played who ranks seventh on the list of all-time tour money-winners. The team of Barbra Fontana and Lori Kotas-Forsyhte had two tournament wins in 1994.

Unfortunately for them, they are competing against Liz Masakayan and Karolyn Kirby, who have won each of the ten previous competitions they entered this year. Masakayan--who goes by the nicknames Flyin' Masakayan and the Lizard--is quick, powerful, intense. Now 30 years old, she was a two-time UCLA all-American and member of the 1988 Olympic indoor team, and she is second on the WPVA's list of career money-winners. Her partner, Karolyn Kirby, has yet to acquire a nickname, but who needs one when everybody calls you "the best woman to ever play the sport"? At 34 years old, she is first in nearly every category for which women's volleyball keeps statistics, including wins and earnings. She is a huge hitter and has battered her way to league MVP honors five of the past six seasons.

"Partnership is everything in this game," says Kirby when I question the two of them about their slamming success. "Liz and I fit together quite well. We both like living on the edge, we're spontaneous, we don't like to be bored. Our style is physical, powerful and graceful. And we can say things on the court in the heat of the game without causing each other to get weird or defensive."

"Trust, loyalty, communication, maturity," says Masakayan, summing up the strengths of the team. "And hard work."

"What about life on the tour other than volleyball?" I ask.

"What life?" says Masakayan, and they both laugh.

"You have to pick your spots," says Kirby. "It takes a lot of energy to sight-see or go to dinner with people when you're exhausted, you have an 8 A.M. match and a pulled muscle you have to spend the night working on."

I tell them that I know something about their massage-table moments. I'm staying in the same hotel they are, and on my first morning there, the room-service waiter, Tony, brought my breakfast and said, "Do you know who's in the room across the hall? Karolyn Kirby and Liz Masakayan." He paused for my acknowledgment, then dropped his voice and said, "Yesterday afternoon I brought dinner to them, and Karolyn was naked on a massage table." He savored this moment, then quickly added, "They told me to come in."

Kirby and Masakayan laugh at the story and bat it back and forth between them.

"Oh yes, come in. Tony, come in," says Masakayan.

"Here's the oil, Tony," counters Kirby. "Let me show you how this is done."

(continued on page 146)Volleyball(continued from page 124)

"Call your boss, Tony," says Masakayan. "Tell him we have a small problem with the bill and that you'll be a while."

•

Despite Kirby and Masakayan's tournament dominance, the crowd is rooting for a close match in the Manhattan final. Fontana and Kotas-Forsythe are the tour's second-ranked pair, so there's at least some hope that they can pump a little last-minute competition into a season that has been embarrassingly short on challenge for the number one team.

The gap between Kirby-Masakayan and the rest of the hundred players on the tour is a vacuum created by a bitter split within the WPVA two years ago, when four of its best six players left to form a women's bracket that would play alongside, but not with, the men on the bigger, richer AVP circuit. The defections came at a bad time for the women's league, and if Kirby and Masakayan had joined the mutiny, it might have sunk the WPVA altogether.

"It was devastating," says Kirby. "The AVP offered a kind of financial security that the WPVA couldn't, and some players chose not to stand with the organization that had given them the opportunity to become professionals. We were in the same boat financially so we sort of understood, but it was disappointing."

"It was hard because they were our friends," adds Masakayan. "It wasn't so much the act of their going as the way they did it, the things that were said by people who had been my friends for six, seven years. When money is laid on the table, shit comes out of people's mouth that should not."

"Volleyball is what we do best," says Kirby. "What we are learning is how much harder it is to control the business and the politics that go along with it."

•

Five minutes into the game, Kirby and Masakayan are beginning to do what they do best. Despite several long points, several wicked serves by Fontana and a couple of sand-eating digs by Kotas-Forsythe, the power on the other side of the net begins to put unanswered points on the board.

"Karolyn and Liz are so together. They just play at another level," says Melanie Sullivan, a 5'10" rookie from Branford, Connecticut. "My partner and I faced them once this year and got our first bagel." (See page 148 for a complete guide to beach volleyball's indigenous language.) Then, as if it were part of some live-ammunition boot-camp exercise, Sullivan shakes her head and says, "I've heard a Liz jump-serve whiz by my ear."

On the court against Fontana and Kotas-Forsythe, the Lizard and her partner are each doing everything: Masakayan is serving the guns of Navarone, digging kill shots out of the far corners, dumping pokeys into whatever small patch of sand is open. Kirby is Kong at the net for the blocks and is driving bloody spikes down the line, down her blockers' throats and deep into the crowd on the rebounds. A half hour into the match they lead 9--3, which is making the television producer very happy. Volleyball is traditionally played without a time clock, to 15 points, but the win must be by at least a two-point margin. The live CBS coverage is scheduled for one hour, which means a close game might not finish in time. As it turns out, the worry is wasted: Forty minutes into the game, Masakayan takes three steps, goes into the air, ponytail flying, and sends a screaming serve down the line to end it 15--4.

After the awards ceremony ($9400 to team Kirby-Masakayan, along with their choice of a Chevy truck or Camaro) most of the players drift into a beachside bar called the Sunset for a season's-end party. It is a casual do, a chance for the women to say goodbye for the winter, to sign one another's programs with the nicknames they've made up: Lisa Gathright and Ann Schirman, both 6', are called Tall and Taller or the Trees; Lucy Han, at 5'2" the shortest player on the tour, is Sand Flea; Marla O'Hara, an in-your-face brown belt big-grunt server, is Cave Woman; and Chris Schaefer, a beautiful and spirited 6' second-year player, is called Schaef Dog.

Schaefer and her partner, Kengy Gardiner, an actress, are among the tour's comics. "We have to make jokes," says Gardiner. "Otherwise, with the work and the competition, things get too serious."

In fact, Gardiner and Schaefer are credited with one of the game's best pieces of slang. "We use it when things are completely flat out there," says Gardiner, "when it's like bad sex--the harder you try, the worse it gets. Our coach told us that in moments like that, when we can't get any real enthusiasm going, we should just fake it. So we just look at each other and say 'diner,' you know, from the scene in When Harry Met Sally where Meg Ryan shows Billy Crystal how a woman can fool a man."

The party at the Sunset also provides a chance for fans to buy the 1995 WPVA calendar and have it autographed by the featured women. But most of the color photos don't do the players justice. They are posed shots--hair done, makeup perfect, smiles pinned in place--that miss the natural beauty of these women in action: luminous with sweat, hair flying, arms and legs ablur in perfect athletic abandon as they go about "getting the uniform dirty," which is their description of coming up from a point with their bodies covered with sand.

The beauty of these women does, of course, play a big part in the selling of the sport, though most of the women I talk with tell me that the male fans react to them as athletes rather than as pin-ups. "Very few guys come up to you to talk, much less to harass you," says Gardiner, who is in the calendar. "You know some of them come out thinking, Let's go watch the bimbos bat the ball around. After the games, though, most of them seem a bit intimidated." Fourth-year player Krista Blomquist agrees. "I get hit on in other situations more than I do on the beach," she says.

At least one of the players, however, has suffered the kind of haunting episode that can put fear into the game for women athletes. In 1993, at a tournament in Santa Cruz, California, Elaine Roque--one of the top women on the tour--was approached by a 6'4", 280-pound man who handed her a letter full of weird fantasies about the two of them. Roque turned over the letter to the FBI and got a restraining order against the man. Even so, she says, "I still double-check my car mirror. I'm always scared."

•

Around ten o'clock on the Tuesday morning after the WPVA final, the dozen or so volleyball nets at Manhattan's Marine Street Beach are busy with players, from giggle to grunt. Four 12-year-old girls hold one court, serving underhand, squealing after wild bloopers, working on their kill shots, which sometimes go under the net. Next to them is a serious game among ten 40- to 50-year-old women who gather twice a week to exercise at their high school sport. They play well, despite the fact that age has blurred the edge between the dive and the fall as they chase the jumbo-shrimp shots that arc just over their heads onto the back line.

The rest of the courts are full of pros and wanna-bes, mostly men, in the middle of long, brutal workouts for the AVP final, which is scheduled the following weekend, at Hermosa Beach, one pier south of Manhattan. Practice balls litter the sand beyond the back lines of each court as the relentless drills--dig, set and spike--follow one another without a break. This is the hard work all of the women talk about, the labor that keeps this life from being as glamorous as it looks: six, nine, sometimes 12 hours a week to pump their legs into shape, to keep the game's skills at an instinctive place in their muscles. All this in addition to their full-time jobs.

The most ruthless morning workout is on the court nearest the water. Holly McPeak, one of the premiere WPVA players who left for the AVP, and Lisa Arce, 1994 rookie of the year in the WPVA, are being worked by Anna Collier, their coach. Collier is standing on an overturned trash barrel spiking ball after ball over the net to start a point. She encourages the women by yelling, "Go, go, go . . . nice hands . . . stretch for it." As the session grinds on toward two hours, both McPeak and Arce stay down longer when they hit the sand. At the breaks they bend forward, hands on their knees, in what I imagine to be both a resting and praying posture: "Lord, give me breath."

As we talk after the workout, Collier, who coaches women from both tours, says she thinks the split between the AVP and the WPVA will eventually heal, perhaps soon.

"It'll happen because women's volley-ball needs it to happen if it's going to reach its full potential as a pro sport," she says. "And the bitterness is less than it was. Just after the split, somebody wrote 'AVP sucks' on my car. But I think we're past that now."

"The bitterness is coming from those who have benefited the most from the split. They're making more money than ever before," says McPeak in a flash of anger. She catches herself before she spills details. McPeak is talking about Kirby and Masakayan, of course, whose sweep of the 1994 WPVA tour earned them considerably more (about $80,000 each) than any of the women who joined the AVP. "We left hoping that others would follow and that the AVP could help us make women's volleyball a more professional sport," says McPeak. "It's been frustrating."

"Anyway," says Collier, "you heard one side of the story last weekend. You'll get the other side in Hermosa."

•

"I love playing alongside the men," says Angela Rock, a 5'8" former Olympian and founding member of the WPVA. We are standing backstage of center court on the second day of the APV Hermosa tournament, and it is another perfect August day: Grandstand banners are slow-dancing on a breeze heavy with the smell of suntan oil, and beach umbrellas cast small spots of shade onto the sand, which is otherwise too hot for bare feet. The men's semifinal is under way, and Rock is speaking over the roar of a crowd ten times the size of that at the WPVA final.

"Look at this. It's a beautiful operation. Great crowds, and we're surrounded by professional people who work hard to make us happy," she says, gesturing toward the players' tent, where 20 tables are being attended by chiropractors and massage therapists.

"It hurt me personally," she says of the split. "I was Karolyn's partner and good friends with many of the other women. Beach volleyball is going to be included in the 1996 Olympics, and in a way, that's a deadline for getting back together. AVP women are not sanctioned to play on the international tour, which means they won't be eligible for Olympic play unless something changes." (In March 1995 the AVP released the women under contract to its tour to play in the WPVA, thereby making them eligible for Olympic competition.)

Rock is waiting to begin the final match of the AVP women's season, a game that will decide the 1994 champions. There are only eight teams, 16 women, on the AVP women's side, and all four of the finalists are former WPVA stars. Rock's partner is Nancy Reno, a four-year Stanford all-American and the number one ranking AVP women's player. Their opponents are Holly McPeak and Cammy Ciarelli, one of the most aggressive players on the tour.

As the game begins, the half-full grandstand tells the story of the two-year-old AVP women's tour. The men's final will draw an overflow crowd, and the winners of that match will split a $100,000 purse and a matching bonus pool. The winners among the women will share a purse of less than $15,000 (the same as the 17th-place men's team) and a bonus pool of about $8000 each.

Though the shortfall of the women's game may be obvious in audience size and prize money, there is no evidence of it on the court after the first serve goes up. The score is never separated by more than two points. Just as it looks like Rock's cannonball jump-serve is about to prevail, McPeak uses her catlike speed to execute a diving dig, then gets off the sand and into position for the set from Ciarelli to spike an angled winner that Reno cannot reach.

On the breaks they sit in the players' boxes, listen to their coaches jabber strategy at them, and check the clock--a nine-minute timer, unique to the AVP and designed to make the sport a better television package. Only the action is timed, and when the clock runs out, the point leaders win. The women's final is being taped by NBC, though only bits of it will be shown during the live coverage of the men's final, which will feature the brightest stars in the game, Karch Kiraly and Kent Steffes.

With 1:20 to go, the score is 12--12. McPeak serves to Reno, who passes to Rock and then spikes the set into Ciarelli's block, which is dug--unbelievably--by a diving Rock. Rock then takes the set from Reno, who spikes it into McPeak's stomach and knocks her on her butt. The crowd, which has grown as the men's qualifying matches finish on the outer courts, comes to its feet roaring. With 30 seconds on the clock, McPeak breaks the tie with a short serve that catches Rock and Reno waiting for the missile she usually launches. And though Rock gets another sideout with a perfect jumbo shrimp over Ciarelli's jumping reach, it isn't enough. As the clock goes to zero it's 14--12, McPeak--Ciarelli.

After the match, I sit with Paul Sunderland, a former Olympian who grew up in Malibu playing the beach game and who is now the broadcast commentator for NBC volleyball coverage. "When you come down to it," he says, "the women's game isn't that different from the men's. They all play with power, finesse, strategy, psychology. And the women's success will come closer to the men's in time. That was great volleyball we watched out there, which is the key. These are beautiful, athletic women, but if it weren't for the competition, they could play naked and no one would show up." He pauses. We look at each other. "Well, almost no one," he says.

"I brought dinner to them, and Karolyn was naked on the massage table. They told me to come in."

"When things are completely flat out there, it's like bad sex--the harder you try the worse it gets."

Beach Blanket Lingo

You may not be able to spike it like the big girls do, but you can speak their language.

Abusing the equipment: When a player pulls on the net.

Bagel: A game in which your team scores zero.

Chicken wing: A reflexive defensive shot off the arm.

Club Med: Indicates that hitting your opponent's wimpy little shot back over the net made you feel like you were on vacation.

Cobra: A dink shot hit with fingertips.

Diner: Said to one's apathetic partner during a game, meaning to fake it until it comes. From the diner scene in When Harry Met Sally.

Facial: A hit in the face.

Facial disgracial: A hit in the face that knocks a player out of the game.

Flipper: Backhanded hit.

French fry: A game in which your team scores only one point.

Hit it with your purse: Said after an ineffectual swat at the ball.

Husband and wife: A ball that drops between teammates and leaves them saying, "That was yours, wasn't it?"

Incoming; also, guns of Navarone: A brutally hard serve.

Jumbo shrimp: A shot that hooks over an opponent's head.

Jungle ball: Volleyball as played at picnics; eight or more players to a side.

Kong; also, a Jed (as in Clampett): A monstrous block.

Pokey: A dink shot hit with knuckles.

Put a stamp on it: When a serve is so long it will have to be mailed back.

Roof: Blocking the ball straight down.

Scud: A ball that rises.

Six-pack: A hit in the face that draws blood. (From a Fifties tradition in which the player who delivered the bloody hit earned a six-pack of beer.)

Spader: An ace.

Team Advil: Partners who aren't getting along.

Tomahawk: A two-handed spike.

Tool: To score off an opponent's block.

U.C. State: i.e., unconscious state, in which a team can do nothing wrong.

Uno, dos, adios; one, two, barbecue; also, the sooner you lose, the sooner you booze:

Losing your first two matches in double-elimination format.

Just Like Hardcourt Except...

• On the beach, two players must cover exactly the same area that six players cover indoors.

• It's four times harder to move on sand than on the hardcourt, and leg fatigue is doubled.

• You lose about one fifth of your vertical jump on the beach. "I jump 30 inches indoors," says Angela Rock, "24 inches on sand."

• The outdoor ball is softer, has bigger panels and is harder on shoulders in the spike. "You just can't hit the snot out of it," says Rock, "like you can the indoor ball."

• Inside, the sun doesn't shine in your eyes and the wind doesn't knock a scud five feet off line. But nobody ever got a tan playing hardcourt.

• In the sand version of the game, you can serve from anywhere along the back line, meaning that you can serve to either opponent straight ahead or at an angle.

• There are no specialized players (setter, spiker, etc.) in the beach game as there are indoors, so your weaknesses are multiplied.

• Best of all, on the beach, most of the uniform is not only skintight, it's skin.