Photo by Craig Carlson

Paul Sunderland is one of the top ten volleyball players in the United States.

Paul Sunderland is one of the top ten volleyball players in the United States. He has spent most of his life trying to perfect his knowledge and performance of the game, but in January of this year he decided to go camping for three weeks in the mountains. Unfortunately for Sunderland, it was not the kind of trip on which you see beautiful pine forests and fish for trout that can hardly wait to snap at your hook. The Abajo Mountains in southeastern Utah, where Sunderland camped, are a bitterly cold expanse in January. Trails are covered by hip-deep snow, and freezing winds whistle across the mountain passes. Temperatures frequently fall below zero at night. Nevertheless, in twenty-one days Sunderland covered one hundred miles, sixty of them on snowshoes. Throughout the trip he carried a seventy-pound pack on his shoulders.

“It’s not something I would choose to repeat,” Sunderland recalled recently. ‘‘I think the hardest part for me was the constant frustration of never having anything to look forward to. When you got up in the morning it was cold — terribly cold. Your feet and hands were numb. Then you’d throw on a seventy-pound pack and walk all day. I wasn’t used to walking in snow-shoes, and I fell flat on my face more than once. ... At the end of the day you’d stop and put up a tent, but it was uncomfortable trying to sleep in it. The snow would melt and freeze underneath you, and you’d slide around the tent floor like you were on ice skates. ” Sunderland did not go camping alone; with him were seventeen other players and coaches for the United States men’s volleyball team. As unlikely as it seems, the team was in training. The trip to the Abajo Mountains was in fact only one of the more unusual features of a unique training program which the men’s volleyball team has been struggling to put together since 1977.

“Doug Beal's the most negative person I’ve ever met in my life."

Photo by Craig Carlson

Previous men’s volleyball teams from the United States — made up of talented “all-stars” who are thrown together at the last moment — have had dismally poor showings in international competition for the last twenty years. The Americans finished ninth at the Olympic Games in Tokyo in 1964, seventh in 1968 at Mexico City, and failed to qualify at all for the last three Olympics. Meanwhile, Eastern European and South American countries, buoyed by year-round training programs that are subsidized by their respective governments, have built dominating teams whose members play with each other year after year. The goal of American coaches and players since 1977 has been to produce a national team along the lines of the Eastern Europeans and South Americans — a team that plays together constantly, executing quickly and precisely the complex tactics that make up a volleyball game at the international level. In the realm of amateur sports in the United States, such a team and the extended program of training and competition it requires are virtually unknown; the volleyball team is currently the only men’s team in the country attempting a program anything like it. If the experiment is successful, it could serve as a model for other amateur sports such as swimming and track.

The difficulties inherent in running such a program, however, are legion. In 1981 San Diego was selected as the home base for the men’s volleyball team, but this decision solved only one of many problems. The federal government chooses not to subsidize amateur teams in this country directly, so the hundreds of thousands of dollars necessary for the team’s equipment, travel expenses, and coaches’ salaries must be raised from private sources. The players themselves, some of whom have wives and children, must find jobs that pay well yet allow them to travel to foreign countries for weeks at a time. There are also tensions that inevitably arise within the team itself, and this has been particularly evident in the clash between several of the more free-spirited players on the U.S. team and their strict and somewhat moody head coach, Doug Beal. One enduring squabble of this nature recently flared again when one of the nation’s most talented volleyball players, Tim Hovland, filed a grievance with the United States Olympic Committee. Hovland, who quit the team in June of 1982, wants to return now, but he claims Beal is unfairly asking him to post money as a “performance bond” first.

Craig Buck worked as a waiter at The Bakery restaurant in Fashion Valley.

Photo by Craig Carlson

In spite of such distractions, the U.S. men’s volleyball team has improved consistently for the last three years and has risen out of obscurity to become one of the top five teams in the world. The expectations of both players and coaches have risen concurrently; primarily hoping to put together a world-class team a few years ago, they now talk seriously about beating the Soviet team, the world’s best, for a gold medal in next year’s Olympic Games in Los Angeles. “I’ve said this many times,’’ notes Beal, “that if we are successful in winning a medal in Los Angeles, it would be a much greater accomplishment than the U.S. hockey team winning the gold medal in 1980 fat Lake Placid, New York]. Because volleyball is practically an unknown sport in this country. There are no pro volleyball leagues, and almost no one plays this game as a kid. ’’ It is ironic that volleyball, a game dominated so thoroughly by other countries in recent years, was invented in the United States. It was first played at a YMCA gym in Holyoke, Massachusetts in 1895. Most of the men who frequented the gym didn’t like play basketball, so at the urging of gym’s director of physical education, William A. Morgan, they knocked a basketball back and forth over a net until their wrists were sore. A lighter ball for volleying was soon developed by the Spalding company, and volleyball had arrived in the world.

The game’s popularity increased dramatically after both World War I and World War II (largely as a result of the fraternization among soldiers various countries), yet volleyball became an Olympic sport only in 1964. Since that time the game has changed remarkably. Today’s volleyball players are taller, stronger, and faster than were the vast majority of players twenty years ago, and many teams now run a bewildering array of plays and options that would leave players from past eras, even those who were standouts, either gaping with amazement or pounding their heads on the floor with frustration.

Dusty Dvorak can set the ball about 150 different ways.

Photo by Craig Carlson

As the first act in bringing its volleyball team up to world-class standards, the U.S. team established a year-round training center in Dayton, Ohio in 1977. Paul Sunderland, fresh out of Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, journeyed to Dayton that year for the same simple reason a lot of amateur athletes join the nation’s teams. “I wanted to see the U.S. team kick ass internationally,” he explains.

Many of America’s finest volleyball players at the time shared Sunderland’s feelings but not his determination. Nearly all the top players are from the West Coast — the sport, popular on the beach, is played more widely on the West Coast than anywhere else — and they tend to view places like Dayton, Ohio as being a couple of kilometers from the end of the earth. A lot of them simply refused to move there, regardless of the stakes.

Sunderland could sympathize with such an attitude; he is from Malibu. A tall, dark-haired man, he has the tan and trim waist of a dedicated beach-goer. As a volleyball player his defense is considered average at best, but he is one of the hardest and most consistent hitters (as a player who spikes a volleyball is called) on the U.S. team. “Paul hits a real heavy ball — meaning it feels kind of like a rock when it hits you,” says Aldis Berzins, a teammate of Sunderland’s on the U.S. team. At thirty-one, Sunderland is well past the team’s average age of twenty-six, but as Berzins notes, ‘‘He’s gotten better with age.” Sunderland remembers that the few top players who did move to Dayton had difficulty finding good jobs at first. “The people running the program meant well, but. . ."

Karch Kiraly, Aidis Berzins

Photo by Craig Carlson

In 1979 most of the nation’s best volleyball players finally gathered in Dayton to prepare for the 1980 Olympics. But without the experience of having practiced together for any significant length of time, they were no match for the opposition in the Olympic qualifying tournament, held in Bulgaria in January, 1980. The U.S. team failed even to qualify for the Olympics, rendering America’s subsequent boycott of the Moscow games a moot point as far as volleyball was concerned. But in 1981 the U.S. team decided to make another determined run at international volleyball competition, this time out of headquarters in San Diego.

Since the training program moved to San Diego, it has been far more successful than it was in Dayton. Most of the players are willing and happy to live here, close to their West Coast roots, but the success is also due partly to the experience gained in Dayton. There has been more emphasis on the quality of the jobs obtained for the players here — a feature the players naturally consider crucial in a program that demands them to train and compete all year without pay. The team has also begun to jell as coaches and players get to know each others’ strengths and weaknesses (many of the players now on the team have been together since Dayton).

Three or four hitters may jump simultaneously,

Photo by Craig Carlson

One of the early indications of the kind of results the program could produce was an exhibition match which the U.S. team played against the Japanese in August, 1981 at San Diego State University’s Peterson Gym. After being beaten soundly by the Japanese in the first two games of a best-of-five match, the Americans managed to pull out a long, hard-fought victory in the third game, 15-13. Then, halfway through the fourth game, the U.S. team appeared to go through some sort of otherworldly transformation. Suddenly the American players seemed to be saving and returning every spike the Japanese made — and they made some vicious, curving shots. At the net, Mark Waldie and Craig Buck began to dominate, blocking spikes single-handedly and in tandem in a way that soon had the Japanese players talking to each other between points. As the excited crowd spontaneously roared, “USA! USA!” and stomped their feet on the gym’s wooden bleachers, the Americans won the fourth game 15-9 and took the fifth going away, 15-7, to win the match. Sunderland considered it a milestone of sorts; he had played nearly twenty-five matches against the Japanese since joining the U.S. national team, and this was the first time he’d been on the winning side.

By November of 1981 the U.S. men’s volleyball team was playing well enough to win the Canada Cup, an annual tournament involving the U.S., Canada, and other top teams from around the world. To win, the Americans had to defeat two teams that are traditionally among the best in the world — Cuba and Brazil. They beat them convincingly, finishing off Cuba in the finals, three games to one.

A tall Bulgarian player smacked a ball that sailed out of bounds and the score was tied.

Photo by Craig Carlson

But tensions were beginning to build within the team itself. Cliques had formed, one involving some of the players from the West Coast (particularly those who had grown up almost fanatically devoted to beach volleyball), and the other composed .of three or four players from the Midwest and East. There was a lot of kidding between the “Easties” and the “West-ies,” as the two groups were called, with the Westies generally portrayed as loose guys who partied frequently, and the Easties as more staid, conservative types. But sometimes the kidding had a mean edge to it. “Deep down I resented some of it,” remembers Marc Waldie, the team’s current captain, who grew up in Wichita, Kansas. “No one likes to be made fun of for who they are and where they’re from.” The tensions “may have affected us a little on the court,” Waldie concedes.

In addition, many of the players were finding it difficult to adjust to head coach Doug Beal. Beal, a former Olympic volleyball player himself, has coached the men’s national team since 1976. He is considered an excellent tactician and has more experience in international competition than any other coach in the country, but Beal is also a strict disciplinarian who purposely keeps distant from his players. His personality clashes colossally with the more unrestrained beach players from the West Coast, but nearly all the players have found him hard to deal with at one time or another. “When I first joined the team, I hated Doug with a passion,” says Aldi* Berzins. Berzins grew up in Delaware and attended the same university at which Beal formerly coached, Ohio State, although not while Beal was coaching there. “He still upsets me at times. In practice, you don’t want to screw up because he’s there. . . . He can get emotional. But overall he’s the best coach we have.”

Photo by Craig Carlson

Other players have stronger assessments. “Beal is really moody,” complains one player, who prefers to remain anonymous. “He’s the most negative person I’ve ever met in my life, which is kind of strange for a coach. You make a great play during a game, and walk over into a huddle [afterward], and instead of saying, ‘Nice play; now here’s what we have to do,’ Beal will say, ‘Shut up and listen to me.’ He’s doing a lot of good things for us, but if he had a different personality. ...”

At thirty-five, Beal is only a few years older than most of his players. He has dark eyes and a mop of short, unruly dark hair, and gives the impression of being rather morose. He rarely laughs. “I’m not too easygoing,” he said, describing himself as he sat in the team’s suite of offices on Chesapeake Drive in Clairemont Mesa one afternoon not long ago. “I believe that practice is important. Every time you walk into the gym you should try to do your best. I also believe that hard work pays dividends. The team that is best prepared and works the hardest will come out on top.”

Beal has said that he deliberately stays removed from his players so that he can make decisions based not on emotions but on what is best for the team. He does have hard decisions to make; for instance, an Olympic volleyball team can only carry twelve players on its roster, so in the coming months Beal will have to tell at least two current team members that in spite of sacrificing their careers and their time for the last two years, they will not be going to the Olympics. But several players point out that Beal seems to carry the concept of keeping his distance to the extreme. Craig Buck recalls that on a recent trip to Bulgaria, Beal and four players were standing in front of a monument while a fifth player prepared to take a photograph of the group. Before the shot could be snapped. Buck says, Beal moved away, apparently so he wouldn’t appear in the photograph with the others.

In June of 1982, Tim Hovland, who had been voted the most valuable player in the 1981 Canada Cup tournament, left the U.S. team because of continuing disagreements with Beal. He was soon followed by two other players, Mike Dodd and Singin Smith. (Smith was actually told not to bother rejoining the team after he took a leave of absence and failed to stay in touch adequately with Beal.) All three are devoted beach volleyball players with a penchant for a fast, fun-loving lifestyle, and their departure gave Beal a reputation for not being able to get along with “beach” players. One team member recently noted that Smith and Beal sometimes clashed over Beal’s strict views on dress and appearance; in addition, Smith was unhappy (as were all of the beach players) with Beal’s edict forbidding them to play in beach volleyball tournaments while they were members of the U.S. team. As for Hovland, however, nearly all of the team’s current players say he was known for being late to practice and for various other transgressions, and that Beal made every effort to treat him fairly. In any case, a majority of the remaining players on the team are still former beach players, including one who seems bom and bred to play volleyball in the sand, Karch Kiraly.

At twenty-two, Kiraly (pronounced Kih-rye) is the youngest player on the U.S. team, but several of his teammates regard him as the most gifted. He has blond hair, blue eyes, and sturdy, chiseled features that probably win him a lot of bikini-clad friends when he is performing in a beach volleyball game. A recent graduate of UCLA, Kiraly was an All-American volleyball player for four straight years, and, along with Stanford football star John El way, was named one of the top five collegiate scholar-athletes in the nation last year. Although international volleyball is far more sophisticated than college volleyball — most volleyball players liken the difference to that between college basketball and pro basketball — Kiraly is one of the few U.S. players in recent years who have been able to step directly out of college and into a starting role on the national team. He remains close to the banished players, Hovland and Smith, with whom he shares a love of beach volleyball and its attendant parties. But unlike them, Kiraly seems willing to adapt his style somewhat to Beal’s. “Beal tries to keep his distance from us. I’d rather he didn’t, but I get along with him okay and end up not dealing with him that much,’’ explains Kiraly. He describes himself as “disappointed’’ that he cannot take part in beach volleyball tournaments, but adds, “Not everything the coaches ask will be liked by everybody. I want to play on this team, so I do what I have to do.’’

Whether or not the players like Beal, they credit him with devising an offense for the team that makes maximum use of their skills. “Maybe Doug doesn’t have the personality everybody would like him to have, but if you look at a curve for the performance of the U.S. men’s volleyball team in the last few years, it’s like this,” sums up Paul Sunderland, holding his stretched-out palm nearly vertical. The U.S. players are talented athletes — smart and quick, every one of them can slam dunk a basketball — but unlike volleyball players in most other countries, they generally learn the game without official supervision. In doing so, they develop quirks that can be very confusing to players who are used to seeing a homogenous style of play from one particular team, and Beal has had the good sense to let his players utilize their offbeat styles to the maximum. With an average height of six feet, four inches, the U.S. team is not considered a tall team by the standards of international volleyball, either, so to make up for the lack of height, Beal and his assistant coach Bill Neville have instituted a system of offense that is arguably the fastest and most complex volleyball offense in the world. “It’s a system that is enabling us to beat everybody,” Sunderland says enthusiastically. “It’s like the Los Angeles Lakers discovering the fast break.”

To receive a serve, the U.S. team usually sets up in a peculiar, bunched-up formation that is designed to let either Kiraly or Aldis Berzins be the first player to hit the ball. One of them will pass it to setter Dusty Dvorak, who then frequently sets the ball to hitters Sunderland and Craig Buck. But for this last step, Beal and Neville have given the team roughly thirty plays, or patterns, that can be run, and each play has five options. The result is that Dvorak can literally set the ball about 150 different ways. Which set he picks depends on what type of defense the opposition is using, as well as on Dvorak’s own intuitive feel for what will work. Typically, as the ball is being passed to him from Berzins or Kiraly, Dvorak will call out a play, much like a football quarterback calling a play at the line of scrimmage. Buck, Sunderland, and the other players will then shout out specific options they have within the play — crossing, say, or angling in from the side — so that Dvorak will know exactly where they intend to be. Three or four hitters may then jump simultaneously, and none of them knows which one will be getting the ball. The one who does get it hits it across the net. In contrast to the rest of the offense, this last part is beautifully simple: a hitter’s job is to whack a volleyball so hard that no human being on earth can possibly return it. Designed partially to confuse the other team through its sheer complexity, the U.S. team’s offensive system is unintelligible to most spectators, too, and it should be noted that it takes an intelligent crew of player to run it successfully within the few seconds available each time the ball comes over the net.

With this offense, but without Tim Hovland or Singin Smith, the U.S. team journeyed to Argentina in October of last year to play in the men’s volleyball world championships. (The world championships are held every four years, between the Olympics. Many countries consider them more important than the Olympic Games, much the way World Cup play is ranked above all other soccer competitions.) The U.S. players were coming off a series of successful matches against Poland, Japan, Italy, and Korea earlier in the year, but at the world championships the team seemed to be jinxed from the start. The antibiotics usually carried on such trips were inexplicably left behind, with the result that many players fell sick. Berzins, the team’s best defensive player, came down with diarrhea before the first match, and hardly played at all thereafter. The team also played its first round of matches in a remote provincial town, Catamarca, where the citizens, stirred to a frenzy by the United States’ role in the recent Falkland Islands war, were not above throwing eggs and heads of lettuce at the Americans. Kiraly remembers that in the team’s first match against the Bulgarians, “the crowd was whistling every time we went back for a serve. ” Even so, with the match tied at two games each, the U.S. team took a commanding 12-4 lead in the deciding game. Then the Bulgarians won several points in a row. and “that's when the crowd made them a different team,” recalls Craig Buck. Rallying behind a tall left-handed hitter, the Bulgarians began to overpower the Americans’ defense, and eventually won the fifth game 16-14. The next night the U.S. players lost to the powerful Soviet team in three straight games, eliminating themselves from the final rounds of competition among the top twelve countries. The Americans finished the world championships at the top of the second division — in thirteenth place overall — but it was small solace that they had won their final seven matches decisively. Assistant coach Bill Neville remembers the trip to Argentina as a “nightmare.” Kiraly says simply, “It was the worst trip I’ve ever been on.”

For almost two months after their depressing trip to Argentina, the members of the U.S. team remained in San Diego, concentrating on their families, their social lives, and their jobs, as much as they ever can. Even so, there was volleyball practice at the Federal Building in Balboa Park almost every morning, and afternoon weightlifting sessions three times a week at the Sports Medicine Center next door to Alvarado Community Hospital. Most of the players have had to place their personal lives as well as their careers more or less in abeyance while they train for the Olympics. “My wife and I have wanted a kid for over a year,” notes Marc Waldie. “But we’ve decided we just won’t have the time or money until after the Olympics. For us, that’s been a real sacrifice.” Chris Marlowe describes being in the year-round training program as “something like living under socialism for a couple of years. Everything is dictated to you. You have almost no freedom, and only one goal — the Olympics.”

While striving for that goal, the players take whatever jobs they can get to generate some income. Craig Buck, who talks of going into public relations someday, has worked as a waiter at The Bakery restaurant in Fashion Valley. Aldis Berzins, who has a bachelor’s degree in astronomy, works in a management trainee program at First Interstate Bank. A majority of the players work at local banks — Paul Sunderland is training to be a loan officer at Security Pacific, and Marc Waldie is an assistant for retail development at Great American Federal — because banks are among the few companies that can afford to pay the equivalent of a full-time salary to someone who can work only part-time. Most of the jobs are found through the efforts of the team’s general manager, Kerry Klosterman, who in turn depends on business leaders such as Gordon Luce (chairman of the board of Great American Federal) to provide assistance. But not all of the jobs are equally good, a fact that contributes to tensions on the team. “The roughest part of the program is dealing with the inequities in it,” Waldie said not long ago. ‘ ‘There’s no way you can have fourteen players and not have some players get a better job, or more concessions, than other players. It’s impossible to keep everything equal. ” Hoping to smooth over such differences as well as patch up the lingering tension between the “Easties” and the “Westies,” the coaches of the U.S. team hit upon a novel idea: they would take the entire team to a desolate mountain wilderness in the middle of winter, for a survival training course conducted by Outward Bound. “A team coalesces based on shared common hardships,” says Beal, explaining the reasoning he and the other coaches used in signing the team up for the three-week expedition. “It’s a way to build a foundation for mutual respect and trust.” Beal concedes that leading the top fourteen volleyball players in the United States into freezing, remote mountains in January also represented a huge risk, both to the players themselves and to the country’s Olympic hopes. “But the goal of achieving a medal is worth almost any kind of risk,” he says firmly.

Many of the team members were less than enthusiastic about the trip, which got under way on January 7 this year. Chris Marlowe, the team’s oldest player at thirty-one, recalls that “I didn’t want to go, but I tried to make other players see there might be some value in it. I’m older, maybe I understand (Beal’s) reasons for doing things a little better than some of the younger players.” Marlowe’s understanding began to fade, however, once the team arrived in southeastern Utah’s Abajo Mountains. The first eight days of the expedition consisted of almost nonstop hiking, including the climbing of an 11.000-foot-high peak. Later came a one-day, sixteen-mile trek in snow-shoes. and three days of solo hiking with little more than matches and a tarpaulin for supplies. “The hardest part was the constant marching,” says Marlowe. “Shit, I’m thirty-one years old, and I’m not used to hiking twenty miles a day with snowshoes on. I hate hiking, period. My idea of camping is to drive into the mountains, do some fishing, sleep with your girlfriend, and leave. I hated the whole experience — it was boring.”

Marlowe’s reaction was fairly typical among the team’s players, but one man who enjoyed the wilderness trek more than most was Aldis Berzins. Berzins, who is the team’s shortest player at six feet, two inches, learned to play volleyball from his father, a Latvian refugee who fled his native country after World War II. A soft-spoken, intelligent man with a dry sense of humor, Berzins explains that volleyball became something of a national passion in Latvia between world wars. “So it’s kind of part of my native culture,’’ he says with a faint smile. Pause. “Like drinking.’’Pause. “But I’ve given up drinking now.’’ Berzins says the Abajo Mountains expedition was “not enjoyable, but rewarding. I like camping. I go on my own sometimes — and I thought it might be a neat thing at first. Then when I got there — Jesus! The first eight days were like a death march. . . .But after the third or fourth day you learned how to stay warm, how to keep your boots from freezing; the simplest things were the hardest. Just going to the bathroom was a hell of a chore. ..."

In retrospect, nearly every coach and player on the team says the same thing about the wilderness outing: it was hard, it was interesting, and it is virtually impossible to evaluate its effect on the team. “Hopefully it was good for the team, because it sure was a pain in the ass,” observed Sunderland. “It’s not like we came down out of the mountains and were different human beings. It may have helped.” He shrugged.

In April, nearly ten weeks after the trip to Utah, the U.S. team played a series of disappointing matches in Cuba against the Cuban national team. (The Americans, who were learning a new system of blocking, lost three of four matches, but won the fourth one three games to none.) On their next trip, however, a long tour of Finland and Poland in June of this year, things began to click for the U.S. players.

They swept the Finns in all four matches the two teams played and took three of five matches from the Poles, too — the first time an American team had ever beaten the Poles in Poland. After returning to San Diego for a week, the team flew to Indianapolis for the North American and Caribbean Zone Championships. It proved to be what is very likely the best tournament a volleyball team from the United States has ever played. On offense, Sunderland in particular was hitting ferociously, and the defense performed brilliantly. “Teams just couldn’t score points on us,” remembers Kiraly. “We could just wait for them to make mistakes, and win the game.” The Americans played fifteen games in all at Indianapolis and didn’t lose a single one. The average score of their games was 15-5. It was the first time in twelve years a team from the United States won the tournament (which officially qualifies them for the Olympic Games), and it buoyed the spirits of the team’s members immeasurably.

Ironically, though, the team’s performance at Indianapolis was overshadowed by rumors that Tim Hovland would soon be returning to play. Hovland had been playing in beach tournaments and in a volleyball league in Italy, earning a total of about $50,000 over the past year. (Because the money is considered “expense money,” “tips,” and so forth, such a player can still retain his amateur status, as do marathon runners and many other amateur athletes who receive remuneration for their participation.) But he had also been in contact from time to time with Beal and was interested in returning to the team. Beal and his assistant coaches were undecided whether or not they should allow Hovland to come back; he is certainly gifted enough to gain a starting berth on the team, but his reputation for being unreliable and hard to control weighs heavily against him. Early in 1983 Beal had called for an advisory vote by the team on whether Hovland should be allowed to return; the vote was ten to four against the idea. But Beal subsequently decided to let Hovland rejoin the team, provided he met certain conditions. Hovland apparently thought over Beal’s offer (some players say he actually accepted it), and then decided to complain about it publicly to a reporter from the Los Angeles Times. Hovland claimed Beal was asking him to post a “performance bond’’ of more than $10,000; if he made practice on time, refrained from talking to the press and from playing in beach volleyball tournaments, and adhered to a few other rules, the money would be refunded to him in monthly installments. But each violation would cost him a fine. (At the time, Beal denied to Times reporter Jerry Crowe that Hovland had been asked to post a performance bond, but several sources close to the team have confirmed since then that Hovland was indeed told he would have to post a bond before he could rejoin the team.) Media coverage of Beal’s offer to Hovland, and Hovland’s subsequent public comments on it, broke just as the U.S. team was demolishing its opponents in Indianapolis, but Beal refused to talk to the team about it until the tournament was over.

Hovland’s remarks to the Times scuttled any possibility of his immediate return to the team, and in the weeks since then the situation has been clouded in uncertainty. “There’s very little I’m willing to say about it,’’ Beal commented a few weeks ago. “Tim is an outstanding volleyball player, but volleyball skills are not the only requirement for being on the team. You have to be committed; you have to make sacrifices. Tim was simply not willing to live within the confines of a structured program. I’m disappointed we couldn’t work things out.’’ Several team members still would like to see Hovland on the U.S. team, however, and their feelings are best summed up by Karch Kiraly. “The past has to be forgotten in this situation. Now is now,’’ he says. “We have to go for the best team.” Most of the players are angry that Hovland, who has won a considerable amount of money in the last year while avoiding the sacrifices of training with the U.S. team, would now even be considered a candidate to return, but Kiraly brushes aside such objections. “If anyone thinks he should be made to pay for what he’s done over the last year and a half, it should be me,” Kiraly insists, implying that, as one of the best beach volleyball players in the world, he stands to be more jealous of Hovland than anyone else on the team. “But I’m not of that opinion. I’d like to see Hovland back on the team.”

On July 27 Hovland filed a grievance with the U.S. Olympic Committee, claiming that he wasn’t being allowed a fair tryout with the team. “They’re saying I have to put up fifteen to twenty thousand dollars before I can try out,” Hovland said in a telephone interview a few days ago. “That’s a lot of money, and no one else is being asked to do it. I think that’s unfair.”

Hovland claimed he original left the team at a time when the training program was not yet well organized, and good jobs were scarce. “I was not treated in the manner I am accustomed to,” he said. And he brushed aside the question of whether the team’s current members would accept him back. “I’ve worked hard to be as good as I am. I’ve sacrificed quite a bit,” he insisted. “I’m not saying I’ve sacrificed as much as I the other team members], but it hasn’t all been easy for me. Now it’s a matter of [them] making decisions . . . and winning is the bottom line, isn’t it?”

It will likely take the U.S. Olympic Committee more than two months to reach a decision on Hovland’s grievance. In the meantime, he has contacted Beal and offered to return to the team under a new agreement, the terms of which Hovland will not reveal. But Aldis Berzins voiced the feelings of a majority of the team’s players when he said, “You can screw up and be forgiven, but Hov screwed up over and over again. I want to win the Olympics ... but I don’t want people like that on my team. These last few years have been a sort of filtering system, for filtering out the best volleyball players in the country, and those of us who are left, we’re strong.” Berzins made a fist and shook it for emphasis. “You have to earn your spot on this team,” he continued. “I don’t think Hov realizes that.”

On August 7 the U.S. team took the floor at the Sports Arena here for an exhibition match against the Bulgarian national team. It was the fourth of a series of exhibitions against the Bulgarians held in the western United States in early August, and the Americans had already won the first three without a great deal of difficulty. They had also won a special fundraising exhibition against the Bulgarians two nights earlier at the Rancho Santa Fe home of Donald F. Sammis, chairman of Sammis Properties, a San Diego real estate development company. (Sammis has long had an interest in the sport, having played a lot of beach and competitive volleyball; he was also a financial backer of the shortlived professional volleyball team in San Diego several years ago.) Sammis was instrumental in persuading the men’s team to move to San Diego in the first place — he submitted the most attractive offer out of 200 that the U.S. team solicited from cities nationwide — and he has subsidized the cost of office space for the team’s coaches and office staff since they arrived here. The fundraiser was one of those hundred-dollar-per-person events that the volleyball team holds to help defray its expenses, which come to about $350,000 a year. Coaches and other staff must be paid, gyms rented for exhibitions, and plane tickets purchased — a single tour of Europe or South America requires more than $20,000 worth of air travel. About 400 people showed up for the fundraiser at Sammis’s home, and they watched the U.S. team out-score the Bulgarians on a makeshift volleyball court that had been put up on Sammis’s private tennis court. Some $30,000 was raised.

The Bulgarians placed second at the Moscow Olympics in 1980 (and of course defeated the Americans in the heartbreaking match at the 1982 world championships in Argentina), but they looked like anything but silver medal winners in the first game at the Sports Arena. The Americans, starting Sunderland, Kiraly, Berzins, Buck, Dvorak, and Steve Salmons, jumped to a 12-4 lead before the Bulgarian team began to dig in. It was the same lead the U.S. team had had in the fifth game in Argentina, but this time they held on to win, 15-8.

The second game was hard-fought from the outset. Neither team seemed to be running its offense particularly smoothly, but they stayed close to each other with tenacious defense. The voices of the American players could be heard throughout the arena, calling out plays and instructions to each other each time the ball was set up — “Two!” “Cross!” “Dusty!” — and each time the team needed a winning hit,Dvorak turned to Kiraly, Sunderland, or, somewhat unexpectedly, Berzins. With the score tied at nine, a long volley ended with a decisive spike by Craig Buck, and it seemed the U.S. team might finally build a lead. But the Bulgarians battled back to tie the score again.

Beal soon began a series of substitutions, and it seemed as if the makeshift American team on the court might finally go down to defeat when the Bulgarians served for game point, leading 15-14. But a “stuff” block by Sunderland — a block of the opposing team’s spike that falls for a point, called by Neville the most intimidating play in volleyball — won the serve for the U.S. team. Unfortunately, the Americans next began a nerve-wracking series of mistakes, including a serve that didn’t clear the net and an accidental touch of the net during play. Each of these errors could have cost the game, but good defense brought them back every time, until finally a tall Bulgarian player smacked a ball that sailed out of bounds and the score was tied, 15-15. Another stuff block by Buck put the U.S. team up, 16-15, and a moment later Berzins hit a ball that rocketed to the floor untouched for the game winner.

By contrast, the third game was anti-climactic. The Americans, led by Kiraly, Salmons, and yet another strong hitter, Pat Powers, drove to a 14-10 lead. As Kiraly served for game point, two Bulgarian players pulled away from the ball, and then watched disgustedly as it dropped between them for the final point of the game. The crowd of about 2000, appreciative but unenthusiastic throughout the evening, cheered almost politely, and left.

The Americans have an intense series of tournaments scheduled throughout the summer, including one later this month in the Soviet Union, and by October they hope to have proved they are one of the top three teams in the world. After that will begin the final drive toward the Olympic Games in Los Angeles. Those Olympics, as Sunderland has noted, are the greatest incentive in the world for the U.S. team; most of the players will be performing in what amounts to their home town, in only the second summer Olympic Games ever to be held in this country. “I know we’ll win a medal,” promises Berzins, voicing a feeling held by most of his teammates. “If we get into the finals, we’ll win the gold medal.” After that, reality will catch up to most of the U.S. players — careers will be taken up, the business of life resumed. A few of them expect a letdown after the months and months of constant training, but if you ask them how they feel about that, they shrug and search for words, as if to imply that it is only to be expected when you have devoted years of your life to attaining a single goal. None of them would trade places with you, nor would Beal; on a desk in his office is a volleyball, well worn except for a patch that has been freshly painted onto it. On a gleaming white background, a black legend reads: USA 3, USSR 2, August 14, 1984.