Kiraly Is on the Ball on the Sand

If he were in basketball, they’d call him “Magic.” In baseball, he’d be “the Man” or maybe even “the Thumper.” In tennis, he might be “Boom Boom.” In golf, maybe “the Hawk.”

He’d probably have a shoe contract like Air Jordan--except his sport doesn’t wear shoes. Like Lawrence of Arabia, his domain is the burning sand. He has been in more sand than a camel.

What he is, is kind of a complicated beachcomber. Oh, he doesn’t spend his time waiting for the copra boat or even searching for the perfect wave. He spends more time at the beach than a sea gull. If it weren’t for sunblock, he’d probably be a char.

He plays a court game but he doesn’t need a racket. In his case, the racket has five fingers and comes attached. And the ball is not this fuzzy little thing about the size of an orange, it’s a big leather ball about the size of a soccer ball. Hitting it can have all the thrills of smashing a fist into a cement block wall.

The players call him “Double-K” or just “KK” as in killer. His game is volleyball and he just might be the best there is at it at the moment, if you count the evidence of two Olympic gold medals, more than 90 open titles and $1.57 million in prize money.

Karch Kiraly (pronounced “Kar-eye’) is one of those guys they’ll name a trophy or award after one of these years. Like the Cy Young in baseball or the Lady Byng in hockey, the Kiraly will stand for consistent excellence. There’ll be legends. Some day, they’ll tell you he had the vertical jump of a springbok and that he once spiked a ball so deep in the sand they never found it.

Although a lot of people are surprised to find it out, volleyball is as American an invention as apple pie. But, while it never seemed to make much headway in its home country, it grew by leaps and bounds overseas.

But what really moved the sport out of agate type and onto Page 1 (and Channel 9) was the beach version.

It historically was played indoors like basketball and hockey--a six-player game that, between Olympics and like the javelin throw, didn’t have much total impact on the sports scene.

It began to be played recreationally on the Southern California littoral by the hang-10 hunks looking for something to do waiting for the surf to be up. The two-man game caught on at once. Instead of the five-set marathons of the indoor games, it had a one-set war that had all the urgency and high excitement of sudden death. Television even insisted on a clock that limited a game to nine minutes of playing time or about one hour of elapsed time.

It was perceived as a kind of dilettante sport. Not polo, exactly, but not Dempsey-Tunney or Ali-Frazier, either. But it did have its scent of head-to-head competition of, say, Budge-Perry or Sampras-Becker. The players made prizefighters look flabby.

Basketball grabbed the headlines with its “Mr. Clutches” and “Big O’s and Big E’s and Big Dippers” and “Magics and Air Jordans” while volleyball got its audiences from people looking for seashells or places to stick the umbrellas.

But all that changed when television people came sniffing around for product. They liked what they saw. The ball was highly visible, no hockey puck here. The action was constant, the bodies were all hard, the game glamorous.

The graph could only go up. The beach game caught on as the hardcourt version languished and you had incongruities like entrepreneurs bringing in truckloads of sand and dumping them on the floor of Madison Square Garden. They’d recreate the beach at Santa Monica in places like Cincinnati, where the only surf was the Ohio River.

Kiraly learned the game on the golden sands of Santa Barbara, but he was not your basic son of the rich. Dad had gotten out of Hungary one jump ahead of Khrushchev’s tanks in the Budapest uprising of 1956 and fled to America, where he became a civil engineer and then a doctor.

There were never any white flags in the Kiraly family as Soviet marksmen could attest, and Karch plays the kind of all-court game that moved an opponent to blurt, “Why is it with K you feel you have your back to the wall when you’re up 11-2?”

He and partner Kent Steffes have won 14 of 18 tournaments this year and go in as favorites at the $1-million Miller Lite Championships at Hermosa Beach this weekend, with $100,000 going to the winning team as well as dispersal of $750,000 in bonus money for the entire season.

That’s a lot of money to make in your bare feet.