Sure enough, two years later, on June 7, 1974, Dad’s promise came home to roost. He was playing volleyball at Muscle Beach when he heard Mom’s piercing whistle.
“Can I talk to you?” she yelled.
“After the game,” Dad shouted back.
Mom insisted. “No, now!” she said. Then, she opened an envelope and pulled out her college diploma. She had a bachelor’s in physical education. She waved it proudly in the air. “Remember, you said we’d get married when I got my degree?” she asked.
Dad gulped. “No, when you get your master’s degree,” he said.
“That’s not what you promised,” she said. “Let’s go get the marriage license.”
Off they went, Dad decked out in his clam diggers, tank top, and flip-flops; Mom wearing a smile from ear to ear. They walked from Muscle Beach to the Santa Monica Courthouse, where they learned wedding ceremonies were no longer performed. But, they were told, they could apply for a marriage license.
“I didn’t bring any money,” Dad said, still trying to squirm out of his promise.
“Well, I just happen to have eighteen dollars,” Mom said.
As they walked through the courthouse, they bumped into one of Dad’s volleyball friends, sheriff Paul Piet, a bailiff and a courthouse security guard. When they explained they’d come to get married, but had been told it was impossible, Paul offered to see if his friend Judge Edward Rafeedie might make an exception.
“That’s not necessary,” Dad said.
Paul disappeared into the judge’s chambers, came out half a minute later, and announced, “He’d be happy to do it.”
“But we don’t have a best man,” Dad argued.
“Don’t worry, I’ll stand up for you,” Paul said.
Dad thought he was going to faint. As he always jokes, “In twenty-two minutes, we’d gone from a whistle to a wedding.”
And it took less than that for Mom’s father, Kenneth Grubb, a Santa Monica city clerk, to appear in the back of the courtroom and witness the ceremony. The news of their impending marriage had shot through the halls of nearby city hall like a rocket. My grandfather was in tears.
“Is your father happy?” Dad asked Mom.
“No, he’s pissed!” Mom said.
After the ceremony, Dad went back to Muscle Beach to finish his game, and Mom went along with him to tell everybody her good fortune.
“Where’d you go?” his cronies asked.
“We got married,” Dad replied.
“No, you didn’t,” his buddies said, knowing Dad was pretty adept at spinning yarns.
Mom interrupted. “Yes, we did,” she said. “And you’re going to give me a ring, right?”
To be honest, my grandparents never got over my parents’ marriage. They’d hoped Mom would pursue a career in professional tennis, traveling the world, winning tournaments, and making tons of money, and they’d also dreamed of her marrying well. Instead, Mom later went to California State University–Los Angeles and worked toward a master’s in adapted physical education. Dad, meanwhile, was completely consumed with beach volleyball, spending practically every spare moment at the beach. He also did a little surfing, played some rugby, and raced motorcycles in the desert. In my grandparents’ minds, Dad was a beach bum with no professional future. However, what they never understood was that all Mom wanted in life was someone to love her completely, and that’s what she’d found with my father.
Two days after their wedding, Mom and Dad had their “reception”—a beer bash at Ye Olde King’s Head, a British-style pub in Santa Monica. Of course, the bar was packed wall-to-wall with their friends from Muscle Beach. Later that summer, they took over a food stand, Tee’s, next to the Sand & Sea Club, as a favor to the owner. Mom had been playing a lot of paddle tennis at the private club, and she and Dad accepted the challenge of turning Tee’s into a moneymaker. They downsized the menu from more than a dozen items to six. Hot dogs. Hamburgers. Cheeseburgers. Grilled cheese sandwiches. Egg and tuna salad sandwiches. Dad says their cheeseburgers earned the reputation of being the best on the beach. Later, he introduced Schwarz’s sausages from San Francisco—kielbasa and cheese dogs. Their endeavor was a smashing success. The following spring Dad and Mom turned back Tee’s to Doug Badt, the club’s lease holder.
Six months after that, Dad and Mom scraped up seventeen thousand dollars to take over Victorio’s, a New York–style pizza stand on Ocean Park Walk, at the foot of the Santa Monica Pier, a few steps from Muscle Beach. Dad cobbled together money from his credit union, his mother, and his friend Henry Conners, buying the business and the three-year lease. It was a turnkey operation. They opened two weeks before Memorial Day, in 1976, and they made only $7.50 for the day. Dad was irate, cursing at the top of his lungs. Mom said, sheepishly, “You think maybe tomorrow might be better?” The second day, they made $22.00. Over Memorial Day weekend, they averaged $125 an hour each day, and once school let out for the summer, things at the concession stand really turned around.
For three years, Dad and Mom ran Victorio’s, opening it from Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day weekend. In the off-season, they opened only on nice weekends—the temperature had to be at least seventy degrees. When their lease was up in 1979, they didn’t renew because, Dad says, the landlord wanted half the profits. Dad estimates they pulled in an average of two thousand dollars a week during the summer season, but, he says, they hired so many of their friends, his coworkers at MGM, down-on-their-luck folks who needed jobs, or kids who wanted money for college that they had very little profit left for themselves. Still, it was the perfect way for Dad and Mom to be grounded at Muscle Beach. Even today, Dad says, he’s proud of the fact that Victorio’s allowed them to be “true Muscle Beachers.”
4
GROWING UP
Three years after my parents married, I came along, quite fittingly, in the middle of the summer, at the height of beach volleyball season. I was born at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Los Angeles, on July 30, 1977, and, as luck would have it, Dad missed my grand entrance. He’d spent seven and a half hours with Mom, propping her up on pillows, holding her hands, rubbing her feet, coaching her to breathe. Finally, he’d given up.
“B., nothing’s changed,” he said, in frustration.
Dad was antsy to get back to Muscle Beach to open up the pizza stand. His Saturday help had bailed on him. Mom could sense his anxiety, so she gave him the green light. Sure enough, no sooner had he unlocked the door to the pizza stand than my grandmother, Betty Grubb, phoned to say my head was crowning. Dad raced back to the hospital, armed with a big tub full of balls for the son he was hoping to have—a volleyball, a basketball, a football, a baseball, a softball, a rugby ball, golf balls, and tennis balls.
His dreams were dashed when he swung open the door to Mom’s hospital room.
“It’s a girl!” my grandmother screamed.
Dad was a bit disappointed. He wound up ditching the balls in a hospital elevator. He hurried to the nursery, took one look at me, and gasped.
“My God, she looks like a werewolf!” Dad exclaimed.
Granted, I did have long dark hair all over my face. He asked the nurse if she’d please double-check my wristband. She told Dad, yes, indeed, it read GIRL MAY.
“Don’t worry, the hair will come off in a few days,” the nurse reassured him.
Then my grandmother gave Dad another jolt.
“Since you weren’t present for the birth, Butch, I get to name the baby,” she said. “It’s customary for the maternal grandmother to do so.”
Dad hadn’t heard of such a custom. “Well, what are you planning to call her?” he said.
“Desiree,” my grandmother replied.
“Over my dead body,” Dad said.
“Okay, what do you want to call her?” my grandmother asked.
Having been born and raised in Hawaii, Dad had hoped to give me a beautiful, exotic Hawaiian name. He stepped away from the nursery and placed a long-distance call to his cousi
n-in-law Mina Dods, who lived in Honolulu. First, he asked Mina for permission to name me after her daughter, Misty, then fourteen years old. She’d always been a favorite of Dad and Mom’s. Then, Dad asked Mina to create a Hawaiian version of the name Misty. So Mina asked Dad to look out the hospital window, just as she had done when her daughter was born, and describe the day’s weather. It had started with an early morning mist, a bit overcast and gray, he told Mina, but later in the day, the sun had come out and burned off the haze, with the skies turning a glorious shade of blue.
Instantly, Mina came up with the perfect Hawaiian name for me: Kehaunani. Nani, in Hawaiian, means beautiful. Kehau translates to mist, misty, or dew. Beautiful Mist. Mina had captured my birthday, as well as the sentiment my father was looking for.
Dad marched to the nurses’ station to provide the official Hawaiian name for my birth certificate. The nurse, witnessing the baby-naming war between my father and my grandmother, seemed a bit on edge. She’d already written Desiree May on my birth certificate. Dad took one look at it and said, “No, take that off.” Then, he proudly pronounced my Hawaiian name for her. She pulled out a new birth certificate and proceeded to type my name as she’d heard it: Kekakanani.
Fortunately, Dad asked the nurse to read my name back to him.
“Kekakanani,” the nurse dutifully replied.
Dad panicked. “Kaka?!” he shrieked, envisioning the horrible name cemented in stone by the State of California. “Scratch that!”
The nurse protested. “What do you mean, scratch that?” she said.
“Scratch that, right now!” Dad demanded. “Number one, it’s spelled wrong. Number two, just type this: Misty, M-I-S-T-Y, Elizabeth May.”
With that, my poor grandmother left the hospital and went home. If either of them had asked me, and I could have answered, I would have told them I was thrilled with the outcome. Misty was a much better choice.
You know the saying, “Life is a beach?” Well, I’m convinced it was coined for me. From the moment I took my first breath, my life has been about the beach. The sand was, and always has been, my playground. Or more accurately, when I was a baby, my playpen.
A week after I was born, Mom and Dad introduced me to Muscle Beach. From that day on, they passed me back and forth to each other, taking turns holding me as the activities unfolded. When Dad played beach volleyball, Mom held me. When she worked the pizza stand, Dad held me. If they both were tied up, playing games or making pizzas, their Muscle Beach buddies kept me tightly in their mitts. Other times, tucked into my stroller and parked on the side of the courts, I’d be lulled to sleep by the sounds of the Pacific Ocean crashing against the sand and the batting of volleyballs back and forth across the nets.
When I became old enough to crawl, my parents would set me down in the sand, and I’d scoot around on my hands and knees like a mini sand crab. Alice Chambers Sanchez, a volleyball teammate of Mom’s, recalls seeing me crawling around on the sand and actually eating it. And what did I wear on the beach in those days? Absolutely nothing.
And I was exposed to the indoor game, too. When my parents were coaching indoor volleyball at Santa Monica College, I got dragged along. Mom was the head women’s coach from fall 1977 through spring 1982, and Dad was her unpaid assistant. Plenty of times the college players snatched me up in their arms, threw me into a netted volleyball bag, and hung me from the hooks on the side of the gymnasium wall to keep me out of their way. Other times, they duct taped my body to the court to stop me from running around the gym.
It should come as no surprise, then, that my first word wasn’t Mama or Dada. It was ball. Not volleyball. Just ball.
When I started walking, Mom became a lot more worried about my whereabouts. You know how they say an apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree? Well, I clearly was Butch and Barbara May’s daughter. As their energetic, self-sufficient, curious, only child, I was very adept at finding ways to entertain myself.
“Stay right here, Dad’s only going to play a couple of points,” he’d say.
Off he’d go to play volleyball, and wouldn’t give me a second thought. I’d shag balls for him and his buddies for a while, then I’d get caught up in playing with my little friends. Later, Mom would show up at the courts, and wouldn’t be able to find me, and she’d holler, “Butch, where is Misty?” Dad would nonchalantly shrug his shoulders, as if to say, “Not to worry, B., I’ve got it under control.” Then, he’d quickly scan the beach, trying to locate me. Finally, he’d point and yell, “There she is, B.!” pretending to have known where I was all along.
Oftentimes, they’d find me performing acrobatics in the grassy area near the courts. I used to love to play on the jungle gym equipment, especially the rings, the seesaw, and the trampoline. When I got older, I’d ask Mom for a little money, and off I’d scamper with my friend Carol Luber, up onto Santa Monica Pier to play the games or ride the bumper cars. Sometimes, we’d pedal our bikes to Venice and back.
In my early childhood years, I was always around beach volleyball, but I really wasn’t into it. Weekday afternoons, I did my homework sitting in the sand, while Dad played games after working at MGM. He’d work the early shift, from 4:00 A.M. to 12:30 P.M., in order to get his daily beach volleyball fix. Mom, meanwhile, coached volleyball or gave tennis lessons for the Beverly Hills and Culver City parks and recreation departments. Weekends, we’d fill a cooler with sandwiches and drinks and drive down to Muscle Beach a little after 8:00 A.M. The minute we hit the sand, Dad would run from court to court, writing his name on the sign-up sheets. Because Dad was such a beach volleyball rat, we’d be at Muscle Beach all day, sometimes as late as 7:30 or 8:00 P.M., depending on the time of year and the hours of daylight.
In those days, though, I was completely wrapped up in my own little world, oblivious to the fact that some of the best beach volleyball players in history were performing at my feet. There were legends like Kathy Gregory, the matriarch of women’s beach volleyball, who reigned supreme in the 1960s and 1970s, and there were up-and-coming stars like Karch Kiraly, now the most celebrated American male beach volleyball player ever, and the only person to have won Olympic gold medals in both the indoor (1984 and 1988) and beach (1996) versions of the sport.
As a child, I had no idea how good anybody was, not even Karch. It was, “That’s Karch.” Or, since I couldn’t pronounce his first name, “That’s Krotch.” Sometimes, I even referred to him as “Scotch Tape.” To me, he was just an old guy—seventeen years older, in fact. He was not some famous volleyball stud. Rather, he was my all-time favorite “babysitter,” the big brother Dad asked to look after me on the beach when Krotch, er, Karch wasn’t playing. For instance, after graduating from UCLA and making the commitment to the U.S. national team, Karch ended up “babysitting” me during a mixed doubles tournament in San Diego. Dad, who’d teamed up that weekend with his successful, longtime doubles partner Eileen Clancy McClintock, recalls being in the throes of a match against NBA Hall of Famer Bill Walton, when suddenly, out of the corner of his eye, he noticed Bill’s son Luke sitting on my chest.
“Bill, would you ask that big galoot to get off of Misty?” Dad said. Although I was three years older than Luke, who now plays for the NBA’s Los Angeles Lakers, he already was a lot bigger than I.
Up until a couple years ago, I must admit, I didn’t have the guts to talk to Karch. Because, at some point, he’d gone from “That’s just Krotch” to “That’s Karch Kiraly!” When I finally got a clue about his talent, I began idolizing him. I began wanting to be just like him. I studied how he trained, how he played, how he conducted himself. I still do. Karch was, and still is, The Legend, the gold standard. When I finally realized how important he was to the sport, I told myself that one day, if I ever got good enough, I’d chase Karch’s legend. I’d try to rewrite history for women’s volleyball. I’d try to create a legacy as golden as his. I’d try to become the female Karch Kiraly. While I’ve never surpassed his accomplishments in the sport—on one lev
el, I know men and women can’t, and shouldn’t, be compared—until the day I die, I’ll keep on chasing Karch because he’s the best there ever was.
You know, the more I think about it, the more I realize that I have never, ever ranked the players at Muscle Beach by their talent, especially back when I was growing up. I always have just embraced them as people. It was their personalities that always resonated with me. And the kookier, the better. At times, all the crazy characters at Muscle Beach gave it a circuslike atmosphere.
There was a boxer named “Two-Way Tony,” who played volleyball by day, but dressed up as a woman by night, going by the name “Judy.” There was “Byron Buns,” a pint-sized muscleman with a pronounced butt. There was “Daddy Gordon,” an elderly gent from Arkansas, who pranced around in his teeny, tiny Speedo and a ten-gallon cowboy hat. He was a chick magnet, thanks to his little Chihuahua named Tina. All the ladies fussed over him, cooing, “Oh, Daddy Gordon, what a cute little dog.” And, oh yes, there was Miss Nude America.
But my all-time favorite Muscle Beach character was Wilt Chamberlain, the legendary NBA Hall of Famer who got hooked on volleyball in his midthirties to rehabilitate from a knee injury. At seven foot one and 275 pounds, Wilt towered over everybody in the sand. Dad later joined him on Wilt’s Big Dippers, a four-man team that traveled the country playing six-man teams. It was volleyball’s version of the Harlem Globetrotters.
Dad always jokes that Wilt’s most challenging games on the beach occurred when he was trying to pick up bikini-clad women. Wilt had a routine. He’d spot a woman he wanted to meet, then he’d turn to Dad and say, “There’s a beautiful girl. Go tell her that somebody tall, dark, and handsome wants to meet her.” Dad would always reply, “Well, Wilt, two out of three isn’t bad.”
Misty Page 4