“Holly McPeak,” I said. “She and I are going to make a run at the 2000 Olympics!”
“What are your odds of qualifying?” Dad asked.
“A million to one,” I said, laughing.
“That sounds pretty good,” Dad said. “Great, we’re going to Sydney!”
What had Dad wanted to say? “Are you freakin’ crazy?!” What he hadn’t told me was that Holly had called him a few days earlier to feel him out about partnering with me and that he’d given her his and Mom’s blessing. What Dad also hadn’t told me was that when it had become clear I was going to pursue a career on the beach, he’d phoned Karch.
“I want Misty to be the next Karch Kiraly,” Dad told him.
“No, Butch, she’s going to be the first and only Misty May,” Karch replied.
In September 1999, Holly and I began seriously training. Little did I know the depth of her commitment to the sport or her intense will to win. We’d meet in Manhattan Beach, at the courts near the big, peach, three-story house Holly shared with her longtime boyfriend Leonard Armato, a sports agent who represented Los Angeles Lakers center Shaquille O’Neal, and a cofounder of the AVP, who later became its chairman, commissioner, and CEO. We started from square one, with Holly teaching me basic skills. Although I’d played beach volleyball, and had a good feel for the game, Holly kept reminding me that I didn’t know its nuances. She was all about fierce defense and her trademark was perfect passing.
“Don’t worry, in a month, you’ll get it, and say, ‘Wow!’” Holly kept telling me. Time and again, as I added skill after skill to my beach repertoire, she proved to be right.
Soon after we began training, Holly suggested we travel to Brazil. Because we were a “small team”—Holly at five foot seven and me at five foot eight and a half—she said we needed to excel in a lot of areas to defeat the taller teams. The Brazilians focused on excellent ball control, a style she envisioned us playing. There were some great female players in Brazil, as well as some great coaches. We’d received a wild card entry into the final event on the 1999 FIVB tour, in Salvador de Bahia, Brazil. So off we went.
I was up for the challenge, although still very much a kid. I hadn’t done much growing up on my own. Throughout my life, my parents had always taken care of things for me, and when I was at Long Beach State, my coaches had handled the details and provided the structure. In fact, I was so accustomed to everybody else taking charge, I showed up at the Los Angeles airport without my passport. Mom had to race home to retrieve it.
Holly and I spent a couple of weeks in Brazil, and the best part of the trip was being in Rio de Janeiro with Shelda Bede and Adriana Behar, the rock stars of women’s beach volleyball. We stayed at Shelda’s house, thanks to Holly’s friendship with her. On that trip, I eyeballed the best Brazilian players, male and female, and I spent hours studying their games. That’s what my parents had taught me to do, ever since I was a little girl. “Pick out the best, see what they’re doing,” they’d instruct. Then I tried to find a way to incorporate their strengths into my game. The first two I picked out? Shelda and Adriana. They were a “small team” with awesome skills, and they’d been on top forever.
Holly and I finished tied for ninth in Salvador. We each won $2,250 and received sixty-eight points. It wasn’t good enough to count toward Olympic qualifying, but it was respectable for a team getting its feet wet. Regardless, we knew we had a lot going for us in our Olympic quest. We both were hard workers, extremely self-motivated. We both had been setters in college, highly skilled in every aspect of indoor volleyball. Holly played three years at the University of California–Berkeley before completing her collegiate career at UCLA in 1990 with an NCAA Championship.
After we got back from Brazil, Holly and I did nothing but practice, practice, practice. Her training regimen was harder than anything I’d ever experienced. Her father, Chuck, was a former marine lieutenant, and it was clear the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. Again and again, she repeated her mantras: “This is our goal.” “We can’t take our eye off the prize.” “It’s not going to be a cakewalk.” Trainingwise, I didn’t know anything besides what I’d done in college, so I often overtrained. If Holly was doing a particular workout, I did it, too. I tried a lot of different things, per her orders, like bikram yoga, and this and that, and very quickly, I became a rat on a wheel, racing from workout to workout, spending hours and hours in my car. I often felt nervous, anxious, and stressed out. I knew if we wanted to qualify for Sydney, I had to give it my all—and then some—and that I couldn’t make any mistakes.
Holly became the driving force behind our Olympic quest. She kept us moving, full steam ahead. She hired Gene Selznick, who was in his seventies, to be our coach. Gene was one of the most dominant indoor players in the history of the game and a celebrated member of the 1960 and 1966 U.S. Volleyball World Championship teams. An early proponent of Southern California beach volleyball, dating back to 1949, Gene was nicknamed “the First King of Beach Volleyball.” Even with a coach, nobody pushed me harder, on or off the court, than Holly. She steered me to talented healers who could help me recover quickly from nagging injuries. She taught me how to be a responsible adult. And she called me out when I made rookie decisions.
One time we planned to practice at Manhattan Beach at 9:00 A.M. When I hadn’t shown up by 9:15 A.M., she ran up to her house and phoned me. I had a severe migraine, and had decided to stay home.
“Well, you need to call me and tell me,” Holly scolded. “We’re a team, a partnership. We’re trying to do something, together, that’s really big. This isn’t just a day at the beach, Misty. This isn’t just a casual thing. This is the Olympics.”
Holly can best be described in one word: INTENSE. She brings out the best in everybody she plays with. She is a hard worker and a very dedicated player. However, it was tough for me, at twenty-two, to get into her demanding regimen. Throughout our growing pains as teammates, and my growing pains as a young woman, Holly continually reminded me, “This is what we’re trying to do. This is where we’re trying to go. We can’t mess around.”
My parents stepped aside and let Holly take the reins. They completely entrusted me to her. She had to be thinking, “Here are two parents who know a lot about beach volleyball. They could be at every practice. They could be pretty controlling, if they wanted to be.” But my parents never interfered. Mom, battling back pain since my last year or two at Long Beach State, watched practice, but not often. Meanwhile, Dad ran me through “extra credit” workout sessions. After Holly and I’d finished practicing, he’d drill me at Huntington Beach. Beyond that, though, they just played supportive roles.
Thanks to Holly, I worked harder than ever. I grew into a professional athlete. She was my mentor, I was her protégée. I always deferred to her. She’d ask which bikini I wanted to wear. We had ten from which to choose. “You pick, I don’t care,” I’d tell her. She’d ask where I wanted to eat on road trips. “You pick, it doesn’t matter to me,” I’d reply. She’d ask if I wanted to wake up at 6:30 A.M. or 7:00 A.M. “Whatever you think,” I’d say. Thanks to her impetus, I signed sponsorship deals, launched a website, bought a home in Long Beach, and started an investment portfolio. In the process, Holly and I had a great time together. Today, she’ll admit there were plenty of times she thought she was traveling with her thirteen-year-old sister rather than a young woman who’d just finished four years of college. Now, I can understand Holly’s perspective: I always say that I gave her a lot of gray hair.
Holly was my mother away from home, and more often than not, she was my big sister. She endured my ever-changing hair color. Jet black. Brunette with sun streaks. Honey blonde. She played a role in my endless pranks, like trying to pass off friends as family members to the media. She rolled her eyes at the crazy situations I got myself into, like staying up until 1:30 A.M. downing one-dollar tacos. (I tied my personal record of ten.) She laughed at the goofy stuff that came out of my mouth, like when a reporter from th
e San Diego Union-Tribune asked about my website, www.mistymay.com, and I replied, straight-faced, “I know it isn’t creative, but I didn’t want somebody stealing my name. You know how they get a name and turn it into a porn site.” She taught me a lot about life and introduced me to elements of it as only a big sister could.
Like getting my first bikini wax.
Holly took me to Pink Cheeks in Los Angeles. Afterward, I found out it was the place for Hollywood celebrities, but I had no clue at the time. I was more concerned that the esthetician took a lot off. Actually, she took everything off. I was in complete shock. Holly hadn’t prepared me to be scalped. It was painful. Going to the gynecologist was bad enough, but now this? And just when I thought the esthetician was finished doing her job, she suddenly barked out an order: “All fours, please!” Yikes. But I quickly told myself, “If it’s good enough for Holly, it’s good enough for me.” When I got up from the table, my butt cheeks stuck together when I walked. After the ordeal was over, Holly informed me bikini waxes were just part of being a pro.
In our first four months together, things went quite well. We believed the 2000 Olympics were within our reach, even if few others did. Then, in January 2000, I got a phone call I wasn’t prepared for.
“I have cancer,” Mom said.
My first thought was, “My mom’s going to die.” I burst into tears. The only people I’d ever known who’d had cancer were my grandparents, Mom’s parents, and they’d both died from the disease. My mind began racing. I thought about my grandfather, who’d had prostate cancer. I thought about my grandmother, who’d had uterine cancer. I thought about all of the great things I wanted to accomplish, in volleyball and in life. And I thought about how my mother, who’d played such a prominent role in my success, might not be around to see my plans come to fruition, to share all of my victories with me and Dad. Would she live to see me get to the Olympics? Win gold medals? Get married? Have children?
In my head, I kept hearing myself say, “This is the end of the world.” Suddenly, I blurted out through my tears, “I want to live at home.” Her cancer diagnosis had turned me back into Mama’s Little Girl.
My mother was stoic, calm. She did her best to hold it together. “Everything will be fine,” she assured me. She’d never wanted anybody to worry about her. But I knew she’d been crying. I could hear a faint nasal sound in her voice.
For two years, Mom had complained about back pain. As a lifelong athlete, she’d figured she just had an arthritic problem in her spine. Or perhaps she’d tweaked her back by swinging too hard at a ball while playing with her girlfriends. She’d had massages and chiropractic adjustments, but they’d only provided temporary relief. The pain quickly returned, cropping up in different areas of her back. X-rays were inconclusive. One day, Dad went to see Dr. William Stetson for his arthritic knees. Stetson got to chatting with Dad about the family, and Dad told him about Mom’s persistent, moving back pain.
“That doesn’t sound right,” Stetson said. “Have her come in to have an MRI.”
Then, boom. A day or so after the MRI, Stetson phoned Dad and said, “We’ll keep Barbara’s appointment for tomorrow, but I want you to come in with her.”
“What’s up?” Dad said.
“She has cancer,” Stetson said.
Stetson explained to Mom that the MRI showed spots in her upper back, just below her shoulders. The cancer already had metastasized, so she underwent numerous tests to determine its origin. She never had a biopsy or surgery, and the doctors never figured out what kind of cancer it was. It moved from her lungs to her spine to her hip to the base of her skull. It was all very confusing to Dad and to me—it still is—because it was discovered so late.
Mom subjected herself to extensive radiation and chemotherapy treatments. She wasn’t going down without a fight. An athletic, strong-willed woman, she tolerated a large combination and high dosage of chemotherapy drugs. However, the potent poison made her extremely ill. It yanked at her emotions, upset her stomach, zapped her energy, and left a tinny taste in her mouth. Sometimes, she slept with a bag of potpourri next to her nose to overpower the taste. The doctors kept cheering her on, telling her the chemotherapy was working, insisting she was getting better. They used cyclist Lance Armstrong as a beacon of hope: Diagnosed in October 1996, at twenty-five, with stage-three testicular cancer which had spread to his lungs, abdomen, and brain, he’d undergone surgery and chemotherapy to save his life. His doctor admitted he had less than a 40 percent chance to survive. He’d proven the medical experts wrong, conquering cancer, then winning the Tour de France seven times (three times during Mom’s battle).
Dad and I, and all of Mom’s girlfriends, were enthused by the doctors’ words, but Mom wasn’t buying any of it. She felt like crap. She was ornery. Everything bothered her, just one thing after another. She kept talking about how much she missed having her mother rub her forehead and promise her everything would be okay. Now that was somebody whose words she could trust. To make herself feel better, Mom cuddled with an old red and white cotton jacket that had belonged to my grandmother.
“My major fear is not dying, it’s my crappy thinking,” Mom said. “Feeling sorry for yourself leads to ‘Why should I live?’ If you’re not happy on the inside, how can you be happy on the outside?”
To pull herself out of her doldrums, Mom consulted a healer, Petra, who focused on improving the spirit. She taught Mom visualization techniques to renew her body, mind, and soul. She had Mom keep a grateful journal. She put Mom on a macrobiotic diet. For some semblance of normalcy, during her weeks off from chemotherapy, Mom took to the volleyball court with her girlfriends. Even if she couldn’t jump, swing at the ball, or hit very hard, she still had the desire to get out there. She was a competitor, through and through, and she loved competing with her girlfriends. The chemotherapy couldn’t kill her passion for volleyball, and it certainly couldn’t diminish her sense of humor. She actually got to the point where she’d laugh at the bandanna covering her bald head. “I look like one of the Seven Dwarfs,” she joked. She threatened to paste a fake beard on her face. “I’ll tell people my hair grew back, but in the wrong place,” she kidded.
Eileen Clancy McClintock, Dad’s longtime beach volleyball partner, remembers playing with Mom and some of Mom’s girlfriends at Sorrento Beach during, or soon after, one of her rounds of chemotherapy treatments. Every time Eileen lovingly got on her, Mom would shoot back, with a smile, “You can’t yell at me. I’m a cancer patient!” Eileen still laughs about the scene afterward, when Mom went into the restroom and announced, “Stand back! I’m radioactive!” A few minutes later, a toxic chemical stench wafted from Mom’s toilet stall. Everybody pinched their noses and held their breath, except for Mom, who roared loudly.
From day one, my parents sheltered me from Mom’s cancer. I went to only one doctor’s appointment, and I never accompanied her to treatments. It isn’t easy for me to come up with the details of her disease, and her valiant battle, because I don’t have much firsthand knowledge. My parents did that on purpose. I was gone a lot, chasing my Olympic quest around the world. I called home every day. Some days, she felt good, others she felt lousy. But my parents never gave me the straight scoop. For the longest time, I felt very guilty about not having been there for Mom, but eventually I made peace with myself. Now, it makes a lot more sense to me why my parents didn’t want me to become involved in Mom’s cancer. Come hell or high water, Mom and Dad weren’t going to let anything interfere with my future. And this battle was hell for us. They insisted I carry on with life, that I do everything in my power to get to the 2000 Olympics. Always being the dutiful child, that’s exactly what I did.
The 2000 FIVB world tour, and the first of nine Olympic qualifiers, kicked off in Vitoria, Brazil, the first week in February. Holly and I finished fifth. While disappointed, we saw some bright spots: We had upset Brazil’s Shelda and Adriana, the number one team in the world, and we had led Liz and E.Y. before dropping a tight match t
hat we could’ve won.
With only one FIVB event under my belt before the 2000 season, Holly and I were at a severe disadvantage at each tour stop, forced to play in the qualifying round in order to get into the main draw. This made our Olympic quest even tougher: We’d have to play twice as many games as everybody else. That meant more stress, more pressure, and more days on the road. Holly would call Dad to lament our predicament, and he’d tell her it was a blessing in disguise.
“That’s great, you get to practice,” he’d say, trying to pump her up. “Use those as practice matches.”
The next tournament, in mid-April, was a USA Volleyball event in Deerfield Beach, Florida. Although it wasn’t an Olympic qualifier, it did wonders for us. It was our first victory, and we split twenty thousand dollars. We dominated the competition. I had 19 kills in only my second final. I became the youngest woman to win a U.S. pro beach title.
“I don’t know what makes us so successful, we’re a brand-new team,” Holly told reporters after the match. “The chemistry is definitely there. I knew we had chemistry from the beginning. We both grew up on the beach playing, so we have the background. We are a long shot to make the Olympic team, but we believe in our chances. If we play the way we did this weekend, we can get there.”
Meanwhile, I was stunned and a bit starry-eyed.
“Everything is a learning experience for me,” I told the media. “I’m still new at this.”
In May, we played in two Beach Volleyball America (BVA) events—Oceanside (second to Lisa Arce and Barbra Fontana after blowing a 5–0 lead) and Santa Monica (third). Again, the tournaments had no impact on Olympic qualifying, but they represented an important milestone for women’s beach volleyball, and that was very meaningful to us. After the 1997 season, the Women’s Professional Volleyball Association went belly up, about $1.2 million in debt. Now, thanks to software multimillionaire Charlie Jackson, the BVA’s owner and operator, the women pros were back in business. Each of the seven BVA tournaments would have a seventy-five-thousand-dollar purse, the winning teams splitting fifteen thousand dollars.
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