A lot of people have the misconception that, in the beginning of our partnership, I was the natural and Kerri was the one who had to make the major transition. That’s not true. Everybody, including me, has to make the transition from indoor to beach. Deep down, volleyball is volleyball, the same sport and the same skills, indoor or on the beach. The beach game is more freewheeling, and therefore requires a lot more versatility, strength, and stamina. From the outside, it looks very hang-loose, very day-at-the-beach, so to speak. But it takes a lot of mental toughness. Unlike indoor, where you may not touch the ball during a rally, in beach, you’re involved in every ball movement, so you have to be able to cover the entire court and make every shot imaginable. True, Kerri and I both made the transition to beach when we were twenty-two. While I might have been a little more seasoned when I stepped onto the sand, having been exposed to the game as a kid, I still was young and immature. Kerri was, too. In one sense, we were girls. We had to grow, not only with each other but as young women, and experience-wise, as far as being on our own.
In indoor volleyball, everything’s taken care of. You show up, and, whether you’re at the top club level, in college, or on the U.S. national team, your uniforms have been picked out. You’re given shoes and knee pads, and you don’t have to wash, replace, or repair your equipment. You’re told, “We’re leaving on this date for this tournament in such and such.” Airline tickets, hotel rooms, and meals are handled for you. All you need to do is pack your suitcase and get yourself to the airport, unless there’s a team bus. Your biggest responsibility? A current passport. And then there’s beach volleyball, where it’s, “Okay, we’re leaving . . .” And everything is up to you. But I didn’t play the role of Mother Hen to Kerri, as Holly had played to me. No, we worked on everything together. Airline, hotel, and train reservations. Packing for extended international trips. Scoping out restaurants. Cutting corners and saving money.
Success didn’t happen overnight for Kerri and me. While we immediately meshed in our practice sessions, we didn’t instantly click in the heat of competition. It’s unrealistic to think success will come instantly for a partnership. It takes time to develop trust and confidence in each other, get the handle on teamwork and the knack for court sense. It takes time to know what your partner is thinking and how she will respond in various situations. It takes time to learn how to communicate, verbally and nonverbally.
As a warm-up to a rigorous FIVB tour, we played two BVA events, one in late April in Clearwater, Florida, the other in late May, in Oceanside, California. Then, in mid-June, we embarked on a nine-tournament jaunt across Europe and Asia. Our decision to play exclusively overseas caused quite a stir. Initially, the AVP wasn’t going to allow us to play in FIVB events. In order to secure enough points to stay in the main draw overseas, and ultimately qualify for the 2004 Olympics, we had to sacrifice playing at home. Also, we needed to compete against the best women’s teams in the world, which meant playing the FIVB tour, not the AVP.
In our first tournament, in Cagliari, Italy, we finished a disappointing ninth. We were knocked out by Holly and her new partner, Lisa Arce. After that, it was a long and winding road for Kerri and me. We placed third in Gstaad, Switzerland; ninth in Gran Canaria, Spain; and seventh in Marseille, France. We didn’t win a tournament until our fifth FIVB event, which was in Espinho, Portugal. Our winner’s check was twenty-seven thousand dollars. Then it was back to the roller coaster. We finished ninth in Klagenfurt, Austria; second in Osaka, Japan; and second in Hong Kong.
Still, I could sense that Kerri and I had something very special. Almost immediately, our partnership felt different from Holly’s and mine. It was truly magical. At every practice, and in every tournament, we were getting better and better, individually and as a team. In fact, I was so enthused I told myself, “We can be Olympic champions.”
But I won’t kid you, it was a real grind. People think your life as a professional athlete is so wonderful; they say, “Look at all the places you get to go and see.” But it’s not a vacation, it’s a business trip. If you lose, yes, you might spend some extra time sightseeing, but if you’re winning, you’re not walking around checking out the town. In fact, you’re not doing much of anything, other than eating, sleeping, and playing volleyball.
We did, however, manage to get the flavor of the country by the style of beach volleyball their athletes played and by the site of the tournament. Brazil, in parts, is more like a third world country. They have a lot of poverty there, but both the rich and the poor show up at the beach. They’re all there. The beaches are great, they go on for miles, and it’s a very active society. It doesn’t matter what size they are, everybody’s in a bathing suit. The Brazilians love life, no matter how much money or how many material possessions they have.
In Switzerland, we played right next to the Alps, and I always felt compelled to roll down the mountains in my bikini, singing the soundtrack from The Sound of Music. Kerri and I fell in love with a salami sandwich at a local hotel. We became so superstitious about it that we always ate it, along with a salad, before tournaments, sometimes as many as three times in one trip. In Austria, we played next to a lake, beside beautiful green foothills. All the food was so fresh. In Marseille, France, we played at a topless beach (but not for us!). While we were playing, we could see people sunbathing with their tops off.
Throughout our first season, Kerri was extremely hard on herself.
“I suck,” she kept saying to me.
“No, you don’t,” I kept reassuring her.
From the beginning of 2001, it was evident that Kerri and I were wired differently. We’re both competitive. We’re both hard workers. We’re never satisfied. We’re always trying to find ways to get better. We’ll both push ourselves to our limits. However, we deal with winning and losing, success and failure, in very different ways. I can shake off a loss in three seconds, hug the opposing team, and run off—my life is more than just volleyball. Kerri lets a loss drag her down for a lot longer, but that spurs her on to be the great player she is. I’ve found my own way to be the best. For me, that involves not letting things weigh on me, not letting myself be defined by volleyball. Kerri wants everything now, but I’m the type who’ll say, “We’ll be good, just give it time.” In order to be a successful athlete, I think, ultimately, you’ve got to be able to say to yourself, “Not every day is going to be my day.”
That first season was an important bonding time for Kerri and me. The closeness we developed as teammates, business partners, and friends was invaluable. We were away from home for almost nine weeks, and we were together every day, all day. It was such an adventure. We traveled well together, which is the real key in a long-term, pro beach volleyball partnership. Although we had different personalities, on and off the court—my dream job is being a Saturday Night Live cast member; hers is, most likely, being a Hollywood stylist or a personal shopper—we got along the whole time.
As Kerri says, “Beach volleyball can be like a soap opera. Ideally you want to find a partner that you can be in sync with physically and mentally.” If we hadn’t gotten there by the middle of our first season, we certainly were well on our way. I remember coming home at the end of August, after our long overseas tour, unpacking my suitcases, and Kerri calling me and saying, “I miss you, Misty.” It had been only six hours since we’d said good-bye to each other at the Los Angeles airport, but she told me she didn’t know what to do with herself because I wasn’t there.
The 2001 season taught me even more about playing with injuries. My left knee had started to act up again. I’d torn my posterior cruciate ligament (PCL) in 1996, as a sophomore at Long Beach State, but rather than have surgery, I chose to rehabilitate it through weight training and physical therapy. I was cleared to get back onto the court, and played in the playoffs, but I probably shouldn’t have. I wore a brace, and because I was so hampered, my Long Beach State team was forced to run a completely different offense to keep me behind the block. After we
lost in the playoffs, I saw a new physical therapist, who questioned why I’d played. He told me I needed to be in rehab for at least six weeks. After following his orders, I was able to get back out on the court without a brace, and I had better stability. I played the rest of my college career without any problems.
Then, in 2001, my PCL injury reappeared. Kerri and I were practicing at Huntington Beach. We were doing a dropping drill. We’d take a couple of steps back from the net, Anna would hit the ball to us, and we’d dig it. I stepped in a hole, hyperextended my left knee, and completed the PCL tear. Now, my left PCL was completely gone. Even at that point, doctors still maintain you can play without a PCL, as long as you’re diligent about physical therapy. But even though I was religious about my rehab, strengthening the muscles around my left knee, and I still was able to squat and jump, I repeatedly hyperextended it. I tried playing in a brace, but it was too restrictive. After the season, I decided to investigate whether surgery could fix it. I didn’t want to live the rest of my life worrying about stepping off a curb, or perhaps just standing, and hyperextending the knee. I went to one of the best surgeons in Los Angeles, and he said he wouldn’t do the surgery because it wouldn’t be successful. He said that, in all likelihood, if he operated on my knee, I’d never be able to play world-class volleyball again. I was ready to quit, but Dad wouldn’t let me.
“Your mother has struggled to stay here on earth, and now you’re ready to give in?” he asked. “You never want to leave before the miracle. Be persistent.”
I was referred to Dr. Bill Schobert, in Mission Viejo, California, by a number of volleyball players and coaches, including Karch. Among athletes, Dr. Schobert was known as the orthopedist you went to if you needed to have another surgeon’s work revised. Dad calls him “Dr. Do-Over.” Unbeknownst to me, Dr. Schobert had been working on a technique for PCL reconstruction for quite a while. In the early 1990s, he’d had a young female patient who needed PCL surgery, so he’d decided to apply the principles of anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) surgery in reverse. First, he’d practiced on a cadaver. Then, he’d performed the PCL reconstruction on her knee.
While the standard PCL reconstruction is done with arthroscopic surgery, Dr. Schobert says, even today, it’s still an operation that is performed “fairly blindly.” It’s tricky because the surgeon drills from the front of the knee into the back, through the tibia, directly at the artery and the nerve. If the drill goes through either, Dr. Schobert says, the patient’s foot won’t work, or he or she could lose his or her leg.
Even today, isolated PCL reconstructions, meaning that no other ligament is injured, are not performed very often, Dr. Schobert says. You’ll hear about people having ACL-PCL or MCL-PCL (medial collateral ligament) reconstructions. But you’ll seldom hear about somebody having just a PCL reconstruction. Most orthopedic surgeons don’t like to perform PCLs at all, Dr. Schobert says. Instead, they’ll suggest strengthening the quadriceps muscle on the front of the thigh to help make up for some of the strength and stability lost by having a torn PCL.
After Mom and I visited Dr. Schobert, we reported back to Dad, and the three of us decided, as a family, to put our faith in him. I knew I couldn’t keep playing with a torn PCL, and I believed I’d be a better player with a more stable knee. I trusted Dr. Schobert, and I was willing to take the risk. Even though at that point in time, he’d done only fifteen to twenty PCL reconstructions, I really liked his style. He was brutally honest and down to earth like Dad. He was also compassionate, warm, and engaging like Mom.
Ironically, Dr. Schobert now says my 2001 PCL reconstruction was “an exciting little surgery, because partway through it, one of the guides moved, and I initially drilled in an area you don’t want to drill in.” It was in a spot in the tibia, he says, and he didn’t like it. So he had to shift the drill hole, and then get the rest of the procedure done. He repaired my knee with a cadaver’s Achilles tendon because it’s so big and strong. The two-hour surgery went very, very well.
These days, I never give my PCL reconstruction a second thought. Except when somebody calls me by my nickname. While I was working to regain my strength on the court, I wasn’t quick to the ball. My left leg didn’t have complete range of motion. I couldn’t flex or extend it. So Kerri’s boyfriend, Casey, nicknamed me Turtle, and the nickname has stuck with me ever since. (What are Kerri’s nicknames? Well, she has several, including “Queen Bee,” which is how her family referred to her growing up. And then there are Dad’s nicknames for her: “Spiderwoman,” “K.W.,” and “Long-Legged Galoot.”)
Today, Kerri and Casey will admit that calling me Turtle is a lot more sarcastic than true because I’m actually very quick in the sand. What you don’t know, though, is that I have an amazing hidden talent: If I tilt my head at an extreme angle and rotate my eyeballs, I look just like a turtle. If ever there was a perfect candidate for David Letterman’s “Stupid Human Tricks,” it’s me.
13
TOUGHEST YEAR
My mother taught me a lot about girl power.
Throughout early 2001, it was becoming very clear that Mom’s cancer treatments weren’t accomplishing what the doctors had hoped. She still met her volleyball cronies at the beach, whenever she felt well enough to get there. She talked a bit about her treatments while passing the ball back and forth, but she really just went to the beach to forget about life for a while. She wanted to get lost in the sport that she loved so much. She wanted to feel the sand between her toes, hear the waves tumble onto the beach, and sense the warm sun on her body. She wanted to go back in time, to the days when she was young, vibrant, and healthy. She wanted to be surrounded by her special group of female friends, whose warmth, love, strength, and athletic spirit fortified and empowered her.
Late in summer 2001, Mom placed an emotional call to Sandra Golden, one of her “old” volleyball friends, and asked Sandra if she’d play with her in the Huntsman World Senior Games, in St. George, Utah, that October. Sandra remembers being surprised that Mom wanted to participate in a tournament against some of the world’s best senior athletes, since she’d been too weak to play volleyball much of the summer. Without hesitating, Sandra said, “Yes,” because she was so honored Mom had asked her.
Indeed, it was a bold move on Mom’s part, but then again, she never was one to let the parade pass her by. For fifteen years, she’d played with Alice Sanchez’s Mavericks team at the U.S. Senior Nationals. She’d always left everything on the court, and yet she’d always been overlooked for national awards. Alice believes Mom’s being passed over had a lot to do with politics. “They just pick people that look flashy and maybe put a ball straight down, where Barbara was just a steady-Eddie player,” Alice says. “She was tough, tough, tough. Very, very aggressive, just a very tough personality.”
To illustrate Mom’s passion, Alice recounts a conversation she had with Mom when she turned sixty-five. Mom, who was forty-eight at the time, proclaimed, “Alice, when I get to be your age, I hope I’m still playing volleyball.” Today, Alice is seventy-five-plus—and still playing.
I’ll let Sandra tell the rest of the 2001 Huntsman World Senior Games story, as she recently shared in a beautifully written tribute letter for this book. She titled it, “A Barbara May Story,” and I cried when I read it. I know I never could have come up with words as meaningful as hers:
After I hung up, I realized Barbara’s call was not about quitting on life or giving up volleyball, something she loved. Not yet! Barb was very emotional about playing competitively again and had decided to play in one more major tournament, the Huntsman World Games, in St. George, Utah. It would be our first appearance at the Games, but it would be the fifteenth anniversary of the Games. Teams from around the world would be present, representing all major sports. Barb had turned fifty in January, which qualified her as a Senior. I was fifty-one at the time, so I was more qualified. We would play on Alice Sanchez’s team, the Mavericks, an appropriately named team. . . .
As the tournamen
t approached, Barbara’s spirit seemed to lift; I think it gave her something to look forward to. On the other hand, she shared with me that she had some concerns because she had not played for a while, and she wanted to play her best. She was also struggling to lose weight due to her cancer treatments; this was a serious goal for her. She wanted to feel her hip bones again. As the tournament drew close, she was at the beach, trying to get in a little bit of play. I heard that her doctors weren’t too pleased with her decision to play because the cancer treatments may have weakened her body in more ways than most of us knew. Any hard fall or hit or something unusual could be tragic; chemotherapy evidently weakens the density of the bones. None of this mattered to Barbara, though; she had to play in what she knew would most likely be her last tournament.
On Wednesday, October 17, I picked her up at her home in Costa Mesa, to drive to the tournament in St. George, Utah, about a six-hour drive. All the way there we talked about everything that was important to her and little about her health. We hadn’t been together for a while because I had been in Europe traveling for four months during the summer. Throughout my trip, I emailed her almost every day so she could share my experiences without being there. We spent much of this trip centered on where I had been and my experiences in previous months. She had seen my pictures and spoke about seeing Europe with Misty someday, realizing that she might not have the chance. She had lots of dreams that we discussed, and we were about to realize one.
That evening we attended the Opening Ceremonies at the Tuacahn Amphitheatre, in a natural red rock mountain setting. It was an amazing event, similar to Olympic events, with an Olympic torch, dancers with flags of the world, powerful music, fireworks, and former professional and Olympic athletes making presentations. They had lived through experiences we desired to experience in a smaller way; we were champions for still trying. . . . The event theme was “Reach Higher”; Barbara was about to accomplish this over the next few days.
Misty Page 17