This started as a father-and-son thing. And it will finish as one too.
Spare Saturdays spent on the beach by a hard-driving father and his bright young son. A love for a game was passed down and a bond was made. A thousand sandy weekends later, the son has passed it on to his own boys.
The sport that bonded Karch Kiraly and his father, Laszlo, wasn’t any of the usual ones. It was volleyball. In particular, beach volleyball, a maverick game that was as much lifestyle as sport in the 1970s. Kiraly came to master the game as no other player before or since. The winner of three Olympic gold medals, more tournament victories, more prize winnings and more accolades than any other player, he became the star that every fan came to see and every young player wanted to be.
He will still be that today when fans fill the sand next to the Huntington Beach Pier for the 2007 AVP Huntington Beach Open. It’s the last time Kiraly, 46, a San Clemente resident, will compete as a pro beach volleyball player in Orange County. Though it seemed like he could go on forever, his 30-year career will end this season.
Kiraly (pronounced keer-EYE) is making the transition that all professional athletes, great or otherwise, eventually have to make. His will bring him full circle in a way, back to where he started. He coaches the St. Margaret’s Episcopal high school volleyball team, including his sons, Kristian and Kory. He started the Karch Kiraly Volleyball Academy as well, designed to teach volleyball to kids and to make young players better. He’s also a broadcaster for AVP events.
It is the right time and way, he said. And he is filled with nothing but gratitude.
“I think of myself as lucky in so many ways,” Kiraly said, chatting on the beach after a recent workout with current partner, Kevin Wong. “I’ve been really lucky to come up the time I did, to live in California when I did, and to be a part of the generation of players we were and the great coaching we got. All of it really came together. I didn’t expect it would be something I could earn a living at and support a family at. Yeah, I pinch myself a lot.”
The family heirloom
Laszlo found the game as a boy too, but far away from California. “I started playing in Hungary in 1950. It got under my skin and never left me,” Laszlo said. He made the junior national team there, but soon escaped the Soviet invasion and came to the U.S. He worked for a while as an engineer and eventually decided to go to medical school. His internship was spent in Santa Barbara. The family would end up settling there in the early 1970s.
“I wouldn’t see him much during the week,” Karch said of his father, who first gave him the ball at age 6. But the weekends would come and Laszlo would invite Karch to the beach to hit the ball around. “It was time I got to spend with him, which was nice.”
For three years, however, Karch only worked on passing the ball around, not playing full games. It paid off, when father and son finally teamed up for local tournaments in the mid-1970s, Karch was fundamentally better than a lot of players twice his age.
“Here I am, 11 years old, and these grown men have to give it everything they have to beat me,” Karch said. “In one part of my life, I was standing toe-to-toe with grown men. It was a great feeling. My dad gave me that gift and volleyball gave me that gift.”
And Laszlo is thrilled to have watched the journey.
“It didn’t take long for him to internalize it, and now he’s instilling it in the boys. He’s passing on the love of the game. It’s a very satisfying thing for him to teach these kids, not just his boys, but all of them.”
The All-American
At UCLA, Karch’s star began to rise, even if he wasn’t quite sure what to do with it yet. He had already been a successful player indoors at Santa Barbara High School but the scale was larger now. His Bruins team piled up a monstrous 123-5 record and won three NCAA championships in 1979, 1981 and 1982. Individually, he would earn All-American all four years. He also graduated with a degree in biochemistry, proving he was no dumb jock.
“In college, I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do as a career. For lack of a better calling, I just figured my dad’s a doctor. He seems to enjoy what he does, so I had my eye on playing volleyball in college, maybe a tiny bit after, but then going to medical school and becoming a doctor. Not because I felt like it was calling my name, but it just seemed like the most sensible thing to do. I felt the most basic foundation of any medicine was to learn it at the molecular level. It was tough, it was a challenge,” and, he chuckles, “I haven’t really used it since.”
Karch joined the U.S. indoor team and won his first indoor volleyball gold medal at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, alongside other stellar indoor names such as Steve Timmons, Pat Powers and Bob Ctvrtlik. But the Soviet bloc boycotted the games and it would take winning the World Cup of volleyball the following year and the 1988 gold medal at Seoul to end any question of how good the team really was. “We felt like we had a lot to prove,” Karch said. But the payoff was huge. “We started to be thought of as the best team in the world.”
And that’s when he could comfortably return to the beach full time.
King of the Beach
The beach game was much faster and more demanding than playing indoors. However, it was on the sand that Karch played even better.
Along the way, he has won 148 tournaments with 13 different partners, in particular Kent Steffes. While Sinjin Smith won 139 during his great career, no active player is anywhere close. He was also the league’s most valuable player six times, its best offensive player three times, best defensive player once, and consistently ranked at or near the top in almost every full season he played. The international equivalent to the Association of Volleyball Professionals – known as the FIVB (the full name is in French) – named him Best Player in the World twice and Player of the Century in 2000.
But in 1996, Kiraly returned to the Olympics and won the first gold medal, with Steffes, awarded to beach volleyball. They beat fellow AVP team Mike Dodd and Mike Whitmarsh in the final.
Kiraly’s been a great player for 30 years for no less reason than he does everything well. Perfect mechanics while also being the greatest student of the game.
“I think Karch is one of those larger-than-life kind of people,” said Wong. “He regularly makes plays that are unbelievable. It’s daunting when you’re going up against that aura he exudes. I get to be on the inside now and not compete against the magic. And I’ve come to realize that it’s not as much magic as it is a lot of hard work.”
Mike Rangel, Kiraly’s coach for the last six years, couldn’t agree more. He knows how hard Kiraly had to work to come back after one knee and two shoulder surgeries. “There’s no doubt he’s genetically blessed. “But you take that with a work ethic and he just has an ability to get more out of his body. Michael Jordan at 38 was a shell of what he was. How well would Lance Armstrong do in the Tour de France in his forties? We’re seeing something we’re not going to see again in our lifetime.
“We’ve trained on New Year’s Eve, Christmas Eve, his anniversary. He takes two weeks off at the end of the season and then starts training for the next season. I think his last six or seven victories mean more to him than the first 140, because of how hard he’s had to work for them.”
And Rangel points out there could have been even more victories, were it not for his devotion to the U.S. team in the 1980s. “From age 21 to 29, he was mostly indoors. How many more tournaments would he have won? That’s mind-boggling.”
Where the sand ends
Though he’s typically designated the “Michael Jordan of volleyball,” his imminent departure will not get the press that Jordan’s did. Any of the times that he retired. Nor Wayne Gretzky’s, or Andre Agassi’s, Muhammad Ali’s or Babe Ruth’s. The TV, radio and news spots he’ll do this year will pale in comparison, but it will probably be enough for his satisfaction.
In the big view of things, he’s probably OK with that.
If his home features no references to what Karch Kiraly has accomplished in his job, it is filled instead with the life that has balanced it. That, unlike being the greatest volleyball player ever, was his plan. Without all the distractions, he can simply pass on the love of a game between a father and his sons.
Contact the writer: Contact the writer: 714-796-2329 or sprice@ocregister.com
