VOLLEYBALL:WE HAVE seen the future. It wears a bikini. Just about.
Everybody say yeah! Says the PA guy whose accent places him as coming from some place mid-Atlantic.
Yeah! we say.
Louder! He says. Everyone in that mid-Atlantic spot is hearing impaired.
YEAH! Are you watching? Are you watching, Are you watching Chairman Mao? Revolving quickly in your mausoleum down in Tiananmen Square no doubt. There's cultural revolutions and then there is beach volleyball.
It's just before 9am in Chaoyang Park in Beijing and 12 women wearing dolls house napkins as swimwear are effectively lapdancing an early morning crowd into wakefulness. It's an easy sell. The gals are dancing on sand specially imported from Canada for it's fine, uhm, sandy qualities. They are striking poses that are still mortal sins in many nations and they are hitting beats with their impressively twitchy asses. Everybody is grooving into the morning except the PA guy who has had too many espressos when kick-starting his own day.
YEAH! YEAH! Enter stage left, surfing into this scene of quintessential California-ness, The Irish Times. Less surfing actually than furtively huffing and puffing up to the media tribune. Glancing about terrified of being fingered as a voyeur rather than a serious beach volleyball pundit, The Irish Timesgazes down at the dancing girls and then holds his little finger aloft against the dazzling morning sun. There is more fat hanging from that chubby little pinkie than from all 12 of the dancing girls put together.
Everybody say, YEAH! The Irish Timesbeing as extravagantly overdressed (it could rain) as Nanook of the North in a sauna duly finds a seat for himself. An Olympic volunteer comes running with a bottle of ice-cold water and proffers it as if it was emergency first aid. The Irish Timesjust giggles. This is work? LEMME HEAR YA! YEAH! YEAH! Reading the guilty mind of The Irish Timesthe mid-Atlantic guy makes a pertinent point.
"There are people outside who are dying to get in here," he roars "but you are here! Sooooooo CEL - E — BRATE!" And the music goes thump-thump-thump. Twelve asses on the sand go bump- bump- bump and, well, seeing as how it's actually a human rights issue and people are dying and stuff, everybody celebrates. Including The Irish Timeswho mops his brow.
Party style. Totally.
"Welcome the athletes!," says the mid-Atlantic guy as if the athletes had suddenly just turned up at a keg party and needed high-fiving. Mid-Atlantic guy's Chinese counterpart chimes in with some exclamation that has made him so excited he actually sounds like a tape recording being played way too fast.
YEAH! The athletes are beach volleyball royalty. And goddesses of the morning. The Americans and reigning Olympic queens Kerri Walsh and Misty May-Treanor are lightly tanned with lean tummies all brown and hard like skillets and they make the dancing girls seem overdressed and dowdy.
Kerri and Misty are famous for locking themselves around each other and rolling all lithe and sweaty and sensuous in the sand for an unseemly amount of time after winning gold in Athens in 2004. In the media guide, Kerri describes those golden, groundbreaking sporting moments as "totally spastic". Which sort of takes the good out of it.
Beach royalty Kerri and Misty may be but even they look like rustic hicks compared to their opponents in this semi-final. Brazilians! Each of them from Rio. Only Rio trumps California in the beach babe stakes. Renata and Taita, (for it is they) share many commendable qualities with their city sister, The Girl from Ipanema.
(Cue shocking flash for The Irish Timesof a desolate and windswept Dublin Olympics. Dollymount strand. Mr Whippy soundtrack and an Irish beach volleyball team both of whom share many qualities with Biddy Mulligan. Vision begone.) Renata Ribeiro lists her hobbies as dancing and watching films. Taita Rocha though says she likes to read. We hope the others don't ostracise her for this. Kerri Walsh, after all, lists "playing outside" among her hobbies. Bless her.
Anyway, once the athletes have been welcomed, the game which is an Olympic quarter-final and a pretty big deal gets going and sadly for The Irish Times, who aloft in his media tribune seat just left of the sun is still snickering in a pool of his own sweaty cynicism, the athleticism and skill takes the breath away. You could actually make an argument for covering this sport without it even being an occasion of sin. No, you could.
The game is a cinch to follow (surprisingly for those of us who thought it would be chess on sand). Each set is up to 21. Best of three sets. And to be sure to be sure the big scoreboard in the corner of the beach area is a neon version of the PA guy.
Kerri hits a spike and the scoreboard says, WOW! Misty makes a save the scoreboard flashes, NOT IN MY HOUSE! Kerri and Misty overwhelm the Brazilians throughout the first set. They are like, totally, dominant.
Every time there is a break in play a new pulsating dance track breaks out at deafening volume on the PA drawing the dancing girls onto the sand like moths to a flame. The Irish Timestries to take notes on the American pair's solid back court play but a Brazilian girl wearing what could grow up to be a very small skirt keeps jumping up and dancing two rows away.
"This is so, like, you know, covering a league game in Birr," The Irish Timeshollers to her. She shoots a look back which says, "whatever." "Not!" adds The Irish Timeswith perfect timing. Ha.
Minutes later Misty and Kerri are almost done with the Brazilians in straight sets. Little wonder Misty and Kerri aren't so tanned. They don't stay out here long enough.
"Are you kidding me?" roars the PA guy when they get to match point.
"ON YOUR FEET," he orders the crowd. The Irish Timesclaiming media exemption from mass callisthenics keeps scribbling questions for the mixed zone. (First to you Kerri, if I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?) "Stand up please," says the scoreboard a little more politely. Everyone is on their feet now. It is a rally. A festival. An entertainment. An experience.
Misty and Kerri finish the second set and the match off with a flourish but, foolishly we think, forego their lascivious rolling in the sand routine. Everybody goes crazy anyway.
Minutes later all four athletes come to the media mixed zone.
We had expected them to get dressed for this chore but, as the media handout for beach volleyball says, the girls don't wear bikinis because they have to. They wear them because they like to. You go girls! Anyway not since we interviewed Páidí Ó Sé post-match in Mullingar wearing nothing but his football socks (Páidí that is) have we had so much flesh distracting us from our inquiries.
Misty, we notice, has an intriguing roman numeral tattoo just at the top of her ass but she also has a frightening leonine intensity about her which drives us in to the welcoming aura of Kerri.
Kerri describes herself as "six feet of sunshine" and she has that California way of inserting a question mark after about? Every third word? And today she is like? Psyched? We are just enchanted.
" I wish I could smile? when I am nervous?," she says thoughtfully to us, as we gaze back at her sympathetically wondering if we could stage a fundraiser to aid research into her awful condition. "But I can't? But now I am happy? I can smile? We want to go to the final now? And kick butt? We had great energy? Great teamwork?"
Biting our lip, we notice that Kerri has an intriguing and tiny tattoo about six inches below her belly button where her nut brown stomach disappears into her dazzling swimming briefs. We lose track of what Kerri is saying as we try but fail to decipher the tiny letters .
(Later in the media centre in the interests of journalistic rigour we Google the words "Kerri" "Walsh" "tattoo" but are directed to a site which promises to show Kerri in the shower. We sustain an injury to little finger slamming laptop shut in horror.) Anyway Kerri keeps beaming at us. Her right shoulder bears scars from the three operations she has endured for a troublesome rotator cuff and we reflect that she is actually a serious, one million dollar a year athlete with almost balletic skills. And of course she is also six feet of sunshine.
"Kerri," we say as the novel excitement of the day wells up inside us all at once. Her eyes bestow themselves on The Irish Timeslike morning rays on a lumpen land.
"Kerri? Will you, like, marry me." "Yeah. Like, totally? Sweaty dude." she beams. The scoreboard flashes instantly, Way Cool! We have seen the future. It is six feet of sunshine with a tattoo.
