Going for the KillKarch Kiraly and Kent Steffes of the U.S. beat down one of their primary obstacles to a goldby Michael Farber
Karch and Sinjin would be the best-known players in U.S. volleyball history even if they were named Pat and Mike. And on the man-made splendor of Atlanta Beach yesterday, Karch Kiraly and Sinjin Smith gave the volleyball world one more reason to never forget them.
Kiraly raised his game to a higher level against Henkel (at the net) and Smith.
photograph by
Their Olympic quarterfinal showdown wasn't a match, as Kiraly's partner Kent Steffes observed, it was a made-for-TV movie. "Never," Smith would say later, "have I been in a match with that much at stake." Emotion and trash talk spilled over the net, a wicked brew leavened with a dose of volleyball politics that makes the Democrat-Republican thing look like class elections. The politics—an inexhaustible source of debate within the sport—are, in brief, these: The 39-year-old Smith and his partner, Carl Henkel, took advantage of an Olympic exemption as the top American team on the International Volleyball Federation (FIVB) tour, while all the American teams that play on the domestic Association of Volleyball Professionals (AVP) tour had to slog through a qualifying tournament.
When another American player, Mike Dodd, was asked after the match if he had ever seen such a widely anticipated sporting event live up to its potential, he replied, "Maybe some of the Ali-Frazier fights." Kiraly and Steffes won 17-15, coming back from a 12-8 deficit and later fending off four match points before converting a fifth match point of their own.
From the beginning of the beach volleyball competition on Tuesday, Atlanta Beach had been Olympic Party Central. But yesterday the circus left town, replaced by Olympian tension for 54 minutes.
Henkel used all of his 6'7" to dominate at the net, scoring five points on stuff blocks. And Smith blended some hard spikes with his customary assortment of angles and junk. Kiraly and Steffes rallied at the end, after the magical spell was broken by the public-address announcer, who asked fans during a break in the action which team they were rooting for. Kiraly and Steffes drew the louder roar, but Kiraly heard one particularly vocal Sinjin rooter, Malu Acosta, wife of FIVB president Ruben Acosta. "I kept hearing her going, 'Come on, Sinjin, come on, Carl,'" Kiraly said in a mocking falsetto. When the match ended with a Steffes kill, Kiraly directed a few choice words in her direction in his normally insistent baritone.
A month ago Kiraly had said Smith and Henkel weren't among the top eight U.S. teams, but he quickly recanted yesterday. "My opinion's changed," said Kiraly, 35. "I had assumed the worst [about that pair], but they gave us all we could handle and more."
Smith and Henkel won't get a rematch because they lost 15-13 to Portugal's Joao Brenha and Miguel Maia later yesterday and were eliminated, as were the remaining U.S. women's teams.
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SI Olympic Dailies
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