Reviews Mostly Favorable After Team Cup Volleyball Makes Its Debut at Forum

The team names sound as if they belong in a Friday night pizza-and-beer softball league--the Mighty Spikers, KROQ JOQS, Hollywood Stars and Team Body Glove. The tension level seems to match, whether it be at the June 18 draft or opening night.

On the court and in the bank, though, Team Cup Volleyball, the latest Jerry Buss production at the Forum, is all pro. Some of the best players in the world--men and women, indoor players and beach specialists--and $100,000 in prize money see to that.

Tuesday’s doubleheader, the first of the 12-match, six-night format continuing through Aug. 6, drew 1,153 fans, a good start from the organizers’ point of view. It also brought $600 to each player in the two winning teams and $400 to the losers, another good start, that from the players’ point of view.

“I don’t want to make them think we’re real happy with the money,” said KROQ JOQS captain Steve Timmons, a two-time All-American at USC and current member of the U.S. national team, “but it’s a start, enough to make things competitive.”

Most of the adjusting, it seems, will have to take place among the players (“This could be utter confusion,” Karch Kiraly of the Hollywood Stars said at the outset). Foremost is the unique 30-point scoring system for each game that brought some discussion and displeasure from a few players during the first match and, on a broader issue, the role of female players.

Exactly where they fit in is the question.

“There’s no way a woman can compete with a man, not with their power,” said Laurel Brassey Kessel, a former star at San Diego State and now head coach at New Mexico. “That’s a fact of life, right?”

So the statistics from the first match, when the Mighty Spikers came back to defeat Team Body Glove, 28-30, 30-28, 30-27, were not surprising:

Nina Matthies, who joins Linda Robertson to form the top women’s beach volleyball tandem; Patty Orosco, another former UCLA standout and Matthies’ teammate on Team Body Glove; Dale Keough from Orange Coast College and a veteran of international play; and two-time Olympian Rita Crockett all had the same numbers--0 kills, 0 blocks.

In the night’s second match, the Hollywood Stars defeated the KROQ JOQS, 31-29, 27-30, 30-27, as Dave Saunders had 31 kills and Kiraly added 19.

There must be another way.

“If you can’t pass, you can’t play,” Brassey Kessel said. “That pretty much sums it up.”

She speaks from experience, having been the first woman in NCAA history to play on the men’s team (San Diego State, 1974). The first woman picked in the Team Cup draft, she also spent a year with Matthies and Lindy Vivas, a teammate on the Stars, in the International Volleyball Assn., the original professional co-ed league that went under in 1978 after six years.

“That helps,” Brassey Kessel said. “I’ve been smacked around before.

“The men, in the beginning, did not think the girls were good enough, so they just kind of pushed us away,” she recalled of the IVA. “We always had to prove ourself. But I don’t think that will be the case here.”

Like other aspects of the league, only time will tell.