BEIJING – The worst of it was Saturday, with the news trickling in slowly, in baleful bursts and sorrowful spasms, each bit of it stabbing a little bit deeper, a little bit harder until by the end there was just a numbness impossible to shake.
This should have been the best day of all for the men of the U.S. Olympic volleyball team, still drinking in the wonder of the Opening Ceremony, still a day away from jumping with both feet into the preliminary round of their tournament. There was a practice. There was lunch.
And then, horror. Pure, abject, unadulterated horror.
“It was,” team captain Thomas Hoff would say, “the worst kind of feeling, the worst kind of helplessness.”
They all knew Todd Buchman, because his daughter, Wiz, was a longtime member of the volleyball community, a former Olympian, and because Wiz was married to their coach, Hugh McCutcheon. It is a tight-knit group, and that circle had been brutally invaded by a madman’s blade at historic Drum Tower.
“We are a family,” said Rob Browning, the men’s volleyball team leader. “And we feel for each other and hurt for each other as a family does.”
Yesterday, together, they were forced to carry on as a family, too. The schedule said there was a 12:35 p.m. game with Venezuela, and the team understood that the starting time was non-negotiable. The Olympics can warm the human spirit, but they can be cold and unyielding, too: If you’re scheduled, you play, or you forfeit.
It was never in any of their minds to pick the latter. Especially after the phone call came Saturday night. It was McCutcheon, calling from the hospital where his father-in-law had already died, where his mother-in-law was fighting for her life, where his wife, who witnessed all of it, was searching for meaning in the madness.
“There are no small plays in what we’re doing,” McCutcheon told them, and the players understood right away, because that has been McCutcheon’s mantra ever since he was appointed coach in February 2005. It was his way of saying: “Keep me in your thoughts. But keep your focus on why you’re here.”
So that’s what they would do. And that’s what they did. For two sets against Venezuela they were near-perfect, and for two sets their minds seemed somewhere north of the clouds that spit rain all day in and around Capital Stadium. Then they captured the fifth set, 15-10, and it was as appropriate a way as any of them could think of to honor their coach, and his loss.
“It’s a game out there, nothing compared to what’s happened to our team,” Hoff said. “But still, the best thing we could do was come out here and try to play volleyball.”
It is a program that peaked with back-to-back gold medals in Los Angeles in 1984 and Seoul in ’88, but by 2000 had fallen to an 11th-place finish. A fourth-place showing in Athens provided enough momentum that this year’s group has visions of bringing home a medal for the first time in 20 years. They didn’t need extra incentive, and didn’t want this kind.
So they will play, under interim coach Ronald Larsen (who used to coach at Rutgers-Newark), and they will persevere. Yesterday, before the game, they gathered in a huddle to provide a small, brief tribute for what their coach – and their extended volleyball family – have endured.
“This has always been about team for us,” Larsen said, “never about the individual.”
Usually, that was a fine theory. Put into practice yesterday, it helped pull all of them through a long, awful, exhausting day. It won’t be the last one.