He made the familiar walk across the sand to where the clipboard hung from a nail on the l court post and signed his name on the challenge list. He counted eleven names above his that weren’t crossed off. It would be a long wait. He had wanted to get there earlier, but orchestrating a beach trip with a wife and two pre-teen sons was not a swift process. Nothing like those college summer days when he would head for the courts with nothing but car keys, wallet and beach towel and not get home until sundown.
He had tried not to fret this morning as Erin had made endless sandwiches, packed a cooler with soda pop and fruit, and located tubes of Nose Coat and sun screen, and borrowed backrests and beach chairs that hung dusty in the garage of his parents’ Laguna Beach home where they were visiting.
He watched the doubles match in progress. All four players were blond, lean and tan. He thought he could recognize one of the pair who had just beaten the previously reigning team. Leo used to play with the kid’s father back when Leo was a high school senior. The kid used to hang around the court and shag errant spikes for the players. He wondered if the young fellow could remember him. The boy’s father and he had once held the court from eleven A.M. till four, winning sixteen or seventeen matches before the late afternoon wind came up and chased most of the players into the nearby taverns to roll for pitchers of beer.
The game had changed since Leo’s day. Before the adoption of international volleyball rules, the American game had been ridiculously pure. Two-hand chest passes had to travel only in the pathway of imaginary lines drawn forward and backward from the passer’sshoulders. Dink shots had to be made with a closed or cupped hand. The deft finger and thumb shots of the modern game would have been called throws. Leo knew all about the new game, had played it, had officiated it, but old habits died hard. Rally scoring hadjust come into existence. In Leo’s heyday, you could only score a poibt if you were the server. There was no point awarde