After finishing second in Virginia Beach, Virginia, a USA Volleyball event in late May, we headed into a hellacious, two-and-a-half-month, eight-FIVB-tournament stretch that would hopscotch the globe.
We kicked it all off in Rosarito, Mexico. We played well throughout the event, the only glitch occurring the morning of the final. I was late meeting Holly for warm-ups because I’d gone to have cornrows put in my hair. The braiding took forever, and by the time I came dashing onto the court, Holly was livid.
“Where have you been?” she snapped.
“Having my hair braided,” I replied.
Holly rolled her eyes in disgust. We ended up losing to Shelda and Adriana, and I wound up paying for it in another way: severely sunburned scalp. Because I was rushing to our warm-ups, I hadn’t had time to put sunscreen on the exposed skin, which was now all over my head, thanks to the cornrows.
A few days later, we left for Europe and Asia on our six-week Olympic qualifying odyssey. I arrived at the Los Angeles airport for my first-ever extended international tour with an enormous suitcase. I packed about twenty-one days’ worth of outfits—one for morning, one for noon, and one for night—because I couldn’t fathom how I was going to do laundry in the beach volleyball outposts we’d be playing in. Holly took one look at my suitcase, shook her head, and said, “Where are you going?”
“To Europe with you,” I replied.
“It’s a business trip, not a summer vacation,” Holly said.
All Holly had was one small suitcase and a carry-on bag. She nicknamed my bag “Big Bertha.” Holly always told me exactly the way it was. She was, and still is, no-nonsense. She’s the only person I know who emails, then follows up with an email saying, “Did you get my email?” As Dad says, “If a tournament application has to be turned in in five days, Holly gets it in with five days to spare.” She was, and still is, all business. It worked for her, and it worked for me.
“Some days, some people don’t want to be there,” Holly told the Los Angeles Times. “Misty’s fired up and ready to learn every day. Her youth and excitement for the game, the energy she gives off, definitely help. Last year, I played with partners I felt sucked my energy.”
Our first stop was Cagliari, Italy, the capital of the island of Sardinia. It has one of the longest and most beautiful beaches throughout the Mediterranean. The Poetto Beach stretches for eleven kilometers and is famous for its fine-grained, white sand. We finished fifth. We didn’t panic, though, and we didn’t lose faith in our Olympic quest. We just kept moving forward. After the match, Holly sat me down, and we analyzed our performance for a couple of hours. From there on out, self-analysis and team critiques became vital parts of our post-tournament routine.
We flew to Toronto, Canada, for the following week’s FIVB event, the Canadian Open. The qualifier turned out to be no fun. It was pouring rain—the court resembled a lake—and Holly and I wore garbage bags over our bikinis. The ball was so wet and so heavy, we had to underhand it. However, we persevered. We lost in the final, again, to Shelda and Adriana, finishing second.
We crossed the Atlantic Ocean again, this time flying to the next week’s FIVB event in Gstaad, Switzerland, one of the world’s most exclusive ski resorts. Beach volleyball? It was a brand-new FIVB event, and at that time, it was women only. The stadium was located in the heart of Gstaad, or the “holiday village,” as the Swiss like to refer to it. Although it was mid-June, it was so cold that we wore booties on our feet during matches. We lost in the final, again, to Shelda and Adriana, finishing second. The best part was our trophies: We were awarded big, beautiful Swiss cowbells. I still cherish mine.
The following week, the FIVB stop was in Chicago, Illinois, a double-points qualifying event. We won three qualification matches to earn a berth in the thirty-two-team main draw. One of my most vivid recollections is playing against a German team on an outside court. It was a hot, humid day, and I was wearing a pair of Oakley sunglasses, which fit too closely to my face. They fogged up. Holly served, and it was short. Germany dove and passed it over the net. “Hit the ball!” Holly yelled. However, I couldn’t see the ball, and it ended up hitting me right in the face. We beat Shelda and Adriana in the final, 15–12, on the Fourth of July. We earned thirty-two thousand dollars and 600 qualifying points. We had 2,062 points total and were closing in fast on Liz and E.Y. (2,284 points) for one of the two U.S. spots.
“Every team that entered this event knew how important it was,” Holly told the Chicago Sun Times. “To come out with all that pressure on us and play against the best team in the world, it just all came together, and it was a huge win for us.”
After Chicago, it was back to Europe for an FIVB event in Berlin, Germany. That’s when disaster struck. Holly and I were playing an Italian team on an outside court. I dove for a ball, tearing my abdominal muscle. I continued playing, but every time I swung, I felt a stabbing in my stomach. It never occurred to me to pull out of the tournament, because we needed the qualifying points for Sydney.
“If you’re badly hurt, you don’t have to keep playing,” Holly kept telling me.
No way was I going to give up our Olympic quest. “Just let me play one more match,” I said. And then, we kept winning. It was crazy. After every match, Holly phoned Dad, gave him a play-by-play and said, “Butch, every time she serves, she cries.” Dad kept telling her, “Holly, don’t bother an injured animal.” Well, the next thing you know, we beat Australians Tania Gooley and Pauline Manser to win our second straight tournament. It moved us into second place among U.S. women’s teams vying for an Olympic berth. It was a huge win for us, and especially rewarding for me, teaching me I could perform at a high level even with excruciating pain.
Several hours later, I flew home from Europe to receive medical attention. Over the next two weeks, I underwent various forms of treatment, but there’s not a lot you can do for a torn abdominal muscle, other than rest, and there wasn’t time for that. Then, we flew to Osaka, Japan, our second-to-last qualifier. I struggled, serving underhand and unable to hit. Sitting? Painful. Coughing and sneezing? Killers. Why, even getting out of bed hurt. I had intensive physical therapy and acupuncture, practically around the clock. At one point, I saw doubt in Holly’s eyes.
“Trust me, Misty, we don’t have to do this,” Holly said. “Your health is more important.”
“I can do this!” I said.
Holly meant well, but she underestimated me. In a gut-wrenching situation, I’m very much Butch May’s daughter. Dad had a will unlike any other. He rode bulls for many years, suffering nasty injuries, and he instilled his warrior’s attitude in me. I’m relentless. I never give up.
Sure enough, Holly and I finished fourth, pretty spectacular given my condition. But that lower-place finish meant we didn’t earn enough points to qualify for Sydney. So we’d have to travel to Dalian, China, for the final FIVB qualifier for one last-ditch effort. Had we finished second or third in Japan, we would’ve qualified, and I could’ve flown straight home to nurse my abdominal tear.
Instead, we jetted to China. To clinch the Olympic berth, we had to finish no lower than second. I lay around the hotel and iced my abdominals. I tried to get medical attention, but there wasn’t anybody who could help me. We were out in the middle of nowhere. It was awful. I don’t know how we got through the tournament. I really don’t. We made the Olympic team, after a come-from-behind semifinals victory over Zi Xiong and Rong Chi of China, 17–16. We trailed 14–8 before stunning the home team. It was a miracle. I just toughed it out in all that pain. By the skin of our teeth we qualified for Sydney, edging out Liz and E.Y. for the second spot by a mere 50 points.
On our flight back to Los Angeles, Holly mapped out our schedule for the next five weeks. She was sympathetic about my injury, but stern.
“Misty, you really need to deal with it,” Holly said. “You’ve got to see the best specialist possible.”
The next thing I knew, Holly was attacking the challenge of healing my abdominal t
ear with the same intensity she applied to beach volleyball. She identified Alex McKechnie, a physiotherapist in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, as a leading authority on core training and movement integration. He’d come to the Lakers in 1997–98 to work on Shaq’s ab muscle tear. She took it from there, setting up an appointment with McKechnie, volunteering to fly to Vancouver so I’d have a second pair of ears, then making our airline and hotel reservations. She told me to meet her at the Los Angeles airport at 9:00 A.M. the following day for a 10:00 A.M. flight. When I hadn’t arrived by 9:30 A.M., Holly called me. She became concerned when she couldn’t reach me. As the gate agent was closing the door to our flight, I phoned to say I was stuck in traffic.
“I’m giving up my weekend to go to Vancouver with you, and you can’t even make it to the airport on time?” Holly barked. “Come on, you’ve got to be responsible. We’re going to try and fix your stomach.”
The plane left without her. We sat in the Los Angeles airport for three hours, waiting for the next Vancouver flight. Holly didn’t say boo from the time I got to the airport until we touched down in Vancouver. That’s how angry she was. Talk about an uncomfortable silence.
We spent two days with McKechnie, and I think it cost me five hundred dollars a day. He introduced me to a series of core exercises. The goal was to get me through Sydney. McKechnie taught me how to segment my abdominals, to recruit muscles around the tear, so that I could relieve some of the pain. Holly trained with me, so she could help me in the future. This episode really illuminated the different weaknesses in my body. I’d never focused on training my core, which is the fundamental muscle source for balance, posture, and overall body strength. Oh, I’d done sit-ups and push-ups to strengthen my midsection, but that’s about it.
In the five weeks before the Olympics, I completely laid off volleyball and concentrated solely on strengthening my core. I returned from Vancouver and showed my program to the athletic trainers at Long Beach State, who did whatever they could to jump-start the healing process. It was a frantic time, trying to fool Mother Nature and speed up my body’s healing clock. I had a lot of acupuncture. I spent hours in physical therapy, hooked up to electric stimulation units. Electrodes were placed at strategic points on my stomach, sending currents surging through my abdominals to pump out the inflammation.
The frantic feeling followed me off the court, too. Holly recalls my parents being freaked out she was going to dump me and pick up a new partner for the Olympics, which was allowed under the rules.
“You guys, I wouldn’t do that,” Holly kept trying to reassure my parents. “Misty earned this spot. That girl is amazing, and I’d never bail on her.”
I think the real reason my parents were so worried about my Olympic spot had a lot to do with Mom’s battle with cancer. While Holly and I were traveling the globe, Mom was moving mountains of her own to get well enough to travel to Australia, should we qualify. All along, Dad and Mom believed we’d get there, and their positive attitude is what helped them believe she could get to Sydney, too. The Olympics gave all of us something to look forward to. That’s why I pushed myself so hard. After all, we were the Three Musketeers, one for all and all for one.
Except when it came to shaving my head.
A few weeks before the Olympics, Dad shaved his head in support of Mom, who’d lost all her hair from the chemotherapy treatments. Our family friend Jim Steele did, too. Mom understood it wouldn’t be prudent for me to be playing beach volleyball, in the hot, Australian sun, with a bald noggin, so she insisted I not do it. As for Dad, she asked him to grow back his hair because she thought she looked a lot better bald than he did. When it started to come in, I tried to color it.
“You should do like rocker Billy Idol and dye it platinum blond,” I suggested.
“It’s burning!” Dad screamed, as I applied the dye to his nubby scalp.
“No, it’s just stimulating the roots of your hair.” I replied.
But I was wrong. It really did burn his scalp, and eventually, we peeled the skin right off Dad’s head.
Meanwhile, my parents’ friends showed their support for Mom in very generous ways. They threw a big party, hosted by Larry and Chris Rundle, at the Westlake Village Tennis and Swim Club. Larry had played on the 1968 U.S. Olympic team with Dad. Everybody who came donated to my parents’ Sydney trip, raising $16,500.
Mom was extremely humble. She didn’t want all of the attention. She didn’t want people coming over to the house and fussing over her. However, she did appreciate the fact that her cancer allowed her to see how important she was to people, that she had a lot of dear friends. Her close friend Toni Bowermaster told me that before Mom got sick, she hadn’t realized how much people loved her. “I think it was a surprise to Barb,” Toni now says about the outpouring of emotion toward her.
It was a triumph for Holly and me to qualify for the Olympics, and it was a triumph for Mom to travel to Sydney. For most of the season, she spent a handful of days each week in chemotherapy. She was tired, but she felt good. She still had her sense of humor. When she boarded the plane to Australia, with very little hair on her head, the steward asked, “May I help you, sir?” Mom laughed. “Well, you can help me, but I’m not a sir, I’m a cancer patient,” she replied. Needless to say, the steward couldn’t have been more accommodating the rest of the trip. Any time Mom asked for something, he got it for her.
Holly was an Olympic veteran, having finished fifth at the 1996 Atlanta Games. She gave me a lot of advice on how to handle the demands of family and friends at an Olympics. She told me that I needed to manage my time, that I couldn’t let myself get swept up in the hoopla.
“We’re going to Sydney to win the Olympic gold medal,” Holly said. “We’re not going to sightsee.”
But when she suggested we skip Opening Ceremony because we’d be spending a lot of time on our feet, Dad blew a gasket.
“Not march in Opening Ceremony?” he snapped. “That’s one of the best experiences you’ll ever have. March and put six of those disposable cameras around your neck, so that the memories that aren’t in your head will always be in pictures.”
I’m glad I listened to Dad, because the Opening Ceremony was the event of a lifetime. It’s the only way to understand the meaning of the Olympics, the only way to truly get the goose bumps.
My parents rented a house about three blocks from Bondi Beach, the venue for beach volleyball. Dad and Mom stayed there, along with several members of Misty’s Misfits, the motley crew that has supported me at volleyball events throughout the years. My half brothers Brack and Scott, as well as Brack’s significant other Krista, stayed in the house, as did dear family friends Loren Woll, Patricia Nohavec, and Ernie Suwara. Two other close family friends, Eileen Clancy McClintock and Jean Brunicardi, who had Parkinson’s disease, stayed in a hotel room across from Bondi Beach. Since the rental house had people sleeping everywhere—in beds, on sofas, on air mattresses on the floor—a hotel was easier for Jean to navigate.
When Mom was diagnosed with cancer, she decided to resolve all of the family issues of the past. She believed it was time for us to be a real family. She made an effort to establish strong relationships with Brack and Scott, and she used my volleyball career to correct mistakes and mend hard feelings. Growing up, I hadn’t seen them very often, perhaps in the summer or at Thanksgiving at my aunt Gen’s house in Northern California. I became the catalyst for bringing all of us Mays back together, and the Sydney Olympics represented a turning point for my family. Mom insisted that Brack and Scott come to Australia, because she knew she was really sick, and she wanted all of us there, to experience it together.
Holly and I stayed in an apartment a few blocks from the beach. My family and friends cooked at the rental house, and I ate meals with them. Every morning, Brack, an incredible chef, bought fresh bakery items. Most evenings, he cooked wonderful dinners with fresh fish and vegetables. The rental house felt like one big Misty’s Misfits slumber party, with people jumping all
over each other, getting up at the crack of dawn, staying out until the wee hours of the morning.
In addition to playing tour director, Holly added another role in Sydney: physical therapist. McKechnie had prescribed specific exercises for me to do daily, as well as warming up before matches. Every day, except days of matches, she ran me through them, just to make sure I was staying on top of my injury and doing everything possible to make it through the Olympics. I’d grab a big purple exercise ball and she’d grab the smaller blue one and we’d head to the hills for two hours of intense ab and body work.
The toughest thing about beach volleyball training at an Olympics? Being allotted only thirty minutes on the court. Because I’d taken five weeks off, Holly and I were just starting to practice together in Sydney. We went to Australia a week early, to try to get back in the groove with each other, but we were practicing with limited time and opportunities. Worse yet, it had been forever since we’d played a game.
Now, Holly says, “We were out of rhythm, and we just weren’t the same team we were before that.”
My legs were weak, my stamina lacking.
We went in as the fourth-seeded team, favored by some to win the gold medal, by others to reach the medals podium. Three opponents later, our Olympics were over. Just like that. Poof. We lost to Brazil’s Sandra Pires and Adriana Samuel, 16–14, in forty-nine minutes. They’d both won medals at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, but with different partners. Four times, we evened the score, only to watch the Brazilians fight back and regain a one-point lead, thanks to stellar net play by Pires. Finally, after three match points, Pires smashed in a winner, bursting the magnificent bubble Holly and I had created over the past nine months, sending us to our knees in disbelief. Our Olympic quest was over, two points shy of making the medal round.
Afterward, Dad, Mom, Holly, and I all said we were convinced we could’ve won a medal, perhaps even gold. If only I’d been healthy. If only we’d been in sync. If only we’d stuck to the game plan Dad and Gene had given us. Later, Holly told reporters, “I felt I should have been more aggressive, and I can’t really explain why I wasn’t.”
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