By Ed Piper
In 1976, I was a 22-year-old sports editor of a tiny weekday newspaper (The Goleta Today) in the Santa Barbara area. John Adams, father of La Jolla beach volleyball player Matteya Adams, a junior on the Viking CIF two-time Division 2 champs, said he was seven years old at the time, and a fan of the Santa Barbara Spikers, a pro coed volleyball team with international stars in the International Volleyball Association (IVA).
The league lasted for a few years, beginning in 1976, and played its home games in UC Santa Barbara's gym. A gigantic event, I remember, was hosting the Orange County Stars, who featured 7'1" Wilt Chamberlain, a beach volleyball nut, then retired from the Lakers and the NBA.
During his playing days, Wilt--who once tried the triple jump at the University of Kansas (nobody went straight from high school to the NBA in those days the way LeBron James did) and came within inches of the world record--weighed a svelte 275 pounds distributed across his 7'1" height.
Against the Spikers, he was heftier, weighing about 350 pounds. An enormous presence in every way, he was the reason many of those packed into UCSB's sold-out facility were attending the game, though the Spikers were a draw in their own right. I don't remember which team won the match.
The Spikers, featuring a co-ed lineup in a co-ed league--quite an innovation at the time--had men at the net and women playing the back line. Debbie Green was an outstanding pro volleyball player, and she played on the back line as a defensive specialist.
Another backrow star, Linda Fernandez, is listed under all-leaguers for 1977 on the Internet. I had forgotten her name until writing this entry.
Back to John Adams, he remembered Bebeto DeFreitas, who went by Beto, the setter for the Spikers and Brazilian. I got to hang out with the team during workouts, quite a thrill for a 22-year-old just starting his writing career, and in the Santa Barbara City College gym, where the team held practices, Beto could "set" the ball--his touch being so gentle and precise--into the basketball hoops that were hanging down in the gym.
Another international star was hitter Luis Eymard, a Brazilian from Campinas, a college town in eastern Brazil. He could leap and he could spike.
Jose Luis Garcia, a Mexican hitter, was said to spike the ball at 130 miles per hour. In his hometown area, in northern Mexico, he often had little kids follow him and retrieve the balls he practiced hitting in a local gym.
Back to John Adams, he has a good sense of humor. When I commented on his having the same name as our second president, he had a rejoinder: "And my dad's name is Samuel Adams." A recent biography details how Samuel Adams, John Adams' older cousin, was a major reason the American Revolution happened. Samuel networked with his Founding Father brothers, coaxed, and cajoled, and according to his biographer, the Revolution wouldn't have happened without him.
The only reason we know so little about Samuel Adams is that he never wrote anything down, and destroyed anything that was written down to cover his tracks. He was the complete opposite of, for example, Ben Franklin or his younger cousin, who we have lots of data on.
