How Mike Dodd won a silver medal at the Olympics first Beach volleyball competition
by Mark McDermott
Whatever faint hope Mike Dodd may once have harbored to be an Olympian had faded a decade and a half earlier by the time beach volleyball was named an Olympic sport in 1995. He was 38 years old, and satisfied with what life had given him. He was still playing the game he’d fallen in love with as a kid.
Ever since he and his friends stretched a string across his backyard in lieu of a net, Dodd was volleyball crazy. Then, at age 10, he discovered the beach game.
“We’re victims of our environment,” Dodd said in a 2010 interview. “If you grow up in Canada, you play hockey. You grow up in Manhattan Beach, you play volleyball. I would go down to Marine Street. There were really good players there who were nice to me and would bump the ball around with me. They fostered a lot of goodwill and love for the game that I have to this day.”
Dodd was a beach volleyball prodigy. At 16, he became the youngest player ever to earn the vaunted AAA rating. He didn’t go indoors until after he grew five inches over the course of his junior year in high school. Suddenly standing 6-foot-4, Dodd joined the Mira Costa team as a senior and was an immediate standout, earning volleyball scholarship offers to UCLA and Stanford. But he was also a basketball star, and chose that route, accepting a scholarship to San Diego State to play hoops.
“Volleyball was in its absolute infancy,” Dodd recalled. “In those days, volleyball was something you did as a social network. I wanted to be a professional athlete. I wanted to be a Laker and live in a big house.”
Dodd played guard for SDSU from 1975-79, serving as team captain his final year alongside another future legend in another sport, baseball Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn.
“I could be part of an answer to a great trivia question,” Dodd said.
Dodd was drafted in the 9th round of the 1979 NBA draft by the San Diego Clippers. The Clippers were a fledgling franchise, but they’d swung a big trade for Bill Walton, a San Diego native who’d just won a title with the Portland Trail Blazers. Dodd had high hopes, but didn’t make it out of training camp.
“It was something right out of the movies,” Dodd said. “I opened my locker and there was a pink slip. Once I learned I hadn’t made the cut, it was a time I’ll never forget. It was this gorgeous day and there was a pool that overlooked Mission Bay. I dove into the pool and just laid there, thinking, ‘I can’t wait to get started in volleyball.’”
“I was optimistic to see how far I could go in my natural sport, the one I was born to play.”
He still had a year of college eligibility left, so he returned to SDSU to play indoor volleyball and promptly became an All-American. And then, as fate would have it, USA Volleyball moved its training facility to San Diego, and in 1981 Dodd was invited to join the U.S. National Team. USA Volleyball had not made it to the Olympics since 1968 (including a Team USA boycott of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow). The powers that be were set on assembling a team that could compete at the 1984 Olympics.
“You know, volleyball was a minor sport,” Dodd said on the Sandcast podcast in 2019. “USA Volleyball, in its infinite genius, had their training camp in Toledo, Ohio for years, and someone had the revelation that maybe if they train in San Diego, we’d have some better players.”
That training camp might have been the greatest collection of volleyball talent ever assembled, including Pat Powers, Craig Buck, Aldis Berzins, Chris Marlowe, Steve Timmons, Dusty Dvorak, Sinjin Smith, Karch Karily, Tim Hovland, and Dodd. But there was a cultural divide between the beach players and the more traditionally-minded coach, Doug Beale.
“Doug Beale hated us, hated the beach guys, and the guys who played both, especially me, Hov, Sinjin, and Karch,” Dodd said. “We were young and cocky and we were all in his crosshairs. But man, did we train.”
The team would practice from 8 a.m. to noon daily, then do an hour of excruciating “jump work.” Then the beach guys would head to the beach to play more ball.
“Oddly enough, four hours and an hour of jump training wasn’t enough, because then we’d head straight to South Mission Beach, buy a sandwich and a couple of Mickey’s Big Mouth beers, and play volleyball all afternoon,” Dodd recalled on Sandcast. “Then we’d go out and go to the bars and wreak havoc until whenever. And then we’d be up at 8 a.m. playing again. But you’re 21, 22, and you could be blowing a .27 and you bounce the first ball in warm ups. It was just the way it was. But boy, were we in shape.”
Dodd played with Team USA in 1981 and 1982, including an epic trip to Japan that included cocktails with the stewardesses in the workers quarters of a 747 and a hotel scene that looked more like a rock and roll band had landed than a group of elite athletes. By this time, the coach had cut some of the beach players, but not all.
“When you’re older, and you can look back at the situation, and Doug — you know, it’s a luxury that most coaches would like to have to be have that much talent, but when you’ve got that many personalities and egos, I think he was like, ‘How am I going to do this? I have to have Karch,’ even though Karch was as much a beach guy as all of us, he was less of a headache. You know, Sinjin would just take off on modeling assignments and show up at 8:15 a.m., a mess from the night before. I think at a certain point, Doug had to just say, ‘These guys are so talented, but if I’m going to mold these guys into what I want, I’ve got to lose a Sinjin Smith and keep an Aldis Berzins, who is not as good as Sinjin…but is just a straight-laced, hardworking Ohio State kid. Doug had to trim that team of some personalities.”
As it turned out, a few of the beach players ran into eligibility issues, including Dodd. He had played in approximately 10 matches in a co-ed professional league called the International Volleyball Association which disbanded in 1980.
“I played for just a couple months, and then the league folded,” Dodd said in an interview this week. “But when I did that, I was kind of branded a professional. On the national team, they were saying that they were going to work on getting me my amateur status back. And at a certain point, it just was obvious that wasn’t going to happen.”
So in 1982, Dodd went to Italy to play professional indoor volleyball. As he later told the LA Times, “I was tired of being in debt to my parents, so when I had a chance to go to Italy I took it.”
“I didn’t want my parents to fund my Olympic dream,” he later told the Easy Reader. “I didn’t see any wheels rolling on my petition and hated being in limbo so I decided to go to Italy and really become a professional.”
USA Volleyball went on to take the gold at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.
“I got a little screwed over, but there were some other guys, like Tim Hovland and Sinjin Smith, who I think were much better indoor players than me and really deserved to be on that ´84 team.”
Dodd had no regrets. He’d gained a lot from his national team experience, perhaps most significantly a partnership that would become part of beach volleyball history. At the time, Smith and Karily were the most dominant beach volleyball team. Dodd had become friends with Hovland at the Team USA training camp, and they formed a team to help Smith and Karily stay sharp on the beach.
“Hovland and I started working with them,” Dodd said. “After a few weeks we started beating them. We turned to each other and said, “Maybe we should be doing this together.’ You still couldn’t survive on volleyball alone, but you could win $1,500, maybe $2,000 as a team in some tournaments – not a bad piece of change.”
For the next few years, Dodd split his time between playing professionally indoors in Italy and on the beach in California.
“It was the mid ‘80s and such a wonderful time,” Dodd said. “It was right when beach volleyball was starting to take off and I could go to Italy in the winter, and then play on the AVP during the summer. It was a dream life.”
By 1986, professional beach volleyball was taking off as a spectator sport, and the money followed. Dodd was able to finally leave indoor volleyball behind. The experience of coming back to the beach fulltime was liberating. Indoor volleyball had always been more regulated, and American players in Europe had added pressure – they were the ringers, expected to carry every team they were on. The toll was exhausting, both mentally and physically.
Dodd’s return to full time life at the beach was joyous.
“It was something glorious,” he said on Sandcast. “Instant catapult, straight up to the clouds. The freedom. The biggest thing was physically. Because you’d show up after a year of indoor [volleyball], where you’re the main guy on your team, you’ve got to carry the load, got to do most of the setting and do a lot of the work. And you’re just pulverized. Within a week of playing beach, all of those aches and pains are gone. The sand is just a glorious instrument of God.”
By the late ‘80s, professional beach volleyball had arrived. Dodd was astonished to find himself making six figures annually doing what he loved more than anything else in the world. He would go on to win 75 tournaments, including 53 with Hovland. After they broke up, amicably, in 1990, Dodd formed a partnership with another former college basketball player, Mike Whitmarsh, a 6-foot-7 forward who’d played at the University of San Diego and had been drafted by the Portland Trailblazers. Like Dodd, he had been cut in training camp. Whitmarsh was five years younger than Dodd, but the two were like brothers, and played accordingly. They would win 16 tournaments together.
Dodd would earn $1.8 million during his AVP career. He met his wife Patty, also a pro player, at a tournament. They started a real estate business and raised a family. He’d lived a volleyball dream life beyond anything he had imagined possible. But he didn’t think of it in hallowed terms. He often referred to himself as just “journeyman volleyball guy.” He’d done what he had to do to keep playing.
But then, in 1995, an unexpected development occurred. The Olympic Federation fast-tracked the inclusion of beach volleyball into the 1996 games, in Atlanta, ruling that because it was not a new sport, but rather a discipline within an established sport, it would not have to go through the four year “trial quadrennial” process most sports face when seeking to become part of the Olympics.
“It instantly became a medal sport,” Dodd said. “So I got really lucky. All the chips fell into place. We won the trials in Baltimore. It was the only time Beach Volleyball had Olympic trials. It was an amazing thing that happened late in my career.”
One of the things Dodd always loved about beach volleyball is that it is a sport you can keep playing as you got older, but he had never anticipated still having a chance to be an Olympian.
“Those were really wonderful years that I was able to play indoors and play beach, but as a result, the Olympics were no longer really a dream of mine,” he said. “I really thought that it was not going to happen. Even when they were talking about it and the president of FIVB came to the Manhattan Open and said he realized the potential of beach volleyball — you know, I didn’t think it would fall into my timeframe.”
He also thought he’d pretty much experienced everything possible in beach volleyball — until he stepped on the court in Atlanta wearing the red, white, and blue.
“Out there playing, you feel something different than anything else that you’ve done,” Dodd said. “I’ve played in hundreds of opens, I’ve won 75 opens, five Manhattan Beach Opens. But nothing is like the pressure of representing not only yourself, not just your family, not just your city, but your country. It’s something that is hard to quantify unless you experienced it.”
Dodd and Whitmarsh advanced to the finals, where they lost to fellow Americans Karch Karily and Kent Steffes. They took home the silver medal. Dodd told the Paper Courts podcast in 2018 that it was the thing he was most proud of in his volleyball career.
“There’s nothing to compare,” he said. “I don’t want to sound corny, but you can feel your country, almost feel how people were behind you and wanting you to do well, and you wanting to do well, but you’ve still got these incredibly tough players in front of you….When I think of what I am most proud of, and what was the hardest, most agonizingly difficult but rewarding achievement that I have in volleyball, it’s the silver medal.”
He would go on to participate in the next four Olympics, first as a broadcaster and then as a coach for Redondo Beach’s Sean Rosenthal and Jake Gibb.
“Being involved with the Olympics means a lot,” Dodd said in 2012. “As far as volleyball goes, and having the privilege of still being involved with the game I love so dearly, the Olympics is where you want to be. It is so much fun and the ultimate affirmation of your hard work and dedication. Every great athlete wants to be remembered, to leave a legacy. Becoming an Olympian makes you part of history, something you and your family can be proud of in-perpetuity, throw in a medal and the podium experience and you have hit the Volleyball Lotto.”
Speaking from the beach this week, where Dodd was working with the next generation of volleyball hopefuls at the CBVA championships, he said a lot of his accomplishments might one day fade from his own and everyone else’s memory. But two things would remain: his name embronzed five times on the Manhattan Beach Pier, and his silver medal.
“There are some things you’ll never forget,” he said. “It’s one of those things, like the Manhattan Open, your plaque on the pier. No one can ever take it away.” ER
