From: ESPN The Magazine
The Body Issue: Nude Volleyball
This column appears in the October 19 Body Issue of ESPN The Magazine.
The meal is just plain awkward. On a gray September Friday, we sit in a western Pennsylvania pizzeria, sharing appetizers and uncomfortable conversation. A bartender, a trainer, a teacher, a college kid and a couple of hack writers — six disparate souls with little in common except the dawning reality of what is about to come. We are the Breakfast Club, only this is dinner.
“Anybody wanna split that stuffed mushroom?”
“Anybody know where the bathroom is?”
“Anybody ever done this before?”
Not hardly.
A couple of months earlier, one of my editors had called with an assignment. He told me about a wildly competitive volleyball tournament held each September not too far from Pittsburgh at a resort called the White Thorn Lodge. The event has been luring quality athletes from all over the country for 39 years: D1 players, national team members. The comp is of such a high caliber, they call it the Super Bowl of Volleyball. “Anyway,” he said, “we want you and Struby to round up a team and write about playing in the thing.” (Struby is fellow Mag writer Tim Struby, whom I’d met a few times but knew nothing about other than that he’s more than a half-foot shorter than me, used to model and didn’t seem the volleyball type.)
“Sweet,” I replied. “Sign me up.”
“One more thing,” the editor said. “White Thorn is a nudist lodge.”
Legend has it that nearly 3,000 years ago, a Greek runner named Orsippus won an Olympic race after losing his loincloth. And now I’m being asked to follow his lead, to proudly continue the legitimate if under-the-radar tradition of nude competition. Now, I may never have had a proper nudist experience, but I will admit to being a bit of an exhibitionist. I spent the first couple of years after college working at a Club Med resort, where I was approximately 8 percent clothed during the day — and even less so at night. But finding four others who are both good at volleyball and willing to take nudism for a spin — in front of millions of readers, no less — seemed a nearly impossible task. Making it harder still was a mandate from The Mag to field two female pros (for gender equity’s sake).