Long Beach State University Athletics
8/21/2008 12:00:00 AM | General
Aug. 21, 2008
BEIJING -- First of all, he didn't know how to play volleyball. Worse, everybody knew it was a girls' sport. Besides, older brothers Chip and Keith were into basketball, so that's what Scott Touzinsky wanted to play.
One of Scott's first memorable phrases had been, "Keith do it -- me do it!"
So to persuade Scott to just try volleyball in the summer between second and third grade, his mother, Anne, offered a bribe of new tennis shoes and enlisted Keith, seven years his elder.
"Scottie," he asked, "if I help coach, will you do it?"
Of course he would. And so was stoked a nearly two-decade journey to the Beijing Olympics for Touzinsky, who played on four state championship teams at Vianney along the way.
"He doesn't like us to brag about his accomplishments," father Charlie said in an e-mail. "But we do, anyway, and at every chance we get."
When the USA men's volleyball team rejoins its campaign for its first Olympic medal since 1992 tonight in a quarterfinal match against Serbia, Touzinsky, 6-foot-6, will proceed to bask in the quest even in a backup role.
"For us, it's a full-team experience," he said Monday after the team improved to 5-0 with a victory over Japan.
If only the team's experience in China were as unblemished as its record.
On the first full day of the Games, at a Beijing landmark, the Drum Tower, the father-in-law of coach Hugh McCutcheon was murdered and his mother-in-law seriously wounded by a knife-wielding man who then killed himself.
"We were devastated. We didn't know what to do. We didn't know how to help," Touzinsky said. "And we weren't sure what it was about. 'Do our families still come? Do we keep them at home?' "
Touzinsky said the circumstances have served not so much to strengthen the team's bonds but to illuminate them.
"I don't think we're closer now than we were before, to tell you the truth. When something like that happens, we're going to stick together. But we've always stuck together," he said. "And now, obviously, he needs a lot of help from us. But I think the biggest help we can give him is going out there and trying as hard as we can."
Despite his grudging start in volleyball, Touzinsky has been trying about as hard as he can almost since he took it up.
"You know, when you're young, and you catch on to something and you want to just keep doing it and doing it?" he said.
So he'd spend hours seeing how long he could bump a volleyball in the air while walking around the back yard. Eventually, his parents put in a volleyball net and sunk the poles in concrete -- indicative of the commitment they saw coming.
Day in, day out, he would serve laundry baskets full of balls, retrieve them and do it again.
Once, he went to a local camp with one eye nearly swollen shut from a bee sting. When a coach asked what the other guy looked like, he said, "I killed him" ... adding only after a dramatic pause that the other guy had been a bee.
Killer instinct on the court helped him soar to a scholarship to Long Beach State, where he became a first-team All-American and the school's career ace leader. But his on-court persona runs contrary to a gentle personality away from it.
When he considers what his baby brother is all about, Chip Touzinsky answers: "Love. Scott is by far the most loving and giving person."
As such, Touzinsky figures to move home one day from California, where he now lives with his wife, Angelique, a promotional spokesmodel.
Besides wanting to expand the volleyball camp he held in St. Louis last year, he'd like to be closer to family again, especially after his mother's TLC for the ACL injury he suffered in 2004 playing in Europe.
But he hopes to have the "full-team experience" for another eight to 10 years before he returns to the wellspring that led him that way.
