RED TAPE AND VOLLEYBALL

By CALVIN TRILLIN

If bureaucrats didn't invent beach volleyball, who did? i ask that question because ever since this summer's Republican National Convention I've been contemplating the moment when Newt Gingrich, in the course of introducing an Olympic volleyballer to the cheering delegates, said, "A mere 40 years ago, beach volleyball was just beginning. No bureaucrat would have invented it, and that's what freedom is all about."

At the time, I refrained from speculating in a disrespectful manner on whether the pantheon of memorable lines by modern American politicians--lines like "We have nothing to fear but fear itself"--would be expanded after this election to include not only Bill Clinton's most stirring remarks about school uniforms and the length of hospital maternity stays but also "Beach volleyball is what freedom is all about."

Why did I exercise this uncharacteristic restraint? Frankly, I once had a personal confrontation with the bureaucratic attitude toward sport, and since then I have harbored memories that may make me naturally sympathetic to the Gingrich view of beach-volleyball history.

Not many years after beach volleyball was beginning, some friends and I used to play basketball on Sunday mornings in a Greenwich Village playground. The highlight of the year was not some spectacular hook shot--there weren't any spectacular hook shots--but the awards banquet at which we'd hand out honors like "The John Foster Dulles Award for the Most Specious Out-of-Bounds Argument" and a special trophy for "Most Improved Jewish Player."

Those of us who grew up in the Midwest had trouble playing without a net, so every Sunday one of us stood on the playground's trash can and taped our own net to the rim. For weeks the park-department employee in charge of the playground eyed this scene sullenly.

Finally, he asked if we had a permit to put up the net. "A net-putting-up permit?" we said. "There's no such thing as a net-putting-up permit."

He retreated, but the next Sunday he told us we could no longer stand on the trash can to reach the net. These days, having listened to oratory from both Republicans and Democrats on the subject, we would have known how to respond. "The era of Big Government is over!" we would have said, or "We do not want government bureaucrats meddling in our lives!" Those days, we simply brought a stepladder from home.

I can't imagine that park-department employee inventing beach volleyball. For one thing, he was always fully clothed. Also, had he been working on the Southern California beach where beach volleyball was presumably invented, he would have thought of some reason why volleyball couldn't be played. He would have said the posts made marks in the sand.

The volleyballers would have found some way to get around that, of course. People who hung around on Southern California beaches in those days--volleyballers, surfers, body builders--were among the first groups in postwar America to become known for openly displaying a disdain for authority and the American work ethic.

In an era when Ozzie and Harriet were the model of how American lives were organized, the folks on the beach weren't much interested in family values. They were sometimes called beach bums. In fact, I just realized what the inventors of beach volleyball would not have been: Republicans.