Way back in the wayback, there was a volleyball pitch between Tom Mboya House and Kibaki House. The pitch reverberated most afternoons after class with the sounds of big hands slapping hard balls. Shrieks of triumph and cries of dismay, depending on the course of the game.
Slabbina was a beloved sport in the world’s greatest school. Unfortunately, there was a hierarchy of sports. Rugby was (and still is) the sport of kings. They strutted like men, even when they were pimply boys of seventeen. They are revered to this day, especially those who won the Prescott Cup (which at the time was a bigger achievement than winning the Nationals). The princes were those who played hockey. And because hockey was played in first term, and rugby in second term, often the kings deigned to be princes for three months.
Lowest on the totem pole was football – for those who would not, or could not, make it to either. By our standards, soccer was not something to boast about on your resume. It was a nothing, an amuse bouche, to not be considered seriously, especially with a menu of rugby and hockey to consider.
Slabbina? Slabbina was a palate cleanser, a light amusement between the last class and a dinner of murram (it was a great school with a terrible diet). And unfortunately, they paved paradise and put up a science lab.
(There was also cross country, by the way, but that had its owners. Running through the forest at five in the morning was not for everyone. Especially when, lore has it, someone once encountered a lion. The trick to oroso was to make sure that you were not leading – lions and all that – and you were not last. Devil and an impatient principal take the hindmost. Stick to the big crowd in the middle. Or simply hide away until all the unnecessary pre-dawn running was dispensed with).
But we were unfair on slabbina, leaving a great sport to the village boys. Yes, rugby is the sport they will play in heaven, but the world does not recognise volleyball for how great a sport it is.
Sports in the twenty first century is about spectacular feats - anything that can be packaged into a highlights reel. Instantly instagrammable. And there are few sports more ready for their time in the spotlight than volleyball. If you watched these last Olympic games, and especially the last rounds of the volleyball competitions, you would have come away totally awed by the sheer athleticism on display.
Volleyball, as all great sports are, is a simple game. Two teams facing each other across a net. You get three chances to get the ball over that net, trying to ensure that the other team cannot return it. The only rule is to keep it between the lines, and to use your hands.
When it is played by middle-aged women on a church afternoon, volleyball can be a genteel affair, full of good humour and soft hands doing undemanding things. But not when things start getting serious. Then the hands get harder. Pupils narrow. Suddenly tall women and men are jumping higher than a pride of warriors.
At the beginning of each point in volleyball, the server stands at the edge of their side, vaulting the ball over the net to the other team. When the church ladies do it, the mere effort needs to be applauded, and a successful serve is a thing to be admired. But when the serious ones do it, the server stands at what seems to be a mile away. They simultaneously launch themselves and the ball high up in the air. The ball is slapped with murderous intent, and it hurtles to the other side in less time than it takes to think. Done well, that ball is not coming back. But all too often, the other side is ready and waiting. They arrange themselves as a regiment, arrayed in the most efficient pattern to enable them to give the ball enough potential energy, which will then be translated into lethal kinetic energy as the ball is hurled back with malice aforethought.
Volleyball is tennis, if tennis was played with your hands, using a giant ball, directly in-your-face with your opponent. Your response time is in milliseconds, and sometimes a successful return (and a point) may be only because you were trying to protect yourself from a ball hurtling towards you at homicidal speeds.
The most spectacular, and also the most aggressive, move in basketball is the slam dunk. A player soars through the air, ball in hand. They slam the ball into the basket - the more menacing they look, the better. What completes the move is when you slam dunk over an opponent. They cower beneath the basket, knowing that the taunts and jeers are sure to follow. It is a move born in inner city playgrounds, where the nets are made of chains, and to give quarter to an opponent is to be soft and effete. Volleyball is a dunk for every point. Played properly, you are guaranteed sprained fingers. If it is not your day, you can count on those fingers being broken. Toss in a black eye and sore shoulders in the mix.
Slabbina is a wonderful sport, and played properly as it was in the Olympics, it is a sport ready to be one of the world’s leading. The IOC almost seems to recognise this, but they have their priorities all wrong. They were under the illusion that what the world needed was slabbina played in skimpy swimsuits on beaches. They were rather stupid about it, fining players who preferred playing without their buns hanging out for people to gawk at. Volleyball does not need spectators leering at players trying to display their best athleticism. It’s like putting Nutella on a plate of fish and chips.
But also, beach volleyball is proper volleyball’s poor cousin. It may be exciting to watch in its own way, but it is like sevens rugby to indoor volleyball’s fifteens. Like a 20/20 game compared to the exquisite beauty of a test match. The full beauty, brutality and athleticism of volleyball is probably only fully appreciated with six players on each side.
So let the important people put resources into volleyball. Let there be big global leagues, with club competitions and international championships being viewed by millions. Let sponsors flood money into the sport, and the best players be superstars and global icons.
Then slabbina will finally take its place, and the village boys will join the pantheon of kings.
(Picture courtesy of the IOC)
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