Dan’s Guatemala Blog #1: About these shorts…

GUATEMALA CITY— It’s Wednesday and I (Dan, not Danny Kinda) am in Central America competing in a NORCECA beach volleyball event. I’m here with my teammate Kevin Gregan and Team USA’s Women’s team, Kathleen Madden (my sister!) and Rosalinda Masler. We got here early Wednesday via red-eye from LAX and we brought our Molten beach balls (they GAVE me some), which we’ve never used in competition but they’re pretty similar to the AVP ball. We’ll see how it goes.

“NORCECA” stands for “NORth American, CEntral America, & The CArribean” and the event is part of a tournament series for these regions. It’s like an FIVB event, mostly because men are required to wear shorts hiked halfway up the thighs (20cm, actually). In “Los Estados Unidos” (USA), stores don’t sell shorts that short unless they’re Spongebob boxer shorts. The social approval level of short shorts in the USA mirrors the public’s approval level of our current president. I blame this on Michael Jordan, who single-handedly transformed popular culture from showing high-thighs to the now-ridiculous midway-down-the-calf shorts. I went from store to store asking employees if they had “reeeeeally short shorts” and finally found two pairs, Nike’s DryFit and a set of Speedos. In the USA, the brand “Speedo” is ONLY significant to the tightie-whities spandex swim “trunks” that foreigners sport when they sunbathe. That’s fine and all, and even though Speedo sponsors Karch Kiraly it wasn’t enough to eliminate the speedo imagery in my head. DryFit!

Tomorrow we practice and play starts on Friday. I’ll be updating you on every single thing that happens down here with the Guatemalans so stay tuned…

• Topic: News & Updates
• By Dan Madden
• April 17th, 2008