Tragedy lingers as U.S. volleyball keeps winning

Mike Celizic

BEIJING - Hugh McCutcheon says he doesn’t bring it to the court. He’s built a room in his mind for the grief and the loss and the pain, and when he’s with his team, he locks the door to that room.

But it’s there, just the same. His U.S. men’s volleyball team has inked the initials T.B. and B.B. on their shoes, a constant reminder of what they’re playing for, a reminder of what McCutcheon works so hard at not thinking about.

On Wednesday night in the Capital Gymnasium, McCutcheon and his team got a step closer to what they came here to do. They beat Serbia in five sets and advanced to a semifinal date with Russia. It’s been 16 years since the men’s volleyball team has won a medal of any kind and 20 years since they won the gold.

In Athens, they were in the same position they are in now. They made the medal round but lost their last two matches, finishing fourth and out of the money. So that’s another thing they’re trying not to think about: the quest to finally get back on the medal stand.

It’s hard to tell which one’s harder to ignore, the pressure to win a medal or the grief their coach locks away on game days.

On Wednesday, it was the prospect of reaching the medal round, an eventuality that was threatened early when they lost the first set, victims of their own nervousness at the importance of the game.

“We were a little bit tense,” said Riley Salmon, who spiked the Serbians with a vicious hit at match point and began the night’s celebration. “We had a lot of expectations.”

It’s unavoidable for them. The wonder is how McCutcheon has been able to separate his trauma from the team’s needs, to find the right things to tell them to settle down as well as the right things to tell himself to be able to function.

“All I’m really thinking about is volleyball,” the coach said after the game. “I’m working hard to compartmentalize my life. It’s not about me.”

On Aug. 9, the day after the Opening Ceremony, McCutcheon’s father-in-law and mother-in-law were touring Beijing’s historic Drum Tower when a lunatic with a knife killed Todd Bachman and critically wounded Barbara Bachman. There was nothing special about the murderer, a disaffected and unemployed man who’d decided to leave this life and take somebody with him. The Bachmans just happened to be there when he carried out his mad scheme, punctuating the madness of it by leaping off the tower to his death.

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The man wasn’t making a political statement — at least not one that fits into any of the normal compartments. 

McCutcheon left the volleyball team to be with his family. His players inked the initials on their shoes and won their first three games. When Barbara Bachman finally came to, she opened her eyes and saw her son-in-law at her bedside.

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“Why aren’t you with the team?” she wanted to know. Life, she was telling him, must go on.

McCutcheon returned to the team as his mother-in-law was transported to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota to continue her recovery. To the three wins they had without him, they’ve added three more. Another two will give them a gold medal.

It can’t have been easy, but no one but McCutcheon can know how hard it’s been. And he’s not talking about it.

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