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Sidelines Kalani Simpson |
Former UH volleyball star Costas Theocharidis and AD Herman Frazier sat with each other at the Quarterback Club yesterday.
Theocharidis no
longer running uphillCOSTAS Theocharidis talks about running up a hill so brutal it could break a person's spirit. A hill that feels like it might never end. A hill that gets increasingly difficult the higher it goes, three grades: steep, steeper and 90-degree angle.
It just gets harder.
Yes, it's a metaphor.
But this hill is real, too. It's called Frank Street, and it is indelibly seared into Theocharidis' psyche after countless early-morning offseason tests of mental strength.
At its very end, Theocharidis says, "Cars can't get up there."
And even if you can, there's nothing left to do but go back down and run it again. And anyone who knows Hawaii men's volleyball coach Mike Wilton knows there is a time limit. "And every year," Theocharidis says, "the time limit drops.
"So by the time you're a senior, you've got to run like, world record."
And any determination to go on is gone by halfway up.
But Theocharidis always made it up that hill, somehow. It changed him, he's better for it.
Yesterday, he made his first real public appearance in the months since the NCAA took his national title away.
"Actually," he says later, "life is like Frank Street."
YOU KNOW THE story. Theocharidis was perhaps the best player in Hawaii men's volleyball history. He won every award. Led the team to its first men's national championship. And then the NCAA started sniffing around, and took everything away because he was "ineligible" thanks to some quasi-professional experience in Theocharidis' Greek past.
And it wasn't UH's fault. We know this because the university said so at every opportunity.
It was the NCAA's fault. It was society's fault. It was the media's fault (this one was actually broached, at that first press conference, until Robert Kekaula almost took an ominous step forward). It's that dang rap music kids are listening to these days.
But it wasn't UH's fault. The university had done everything it possibly could have, we were told.
So it was Costas' fault.
"I mean, yeah, I might have been kind of like a scapegoat," Theocharidis says. "Especially in the media."
The media? It wasn't the media that sat there in an official press conference and said the root of his ineligibility was "the player was not fully forthcoming."
But he took it. He didn't say much. He kept a low profile. He says now he didn't do anything wrong, but he didn't say anything for a long, long time. He just took it.
"You know," he says, "I think I can take it for the team. You want to blame someone, blame me."
But the best part was, most people didn't. His coaches didn't. His teammates didn't. He's eternally grateful that it has felt like the people of Hawaii "backed me up, you know?"
He's started to emerge again in the past month or so, showing his face. He's done a couple of short TV interviews. Yesterday, he spoke at the Honolulu Quarterback Club. A nice speech, about what it takes to win a national championship.
And when headliner Herman Frazier came in late, the open seat was next to Theocharidis, and the two shook hands and shared words, the way an AD and an old star player should.
No hard feelings, it seems.
THE QUARTERBACK CLUB is a polite group. And so no one touched the subject of the NCAA, or a vacated championship. Theocharidis even leaned forward, and raised his eyebrows, and tilted his head, ready to take it. But it never came.
Now that's a polite group.
He's in business now. Yet retired -- "I knew the tradeoff," he says, of getting a job, and giving up playing ball.
How's this for irony? He's not on his country's Olympic team, in part because Greece is only using professionals in its lineup.
But that's behind him. He loves his job, in the securities industry, he loves Hawaii. He's trying to get his parents to retire here, his brother to move here.
He's smiling, coming out into the light again.
Theocharidis seems happy now, like all that NCAA stuff is behind him, in the past. Like he's made it to the top of the hill.
"No, no," he says, "I'm not happy. I'll never forget about these things. But there's nothing to be done. And just thinking about it makes me feel like sad and depressed. And, you know, I'm young. I'm (much too) young to be thinking about stuff like that."
See the Columnists section for some past articles.
Kalani Simpson can be reached at ksimpson@starbulletin.com
