Home sweet home front
With an Olympic gold medal hanging around and nothing left to prove, beach volleyball king Eric Fonoimoana sees the weekend’s Hermosa Open as one of the last sand castles he hasn’t stormed.

Hermosawave Easy Reader
by Robb Fulcher

As workers were busy turning the Hermosa sand into a temporary village for extreme sports and pro beach volleyball, one of the city’s most famous residents, Olympic gold medallist Eric Fonoimoana, was itching for one of the few prizes that has eluded him.Flush from victory with new partner Dax Holdren in last weekend’s AVP Huntington Beach Open, the Olympian aches to win the $75,000 Sideout Hermosa Beach Men’s Open for the first time in his impressive career.
Only the Manhattan Open title has proven equally elusive to “Fonoi,” and the hazel eyes of the alpha competitor smoldered as he anticipated the coming weekend, which combines the Hermosa Open with the Mervyn’s Beach Bash, featuring the world’s top skateboarders, skaters and BMX athletes.“As long as I am competing, Hermosa and Manhattan will be my goals,” Fonoi said as he sipped coffee in the Good Stuff restaurant a few dozen yards from where workers were setting up bleachers around the sand that is to be his fierce playground.

Sport circus
The competitive fire will not be his alone. The three-day Beach Bash will also feature the $75,000 Jockey Hermosa Beach Women’s Open with stars such as Manhattan Beach’s Lisa Arce and Holly McPeak. McPeak won last weekend’s Huntington event with partner Elaine Youngs.Fonoi’s and Holdren’s competition will include the Huntington men’s runner-ups Mike Whitmarsh and Canyon Ceman, last year’s Hermosa Open winner Todd Rogers (who won with Holdren) and three-time Olympic gold medallist Karch Kiraly.

Left-handed compliment
Last week Fonoi and Holdren bested the team of fellow Hermosan Ceman and Whitmarsh 21-18, 21-14 in the battle for Huntington, using an attack designed to keep their opponents guessing.
The main difference between playing with Holdren and playing with ex-Olympic teammate Dain Blanton is that Holdren is left-handed, Fonoi said. Holdren occupies the right side of the court while Fonoi, a right-hander, covers the left. As a result, the pair can more easily go for the offensive kill on the second touch of the ball, rather than the third.
“We’re both open to the court, our shoulders are open to the court,” Fonoi said. “So he can hit it over on two if he chooses, or he can jump to trick the defense and I can hit it over on three, which of course is the normal thing.”

Solid foundation
Hermosa and Manhattan notwithstanding, Fonoi has conquered the world of beach volleyball so completely with his medal from the 2000 Sydney Olympics and hundreds of thousands of dollars in AVP prize money, that now he has set his sites on other frontiers.Two years ago he established the nonprofit Dig for Kids Foundation, which combines academic mentoring with after-school volleyball to help kids in disadvantaged communities complete their primary and secondary education, and go on to college.With sponsors including Speedo, Wilson, Mervyn’s California and Southbaycalendar.org, the foundation has set up its pilot program in Carson, supplying academic help plus uniforms, equipment and an assistant coach for boys’ and girls’ high school teams. In turn the high school kids serve as tutors and mentors for younger school kids.
The foundation’s other efforts have included starting up in-classroom libraries in Linwood. After Fonio talked to Hermosa Valley School kids, they donated thousands of dollars worth of books for their inland counterparts.
“It’s nice to have the ability to give back to something that has benefited me so much,” Fonoi said.

Family values
In reaching out to under-advantaged kids, Fonoi is not exactly hearkening to his own childhood. “I didn’t go through that, I grew up in Manhattan Beach. I had a great childhood, I had anything I could possibly want. We had ski trips, water skiing trips, I could surf whenever I wanted. We weren’t spoiled by any means, we had to earn it, but we weren’t denied anything we could have really wanted,” Fonoi said.The youngest of six siblings, including sister Lelei, an Olympic swimmer, Fonoi was pushed to excellence at an early age. He credits much to his parents, mother Constance, a real estate broker who was killed in a traffic accident when he was 19, and father Alio, a plumber, who died of cancer four years ago.“I had a strict family, that’s where I get my work ethic,” he said. “I was never allowed to quit any sport. Anything I started, I had to finish, even if I didn’t like the sport. Like swimming.”Fonoi’s parents pushed swimming more than other sports, and Eric managed to escape the chlorinated arena only during his middle school years, after older siblings had paved the way.“After six kids saying they didn’t want to swim any more, it was the trickle down theory,” he said.He described being the youngest of six as an advantage.
“They pushed me to be a better athlete at a younger age,” he said. “When I would play soccer and steal the ball from a kid who’s much older, that’s how I learned to be an athlete.”Like Michael Jordan, Fonoi can play pretty much any sport, but like Jordan, coincidentally, Fonoi finds he’s not that hot on the tennis court. Of course, this weekend there won’t be a racquet in sight.