Redondo Beach volleyball with the Lakers (Aaron)

I just wanted to share my Saturday morning with you. My friends and I are playing in a little beach volleyball tournament next weekend. Now, I know that it's not typical to "practice" for a dress-up-and-drink tournament, but we wanted to take advantage of the early fall good weather and play a little beach ball. We all agreed to meet over at Knob Hill in Redondo Beach. I arrived and we had a good size group there to play.

I'm warming up and I see this EXTREMELY tall man meandering down the stairs to the beach. He's got a scraggly beard and there's another guy with him, and I'm thinking, "Hey, wait a minute... Holy crap, is that Pau Gasol? Whoa! Cool!" And then he and his buddy get to the bottom of the stairs, and they start walking toward us. (Whoa!) And then they started warming up with us!

We played beach volleyball with the Lakers' star center Pau Gasol and his buddy, feisty 3 point specialist, the Machine, Sasha Vujacic! It turns out that Sasha lives in the building nearby, and that Pau is building his house nearby. They were both really cool and were eager to have some fun scrimmaging with us.

Both players are definitely basketball players first, and the team we were scrimmaging against was clearly not as good as our team. Pau just stayed up front in the middle all the time, and Sasha wanted to set. Our team played its usual rotations.

Let me tell you, it is very intimidating to line up across a 7 foot basketball star. That was the first rotation of the game, and I went up and blocked his first hit. :) (As I said, basketball is definitely his first love.) We played 4 games, and we went up against each other many times. As the day went along, he blocked a few of my hits and I got some more of his too.

Unfortunately, I didn't have a camera or my phone anywhere nearby, so no pics, but it was definitely a highlight of my extended summer!

UPDATE: I was emailing with the guys after the day...
Me: Dude, I can't even come up with anything clever to express how cool it was that we were playing vball with Pau and Sasha. It's a little intimidating to line up across an NBA all-star center! Hopefully, none of the other teams will have Chris Kaman on their teams this weekend.

Justin: I think there was one rally where Aaron blocked Pau 3 times in a row. Each time, Pau threw out some awesome random profanity. F-ing Hilarious.
Good times. Wish I could have stayed longer.