Sure, all these swimming races are exciting and inspiring and all that, but after a few days of watching people paddle back and forth across a pool, your average red-blooded American sports fan begins to wonder: Hey, where’s the violence?Fortunately, the happy answer is just a couple hundred yards away, in the indoor pool, where the preliminary rounds of water polo are in progress.There’s enough violence in an average water polo match to fill all your brutality needs, at least until football season starts. Water polo is a combination of swimming, soccer and basketball, plus wrestling, boxing and mugging.The players are phenomenal athletes who perform amazing feats of speed, grace, stamina and ball-handling. They also perform amazing feats of kicking, punching, scratching, clawing and choking. And that’s just the men.The women are also fond of tearing each other’s bathing suits off. ‘‘There’s a lot of fighting,’’ says Layne Beaubien, 28, a defender on the US men’s team. ‘‘Under the water, anything goes.even biting. I have a guy on my team — Jeff Powers — who has a scar on his shoulder that’s a whole mouth, a whole bite. All of us have had chunks taken out of our face. And there are a lot of broken noses.’’‘‘It gets pretty feisty,’’ agrees Natalie Golda, 22, a defender on the US women’s team. ‘‘On top of the water, it looks pretty mellow — you’re passing the ball around — but under water, they’re grabbing, they’re punching and people are getting dunked. Sometimes they’ll pull you under water for so long, you’re thinking, ‘If I don’t get air, soon, I’ll be in trouble’.’’Surprisingly, most water polo injuries are minor, Golda says: ‘‘They’re mostly superficial — broken fingers, broken noses, teeth, jaws, eardrums, stuff like that.’’Which tells you something about water polo: It’s a sport played by folks who feel that broken noses and busted jaws are ‘superficial’. Frequently, a player will suddenly disappear under the water, as if yanked down by an invisible hand. That’s because he was yanked down by an invisible hand — the hand of an opponent.For men, the preferred method of dunking an opponent is to grab the body and yank down. For women, it’s grabbing the opponent’s swimsuit and yanking down. ‘‘They’ll grab the suit in the back and twist it, and sometimes it’ll tear off,’’ Golda says. ‘‘So you lose quite a few suits.’’When that happens, she says, ‘‘you play as long as you can and then you get subbed out’’.Technically, none of this stuff is legal, but the refs working the poolside allow a certain amount of leeway. However, there’s a catch: With the water churned up by all the action, the refs can’t really see under the surface. ‘‘There’s a lot of white water,’’ says Beaubien, ‘‘and if the ref doesn’t see it, it doesn’t count.’’As every schoolchild knows, water polo was actually played on horseback until PETA complained about the effects of chlorine on equine eyeballs.(LA Times/Washington Post)
