HERMOSA BEACH, California – Kent Steffes is many things.

He is an Olympic gold medalist.

Statistically speaking, he is the most dominant player in the history of beach volleyball, winning nearly half of the 233 events he played.

He is a father, a writer, an author, a podcaster. He recently added documentarian to the growing list of hats he dons. He’d been asked about participating in documentaries or docuseries on a near-annual basis for the last 25 years or so until he finally grew tired enough of the charade and just did it on his own.

“Why can’t I take my camera and shoot it? Tim Cook from Apple tells me I can do a whole movie with an iPhone. What do I know?” he said on SANDCAST. “It’s a video book on our book, Kings of Summer. I’ll just interview the guys, do the same sort of thing in a video format, and the documentary on beach volleyball has been done. Took me one month.”

All of this is a quick explainer that to write about who and what Steffes is would require a story the length of a book. Maybe one day he’ll write it.

But as his public presence has once again exploded into the collective volleyball conscience, so, too, have the many opinions of what Kent Steffes is not. So rather than attempt to neatly wrap up this 57-year-old author-gold-medalist-podcaster-documentarian-father in a story that would in no way suffice, I will instead attempt to unpack the numerous things Steffes is not.

Kent Steffes is against the AVP

The most-oft discussed matter when it comes to Steffes is his opinions about the AVP. Anyone who reads his writing on his prolific Facebook page or listens to his podcast – or listens to ours – might get the impression that he has a bone to pick with the AVP, that he is attempting to take it down.

This, when you go even a touch deeper than the surface on which many exist, is not true.

He isn’t anti anything.

He is, rather, pro beach volleyball.

After all these years, after growing up heading to State Beach after high school and playing until the sun went down, of being honored to jump in and get his ass kicked by Sinjin Smith and the professionals at a practice, after competing on and helping to build the AVP, after winning the inaugural Olympic gold medal, after making a bid to purchase the AVP before Donald Sun came in with a higher number, after watching the sons of his rivals make their own way into the professional ranks – after all that, Kent Steffes still loves the game of beach volleyball. Loves it to the point that, when he dropped by Six Man a few years ago, he jokingly said that he shouldn’t come by these types of events anymore, for they get him excited to the point he might just have a heart attack. Loves it so much that he swung by a CBVA to simply watch me play a random tournament in Santa Monica with Wyatt Harrison. Later that summer, he made the drive down the 405 to take a peek at a charity fours tournament in Hermosa Beach, just because beach volleyball was being played.

“I want nothing but the best for the sport,” he said. “I would love it if the tour was just like the 90s, that number of events, that prize money, that television audience, that’s all I care about. Internationally, I think the top players should be making 2 million bucks, here maybe $1 million, number two, $600 grand, then the third should be making $300 grand each. Those are the metrics you’re striving for.”

Those are the metrics he is not seeing.

He doesn’t believe in the current iteration of the AVP and didn’t believe in the one before it. He wrote as much, predicting that the AVP, then under Bally’s, would sell. This of course rankled the AVP – until it did indeed sell, to Alden Global Capital.

“These things are so predictable,” he said. “There is no way they can make money with the business plan they have.”

So he writes out the flaws, why it will not work, and this gives the impression to many that Steffes is against the AVP. But it isn’t the AVP he’s against, nor is the AVP the only one who attracts his critical eyes and sharp critiques. His passions are business and sports, and the intersection of the two. He lauds those who get it right – women’s college softball is a favorite, and he is fascinated by UFC, Formula I and NASCAR – and examines and explains the many sports he sees as getting it wrong, the USFL and XFL and LIV Golf being prime examples.

What he seeks are sports done right, and he enjoys the examination of them.

He doesn’t see the AVP as doing the sport right, and that, more than anything, is what Steffes wants, because even while he is clearly no fan of the current manner in which professional beach volleyball is being conducted, he still encourages every fan to spend $100 on beach volleyball this year, AVP or otherwise. Get enough fans to do so and you have a certifiable professional sport.

He hasn’t seen this happening.

“The sport isn’t a private equity asset. That’s the problem. It’s called the illusion of sport. Sports are unique in that you have to convince people to care about the outcome,” he said. “Why do Americans care about football and not cricket, and why do Indians care about cricket and not football? It’s the illusion that it matters, that we should care about the outcome. Less people do than you think.

“The problem with the League and the city vs. city, it’s not a good idea or a bad idea, it’s a non-idea. It’s the competition. People are not convinced that the competition is real, that the teams are battling. You have a high hurdle to overcome to get people to believe that it matters, or should matter. When you have a single-entity owner you break the illusion and that it matters. This was written in 1980, the Illusion of Sports. That’s really important.

“The League has a championship, correct? Is that the thing every beach volleyball player in the world is dying to win? Would they give their left arm to win that? They did a poll on Olympic athletes and said if we could give you a pill which will guarantee you’ll win an Olympic medal but you’ll be dead at 30, and 95 percent of them said yes. It’s meaningful for Olympic athletes to win a medal, therefore the people believe it’s a championship.

“The point is, is anyone going to take a pill with a guarantee of death to win the League? How about the Stanley Cup? How about the Masters? How about the US Open in tennis? How about Wimbledon?

“The League is clearly not working, and they need to stop.”

Which is why he writes.

He wants beach volleyball to work.

And, other than his own satisfaction of seeing it happen, there is no incentive for Steffes to be doing anything that he is currently doing.

This brings us to misconception no. 2.

Kent Steffes has ulterior motives

Steffes writes and podcasts for free. He does so because he wants to. He does not make money on it, nor does he care to. He writes to think, and then pours his thoughts onto paper, like a modern-day, steam-of-sports-business-consciousness Kerouac. He could command tens of thousands of dollars for consulting services but instead does everything for free, and willingly engages in comment sections and messages.

Why would a businessman of his acumen do that?

Because Steffes cares about beach volleyball the way one does about many aspects of life for which no external motivation is required.

“I don’t care if I make a dollar. I would like to see the sport bigger and better just because I care about it like I care about a lot of things,” he said. “I care about my school doing well, I care about my church doing well, I care about my family, I care about a lot of things. There’s a lot of people who like doing things not because there’s a personal benefit to them.”

The only benefit Steffes gets out of doing what he does is the intrinsic satisfaction of the act itself, and the hopes that one day, the perpetually sinking ship that has been professional domestic beach volleyball in the United States will right itself.

It wouldn’t matter to him if he played a part in it or not.

“I only give these suggestions to help out,” he said. “Maybe someone will listen, and the owner will make money, the players will make money.”

These aren’t the rash thoughts of a social media commenter, either. He doesn’t raise his fist to the sky and declare that if only they kept the court big, the scoring side out, all of the sport’s problems would simply vanish into the Pacific Ocean and the AVP would return to its halcyon days, with Miller Lite and Cuervo raining down money and five million tuning into NBC on summer Sunday evenings and parties raging until the sun comes up.

It’s more nuanced than that, far more, and he knows it.

His posts are well-researched and sourced. Steffes can – and frequently will – reference obscure books from the 80s, or a random note he made on a tome of a book on Joe Torre, or the work of psychologist Robert Cialdani, the father of persuasive psychology. He will explain why the Masters and U.S. Open will average 2 million viewers through the first three days, 5 million on Sunday, and 9 million for the final 45 minutes. He knows TV numbers from NCAA softball to the WNBA to Formula I to LIV Golf, and why some sports – the former – work and some – the latter – do not.

“In my opinion, the sports fan is a lot more knowledgeable than we credit them for. Sports fans know, they know what the championships are,” he said. “They know what the good matchups are. They’re not fooled.”

The incentive, then, is this: Kent Steffes wants to see beach volleyball done right.

The catch is that most human beings don’t enjoy being told they’re wrong. Steffes has no qualms about expressing such things.

That is actually one of the traits I appreciate most about Steffes: When I have an idea or thought or musing, I’ll often run it by him. Sometimes he’ll laugh at my naivety, clap me on the shoulder, and then explain why the idea, noble as it might have been, is not a good one, or not feasible (case in point is when I ask him, during the podcast, if we could ever see a Manhattan Beach Open become a true open, with all of the top teams in the world descending upon the best annual event on the sport’s calendar).

He is not a yes man.

But he is a good man.

This is the final misconception into which I’ll delve on Steffes.

Kent Steffes is an asshole

Well, maybe that is true in some cases.

I didn’t know Steffes when he was a player, but those who did have feelings for him as strong and polarizing as politics, religion, and hand-setting rules. I played fours in Hermosa Beach a few months ago, and someone asked me about what it was like writing a book with Steffes. Before I could say a word, another player, a former rival of his, said that Steffes could eat something rather unsavory. I laughed, because this is not an uncommon sentiment from folks of that era. Old rivalries die hard, although his with Sinjin Smith has indeed melted into a brotherly type of friendship, and Sinjin’s son, Hagen, is one of Steffes’ favorite to watch and support.

It is impossible for normal human beings to relate to those who achieve at the highest level of their craft. When B.J. Armstrong was asked, on the Last Dance docuseries, if Michael Jordan was a nice guy, he smiles, shrugs, and says “ehhhh.”

Jordan was famously not nice.

But, Armstrong elaborated, he was a great teammate, because doing what it takes to enable your team to win six NBA Championships was his standard of being a great teammate — not being a nice guy. Jordan was able to get more out of the team and everyone around them, because he did what was necessary, not what was easy.

Kobe draws the same reactions.

So does Tiger.

And Djokovich.

And almost any other giant in sports, save for perhaps Roger Federer.

If it sounds hyperbolic for Steffes to be mentioned among those names, it is not. To make 137 finals in 220 domestic events is almost impossible, yet Steffes did it. He was as dominant, if not more, than every single one of the aforementioned athletes in their sports.

I can’t relate on what it was like to play with or against Steffes. I can’t imagine I’d have enjoyed it.

What I can relate to, however, is what it is like to work with Steffes, and have him as a friend.

When I sent him the first draft of Kings of Summer, he hadn’t yet been interviewed for it or participated in any way. He’d ignored all of my messages for years, so all of my research on him came in the form of interviews with his contemporaries and old stories in the Los Angeles Times and other outlets from that day.

Then he wrote back.

He’d read the book. Read it again. He loved it. Was ecstatic.

“Finally,” he said, “someone did it. Someone finally wrote the book.”

Over the next year, we worked together on it, exchanging ideas. He added interviews I was never able to get, corroborated stories that needed fixing. He made it infinitely better. When the book finally came out, he was as giddy as a kid on Christmas morning, flipping through the book, turning it over.

“Can you believe it?” he said. “Wow. Look at this. I’m an author.”

After all he’d accomplished, writing a book made him a kid again.

That revealed a lot to me then.

We’ve enjoyed a wonderful friendship since, checking in here and there. We read each other’s writing and trade notes and ideas. We do not agree with everything we write and say, which makes our discourse that much more fun to me.

When my son was born, he and his longtime partner, Tracy, gushed over him as if he were their own nephew. They’d swing by every now and again with books and little trinkets for him. We’d have them over for dinner, they’d have us over for the Super Bowl.

I’ve learned I have a rare perspective on Steffes, which is why I so enjoyed podcasting with him, and why I enjoyed writing this story. He doesn’t need me to write this anymore than he needs to write on his Facebook page. I wrote it because I wanted to, because it was enjoyable to put thought on paper.

I wrote it because he is not the devil some may think he is, although if you do see him as a devil, then maybe he is the devil the sport needs.