The Extraordinary, Heartbreaking, Triumphant Career of Tri Bourne

HERMOSA BEACH, California – Four weeks before the final tournament of Tri Bourne’s career, he is lying down on a couch in his podcast studio in Hermosa Beach, pulling the microphone over to him. A freshly opened 805 Blonde Ale is cradled in his right hand.

“I don’t think we’ve ever done a podcast laying down before,” he says. He smiles. Laughs.

This is not the look of a man one month away from retirement, from shedding the skin he has worn for these last 14 years as a professional beach volleyball player. If the old adage is true, that athletes die twice, once when they retire, again at the end, Bourne is a man who is radically at peace with the former.

“Well,” he says, laughing, “since we’re on our way out…”

There was a collective shudder in every beach volleyball fan of the 2010s when Bourne announced his retirement from the game on July 23. A mix of disbelief and wonder.

“Weird,” is how Trevor Crabb, Bourne’s childhood friend and partner of nearly five years, described it.

“It really feels kind of strange,” added Riley McKibbin, another lifelong friend of Bourne’s. “It’s weird because in my mind we’re still in our prime. With Tri, it’s especially strange to see him retire because if he was healthy, he’d be playing forever, which will happen to the Crabbs. Taylor is going to be the next [John] Hyden. Trevor’s figured out a way to play the sport and be great at it with no shoulder and no extreme hops. It’s kind of unbelievable that he’s retiring. It doesn’t feel real in a sense.”

It’s fitting that McKibbin mentioned Hyden. If there is a man in which Bourne’s career most entwined, it is Hyden.

There has been a circular poetry to Bourne’s final month as a professional beach volleyball player. Before he announced his retirement publicly, Hyden was staying in Bourne’s studio, in town from Nashville to coach a trio of juniors tournaments at the Hermosa Pier. That in itself was a moment for Hyden who, in a number of ways, has been something of a father figure to Bourne. If he didn’t beget the man himself, he is the man largely responsible for the rip-roaring first four years of Bourne’s career.

The Perfect Fit

All these years later, Bourne still can’t hardly believe Hyden picked him up as a partner when he did, in 2013. In the previous four years, Hyden had established himself as perhaps the second-best defender in the United States and, to take it a step further, the world. Only Todd Rogers, the 2008 Olympic gold medalist, had a better claim to that title. From 2009-2012, Hyden and Sean Scott were one of the few teams who could go toe-to-toe with Rogers and Phil Dalhausser, who won 15 domestic tournaments and 17 international in that stretch.

The team who won the second-most tournaments on American soil in those four years?

Hyden and Scott.

In 2011, when the AVP was still mired in bankruptcy and Karch Kiraly founded a Corona-sponsored tour called the Wide Open Series, featuring the old school, side out scoring format of the ’90s and a bigger court, there were five total events. Hyden and Scott won all five. That same year, Jose Cuervo had also reentered the professional beach volleyball market with its Pro Beach Series. Hyden and Scott won two of three, and also claimed the debut tournament of the upstart National Volleyball League.

The two were likened to the Baltimore Ravens defensive duo of Ray Lewis and Ed Reed. Scott, who was 6-foot-5 and, fittingly, built like a middle linebacker, was the Lewis of the duo. Hyden, a crafty and cerebral defender, was Reed.

“Once you find the perfect fit, it just kind of rolls from there,” Hyden said.

But as funding for the sport flagged in the United States, Scott was offered a job to be the director of the national beach programs for USA Volleyball. A new father, he made what, to him, was an easy choice: He retired from playing and took the job.

“A lot of people were upset with him, but I wasn’t one of them,” Hyden said. “For me, I had more to do. I was at a loss. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t have an option. I didn’t know who I was going to play with.”

Scott, who was raised in Kailua, Hawaii, had an idea. He passed Hyden’s number along to Bourne, another Hawaiian with an eerily similar physical makeup – 6-foot-5, jumpy, a workhorse’s workhorse.

Bourne shot him a text, and Hyden happened to be on his way down to Orange County. The timing worked out for a practice with Bourne, Hyden, and Tony Ciarelli, one of Bourne’s former teammates at USC.

That one hour, in a practice run by Hyden himself and not a coach, was all the 40-year-old needed to see.

“That day, I was like he’s Sean’s height, he’s athletic as hell, that’s a guy you want to mold into Sean,” Hyden recalled. “Everyone wants to be technically sound and one of the best blockers ever.”

But not everyone wants to do the work it takes. One of Hyden’s favorite quotes is “Everyone wants to be the beast, but not everyone wants to do what the beast does.”

Sean Scott did.

So did Tri Bourne.

After that practice, Hyden noticed Bourne pull a notebook out of his backpack and jot down everything they did, everything Hyden said.

One of the bullet-points, written in all caps, was “DON’T NET. EVER.”

Hyden asked him to be his partner the next day.

“I think he fainted,” Hyden said, laughing.

They’re sitting together in Bourne’s studio now, the conversation and memories flowing as easily as their partnership once did on the court.

“I thought I was just going to shag balls for him,” Bourne says, shaking his head.

“From there on, it was sit down, write notes after every single practice,” Hyden says. “Then it was, ‘Do you want to see my trainer?’ ‘I’m in.’ He’s just 100 percent in. You don’t see that these days where somebody just, ‘I’m going to give it my all, do what it takes.’ He said ‘Just tell me what to do.’ That was it. It just worked because he bought into everything I had to say.”

In that practice, both found exactly what they were looking for, even if, on a conscious level, neither knew they were looking for anything at all. Hyden was searching for another Sean Scott and found, essentially, the 23-year-old version of him. Bourne, who had been playing professionally indoors in Puerto Rico for two years, sought an avenue in which to become a truly world-class athlete.

“I wanted to do it all the right way,” Bourne says, “but I had to figure out how to do that. Then I partner with Mr. Do All The Right Things, then he brings me to Mykel [Jenkins, their trainer] and he gives me the other part of the experience of being a pro athlete, the literal blood, sweat, and tears kind of stuff. That’s what world class athletes do. It was just a good combination.”

“His professionalism,” Hyden says, “which he got from me, is what got us quickly to where we needed to be.”

Their partnership was a rocketship, validating any questions about Hyden’s choice in the rookie whose only previous AVP experience had been a second-round loss in a qualifier in Cincinnati in 2012. Milestones flew by like light poles out of a train window: Bourne won the AVP 2013 Rookie of the Year and Most Improved while Hyden was voted Defensive Player of the Year. It took them just six events to make their first AVP final, in Santa Barbara, and they followed it up with another in Huntington Beach in their next event. They qualified for the main draw in the first four international events of the 2014 season and won gold at the Berlin Grand Slam out of the qualifier in their fifth. Two weeks later, they won their first AVP, in Milwaukee, beating the No. 1 ranked team in the world in Phil Dalhausser and Sean Rosenthal in the finals.

“It was unreal,” Bourne said in 2016. “That was kind of – as a beach volleyball player, you kind of dream about winning an AVP tournament. I think some people get wins on their resume in smaller events but to know that you beat Sean Rosenthal and Phil Dalhausser in a stacked AVP – that was unreal. That solidified in my head that this was a reality. You got to get one first to know that you’re ever going to win.”

They’d win, all right. In 2014, Bourne and Hyden made the semifinals in six out of seven tournaments, winning in Milwaukee and placing second in Huntington Beach. In 2015, despite playing the majority of the season overseas in an attempt to qualify for the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, he and Hyden won back-to-back AVP tournaments to finish the AVP season, the first in Mason, Ohio, the second in Huntington Beach, California. In four AVP tournaments that year, their worst finish was third. They were named the AVP Team of the Year.

“Now, it’s kind of fun because I’m looking eye to eye with the legends of the sport,” Bourne said then. “And I’m still ten years younger than pretty much all of them.”

He is no longer younger than the men he once dreamed of beating. He’s aged far more than the nine years that has passed since he said that.

As quickly as Bourne’s career took off, as heaping as the scoop of serendipity was that landed him the perfect partner at the perfect time for his career, Bourne was about to have it all taken away from him.

Maybe for good.

A New Tri Bourne

The legacy that Tri Bourne will leave on the sport of beach volleyball is not an easy one on which to put a finger. His is a career that is equal parts extraordinary as it is heartbreaking, as triumphant as it is tragic.

It makes it easy to wonder what if.

What if he didn’t need a surgery on his ankle to remove a cyst at the end of the 2016 season, one punctuated with a bronze medal and $10,000 at the World Tour Finals in Toronto? What if he hadn’t needed a cortisone shot earlier in the year, a powerful anti-inflammatory that, beneficial as it may be, masks the body’s warning signals that something may be totally, irreversibly wrong? What if he hadn’t needed a heavy dose anesthesia and antibiotics and a heavier dose of donuts after the most successful and stressful year of his life? What if his hands hadn’t started swelling up one day at a practice in the pre-season of 2017? What if he’d just listened to his body, if but just once, along the way? What if he hadn’t ignored the signs again, manifesting themselves in his hands, which hurt so bad he had to put on gloves for blocking practice?

“That,” he says in the fall of 2017, “was the beginning of my body saying ‘Alright Tri you’ve pushed me pretty hard for a few years now and you’re not listening to me so I’m going to shut you down.’”

He says this from his kitchen table at his condo in Redondo Beach. His white shirt hangs off a once-sturdy frame. He’s lost 30 pounds since he and Hyden played their last tournament in September of 2016, the weight melting off him from a hellish cocktail of inflammation and more drugs than Bourne can recount.

He cannot lift, cannot work out, cannot do anything.

“My body was sending inflammation everywhere, like it would to an injury, but it’s sending it all over my body,” Bourne says. “I got super stiff, it got to my hip joints so it was hard to stand up. I lost all my energy, but I’m still trying to grind, because I’m a pro athlete, that’s what we do, we work through it, it hurts, work through it. It got to a point where Hyden’s looking at me saying ‘Alright dude, either you did something bad to your body this off-season or something’s wrong’ and my body was just not going.”

On February 13, two days before they were set to fly to the Fort Lauderdale Grand Slam to open the 2017 season, Bourne’s doctor told him not to get on the plane. His liver was inflamed. Everything was inflamed. The flight could literally kill him.

For the first time in as long as Bourne had been playing sports, he listened. To his body. To his doctors.

He wouldn’t play another beach volleyball tournament for nearly two years.

Even as he rested, Bourne’s condition worsened, his body rebelling from the abuse of four years of non-stop grinding. Scratch that. Make it 10 years. This is a habit that stretched back to his childhood, when he broke one wrist in a high school basketball game and broke the other in the next game a few days later. It followed him to USC, where he was an outside hitter and libero, and he herniated a disc in his back and played anyway, on two epidurals. Feeling weird one day, he biked to the medical center and was immediately rushed into surgery for an emergency appendectomy.

“It’s been his whole life that this has happened,” Riley McKibbin said, “but he always finds a way to persevere.”

The very engine that had built him into the second coming of Sean Scott, one of the best blockers in the world, had turned his body against him. Months passed. Dozens of blood tests and protocols. Nobody could figure out what was wrong with the otherwise perfectly-healthy 27-year-old. The United States Olympic Committee flew Bourne to Salt Lake City, one of the top facilities in its National Medical Network. There, they cut Bourne’s leg open for a biopsy.

The results were alarming.

Bourne’s muscle enzyme counts were through the roof, his body sending inflammation from the tips of his toes all the way up to his collarbone, a rare and enigmatic autoimmune condition called Myositis. The rest of the 2017 calendar year was spent on “trial and error,” Bourne says from the kitchen table.

“Different drugs and stuff,” is the phrasing he uses. They loaded him up with Prednisone, a steroid often prescribed to reduce inflammation and suppress an overactive immune system. Eighty milligrams worth. Initially, it worked. The inflammation slowly dropped, to the point that Bourne was down to 20 milligrams a day, five from his target of 15 milligrams, which would allow him to slowly begin practicing again.

The inflammation exploded.

Then exploded again.

In a matter of a week, he was back to 60 milligrams a day.

“To be honest, I’m not close at all to working out, which if everyone really knows me, I don’t stop,” he says. “It’s not possible for the old Tri Bourne.”

It’s funny, in a dark sense, to hear his choice of phrasing now. The Old Tri Bourne. The hyperactive towheaded son of a pair of triathletes. The kid diagnosed with ADHD by every doctor who only needed to take a peek at him, let alone attempt to sit him down and have a diagnostic with him. That Tri Bourne couldn’t sit still. Wouldn’t. His days were spent at the Outrigger Canoe Club, surfing, paddling, swimming. Playing volleyball all day long on the two beach courts and the baby court. Talking trash. Crushing those famous milkshakes served at the snack bar, which would become the subject of a children’s book we’d write, Volleyball for Milkshakes.  

The kid was, simply put, built to move. So disinterested was he in school that, when ESPN asked the USC indoor team to fill out a questionnaire with basic information such as hometown and major for their graphics when they televised the 2009 National Championship, he wrote the wrong one.

And that kid was supposed to rest? Take it easy?

Not move?

“This body,” he says, “doesn’t want to move. I’m just sitting it down, calming the mind, and figuring out a way to make it heal.”

Maybe his body knew a thing or two, for it left Bourne no choice.

“You know that feeling where you work out really hard, all the way to failure, you just can’t press it anymore? I get to that right away,” he says. “I’m almost always at that point where your muscles are about to cramp. If I push through that, my recovery is almost five hours. I can’t get off the couch. I’m in the fetal position.”

In early 2017, when he still thought he had a season ahead of him, when he thought he was “the next guy” for USA Volleyball, he’d drive up to see Jenkins, his trainer, and “instead of driving home, I’d just curl up in the fetal position and lay there for an hour. That’s just kind of where I’m at.”

With every protocol of drugs failing, Bourne turned naturopathic.

If rest was what the body truly needed, fine, he’d give it to it. On his honeymoon in Bali, in October of 2017, he found a naturopathic doctor who prescribed him a breakfast shake with turmeric, ginger, cucumber, asparagus, apple, beets and parsley. He returned from Indonesia with incenses to light, to help with the hour of meditation he was doing per day.

“Basically, I’m giving my body the ultimate healthy state,” he says, “creating the ultimate state for my body to heal itself to it snaps out of it and gives me my body back. I’m basically trying to reset everything. I’m trying to wake up every day and do a body check, to connect my brain with my body. I know it sounds like I’m going all Buddha, but it’s kind of nice. This is all new to me. This is the new Tri Bourne and I’m going with it.”

The New Tri Bourne is sitting at his kitchen table again, across from Murphy Troy, in January of 2018. Teammates for three seasons at USC, from 2008-2010, the two are in seasons of life that are as similar as they are radically different. After a tremendous indoor career that saw him compete in the 2016 Olympics, Troy has recently retired from the sport and is in that strange purgatory between being an athlete and being…something else. Something normal. Bourne is likewise stuck in an athletic limbo, one in which he is unsure if he will ever return.

The vast majority of the public cannot possibly understand a professional athlete because they cannot empathize with them. They were not gifted the blessing that is the drive that creates those athletes, nor the curse that that drive frequently becomes.

Bourne and Troy are not normal human beings.

Troy understands it all.

He hears Bourne “get excited about being able to go to rehab and doing footwork and all that stuff, the most boring stuff on Earth” and knows why that boring stuff is so thrilling, just as he hears Bourne lament his inability to listen to his body’s warning signs for so long throughout that 2016 season and gently pushes back.

“The only way to stay competitive, you have to go to all these events, go to these tournaments, practice year-round, because if you’re not getting better, somebody else is,” Troy says. “But at the same time, if you’re not getting rest, you’re not going to be 100 percent.”

“I didn’t know how to rest, and I didn’t know I didn’t know how to rest,” Bourne responds, laughing. “What I learned is playing all year and working out every day and surfing as rest and golfing and body surfing wasn’t what my body wanted. It seems pretty obvious, but me being me, growing up in Hawaii and being an active person, that’s what I thought resting was.”

The two devise a Jedi mind trick for Bourne to reset his view on rest. Pathological competitors both, they flip rest into a game, something to win.

“You have to rest right now but attack it,” Bourne says. He’s getting revved up now. “Attack this rest. It was an hour meditation for a day for 21 days. I’m ADD as hell. Make me meditate for an hour a day? That’s torture. But somehow, I did it. It’s a cool thing. That’s an eye-opener. I’m that competitive. Most of us are. I’m gonna kick the crap out of this meditation.”

Suddenly this autoimmune disease isn’t a disease at all, but an opponent, a worthy one, one in which Bourne can learn a thing or two, one he can beat. He’d always been interested in mindfulness. Now was his time to practice it. He’d always been too fidgety to read. Now he could devour books by Joe Dispenza, the best-selling author of such titles as Becoming Supernatural and You Are The Placebo. He’d always hated watching the sport. Couldn’t sit down and watch something he could do better than the men and women on the screen. Now he was commentating the livestream of the AVP, learning the spacial awareness of Brooke Sweat, the creative ways Laura Ludwig would find to score. He’d always wanted to make an impact on the game off the court, so he called me, a journalist by trade, and asked if I’d want to launch a beach volleyball podcast, one where we could pick the minds of the greatest players in the game. He’d always been a physical phenomenon. Now, when he returned to the court, whenever that return may be, he’d come back as a completely different player.

A New Tri Bourne.

“This is taking it to a whole new level,” he says. “Meditating 45 minutes a day. It’s a lot. But if I can take it to the next level, so when I come back to the court, it’s going to be game over.

“Everything I’m learning right now, this mindfulness, this listening to my body, this self-awareness, I’m bringing all of this back into my training, into my practice, even learning volleyball itself, the ebbs and flows of it. I’m gonna listen to my body this time. If I have a tournament next week and my body doesn’t want it, I’m going to listen. I just have a really good feeling that it’s all going to transfer.

“I’m obsessed with working hard, like most professional athletes are. That’s there. I don’t have to worry about working hard. I can just apply all of this new knowledge when I get back and learn from the best. If my body can get back to where it was, it can do some pretty amazing things. As of right now, I’m not even a month away from hitting the gym, from starting to work out at all.

“I just have a good feeling, whatever happens after that.”

Slaying Dragons

Trevor Crabb laughs as we recount the conversation.

“It was just ‘Let’s play Manhattan and figure it out from there?’” I ask.

“Yeah,” he says, “that’s pretty much it.”

Of all the friends who dropped by or checked in on Tri Bourne over the year and a half that his body had been ravaged by the autoimmune disease, none did so more than Crabb. Best friends for as long as either can remember, Crabb would swing by almost daily to do a whole lot of nothing.

There wasn’t much Bourne could do.

“I was pretty boring,” Bourne says. “Trevor would just come over to sit on the couch, shoot the shit. Eat a lot of food and be dumb.”

He’s back at his kitchen table, podcast microphone in hand. He’s happy, happier than he’s been since he won that bronze medal at the World Tour Finals in Toronto of 2016.

Tri Bourne is talking about his return to beach volleyball.

After a year of drugs and supplements and all the juices a naturopath could concoct, nothing working, one finally began to keep the autoimmune under control. Doctors experimented with an infusion of intravenous immunoglobulin, otherwise known as IVIG, where purified antibodies (immunoglobulins) are infused into a patient’s bloodstream. It is, as Yale Medicine writes, “used to boost the immune system, treat autoimmune disorders, and prevent infections in individuals with weakened immune systems or certain immunodeficiency conditions.”

Twice a month, on back-to-back days, there Bourne would be, strapped to an IV for seven straight hours, antibodies pouring into a vein in his arm.

It worked.

Something finally worked.

Bourne’s enzyme counts plummeted. He got off the Prednisone. In June, doctors cleared him to begin working out, and Bourne went straight to the self-prescribed reps he so loves, driving to a park, surrounded by children, where he set volleyballs into a basketball hoop, hit ball after ball into a wall to rediscover his arm swing. In the mornings and evenings, he’d bring a cart of volleyballs and hit standing shot after standing shot.

In mid-July, he practiced with a team for the first time in nearly two years.

“My days are much more happy these days,” Bourne says. “Training in the morning, getting in the water, going to USA after, getting treatment, then coming and doing my favorite podcast. It’s nice. It’s really nice.”

The AVP Hermosa Beach Open was a week away. Bourne could have pushed it but decided against it.

He was doing what he said he’d do: He was listening. He knew his body wasn’t ready for a full tournament. But it might be in a month. And how perfect it would be to make the debut of the New Tri Bourne, the one who beat back an autoimmune disease, at the 2018 Manhattan Beach Open, the biggest event on the annual beach volleyball calendar?

He had his body back. Now he needed a partner.

For nearly a month, he hopped in random practices, playing with anyone who would put up with an emaciated version of the man who once led the 2015 World Championships in hitting percentage. After a practice with Crabb, he joked about how fun it could be to finally play one together. They’d spent their childhoods playing against one another, talking trash on the baby court at the Outrigger Canoe Club, going at it indoors when Bourne was starring for USC and Crabb at Long Beach State, warring on the AVP.

It didn’t make a lick of sense. They’d been playing against each other, not with each other, for good reason. Both Bourne and Crabb played on the left side and were full-time blockers. Neither had ever played on the right, nor had either played a single point of defense. It would have made far more sense for Bourne to call Crabb’s partner at the time, John Mayer, a right side defender and 2016 AVP MVP who was having a decent enough year with Crabb. They won back-to-back gold medals on the World Tour and finished fifth in three out of the four AVPs at that point in the season.

The plan, initially, was to team up for a season-ending event in Hawaii and hope for a wild card if Crabb and Mayer didn’t perform well enough in Manhattan Beach and Chicago to qualify on their own. But when Bourne called and asked if Crabb “wanted to charge it and do Manhattan and Chicago” Crabb figured “if we’re going to do Hawaii anyways, we might as well do Manhattan and Chicago before,” he said. “Let’s wing it.”  

That was it, then: Tri Bourne and Trevor Crabb, a pair of left-side blockers, were going to play together in Bourne’s first event back. Crabb gave Bourne one job to do: Sign them up for the tournament.

He couldn’t even do that.

He was no longer a member of the AVP, his member number having gone inactive. They sent him a new one and that one didn’t work, either.

“We’ll just sign you up this time,” the AVP wrote him in an email. “We’ll figure it out.”

If there was a theme to the Bourne-Crabb partnership, that would be it: Just figure it out. Where everything aligned just so for Bourne’s partnership with John Hyden – a left-side blocker with a right-side defender, a soldier being commanded by a general, a physical phenomenon who operates on instinct matched with a cerebral mastermind – there wasn’t a single aspect of this new team that had anything concrete going for it.

“There’s so many new aspects in our game,” Crabb says. “We’re going to be split-blocking and playing defense, and neither of us have played defense full time. We’re probably both going to play both sides. There’s so many new things being fired at us, but at the same time, we’re the only two people who can handle the all-around aspect of the volleyball game, which is unique.

“It’s going to be a lot easier playing with him than every other guy. There’s no downside to this whole thing. I couldn’t be more stoked to play an event – I’m trying to think, in my first five years on Tour, I haven’t been more excited to play an event.”

Bourne is restless as ever. A walking contradiction, he feels the pull between acknowledging the reality of being a severe underdog, as unlikely to win as he has ever been, and the relentless competitor who has become expected to contend for every tournament he enters.

“On the one hand, I’m like ‘Let’s just get through these first two matches, let’s not BBQ,’ and on the other hand, it’s like ‘Let’s win this fucking event,’” Bourne says. “I’ve been in the finals the last two years. My mind just goes there. Trevor was in the finals last time. How could my mind not go there? It’s a huge swing. Hopefully I can have fun. Hopefully I can bring the best out of Trevor. No pressure. We’re just here to slay to the dragons.”

Playing a full tournament while in a perpetual battle with an autoimmune disease was the first dragon. They slay it, finishing seventh in Manhattan Beach, a run that included a win over Crabb’s former partner, Mayer. Two weeks later, in Chicago, they take fifth, and third two weeks after that in Hawaii. A week after that, they fly to Qinzhou, China, for their first international event, the truest, most severe test on Bourne’s body yet: international travel, against the stiffest competition the world has to offer.

The final dragon.

More than two years after his last international tournament, Bourne, body destroyed and rebuilt by an autoimmune disease with no cure, on just two months of practice, with a new partner in which neither really knew what they were doing in their new positions, wins the second international gold medal of his career.

For years, Bourne has been preaching how this disease, this time off, would be good for him, that good would inevitably come out of it. Just one month into playing, here was the proof.

“He came back a more complete player,” Crabb said. “He came back smarter. Just seeing a higher IQ. The physicality was still there. It was the same before the autoimmune. Once he was fully healthy, the physicality was there for sure. He was more of a student of the game.”

There was one event left in the 2019 season to prove this was no fluke, no honeymoon: A major international event in Las Vegas with a fully loaded field.

No fluke indeed.

Bourne and Crabb emerged from the qualifier and finished fourth, their only losses to Norway’s Anders Mol and Christian Sorum, and Russia’s Oleg Stoyanovskiy and Viacheslav Krasilnikov, the eventual gold and silver medalists, respectively, at the Tokyo Olympics. They hadn’t discussed furthering their partnership past Hawaii. Hadn’t thought for a moment about the upcoming Olympic race. Yet here they were, with a gold medal and a fourth-place finish on the ledger, all done “on a whim,” Crabb said. “No coaching, no nothing, just us playing.”

The Guy You Want In Your Corner

To some, it’s still somewhat inexplicable, their success. Even in retrospect, it’s difficult to fully make sense of it.

Jose Loiola might be the only one who can.

In the early winter of 2019, fresh off all that success in the fall, Bourne and Crabb called Loiola to check on his availability as a coach. They grabbed lunch and Loiola was honest enough: They’d be his number two team, behind Sara Hughes and Summer Ross, the up-and-coming stars on the women’s side.

They had no problem being No. 2, because there was no coach on the planet who better understood where Bourne and Crabb were coming from than Loiola.

Like Bourne and Crabb, Loiola played the first half of his storied career as a full-time blocker, flying up the ranks of the AVP and World Tour as one of the most exciting players to ever touch the sand. Six years into his professional career, he switched to split-blocking with Kent Steffes on the AVP in 1997 and Emanuel Rego internationally in 1998.

The result? He’d become ranked No. 1 on both tours, winning 13 of 22 tournaments on the AVP in 1997 and 15 of 36 on the World Tour with Rego from 1998-2000.

He took a look at Bourne and Crabb’s film from 2018, saw them winging it, and knew exactly where to start.

It is exactly the opposite where most sane coaches would.

He saw two men who “had no idea what they were doing on defense,” he admitted, laughing, and decided to… mostly ignore it. Instead of shoring up the most glaring weakness in beach volleyball, Loiola doubled down on their strengths as two of the best offensive players in the United States.

“I wasn’t going to turn them into a block and defense team,” Loiola said.

He switched Crabb permanently to the right side, where his vision was put to better use, and kept Bourne on the left to keep the threat of the option open. He’d watch them play defense and openly wonder, part in amazement, part in laugh-out-loud incredulity, how in the world they’d end up on the same side of the court so often.

Why were they starting so far to the left? Why not start in the middle?

It was like watching juniors.

But he understood. He understood because he’d been through it before. And he also preferred the type of offensive makeup Bourne and Crabb had as a team.

“They only needed to dig four or five balls,” Loiola said. “I’d much rather have that than a defender who digs ten balls but doesn’t put any away.”

The volleyball itself, though, is only a minor ingredient in their success. Loiola saw in Bourne and Crabb the same type of psychopathic competitiveness that once raged in himself.

Occasionally it was even directed at the opposing team.

“We’re competitive on the court. I don’t want Trevor to be carrying me,” Bourne said. “We can be competitive with each other on the same side of the net. Realistically, we’ll be talking shit with each other. If he’s not carrying my weight a little bit, then c’mon.

Crabb doesn’t miss a beat.

“I’ve been doing some extra back exercises this week just to carry him.”

To some, this may seem a toxic environment. To Loiola, this was the secret sauce. If a practice ever turned lethargic, he’d have them compete against one another. The trash talk was epic.

“It was crazy, man,” Loiola said, laughing.

The only thing they loathed more than losing was being the cause of the losing itself. Both knew the other wouldn’t let him forget about it.

They never did.

It made for some glorious flameouts and indelible comebacks. Take the 2019 World Championships.

Hamburg, Germany. Quarterfinals. Already, Bourne and Crabb have won a pair of matches in which they dropped the first set. Again, against Brazil’s George Wanderley and Andre Loyola, they found themselves down one set to none.

No problem.

They smoke the Brazilians in the second, 21-15. An error to start the third gifts Brazil a lead they will stretch to 14-11. Three match points. An insurmountable lead at that level of the game.

Neither, however, wants to be the demise of the other.

Crabb sides out. Andre slaps one into the net. An out of system pass leads to a Bourne pull dig and putaway.

The comeback is complete before Brazil ever realizes it was on in the first place.

George saves the next point after an extended rally, but the momentum is too far gone. Bourne unloads on an option to save another match point.

15-15.

Crabb makes a dig down the line and blasts a kill into the angle. He is nodding at Bourne, yelling. Bourne nods back, saying nothing.

What needs to be said?

Crabb makes another dig down the line, goes right back into the angle for the sealing kill, 17-15.

“All of my best comebacks,” Crabb says, “have been with Tri.”

Six years later, Bourne will get an explanation for this. He’s taking one of those personality tests with Mark Knudsen, a former professional player who played for and coached under the legendary Al Scates at UCLA, winning five national championships. He’s seen competitors.

He laughs when he sees Bourne’s results.

“You’re the type of guy,” he says, interpreting the results from Bourne’s tests, “that could be down 10-0 in the third set and say ‘I got this.’”

Bourne laughs. Sounds about right.

“You’re exactly the kind of guy,” Knudsen elaborates, “I’d want in my corner.”

It helps to explain what happens two years later.

Thought that comeback was something?

Think again.

Manhattan Madness

If there is a single defining match of Tri Bourne’s beach volleyball career, it is the 2021 Manhattan Beach Open semifinals. They are down 16-12 in the second set to Chaim Schalk and Theo Brunner after having already lost the first.

This is where Schalk and Brunner make a fatal error, one that will cost them a shot at their first Manhattan Open titles. They switch sides quickly, walking under the net, directly at Bourne and Trevor Crabb. They meet chest to chest.

This is a mistake.

Bourne and Crabb live for trash talk. It is their love language. How they get the most out of one another and how they beat opposing teams from the inside out. In the days leading up to the tournament, Crabb had even guaranteed a victory in Manhattan, and now he was five points away from having that egg crack on his face.

“They got really confident,” Bourne said. “They’re thinking ‘We’re up 16-12, we won the first, they’re always talking, those guys deserve to hear it,’ which is true, we do. But they said it too soon.”

Had Schalk and Brunner been up 20-10, it would have been too soon.

“You’re about to crack,” Crabb says. “It’s coming.”

“The next point,” he recounts later, “is when the madness started.”

A sideout makes it 16-13.

“It’s coming,” Bourne reminds them through the net.

A Crabb dig and conversion and it’s 16-14.

“It’s coming.”

Then the real show begins.

Bourne blocks a Schalk low line.

And another.

And another.

And another after that.

“Chaim’s in a phone booth!” Kevin Barnett roars on the comms over the livestream. “There’s nowhere to go!”

Bourne has elevated to a superhuman plane. He can feel himself slip into a flow state. His focus remains exclusively on staying there, fighting distraction. He’s not calling plays. He’s looking only to block the hard hits, Crabb is defending for shots. He’s not thinking. He’s performing, orchestrating.

The crowd understands. They know their role. When Bourne and Crabb close the second set on a 9-2 run, sealing it, 21-18, there is no celebration from the Hawaiians. They retreat to their boxes, stoic as sentinels.

Meanwhile, the crowd is losing its shit.

Mark Schuermann, the longtime emcee of the AVP, asks who in the crowd is cheering for Schalk and Brunner. He is met with the polite applause mostly reserved for golf courses.

How about for Bourne and Crabb?

It is an explosion.

But Schalk and Brunner are here by no accident. These are the Hermosa Beach winners, two of the best offensive players on Tour. They will not go quietly into the South Bay night. They find their legs like a boxer who has wobbled but managed to stay on his feet to fight another round. They punch back, jumping out to a 4-1 lead. Bourne and Crabb think back to a week before, in Atlanta. Twice, they let teams back into it, cracking in the third set.

One of those teams was Brunner and Schalk.

“All our practice the week before was when we get to that moment, we gotta push through,” Bourne says.

They push, and Bourne feels a familiar click, a deafening quiet, like the sound of mountains at dawn. There is no crowd. There is no Brunner and Schalk.

There is no thinking.

He runs on autopilot. He is a child at the Outrigger Canoe Club again, playing for milkshakes with his best friend. At 8-8 in the third, Bourne and Crabb erupt again, ripping off a four-point run, enough to seal a 15-11 victory, a comeback for the ages.

It is the signature event of Bourne’s career.

“That was something,” Crabb says, laughing at the memory. “Yeah, man, that was something.”

The cherry on top is what comes next: A sweep over Chase Budinger and Casey Patterson in the finals.

For years, Bourne had carried around the scar tissue of having multiple match points in the 2016 Manhattan final, failing to capitalize on both. He could still feel missing the block on a low angle swing from Patterson, could still see the replay of Crabb blocking that same exact swing in 2019 when he won his first Manhattan with Reid Priddy while Bourne watched from the couch, his arm in a sling. Now it was Patterson again, swinging low angle – and barely beating Crabb, saving a match point.

“Not again,” Bourne thinks, his stomach sinking.

But they side out. Get another crack at it, and now Bourne’s at the net, and Crabb is serving Patterson. Bourne will let anything go except for the swing that has haunted him every mid-August since 2016. He plants his right hand into the angle, and Patterson goes exactly where he always does when a match is on the line: He swings angle.

The ball lands before Bourne does.

Suddenly they are a mess of bodies, Bourne, Crabb, and Jose Loiola, jumping, hugging, falling. Mykel Jenkins, Bourne’s trainer, sprints onto the court, knocks Bourne and Crabb to the sand with violent chest bumps. They are kissing wives, girlfriends. Beer is spraying everywhere.

Winning Manhattan makes you an instant legend in beach volleyball.

It isn’t even the most significant event of the summer for Bourne.

The Perfect Storm

Tri Bourne is at one of those nondescript gas stations outside of Las Vegas that gives its weary passersby a few options, none of them particularly good. There is the convenience store, a Subway and a Dairy Queen. His daughter, Naia, sprints to her choice.

They’re going to Dairy Queen.

It is mid-July of 2021, and he hasn’t played volleyball in nearly two weeks. His run at the Tokyo Olympics came to an end the first week of June, in the final Olympic qualifying event in the Czech Republic. He and Trevor Crabb needed to make the finals. They finished ninth, and inside a nearby café, Jake Gibb and Taylor Crabb burst from their chairs and embraced with tears and hugs. Italian blocker Alex Ranghieri put a hand on Crabb’s shoulder, asked him what was wrong.

They all laughed.

Nothing was wrong. Gibb and Taylor Crabb, Trevor’s younger brother, had just qualified for the Olympic Games. Bourne and Trevor Crabb were out.

It left four tournaments on Bourne’s 2021 schedule: A final international event in Gstaad, Switzerland, and AVPs in Atlanta, Manhattan Beach, and Chicago.

“We basically had a month off,” Bourne said.

So he’s visiting family in Vegas, taking his 2-year-old, towheaded daughter, the perfect blend of Bourne and his wife, Gabby, an actress. She sprints to the Dairy Queen when Bourne’s phone rings. He sees the name. Pauses. It’s a name that has never once appeared on his phone. Not once.

The only reason Bourne has his number is because we recorded a podcast with him three years prior.

There is only one reason that Jake Gibb would be calling Tri Bourne at this exact moment in time.

“Literally nothing else,” Bourne says. “It went straight to my head. Am I getting the call? Because there is no reason to call me. He’s never called me before.”

Bourne answers. The tone on the other end is lifeless.

“I’m assuming you heard the news,” Gibb says.

Bourne hasn’t, “but the fact that you’re calling me,” he says, “tells me something is up.”

Something was up. Crabb tested positive for COVID. He hadn’t been entirely ruled out from competing in the Olympics, but the odds were slim. Gibb needed an alternate to fly in as soon as possible. His first option, Trevor Crabb, couldn’t go, still nursing a hurt back.

“So I guess I’m calling you now,” Gibb says. “If you want to get on the plane and play with me, we can do that.”

Bourne knew this was a possibility. He’d played it out in his head, his imagination drifting towards filling in for Nick Lucena or Phil Dalhausser, the other American team, but never Gibb. He did his best to nip those thoughts at the bud.

“Really stupid to think about,” he says later. “You’re not going to the Olympics.”

He’d even recorded videos of himself working out in his brother’s garage, sweat dripping from the 105-degree heat, telling the camera that he was ready for Tokyo if they needed him. He never posted it.

“Didn’t want to be that guy,” he says. “In my head, I was still fired up about it.”

Now he is staring at his phone at a gas station outside of Las Vegas, wondering if it’s all real, or just a desert mirage.

“I’m ready,” he tells Gibb. “I’m ready. I’m super ready. I’ve been training. I’ve been in the heat. I went to Gstaad. I’m mentally prepared. If I fucking get on the plane to Tokyo, I’m going for that gold.”

Gibb peps up. It’s the most life he’s heard from anyone since Crabb tested positive on July 21.

“Alright,” he says. “Fuck yeah. Let’s do this.”

They hang up. This is happening. Tri Bourne is going to the Olympics. He runs in to grab his daughter, who pleads with him that, no, no daddy, this is a break from driving.

“Naia!” he says. “We gotta go! I have to get to LA and then get on a plane to Tokyo! I’m going to the Olympics!”

He chooses Subway.

The next few days are a psychedelic dream for Bourne. He’s on a plane, surrounded by people who have no idea he’s an emergency sub for the Olympics. Walks undetected through the airport. Shows up at a different hotel in Tokyo, “basically by myself for two days,” he says.

Taylor is the first to reach out, confirming that he’s going to pull out, that the spot is Bourne’s, that there’s nobody else Crabb would rather have it go to than another Hawaii boy.

Bourne’s next call is to Sean Scott, the director of beach volleyball teams at USA Volleyball. Tells him he wants to do the Opening Ceremonies. Scott squeezes him in, makes an appointment with the Ralph Lauren team to get Bourne fitted for the USA Olympic Team gear.

Bourne’s always had a complicated relationship with being labeled a member of the “Olympic Team.” Sure, he’d represented the United States for the better part of a decade, had been on the National Team since he and John Hyden hit the World Tour together in 2014. Had it not been for a country quota limiting each nation to two teams per Olympics, they’d have qualified for the 2016 Rio Games by a mile.

Still, Bourne refused to wear anything that said Olympics, Olympic Team, or even Team USA.

“I’m not claiming being an Olympian until I am one,” he said.

Now he is one. He’s in Tokyo, getting measured and fitted by Ralph Lauren, for an outfit he’ll wear at the Opening Ceremonies.

The Opening Ceremonies!

“Holy shit. This is fucking crazy,” Bourne says. “I went from having no Olympic Team gear to having everything.”

He left for Tokyo with one suitcase. He’d return with three.

“It was like I was a new person when I landed,” he says. “Now I’m in Tokyo, and the whole world knows. It’s buzzing about it.”

They have two days to prepare. One practice, and an exhibition match against Russia’s Oleg Stoyanovskiy and Viacheslav Krasilnikov, the No. 2 seed and 2019 World Champions. The emcee does the introductions and everything.

“Is this for real right now?” Bourne wonders as he hears his name called. “This is insane.”

Russia serves him every ball. They lose, but not badly. They are competitive enough.

“We had one practice,” Bourne says later, “and then we were playing in the Olympics.”

Even four years later, Bourne still can’t quite get over how weird it all was.

In the leadup to their 10 p.m. opening match against Italy’s streetballing duo of Adrian Carambula and Enrico Rossi, Bourne was completely by himself. For whatever bizarre COVID-related reason, Gibb had been forced to move hotels, staying away from the team. They wouldn’t even see one another until they arrived at the warm-up court. So Bourne drifted through an empty Olympic Village, totally alone, sitting at the cafeteria by himself, watching dozens of other athletes from all manner of sports do the same.

“This is not how I pictured it,” Bourne said. “This is such a trip. It was very quiet.”

He ruminates on the scenario as a whole, and how strange it all is. He’s about to play in the Olympic Games, being coached by Gibb’s coach, teamed with Taylor’s partner, playing a position he’s never played. He got a good laugh out of their team meetings, picking the mind of Gibb, who was famously secretive about giving out any information.

“I was in the enemy’s lair!” he said with a laugh. “I thought it would be so much different. This is so weird.”

It was all weird. Eerily so. A 12,000-seat stadium filled only by staffers and coaches was quiet to the point that the players could hear one another talking. They lean into the weirdness. Own it. Bourne and Gibb pop off in the first 10 points, going up 8-2 on a blend of aces, blocks, digs and transitions.

“It’s a trap,” Bourne thinks. “Don’t fall for it. I’m playing one point, one point, one point and I’m hoping that the ref blows the whistle at the end of the match.”

Forty minutes later, he does. The match is over, a 21-18, 21-19 victory in hand, a match in which Bourne and Gibb play nearly flawless volleyball against an Italian team that is known not just for beating teams but embarrassing them with a creative style of play the world hasn’t seen before.

“I’ve always played my best in the biggest spotlight, in the biggest matches, in the biggest tournament,” Bourne says. “It’s not being afraid to fail. I want to experience being number one, having that pressure. I could only win here. I’m going to stay in my zone, do the mindfulness that I always do and see what I can do. It was super freeing just worrying about myself and my game.”

That freedom prevails through the next three matches: A win over Switzerland and a pair of losses to Germany and Qatar. They finish ninth. It is, realistically, the best Bourne and Gibb could have been expected to finish. Bourne finishes with the highest hitting percentage in the entire Olympics, hitting sets from a man he’d never once played with. After their 21-17, 15-21, 11-15 loss to Germany in the ninth-place rounds, Gibb can be seen looking around the stadium, taking a moment for himself, drinking it all in. This is his final Olympics, and he knows it.

For Bourne, this is only the beginning.

“I haven’t comprehended it yet,” he says two weeks after the Olympics end. “I was just thinking what’s next? You got the label. You did it. I went to the Olympics, I saw April [Ross] win it. I want to go for that thing now. It’s scaring me. It gives me that same feeling. I think I found it. I found that energy. I could quit right now if I wanted. I achieved my goal. But is that what I want? Nah, fuck that. We just changed the goal.”

The high of the Olympics and the Manhattan win seems to carry into 2022. If fate had taken everything away from Bourne for nearly two years, it is now paying him back with interest. He and Trevor Crabb win in Fort Lauderdale without even losing a set, making good on another Crabb guarantee of victory. One month later, they win Manhattan again, becoming just the 16^th and 17^th players, respectively, to win back-to-back Manhattan Open titles. They ride the wave through Chicago, winning that one too. Bourne nearly doubles his previous career-high in earnings on the AVP. Their three wins are the most of either’s career in a single season. They win Team of the Year by a landslide. Bourne is voted MVP for the first time.

It is a career-defining year.

This is where the movie should end.

Roll credits.

Fade to black.

But Bourne’s life is not a movie (yet) and that is not where the credits rolled.

It is July of 2025. He’s back in his studio, talking with his wife, Gabby. They have just returned from Hawaii.

In truth, Bourne has never really left Hawaii. A piece of him – most of him – has remained on the Islands. Throughout the grind of the beach volleyball season, of endless practices and lifts and tens of thousands of miles flown and hotel rooms and strange food and jet-lagged mornings, it can seem, at times, as if Bourne is sleepwalking.

When he goes to Hawaii, he comes to life.

When you travel to someone’s hometown, you travel through their memories: Of who they used to be and where. When you go to Hawaii with Bourne, you get a glimpse into who he really is.

In Hawaii, he is a boy, the same little boy who grew up barefoot and shirtless, charging around the Outrigger Canoe Club. A training camp in January of 2024, as Bourne and Chaim Schalk prepare for the final push at the 2024 Olympic Games, feels more like a childhood summer camp than it does an Olympic training retreat. We crash at his parents’ house. There are humans everywhere, and we are loud and messy. His mother, Katy, as tanned and vibrant and full of life as any 22-year-old, loves it. It reminds her of when Tri was a boy, and she’d come downstairs and see all manner of boys sprawled around the house.

We feel like boys, too. We leave the house just after dawn, packing our bags for the day, and don’t return until well after sunset. We train and lift and do everything professionals should do, and the rest of the days vanish in a haze of surfing and swimming and saunas and visiting old friends from Tri’s childhood. We stop by his favorite food haunts, drink out of coconuts with straws. In a matter of days, his Hawaiian accent is laid on thick as honey, pidgin being mixed into his dialect with a startling regularity.

It is here, and only here, that you can begin to understand who Tri Bourne is.

He is not a volleyball player. Not really. He’s just a boy built to move, remarkably the same as he was when he was a child. There is a biological imperative for him to get into the water. Something chemical. It explains why Bourne has never been able to sit down and watch volleyball, even if that was what he did for a living. He’s never been able to sit down and do anything. This life was never about the volleyball for Bourne so much as it was about what it allowed him to do: Live a life of movement and play.

Volleyball hasn’t felt like play in three years.

Even that last career-defining year with Crabb in 2022 felt, as Bourne routinely described it, “heavy.” For all their success on the AVP, the two struggled internationally, failing to make a single quarterfinal in an entire season. After that first win in Qinzhou in 2018, they never won again. So he switched it up, dropping Crabb to pick up Chaim Schalk, a partnership that made sense in every way that his partnership with Crabb didn’t. Schalk was a right side defender, one of the most accurate passers in the United States. Schalk took a similar set to John Hyden and stood the exact same height. Just as Hyden once sought another Sean Scott, in Schalk, Bourne thought he might find another, younger Hyden.

There were times it looked like he did.

They won their first AVP together, in New Orleans, and made the finals in the next. They made three quarterfinals in their first six international events and added two more by year’s end.

In one season, Bourne made as many international quarterfinals with Schalk as he did with Crabb in three.

But something was missing. He knew it. Schalk knew it. Nobody could quite put a finger on what it was. The inexplicable alchemy Bourne had with Hyden and Crabb wasn’t there with Schalk, and when they decided to call off the partnership with three months left in the Olympic race, neither had any hard feelings. It just wasn’t working, and it felt, for Bourne, an awful lot like work.

“It feels like I’ve been playing with the brakes on, is kind of the analogy I’ve been using,” he tells Gabby. “I’m in a bike race but I’m playing with the brakes on and everyone else is biking without them. It doesn’t have to be that way. I can be living or doing a career or doing things where I don’t have the brakes on, but I just have to switch tracks or what I’m doing.”

He’s always felt an imperative to play the role that Hyden once played for him, the veteran picking up a youngster. He even gives up an all-but-assured spot in the 2024 AVP League, and its $20,000 payday, to do so. He returns from a two-week vacation in Fiji and announces he’s playing the second half of the year with Ryan Wilcox, a Hawaiian rookie whom Bourne had identified at the beginning of the year as someone folks should look out for.

In a fascinating trend, they win their first AVP together, in Virginia Beach, and play well in Manhattan and Chicago. But Wilcox has time yet to develop. If Bourne has any juice left in his career, enough to potentially qualify for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, Wilcox isn’t where he needs to be.

He turns to Evan Cory, a promising defender who has long been in search of the right partner.

In Bourne, he has that partner.

The Universe has other plans.

An attempt to qualify for the AVP League is derailed by an untimely back injury that knocks him out of the first qualifier. A bid at the World Championships is all but stillborn after a number of narrow losses in Mexico to begin the season. They go to China and play well enough to put Cory on the USA Volleyball stipend – and then they bow out, Bourne simply running out of gas against a physical Israeli team.

There are no regrets after that loss, no wondering what if he hit this shot or called that defense.

He leaves the tournament on E.

He is, at long last, listening to what the Universe has, it seems, been nudging him to see, gently at first, and then violently, until it just grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him until Bourne stopped fighting it.

“It’s a blessing I think that I’m getting the signs and I’m smart enough to step back and listen,” he says. “In a lot of ways, I haven’t listened and been punished and that was the journey I was on. I was going to be that crazy, world class professional athlete: I’m going to push past the pain.

“[Retirement] was a word we didn’t say before the last year. ‘No, that’s not a thing.’ It came on quick is what I’m saying but it feels right. When I really do the self-work and step back, besides being all in and laser focused, putting the blinders on, when I step back and look at life as a whole, it just makes sense. It’s just where we’re at. There’s so much more. I don’t need to be defined by this one goal I had as a kid and be my only goal or focus.”

Any doubts over whether or not he is making the right decision are assuaged on a Friday in Hermosa Beach in July. Bourne goes to pass a ball, feels a familiar pull in his back, stops. He puts his hands on his hips, laughs.

The younger Tri Bourne would have pushed through this pain. This one? He simply shakes his head.

A circular poetry.

“He hasn’t been 100 percent since 2006 when he first threw out his back,” Riley McKibbin says. “He’s had the same character arc his entire volleyball career. He’s had so many obstacles to jump over, and every time one comes, he figures out a way to hobble over it and then figure out a way to sprint again. I’m bummed for him, but he’s had a great career and that’s something to celebrate as well. It’s crazy how much he’s warriored through so many injuries and he’s still doing it, even leading up to Manhattan Beach.

“It’s hard not to think about what could have been if he wasn’t cursed with so many injuries. It’s something to celebrate that he was able to have such a successful career in spite of all of those obstacles.”

Maybe Bourne will wonder. Maybe not. For now, he’s finally listening. He grows reflective on his studio couch, taking inventory of all this sport has offered him. He’s at peace with it all.

“I went to Outrigger and would just play volleyball at the beach clubs. It was a joke: ‘Tri’s just down there at Outrigger and doesn’t take anything seriously because he doesn’t take organized volleyball.’ I never got coached in volleyball, I just played for fun,” he says. “It ended up being my job. I guess I just get to goof around for life. I’m lucky in that sense. It’s the perfect storm.”