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abrielle Reece
Basic
infoName:
Gabrielle Reece
Nicknames: Gab, Gabby
Position: Middle Blocker
Birthdate: January 6, 1970
Height: 6'3"
Weight: 160
College: Florida State
Residence: Marina del Rey,
CA
Status: Married to surfer
Laird Hamilton
Hometown: La Jolla, CA
Years in Bud Light League:
5 (last recorded)
Career Victories in Bud Light League:
7 (last recorded)
| Year | Wins | Tournaments | Team |
| 1993 | 2 | Seal Beach CA, Tampa FL | Lady Foot Locker (Team Captain) |
| 1994 | 3 | Turtle Bay HI, Manhattan Beach CA, Boston MA | Nike (Team Captain) |
| 1995 | 2 | St-Paul MN, Newport RI, | Nike (Team Captain) |
| 1996 | 0 | Nike (Team Captain) | |
| 1997 | 4 | Newport RI, Chicago IL, New York NY, Dallas TX | Nike (Team Captain) |
The Ubergirl Cometh
The age of Gabrielle Reece is upon us. She's big, she's strong, and with
thousands more like her out there, she's replicating fast. Can you deal
with that?
By Karen Karbo
It’s
a windy Mother’s Day on the Hermosa Beach boardwalk, where the muscle men
strut and pose in the sun, all greased up with nowhere to go, and felons-in-training
sell phony designer sunglasses
from
their vans. Nearby, a man with dirty blond dreadlocks works the crowd from
behind a
rickety
card table, offering to marry strolling couples for $5. When the wind shifts,
the tonic
salt
air is undercut by the carnival aromas of cocoa butter, fried food, and
incense. The Goodyear Blimp lolls in a yellow sky.
A stone’s throw away from the boardwalk, a women’s professional volleyball tournament is in progress, with a crowd of some 300 looking on. It’s the opening weekend of the Bud Light Pro Beach Volleyball League, and Team Nike is squaring off against Team Sony Autosound, the four-woman squads lunging and vaulting into the air. Except for the bleachers that flank the court, there is little to separate players from fans and fans from aimless onlookers milling on the beach. At one end are a few rows of sand chairs, the beach volleyball equivalent of box seats, and a half-dozen booths where the sport’s biggest sponsors—Paul Mitchell hair products, Naya mineral water, Lady Footlocker, Sony, and Nike—disseminate stickers and T-shirts. A thatch-covered riser looms over the bleachers, “ESPN” spray-painted red across a pale yellow surfboard hung from the cameraman’s perch.
The captain and star of Team Nike is a six-foot-three, 172-pound woman named Gabrielle Reece. She is strong. Not in the manner popularized by actresses in recent years, their backs and biceps sculpted for display purposes only, but in an efficient, brutal way. When Reece delivers one of her legendary kills, the rifle report of her flat hand against the ball causes people in the crowd to flinch. Reece is a middle blocker, a position she likes to describe as “the big dumb one in the middle.”
Reece stands poised to receive the serve, her cinnamon-brown arms held slightly away from her sides, long fingers splayed. Like the rest of Team Nike, she wears a blue spandex fitness top and shorts that are only slightly less revealing than a bikini bottom, “Nike” emblazoned in white letters across the butt. There is the peculiar visor favored by beach volleyball players, oversize brim flipped up in the style of some demented Italian cyclist. Jet-black don’t-mess-with-me wrap around shades and a pair of large diamond stud earrings complete the ensemble.
When the ball has cleared the net, Reece takes flight. She whips her right arm back in a move you need to see in slow mo to appreciate, then thwacks the ball down the throat of her victim on the other side of the net. She executes the kill with a grunt and a churlish sneer that might give the editors of Elle, who once named her one of the Five Most Beautiful Women in the World, incentive to call for a recount.
During a brief time-out, Reece motions for a huddle, snaking her arms around the shoulders of two of her teammates, with enough arm left over to reach and grab the third by the neck. “Stay calm and aggressive,” she says as the women break up and the game resumes. A serve, a volley, and it’s over. Team Nike has not only lost, but has been eliminated from the tournament. Reece slips into a pair of plain blue sweats and a sour mood. The downside of being an icon, it seems, is suffering the world watch you lose.
It’s a bit of a shock to me, at first. I watched the tournament with the irrational assumption that a Team Nike win was more or less a fait accompli, not merely because Reece was the league’s 1994 Offensive Player of the Year or because she has twice held the record in kills per season, but because she is successful in areas that have nothing to do with her sport and everything to do with celebrity. Hers, it seems, is The Charmed Life. Over the past two years, she has risen from obscurity to the white-hot center of popular culture, a distinguished nexus of TV, fashion, and sports. Her face stares out from the covers of women’s magazines like Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, Shape. A millionaire at age 25 who is said to pull down as much as $35,000 a day as a model, she is a commentator for the NBA’s Inside Stuff, which airs on NBC, and for MTV Sports, a show that profiles the kind of eyeball-bulging pursuits that typically raise life-insurance premiums, like drag racing, street luging, bungee jumping, and skydiving. Her own syndicated show, The Extremists with Gabrielle Reece, which covers the same sort of terrain, began airing last month in 40 countries worldwide. She is also a consulting fitness editor for Elle and a high-profile spokeswoman for Nike, whose Air Trainer Patrol cross-training shoe she helped design; she was, in fact, the first woman to promote her own Nike shoe. Lately, Hollywood roles have begun to float Reece’s way, and her manager, Jane Kachmer, says keeping tabs on everything has become “like trying to navigate the Colorado River.” Reece even dates Superman, or at least the nearest facsimile: Dean Cain of ABC’s Lois and Clark.
So how can a celebrity, a winner by every standard index of American culture, lose?
As Reece
strides off the court, jaw set, eyes unreadable behind her shades, a crowd
of fans begins to metastasize on the beach. Eventually she is met by two
teenage boys in baggy shorts and T-shirts who just stand there gawking.
The one with the braces and the moxie proffers a rolled-up tournament program
and a felt-tip pen, and Reece dutifully scrawls her name. The boys seem
uninterested
in the fact that she and her team have just been eliminated. If anything,
it was good news: They didn’t have to wait long to get a piece of Gabby.
To them, she is a supermodel and MTV babe who also happens to play a little
volleyball, like Miss America with her talent for tap dancing.
“For a woman athlete, it’s tricky sometimes,” Reece will tell me later. “A male athlete can just slam-dunk above the rim and that’s that—he’s a hero. If you’re a woman, you’ve got to do the sexy thing and you’ve got to do the nice thing. It’s reality.”
There are two public faces of Gabrielle Reece, two images that are seemingly at odds with each other. There is Gabrielle Reece the volleyball powerhouse, all sweat and grinding teeth and bird-of-prey malevolence. And there is Gabrielle Reece the cover girl, with her sultry, come-hither poses and mesmerizing eyes that change from green to blue at the whim of a fashion editor. A popular Nike commercial, “Gabbing with Gabby,” gives equal time to both personae, with rapid intercutting between images of Gabby mercilessly spiking volleyballs to the all-business rasp of her breathing and Gabby luxuriating on mussed satin sheets in a white bikini bottom and cropped T-shirt as she offers beauty tips with a pretty good tongue-in-cheek delivery. The ad portrays her as the hybrid that she is: the glam-jock.
It’s been suggested, in fact, that the rise of Gabrielle Reece in the public consciousness signals a sea change in the way American culture perceives physically powerful women. Reece’s response to this sort of talk is a half-demurral. “Nah,” she says. “I hope I just show women that it’s OK to inhabit your own body. I’m not a rah-rah feminist. But it’s important to me that people see you can be an athlete and be strong—and also be a girl.”
1994, 1995,
1996 - Bud Light Pro Beach Volleyball League leader in
kills
1994
& 1995 - Bud Light Pro Beach Volleyball League Offensive Player
of the
Year
1993
- Bud Light Pro Beach Volleyball League kills and blocks leader
Ranked fifth in the NCAA in career blocks
QUICK SETS
Fifth season as a Team Captain
Led League in kills 1993-1996
Led League in blocks in 1993
Holds league records for kills per match (11.9) set in 1994 and 1996,
kills
in a season (547) set in 1996, kills in a tournament (63) and total
attempts
in a tournament (173), both set in Chicago in 1994
Named nation's Most Inspiring Collegiate Athlete by the Dodge National
Athletic
Awards Committee as a junior at Florida State in 1990
Named All-Metro and All-South Region at Florida State in 1990
Earned All-Tournament honors several times in her collegiate career
Is also internationally recognized as a top fashion model and
spokesperson
for several companies, including Nike
Has hosted TV shows such as The Extremist with Gabrielle Reece
and MTV
Sports
Her book, Big Girl in The Middle (Crown Publishing), which she
co-wrote
with Karen Karbo, published in July 1997
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