RIO DE JANEIRO -- Like some ghost from the past, the memory of a stinging loss in the Olympic gold-medal volleyball game more than three decades ago returned just in time to save Brazils night. Without it, chances are good that both Alison Cerruti and Bruno Oscar Schmidt would have wound up on a hardwood floor instead of a sand court.Their three-set semifinal win Tuesday over the Dutch pair of Alexander Brouwer and Robert Meeuwsen advanced the Brazilians into yet another gold medal final and helped soothe their countrymens nerves after Brazils top-seeded womens pair was upset in an earlier semifinal by Germany.Alisons nickname is Mammoth and its easy to see why. He stands 6-foot-8 and takes up enough space to play power forward in the NBA. Schimdts uncle, Oscar, is the greatest basketball player in Brazils history and one of the most decorated international stars of all time. He could shoot without conscience, and even if he thought defense was the interval between his last shot and the next one, he could carry a team and the hopes of an entire nation on his back, including those of his nephew.Oscar is my idol, Bruno said.The long and winding road that brought both Alison and Bruno Schmidt to the beach begins with a volleyball game that was played at the 1984 Los Angeles Games before either of them was born.In the 1980s, basketball and volleyball were like this, five-time Olympic Brazilian volleyball great Emanuel Rego explained, holding both hands palms down at his chest. Maybe basketball was a little bigger because of Oscar. ...Then came the game. It was much talked about. It changed the balance, Emanuel said, turning his right palm up, like that.That game was played at the 1984 Summer Games, pitting traditional indoor volleyball powers Brazil and the United States for gold. The two had traded trophies in international competitions with only the occasional interloper sneaking in between them. After two tight sets, the Americans cruised to a 15-2 win in the third.Soon after, beach volleyball became all the rage. Having begun in Southern California in the 1920s, it took off, according to legend, when it was played at a nudist colony outside Paris a decade later. In the years that Alison and Schmidt grew up, volleyball in the sand was just hitting its stride on both continents. Once again, the United States and Brazil locked horns.Alison, who was born in 1985, wanted to play futbol, which Brazilians like to say is more a religion than sport. When the last spot in a league he wanted to join was taken, he wound up in one of the volleyball programs launched across the country to return Brazil to what the sporting public here viewed as its rightful place at the top.I have to thank my mother, Alison said through an interpreter. That made me a great player.Schmidt was a promising basketball talent until he was 12. But he got tired of always being Oscar Schmidts nephew, always being compared, said Luis Felipe Schmidt, Brunos father, Oscars younger brother, and a member of Brazils military teams for years.I was in the Navy and in 2004, we moved to Vittoria, where there was a big center for beach volleyball, he continued. It was fun, and not so much pressure. ... You get a ball and go to the beach, there was always a game. I used to be Brunos teammate until he became too good.Asked how uncle Oscar responded to news that his nephew was choosing volleyball, Luis shook his head.We never had a real discussion, he said. We are a basketball family, after all. But we are also a sporting family. It also helped that his uncle Tadeu (Luis youngest brother) was a good player and supporter of Brunos volleyball playing.Beach volleyball became a medal sport at the 1996 Atlanta Games. Since then, Brazils mens and womens team have won gold twice and 11 medals overall. The numbers for the United States are six and 9, respectively. The German men won gold in 2012, representative of a push by European teams like the Netherlands and the Czech Republic, as well as emerging Asian power China, to shoehorn themselves between Brazil and the United States.The Brazilians wont give ground easily, if at all. At the end of their tough three-set win over the Dutch pair, Alison fell flat on his face and lay spread-eagle in the sand for nearly a minute before rising to shake hands and hug Bruno and then their opponents.Outside the arena, Luis Schmidt accepted congratulations from several generations of Brazilian greats -- first from Emanuel, then from Bernardo Rajzman and finally a handful of officials from the national volleyball federation. He recalled the days when young Bruno left his basketball at home and sauntered down to the beach in bare feet with a volleyball stuck under his arm.Unbelievable, Luis said finally. Totally unbelievable to see him reach the position he is in today.---Jim Litke is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jlitke(at)ap.org and Twitter.com/JimLitke.Cheap Boston Celtics Jerseys China . In the lead up - which seemed to begin the moment Mike Geiger blew the whistle in Houston last Thursday night - the Impact rumour mill went into overdrive. The speculation went into meltdown mode, of the golden nugget variety. Discount Nike NBA Jerseys . Terms of the deal were not immediately available. The 26-year-old finished last season with Clevelands Triple-A affiliate in Columbus after signing with the Indians in August. http://www.cheapbasketballchina.com/ . Thats about all he can do right now, so hes trying not to think about when he might be able to play again for the Los Angeles Lakers. Clearance NBA Jerseys Store . Peter Gammons, an analyst for Major League Baseballs network and website, drew the ire of hockey fans on Sunday when he criticized the two NHL teams on Twitter for their physical game the night before. Wholesale Basketball Jerseys . Toronto has dropped games to Indiana and Miami since a five-game winning streak and closed out a three-game road trip at 1-2.With hindsight it isnt hard to show that the 25th of June 1983 was Day One of a new era in Indian sport. Cricket writers like channelling their inner CLR James, so that shock World Cup win was thoroughly mined for its implications. These ranged from changes within cricket ?- the rise of the limited-overs game and the decline of Test match spectatorship - to meta-cricketing consequences, such as the new political economy of cricket, dominated by the BCCI. This piece doesnt go there. It doesnt try to understand what that win means now; its a bid to reimagine what it meant then.It has been more than 30 years since Kapil Dev took the trophy from some English toff on that pavilion balcony at Lords, so its hard to just shut your eyes and taste the fizzing shock of it. Things read, things written, television reruns, YouTube videos, that endless loop of Kapil loping one way, looking another before casually catching Viv Richards skied pull, get in the way. That its a television memory to start with doesnt help; theres nothing to smell, no weather, just a bunch of us sweating in a room in Delhi, staring at a chunky TV that looks like furniture.I could have been there. I remember thinking that when Kapil grinned goofily, announced that drinks were on the house and invited everyone to join the team in its celebrations. I had been a student in England till less than a year before the final, and if I hadnt been hopeless at archival research my grant might have been extended for a third year, which would have seen me through to that World Cup summer. An Indian friend, a parasitologist on first-name terms with Trypanosoma brucei but who couldnt tell Kirti Azad from Maulana Azad, went instead. Gaiti Hasans first cricket match was a World Cup victory at Lords.She didnt even want to go. A fellow doctoral student, who bred rats and puréed their innards for usable tissue, had two tickets for the 25th. He being English and this being 1983, he was certain England would win their semi-final against India. Low delight in the disappointment of ambushed angrezes was one of the chief pleasures of 83. When Bobs heartbroken friend dropped out he needed company, so he asked Gaiti. She couldnt see the harm in it, so she went.She was the only friend of mine who was actually there at Lords, so ignorant or not, she was my representative. They took the train to London carrying sandwiches they had frugally made themselves for lunch. They didnt have seats directly behind the batsman. They sat at an angle to the action, sort of mid-off or long leg. She didnt know the names of the fielding positions. About 20 degrees to the pitch is what she said. Between innings, as they ate their sandwiches, Bob and everyone else around them thought India would lose. She registered the excitement when Kapil caught Richards out, and she thinks she saw champagne being sprayed around in the pavilion after the match. She doesnt remember much else.Nobody felt the earth move or the balance of power shift. This was the third World Cup in England and the third final to be played at Lords. It was played in whites, with a shiny red ball, through Englands long, long summer days that fit two 60-overs innings in with daylight to spare. It seemed unthinkable then that the Cups tableaus wouldnt be staged in England forever. Kapil Dev took the English ownership of the tournament so much for granted that he declared he wanted to come back with the boys and win it all over again. Continuity was everywhere; the great Sunil Gavaskar took guard against Andy Roberts, Malcolm Marshall, Michael Holding and Joel Garner bareheaded. Later, when he caught Larry Gomes off Madan Lal during the chase and reduced West Indies to 66 for 5, the teams, with the match in the balance, went in for tea. Tea! The old ways lived.But they lived on as eccentric leftovers from another time. And not just in distant retrospect: later that morning Gavaskars quixotic refusal of protection seemed more daft than heroic when Marshalls wickedly fast bouncer hit Balwinder Singh Sandhu on the head. A brave No. 11, Sandhu drove the next ball off the front foot, but if it hadnt been for the helmet perched on his patka, the scorecard might have read BS Sandhu, retired dead.I had forgotten about Sandhu being hit as I had forgotten so much else about this match. The 83 final is an object lesson in how the past recedes. We keep the bits that fit the story, and the story of a cricket match is written by its end. Every desi who watched that final remembers Sandhu for that artful inswinger that bowled Greenidge even as he shouldered arms.dddddddddddd Almost no one recalls that near-death moment. I caught it in a fuzzy highlights package online. There was an English commentator, I cant tell who, tut-tutting gently about the wrongness of bouncing a tailender. It was a good bouncer, he said, but...That but has never gone away, not even now after helmets have become the norm. Theres a lethalness to cricket that gives people pause. It certainly did that June afternoon. Play stopped; Jeff Dujon walked up to Sandhu to see how he was. Sandhu leaned on his bat and affected indifference. Marshall took a moment; he stopped in his follow-through, bent over and tied his laces for a long time. Playing cricket is a mortally serious business; no one dies playing tennis.The difference between cricketing memories before television and after is that before, there wasnt a video archive to keep people honest. In the mid-60s, my father told me about the Tests he watched in England as a young man. So Duleepsinhji, slight in his billowing silk shirt, walked out to bat and Frank Woolley drove through cover and Percy Chapman fielding at slip took every catch that came his way with his bucket-like hands. He had followed the Australians around England one long-ago summer and he was full of tales. I dont know how many of them came from matches he had watched and how many from second-hand lore; I dont think he did either. When he told me those stories, they were more than 30 years old, which is roughly the distance in time between Lords 1983 and now. Except, now we have YouTube to refresh (or reconstitute) our memories.In 1983 it would have been hard to argue on the evidence of the cricket played that the tournament was a hinge moment in the history of cricket. From an Indian point of view the win wasnt a revolution, it was a heist pulled off against the odds by a mix of old lags and new bucks, more Oceans Eleven than Battleship Potemkin. If Indias great tradition was spin, the tournament marked the triumph of its little tradition, military-medium seam bowling. If we discount Kapil for a moment, Mohinder Amarnath, Sandhu, Madan Lal and Roger Binny were Indias answer to Roberts, Holding, Marshall and Garner. The only non-violent seam attack in the history of the game went up against the scariest quartet of fast bowlers assembled in one team... and won. Madan Lal took three top-order wickets in the final; Amarnath bagged two as well as the Man-of-the-Match award. In some ways the 83 win was less a harbinger of a powerful future than the fugitive triumph of a hardscrabble past.The things that foretold the future happened off camera. Like Kapils match-saving, tournament-winning hundred against Duncan Fletchers Zimbabwe: 175 runs in just 138 balls, it was clearly one of the first if not the first great limited-overs innings. There were no cameras at Tunbridge Wells because of industrial action at the BBC. There is no footage to rework or ratify lore, so we are free to imagine those six sixes and those 16 fours, that 72-ball century.The other game-changing thing that the cameras didnt catch was the Indian cricket board presidents pique at being denied two 11th-hour passes to the final for his VIP friends. Gossip had it that the MCCs arrogance so infuriated the Indian apparatchik that he moved heaven, earth and Dhirubhai Ambani to wrest the World Cup from England and bring it to India in a new avatar, the Reliance Cup. But I didnt know that then, and even if I had, I wouldnt have cared. No desi fan has ever mistaken the grievances of these thin-skinned operators with the cause of Indian cricket.When the last wicket fell - MA Holding lbw b Amarnath 6 - the thing that mattered was the look on Mohinders face as the umpires finger went up. He grinned and kept running, swerved to grab a bail and raced for the pavilion as the desi hordes invaded the ground. The camera closed in on him in mid-shot; he was smiling his Errol Flynn smile (he had a little moustache) and it was a look of serious delight. Perhaps he was thinking of his father, the great Lala, who had scored a Test fifty in that same ground in 1946; knowing père Amarnath, this would have been a tale told often to his hectored sons. Or perhaps this battling veteran saw clearly in that moment that he had transcended a chequered career and found, along with his team mates, a kind of immortality.Mukul Kesavan is a writer based in New Delhi ' ' '