June 28, 2007

Note: This story originally ran in the Santa Barbara News-Press on June 10, 2007.

Volleyball vagabond Larry Milliken seemed to just roll in with the tide one day at East Beach.

Jon Lee saw him rise out of its sand volleyball courts nearly four decades ago and establish the most eclectic athletic career ever seen in Santa Barbara.

"I lost to him in the finals of the Santa Barbara 'A' tournament," Lee recalled. "It was the first big tournament I ever played in, and we've been friends ever since."

Milliken, known to most as just "Boomer," won an International Volleyball Association championship with the Santa Barbara Spikers in the 1970s, helped coach UCSB to the NCAA men's volleyball finals in the 1980s, umpired at the U.S. Open Tennis Championships in the 1990s, and even coached Duende to a Pacific Coast Open Polo championship in the 2000s.

"He's a very unique fellow," said Lee, the longtime volleyball coach at San Marcos High School. "He's even got a reputation as a renowned kayak fisherman. He knows every reef and shoal and kelp bed in these parts, and a lot of people go to him for advice.

"He's kind of bare-bones about it -- he calls it 'Chumash fishing,' because he doesn't use a depth-finder or any technology at all. He'll hook a 150-pound shark and let it tow him all the way to the oil derricks before it gives out."

But that kayak is now heading into the Santa Barbara sunset. He just ended his second stint as an assistant men's volleyball coach at UCSB, announcing that he will soon depart for Southeast Asia, or South Africa, or wherever the current takes him.

"I have to figure out the weather patterns before deciding where to go first," he said.

But why leave Santa Barbara at all?

"He's a wanderer," Lee explained.

Boomer put it a little more philosophically: "I don't think there's anything left here for me to do."

"He's one of those guys from the '60s with a passion for volleyball," said UCSB head coach Ken Preston. "You know, people like Kathy Gregory and Mike Maas and Jon Roberts and Jon Lee. They're different kind of people.

"But the mold was broken after Boomer was born."

The 1990 Painted Cave Fire burned him out of the home he shared with Gaucho announcer Mark "Cubby" Jacobs, a former UCSB volleyball star, and he's been mostly homeless ever since. He hasn't kept a local address since the beginning of 2003, house-sitting most of the time.

"I did eight years as a referee on the pro tennis tour, and we were always traveling, so I just lived out of my van," Milliken explained. "Actually, I'm still kind of living out of it.

"I'm the happiest homeless person you'll ever meet."

When he was a kid, the Sorrento Beach volleyball courts were his home. Lee was only 15 and fairly new to the game when he first saw Milliken pound a volleyball.

"I thought, 'Wow, I want to be able to do that,' " he said. "He was kind of a rough-and-tumble kid from the streets of Santa Monica with a live arm and impeccable coordination."

Their teams faced off in 1969 in the winners' bracket final of the U.S. Volleyball Association's National Collegiate Championships -- precursor to the NCAAs -- when Lee was at UCSB and Milliken was at Church College of Hawaii, now known as BYU-Hawaii.

"He was a one-man show for them," Lee recalled. "He was one of the best players -- maybe the best player -- in college at the time."

Church College had upset UCLA in the winners' bracket final to get a shot at the Gauchos, but then lost to both UCSB and the Bruins in the double-elimination event.

"The Gauchos won it all with Jon and (Dave) Shoji and (Chris) Casebeer and guys like that," Milliken said. "We took third, and we had only about 450 guys at that school."

Boomer was given his nickname during the summer of that same year while playing in a match at Transylvania College for an open team sponsored by a Manhattan Beach bar called Cisco's.

"They had a guy named Boomer on their team, and every time he hit a ball, the crowd would yell his name," Milliken recalled. "Well, we had a crazy guy on our team -- Larry McCullough, I think -- and whenever I'd get a kill, he'd run over their crowd and start yelling 'Boomer!' right back at them.

"The name stuck. It was a six-day trip, and by the time we got back, it was still 'Boomer' this and 'Boomer' that. And I had nothing to say about it."

Milliken arrived in town in the early 1970s and moved in with Lee and the rest of the "inner circle of Santa Barbara volleyball" at a sort of spikers' commune they called "Anomaly Acres."

"Our relationship became very strong," Lee said. "We were quite different types of people. I was the literate one and he was much more instinctive than I. In other words, I had the BS and he had the wisdom.

"Together, we made a nice team for a very long time."

Lee considered Milliken to be the Yogi Berra of volleyball for the way he'd create his own language with bungled, hybrid words,. He once described a laid-back player as being too "contemplacent."

"Jon Lee calls them 'Boomerisms,' " Preston said. "I remember one time when I told Larry that I had to cut this guy from the team, that there was no way that I could handle him.

"He said, 'Well, Kenny, that's your apartment.' "

But he saved some of his most original words for the UCLA volleyball team.

"My fondest memory is screaming at (the Bruins') Kirk Kilgour at Rob Gym," he said. "He had the biggest ears, and me and Jon Lee and Cubby would sit in the crowd and really get to him. He'd hear every word that you'd say."

But they wouldn't sit still for long. Milliken toured the world with Lee throughout the early 1970s, winding up in such places as Colombia, Morroco, Portugal and Spain.

They played for a club team on the Spanish island of Mallorca in 1974 and 1975, but returned later that second year to join the Santa Barbara Spikers of the fledgling International Volleyball Association.

Milliken was still on the team when the Spikers won the IVA championship in 1978.

"There's a picture at my mom's house which shows me holding up the trophy in Rob Gym," Milliken said. "Rob Gym, once again. It's amazing how many memories I have from that gym despite having never been a Gaucho."

Preston remedied that by hiring him as an assistant coach in 1987. Within a year, he was helping UCSB play for a national championship against USC in Fort Wayne, Ind.

"He's the best bench coach I've ever been around," Preston said. "He could see stuff that was going to happen before it happened. It was amazing.

"He's got this incredible mind for athletics. I mean, he made himself into a frickin' polo coach, for gosh sakes."

Milliken was watching a match at the Santa Barbara Polo & Racquet Club when he passed a suggestion along to one of the teams. It paid off so well that the team had him stick around for the next two years as its coach.

"He has all these little niches," Lee said. "He likes to ride horses, and even took me out to Devereux to ride.

"It was so amazing, Boomer rubbing shoulders with all the polo elite in Montecito. He's just a real wise competitor, and that wisdom goes from fish to polo ponies and UCSB stallions."

The 1988 Gaucho volleyball team had some horses up front with Jose Gandara and David Rottman, plus a skilled setter in Jon Wallace, but it lost to USC in the NCAA final despite winning the first two games.

Milliken looks back with no regrets.

"We didn't choke and we didn't gag," he said. "USC brought in this guy who solidified their passing and got their offense running smoother, and the quote in the paper the next day was that he'd played the greatest match of his life.

"We didn't do anything differently. It was just one little point here or there. The biggest thing I remember is how great of a match it really was."

Milliken left the Gauchos after the 1992 season when a round of budget cuts at UCSB left him with a smaller paycheck.

"We was kind of affronted about it," Preston said.

He headed for Bellingham, Wash., but soon returned to coach girls volleyball for the Santa Barbara Vollyeball Club.

He also became a tennis umpire, rising through the ranks to work some of the biggest events in the country -- but not even the hottest of heads on the tour couldn't affront him.

"Who else can they vent at?" Milliken said. "I understand exactly what they're doing, man.

"You're the only person they can scream at, and they've got to be able to get rid of those nerves some way."

Preston coaxed him back to UCSB when Todd Rogers stepped down as assistant coach midway through the 2004 season to concentrate on his pro beach volleyball career.

Milliken helped develop All-America hitter Evan Patak, a senior that he expects to graduate to the U.S. National Team.

"He'll go as far and as long as his shoulder holds out," he said.

Milliken decided it was time to move on after Patak helped the Gauchos beat UCLA in the first round of the NCAA playoffs.

"Beating the defending national champions in the playoffs in our place was outstanding, and that just solidified it for me," he said. "It was a fun crowd, like the old days.

"I mean, I've been screaming at the Bruins since 1970."

And now Boomer could go out on a high note.

--www.ucsbgauchos.com--