ED RHEE Chris Peña has confidence
and the family support to make him a starter on the No. 1 men’s
volleyball team.
By Diamond Leung
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
For a guy who carries himself with a chest-thumping swagger,
Chris Peña is awfully sappy. You can tell on the court he
savors the thrill of killing a ball or blocking one back into his
opponent’s face. But those are just the temporary highs of
the sport.
For Peña, there is only one constant in the volatile game
of volleyball ““ his father.
Ben-Hur Peña attends almost all of his son’s matches
at UCLA. A quiet South American man, he only exerts a tiny jerk of
the neck when his son kills the ball, a few soft claps when he
blocks one.
“He doesn’t fully understand the game, but he knows
when his son is doing well,” Peña said.
As a redshirt sophomore, Peña has broken through and won a
spot in the starting lineup as a middle blocker for top-ranked
UCLA. He has surprised everyone by emerging as the team’s
most reliable attacker, hitting at a gaudy .450 percentage. And
Ben-Hur is enjoying every moment of it.
“Chris is playing like a million dollars,” Ben-Hur
said.
There were times, however, when Ben-Hur didn’t have
anything to cheer about. In Peña’s redshirt year with
the program, when UCLA won the national championship, Peña was
relegated to the second-team and to mopping up sweat off the floor
after practice.
Last year, Ben-Hur would come out to watch UCLA, only to see
Peña standing on the sidelines, plagued by injuries and buried
under the Bruin depth.
“I was not happy because I wanted to see him play,”
Ben-Hur said. “But he understood his role. He was never
discouraged. He kept working.”
After matches, Peña and Ben-Hur would go out to dinner to
talk. Volleyball usually wasn’t a topic of conversation; the
sport was just an excuse for the two to spend time together.
But Ben-Hur made sure to reiterate something to his son:
“If you start something, you finish it. Everything else will
fall into place.”
It wasn’t lip service. Peña was taking advice from a
man who grew up barefoot-poor in the jungles of Colombia, a man who
later found himself acting and singing on Broadway, a man who
eventually settled in Santa Ynez, Calif. and ran the only grocery
store in town.
“All I did was snack on the candy and doughnuts,”
Peña said with a laugh.
“I’m inspired by my father,” he added.
“His life is the textbook example of the American dream, and
he told me that everything would work out.”
Ben-Hur was right. This year, with four-time All-American middle
blocker Adam Naeve gone, Peña got his chance to play. He was
the best player on the team in the preseason, earning Most Valuable
Player honors at the Husky Dino Cup in Canada in October.
Most importantly, he got his confidence back and began to
develop his role as the emotional leader of the team.
“I’m always talking and yelling,” he said.
“Because I’m loud and obnoxious, a lot of my opponents
don’t like me. Some of my teammates, too.”
Now what does Peña say on the court that even has his
teammates cringing?
“Stuff you can’t print,” he said,
grinning.
“We like a player who’s a little cocky,” said
Bruin head coach Al Scates, never one to lack confidence himself.
“That’s the type of player we’ve won with for all
these years, the type of player that usually gets the job done for
us.”
There are outside observers who think he’s arrogant
““ a product of a volleyball program that has dominated,
capturing 18 NCAA championships.
But father knows best.
“He’s just very secure about himself,” Ben-Hur
said. “And he got that from me.”