Regla Torres (CUB)
Cuba's Beautiful Ebony Tower

"Torres" in Spanish means "towers". Regla Torres certainly takes after her family name. She seems to have been cloned out of Magaly Carvajal, with added amenities, and has become Cuba's latest prototype of the '90s middle blocker/hitter. The first time I saw her was at the 1990 Goodwill Games in Seattle. She played with a very young National Team (I think they were the Youth team, the age-category before Juniors) and frankly, they did not impress at all. She was tall, looming over most every other player on the court, but her skills were still raw, she was clumsy and impatient when hitting. The next time I saw her play was at the Barcelona Olympics. She replaced Cuba's other middle hitter, stoic Mercedes Calderón, who was also good, but not good enough for coach Eugenio George to leave Regla Torres sitting on the bench. Torres played in the gold medal match against the Unified Team, contributing to Cuba's victory of the Olympic gold. With that, she became the youngest player in history to win a gold medal in Olympic volleyball at age 19. In 1993, she played at the Junior World Championships in Brazil, where she was named the best hitter of the tournament (her teammate Taymaris Agüero got the MVP award). Agüero, Torres, Marlenys Costa, Ana Ibis Fernández, Mirka Francia, and Marta Sánchez, inter alia, led Cuba to a 3-0 victory over the Ukraine to capture first place at the Junior World's. Just one year after that, Regla Torres was not only returning to Brazil for the '94 Adult World Championships, but she won the tournament MVP award as well! The clumsy teenager from Seattle '90 rose to absolute stardom in just under 4 years, a giant leap for her and a new pillar to sustain Cuba's supremacy throughout the 90s.

At the '94 World's, Cuba drubbed Brazil 3-0 in the finals. Torres demonstrated that she was then fully confident of her skills: she was hitting almost as well as her teammate Carvajal did in the middle, she was blocking solidly, but most of all, she provided Cuba with a better defence, covering the whole back line for those high off-the-block tools. She must have done something terribly right to receive the honour of MVP, for Mireya Luis was the team's emotional leader. Statistics-wise, I think Torres outclassed her teammate in all the categories combined, so it is fair to say that she deserved the award of Most Valuable Player.

Regla Torres is not only very fit, she is also a very beautiful woman. In Brazil '94, her hair was tied in a thick, long braid down her back, her dark skin glistened warmly, and her face has very elegant features for a woman her size. She resembled a fierce Amazon from the Caribbean. It came as no surprise when the FIVB discovered her beauty and began to publicise her level of play and her astonishing looks in order to increase the participation and audience of the sport. Everything about her was "ideal" in the eyes of the FIVB, her intense fighting spirit, her sculpted body. But then, the FIVB's protégée got severely reprimanded and suspended at the '96 Grand Prix for running around the Brazilian court trying to punch a Brazilian in the face. However, at the '98 World Championships in Japan, she contained herself and was very relaxed in her manners, in fact, she was also quite graceful. She didn't go around provoking her rivals like Mireya did in 1994, but then again, when your team is steamrolling through a tournament, there really is no need to add insult to injury. It seems that Regla Torres learned well that she can be an excellent player, and that regardless of how much more she improves she can still distinguish herself from Mireya's haughty invicibility by being a respectful athlete.

After Sydney: As was expected, Regla Torres played brilliantly in Sydney. Not only did she pound gold medal point on a wonderful medium slide set by Agüero, but she played with grace and maturity. By being the starter in three consecutive Olympic finals (along with her teammate Regla Bell), and by being such a commanding force in international volleyball throughout the 1990s, she was elected as The Player of the Century by a panel of specialists and journalists. This would seem like a controversial choice, given that technically, Lang Ping was a more effective player in her time and Mireya Luis was more dominant. But the award went to Torres and it certainly recognised a player who improved so much so fast, that probably it was her relative youth which seemed incongruous with a title that befits a legend. Nevertheless, Regla Torres certainly has become a legend in the volleyball world, because the things she could do with her power have not been seen anywhere else (yet). People often speak of her in an awestruck tone, "Do you know what La Torres did in a match in Sydney? She hit a middle ball and clobbered a Peruvian player in the face and they had to sub the poor woman out for the rest of the match!"

After her award, I heard that Regla Torres was out of volleyball for awhile due to injury. Then I heard she was actually studying for a career. When she returned briefly for some tournaments in 2002 (including the 2002 World's in Germany), she played rarely and sometimes as opposite, not as middle. I lost track of her since, but when I saw the photo on the FIVB website where she's congratulating Danielle Scott for advancing to the semifinal of the World Championships, I smiled. Regla Torres had come a long way and with that display of transnational camaraderie, her award seemed well deserved.