Ninety models were playing volleyball at the South Beach nightclub Nikki Beach Saturday morning. The cause was not cancer or child poverty but a free trip to Turks and Caicos for the winning team, because extremely beautiful people need to vacation as much, if not more, than the rest of us.
The Wilhelmina agency commenced to whomp Next, while Elite and Ford and perennial favorite Irene Marie practiced sets or smoked Marlboro Lights off-court, but Wilhelmina's cheering section soon reached a crisis point: ''Dude, I need shade. I am seriously frying,'' said Danielle Dwyer, from San Antonio, who did, after all, have a 6 a.m. shoot the next morning.
When not playing, the models were on the club deck, not touching the pastries and fruit salad. Some had flown in (''How was Cape Town, honey?''); most were here, anyway, for the shooting season, which begins in December and lasts into March. Mostly they were from fashion agencies, not commercial, ``because we want to keep it small,'' said Sebastian Noreno, Nikki's VIP director. ``So it's more intimate, like a family.''
In past years, this family has been infiltrated by men and women who were not actually models but very good-looking professional volleyball players of both the beach and indoor variety.
Noreno put a stop to that this year, with special working-model wristbands. But present in the crowd was an interesting test case: Irene Marie's Scott Emslie, down from Toronto, who quit professional volleyball four years ago to become a model.
Emslie pledged to keep his spiking in check -- ''I will not be hitting anyone in the face today,'' -- but it wasn't clear this would fly with Noreno, who seemed to be under the impression he'd already banned him.
Probably Irene Marie would be OK either way. ''I play every day,'' said captain Mark Fisher, who is 32, was discovered in a mall in Georgia and prefers the pickup games at Eighth and Ocean to lifting weights, being ``not really a gym guy.''
Fisher guesses he'll stay in the business until he's 60, ``doing gray-haired ads.''
This was a somber thought, not quite an intimation of mortality but close enough. One looked quickly to the volleyball court -- silky thighs, perfectly bronzed backs, cheekbones sharp enough to wound -- to dispel it.
The 3rd Annual Model Volleyball Tournament resumes at 11 a.m. Sunday at Nikki Beach, 1 Ocean Dr., Miami Beach.
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