Tracy Press

 
Tracy parents pack their bags and travel to China to watch their son play starting goalie for the USA National Water Polo team

Max and Marlene Moses of Tracy show some of the Team USA memorabilia they’ve collected. Son Merrill will be starting goalie for the USA National Water Polo team at the Olympics. Glenn Moore/Tracy Press

Parents of athletes take a lot of road trips. Many of those will be a couple of hours away by car. Few will be to the other side of the globe.

Marlene and Max Moses made sure they would be the first parents of members of the USA National Water Polo team to book their flights to Beijing. Their son Merrill, 30, is the goalkeeper for the team, and once the team was headed for the Olympics, he knew he would be part of the 2008 squad.

“We knew we were going as soon as we knew he was going,” Max said.

The Tracy couple will leave Aug. 6 and return at the end of the month, after the gold medal match Aug. 24. They’ve learned certain Mandarin phrases — like “Where’s my luggage?” — and expect they’ll get a chance to visit tourist destinations like the Great Wall or the Forbidden City.

But the main attraction will be the opening ceremonies Aug. 8 and water polo matches every other day for the next two weeks.

“This has been a journey for many of these families and these guys,” Marlene said. “It’s something we’ve worked toward all these years.”

Merrill started in the sport at Palos Verdes Peninsula High School and was a team standout at Pepperdine University. His parents moved to Tracy this spring as Max, an orthopedic surgeon, established a private practice specializing in workers’ compensation.

It won’t be the first international trip to watch water polo for Max and Marlene. Max was team doctor on trips to Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean in 2005 and 2007. The couple also accompanied the team to the Pan American games last year in Rio de Janeiro, where the USA National Team qualified for the Olympic games.

“We were there for every single game and watched them walk away with the gold,” Marlene said. “This is a medal-winning team.”

Merrill Moses said the team is an extended family, and all of the athletes’ families plan to go to Beijing.

“They’ve been part of this journey and dream for a long, long time,” he said.

Moses has been on the USA National Water Polo team since 1997, the year his team at Pepperdine University won the NCAA championship and he was named team MVP.

That led to his career on the national team, and he joined right after that championship season. He graduated in 2000 and has been on the team ever since.

He missed the cut to be on the squad that went to Athens in 2004, though. It was a big disappointment, and he took a break from the sport, but he couldn’t stay away. For the past two years, he has been the team’s starting goalkeeper.

The team didn’t announce its Olympic lineup for the 13-member men’s and women’s teams until June 30. Moses said his role as goalkeeper all but guaranteed him a spot on the Olympic squad, so he knew by the end of the Pan American games that his parents could plan on seeing him in the Olympics.

“I’m pretty confident in my abilities, so I told them to book their tickets a year ago.”

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