Minton (You know you love it)

I really miss playing badminton.

For my last semester at SMU, I took badminton for my one required PE credit, figuring that it couldn't be that hard. I mean, you're indoors, on a tiny court, with a tiny racket, swinging at a little bird thing, there's no way too much damage could result, right? I am notoriously horrible at sports, or any physical activity for that matter, so I always choose my athletic battles very carefully.

I could not have been more wrong about badminton. For one, it is infinitely more difficult and interesting than tennis, at which I had some previous success. Everything moves way too quickly, there is almost no time to set up a shot, and many portions of a successful game depend on the ability to hit the shuttlecock hard enough to clear it from one baseline to the other. Do you know how many injuries are available to the enterprising klutz in this? Shuttlecock to the eye, causing blindness, swinging the overly light racket into your shin, or arm, or head, in a zealous attempt at clearing, and the many bruises, scrapes, and burns associated with diving for things on a hardwood gym floor. Yeah, I thought this thing through beautifully.

I managed to lose my first 14 consecutive matches. That was three whole badminton classes in which I was regularly schooled by girls half my size and weight and guys who had never held a racket in their life, up to that moment. But I took it with aplomb, I know that I suck at sports, you just gotta embrace the pain.

Then, a couple of weird things happened. 1) I started to get into the game, and 2) I started to get good. Not good in any conventional sense, in that my shots were never hard enough, my serves were never deep enough, and I had no sense of touch or placement of the bird. But it turns out I have incredibly fast reflexes in terms of racket handling (years of clumsiness paying off in random ways) and I would totally run down every shot on the court until I was ready to pass out. Sometimes illogical persistence works for you despite, you know, the whole lack of logic thing.

It's weird to say that you totally got into the game of badminton (when you say that, people look at you like you just said that you're really into Victorian-age ballroom dancing and/or the accordion) but seriously, I looked forward to that class so much. My doubles partner was Frank (he of the broken html page title) and we made an unbeatable force of him standing in one place cursing and swinging the racket wildly, and me running around spazzing out diving across the court bruising my elbows only to miss the shot by a clean 7 feet. We were an awesome force to be reckoned with.

We even had an arch nemesis team, John & Gina, to whom we usually lost, but played against constantly due to the win-loss tournament style of the class. There was an endless amount of trash-talking going on there, and you haven't really lived until you've heard badminton trash-talk.

Anyways, by the end of the semester, I was totally awesome at badminton. And by totally awesome, I mean that I sucked, but could parlay that sucking into winning a few games by being singlemindedly determined to always hit shots back at my opponent with no sense of skill at all, until they made a mistake and I won the point.

The last thing in the semester was a singles tournament. You would go around and try to play every person in the class and records were kept. The top 8 people then competed in a single elimination tournament to see who would be The Champion of Badminton. (The Champion of Badminton winning an awesome badminton class t-shirt, which I coveted with all my heart, even though I had never seen it.) I played my tiny unathletic heart out and tied for 2nd place in the rounds playing, but lost the tiebreaker, since one of my losses was to the guy that I tied.

But still, Oh my God, 3rd place overall in the class in the intro tournament from 14 straight losses to start out. I was so impressive that it made my brain hurt. Never mind that I fall down an average of 6 times per day and hit myself with the racket at least that many times. Impressive, I say.

In the final tournament, I totally lost in the last round to the guy who was seriously like the best badminton player in the history of time and space. (Not to play up his skills or anything.) But yeah, he just destroyed me. BUT, since we managed to complete the whole tournament in like 30 minutes, we got to have a second tournament on the last day of class. And in that one, my arch-nemesis John managed to beat the best badminton player in the history of time and space, which meant that after I finished an epic 28-26 victory over the guy who considered me his arch-nemesis, I got to play John for the title of Champion of Badminton, on This Particular Final Day.

And so, with the two of us the only ones playing in the entire gym, on the first court, in front of those many badmintoners who stayed (at least 5 people) I tasted the victory of badminton. It was good. Kind of minty, though.

The battle had been ridiculous, though, and included the longest point I ever played, which I swear had to have gone on for at least 5 minutes and involved John smashing the bird on my side and me barely popping it back and him smashing back on my side and me barely popping it back endlessly throughout time (which I ended up winning and should totally be on ESPN's greatest points of all time. Unfortunately there were no cameras. And no one cares but me. But still.). The best badminton player in the history of time and space then requested a match to determine who the real badminton champion was, but I deferred, preferring to stick with the version of events that the BCS goes by - who ever wins on the last day gets to be named the champion, never mind who the best team is.

So I won my very own Badminton Champion t-shirt, which actually did not mention badminton at all, and was in fact a blue Wellness t-shirt that you get your freshman year for having perfect attendance in the required health class at SMU and which I already had, in red form. But it was still awesome and I wear it often, telling everyone that I see that it is proof of my superiority at badminton. You know, on that one day. Without any skills, but plenty of tenacity.

Whatever, it's awesome. Y'all don't even know.

Sigh.