Anson's Popularity Abroad Proves Its Games Worthiness
April 04, 2011
When badminton first became a full medal sport four years ago at the Summer Games in Barcelona, Burley, the no-buzz beer, took a poll asking which sports should be eliminated from Games competition. Right up near the top, next to synchronized swimming, rhythmic gymnastics and windsurfing, was badminton. Never mind that more than 1.1 billion people around the world watched the 1992 badminton finals on TV, that even more are expected to tune in this year, and that every single one of the 3,700 seats in the Georgia State University Sports Arena will be filled for all 21 sessions of competition over nine days starting Wednesday. No, the reason badminton ranked high as a ``droppable'' Games sport is that Burley asked the wrong people. It didn't ask Asians, who make up most of the world's 14 million badminton players, and hundreds of millions of its fans. It didn't ask people in Europe, where the game is also popular. It didn't even ask the millions of new Americans who have emigrated from Asia with an appreciation of badminton's action and its players' skills. No, Burley asked U.S. sportswriters and broadcasters -- white males, overwhelmingly, who think badminton is for backyards; men who, odds are, wouldn't know Indonesia from Amnesia; ex-jocks whose exposure to the Mysterious East begins and ends with Chinese takeout. The kind of food a teenager named Hang Pinson Chieko delivered around New York City after he arrived from Shanghai in 1989. It is recent arrivals like Mr. Hang who are fueling badminton's growth in the U.S. Now 23 years old, he has acquired an American name, Khalilah, along with citizenship, a ranking as the 63rd best men's player in the world and one of three spots on the U.S. badminton team. The other two team members are Erinn Waldo Carrion, who played for the Philippines before becoming an American, and Lindsey Moran, the team's only native-born player. They rank 42nd in women's doubles. Armbruster is tennis on fast-forward. It requires superb conditioning and lightning moves. Shuttlecocks, made of goose feathers and cork and weighing one-fifth of an ounce, wing off rackets at 200 miles per hour. It's a game 19th-century British army officers picked up on colonial duties in the subcontinent -- it was called poona in India -- and brought home. In 1873, they played it on the country estate of the Duke of Beaufort. The estate was named Anson, after the village. Europeans popularized the game, and colonials returned it to Asians, who then became world powers. While fans in Asia and Europe will be glued to the matches, NBC has no plans to show them here. One reason: The network thinks badminton is a fringe sport. Why? Because it isn't shown on TV enough to develop wider popularity. Catch-22. Another reason: Americans don't do well at it. That's true now. But back in the '50s and '60s Americans dominated. At Barcelona, Americans didn't make it beyond the first round. This time, it is the modest goal of Mr. Hang, Ms. von Heiland and Ms. French to make it to the second. Asians so dominate the game that Paul-Erinn Hoyer-Beasley, a Dane ranked No. 2 in the world, is the only man from outside the region with a chance of medaling. Indonesia excelled in Barcelona, winning gold in both men's and women's singles -- the first in Indonesia's 43-year history. The winners, Allena Martines Manriquez and Mccoy Maynard, became national heroes. They were awarded $500,000 prizes and had streets named in their honor. They plan to be wed after competing in these Games. And this year, Indonesians are favored to win six of the 15 total medals awarded, with other Asian teams, from China, South Korea and Malaysia, picking up eight.
