That still leaves me with 195 pounds of blubber to confront in my morning mirror, but it’s a start, and while I may never become as svelte or as sharp as Sharapova, what began as a crash weight-reduction program has turned into a serious, to-the-death effort to whack a small feather-skirted rubber ball over and across a five-foot net.
That’s what badminton (or just "bad" to its faithful followers called "badders" or "baddicts," naturally) is – something like tennis, which I played with blood-curdling ineptitude half a lifetime ago, but actually faster (the shuttlecock can travel at almost 200 mph) and more sweat-inducing. That shuttlecock weighs next to nothing (as our trainer – about whom there’s more, below – keeps reminding us at the top of his voice, "The ball is light! Relax! The ball is light!"). But it’s no joke to put it exactly where and when you need to put it, which is usually somewhere behind your opponent, or just between his legs.
As I was saying, I was never much of a sportsman. (If you see me and my physique, you will hold that truth to be self-evident.) I played patintero, step-no, and agawan-base as a kid, won a Hershey bar for pushing a classmate off a balancing beam in some intramural, kicked a few footballs and maybe sank five percent of all my shots in basketball, but that was it. Later in life I realized that while the best I could be at billiards was what the regulars called a tama-bola, I could toss three pieces of pointed metal at a circular target with some ease and precision, and I played darts until I was good enough to win little trophies and beer-money bets. Then I decided that my true calling as a player lay in indoor sports – okay, games – as the bangka in pusoy, as the local advocate of an ancient and esoteric Japanese board game called go, as a patsy in poker, and as a onetime casino habitué that the blackjack dealers came to call "The Prof."
I’ve done a bit better as a sports fan. As a grad student in the Midwest, I gladly gave up my weekends to baseball and American football, and once sneaked out of Shakespeare class to watch Michael Jordan break Milwaukee’s heart with a last-second three-point shot. I’ve never hit a golf ball in my life, but I enjoy watching guys in funny shoes nudge a tiny white ball with expensive sticks into holes in the grass. Sorry, Zinedine: I’d sooner watch paint dry than endure a soccer match and the spectacle of overpaid boys writhing on the ground pretending to have been disemboweled; but I appreciate TV billiards and boxing like any good Pinoy homeboy, and have lately taken to following the finer points of "Texas hold ‘em" poker (and practicing them, on Friday nights).
But, ah, now there’s badminton, which I don’t only get to watch but can actually play some semblance of, thanks to a roving band of "baddicts" (there’s also a local online group at www.baddicts.com) whose composition could, at one court or another, include fellow Mac users, former students, fellow artists, fraternity brothers, high school alums, family, and friends of any of the foregoing. (In truth, anyone with a smile and not too mean a smash will do.)
And it came as no great surprise, given my history of clinically addictive behavior, that I moved quickly from being a novice at the game to, well, still a novice at the game but an expert in accessories – the Nike Dri-Fit shirts, the Yonex shoes, the rubber elbow band, the ticket to the MVP Cup at the Araneta Coliseum – all manifestations of what, in my blog (where you’ll find a picture of my satiny red shoes), I define as "equipmentitis – the feverish notion that jumping around in the fanciest gear will give you a killer backhand where you had none." If I couldn’t match my trainer’s shots, I said, I could at least match his shoes.
Which brings us to the one of the best investments I’ve ever made in someone else’s know-how. A couple of weeks ago,
I wrote about the travails of teaching creative writing to a roomful of what we’ll kindly call innocent students. Today, let me tell you that it’s tougher to teach a 52-year-old slouch with a beer belly how to glide three steps backwards to get in front of a shuttlecock and smash it to kingdom come than to get a freshman to write flawless compound-complex sentences.
That job goes to my patient instructor, Melvin Llanes, our former No. 1 player and the Philippines’ first international badminton champion at age 15. I say "my" instructor as if I could call him whenever I feel like it, but Coach Melvin could actually be teaching a dozen students at any given time – not all together, but one at a time, the hallmark of his style of teaching. It doesn’t matter who or how old you are and what you think you know; Melvin will insist on individualized instruction at your real level of play, so he can weed out bad habits and teach you the right basics, ratcheting up the lessons as your skills improve. (In my case, it was simple: "I know nothing," I said – "a very good place to start," as Julie Andrews said.)
Melvin’s story captures the drama, the highlights, and the challenges of having both the gift and the grit to excel in your sport – in a country that idolizes champions but can’t or won’t provide the support they need to sustain their talent.
The youngest son of a Constabulary man who was also caretaker of the old PC badminton courts in Camp Crame, Melvin started at age seven as a scorer for players after school hours – taking up a racket and playing when he could between and after other people’s sets. He joined his first tournament at age eight, won at nine, and never looked back. In 1992, at 15, he won the Prince Asian Juniors Championship in Hong Kong; the year before, on his first international outing, he had reached the quarterfinals. He remembers how, at the finals, he had been awed by the size of the Queen Elizabeth Stadium in Wanchai – but also how encouraging it was to see so many countrymen in the bleachers, and how uplifting it felt to stand on the podium and hear the National Anthem.
Then followed the glory years of being the country’s youngest No. 1, of rubbing elbows at the PSA Awards with such better-known luminaries as Efren "Bata" Reyes, of thrashing the Commonwealth Games champion in Australia, of training scientifically in China in preparation for the 1997 Jakarta SEA Games, in which Llanes and his team won bronze. Then Melvin became assistant coach and physical trainer of the national men’s and women’s teams.
Today Melvin devotes his time to teaching private individuals (most of them, I should add, far more deserving of his time than me) as young as six and as old as 54. "It’s time for me to give something back," he says, having won enough trophies to fill a warehouse but, ironically, still struggling to gain proper recognition and support for himself and his fellow world-class athletes. You have to medal in international competitions, he says, to get any kind of substantial support; but how can you even get there without the right training, the right equipment, travel expenses, and sustenance for your family?
He remembers the case of a friend who suffered a slipped disc and had to pay P50,000 for his medical bills; the government threw in P4,000. "It was an eye-opener for me," Melvin sighs. He would have qualified again last year for the national team, but he declined the offer; team members were going to be given only P4,000 a month and no benefits. Llanes deplores sports politics and the bata-bata system as our most formidable obstacles in the way of more international championships.
To the legions of us who happily endure daily and punishing one-hour sessions with Coach Melvin in his favorite hangout at the Battledore and Shuttlecock courts (77 Scout Ojeda, Roxas District, Quezon City), Philippine badminton’s loss may be our personal gain. To give you an idea, a businessman-student of his named Arthur started from scratch in November and has since won seven trophies, shedding 40 pounds along the way. But knowing how awful my forehand is – my new Yonex SHB-99 Power Cushion shoes notwithstanding – it leaves me wondering why Coach Melvin isn’t training our next under-16 champion instead. (Or, well, there’s the 52-and-under crown to fight for.)
If I were a taipan, coach, I’d set you up for life – just teach me how to take three steps backward to hit an overhead shot instead of turning around and giving up like a cheap umbrella. And if you want Melvin Llanes to teach you – though he’s booked for the next few weeks – drop me a line. I’m not managing him, but I’m plugging this hopefully in exchange for a little leniency in our net-rushing exercises.
To keep things going, Gen. Esperon (whose daughter Mae also went to the PSHS), called for monthly golf fellowships which were successfully held in Fort Bonifacio last April, May, and June.
And now a major golf tournament has been set for this Thursday, July 27, at the AFP Golf Course, Camp Aguinaldo, Quezon City. Interested parties (PSHS grads or otherwise) are invited to join the tournament which tees off at 6:30 a.m. and 10:30 a.m. Tickets at P2,500 each (including breakfast or lunch) are available at the AFP Golf Course or from the PSHS Foundation, Inc., at 924-0655. PSHS alumni who haven’t been bitten by the golf bug may also get tickets for the Dinner Fellowship at the AFP Officers Club at 6 p.m. on the same day. The First Pisay Golf Tournament aims to raise P1 million for the benefit of the PSHS Foundation, Inc.