And the Winner is……(WU #15)

This week was a big badminton week. Monday was a holiday (Tomb Sweeping Day) so no school. But I tutor a young boy every Monday and we still met. His father is a badminton player (he’s been playing 3 times a week for 20 years) and asked if I wanted to play after class.

Would I? Hell yeah!

So, I went to a new (to me) gym. In fact, it wasn’t new at all but seemed very old in the coolest way possible. Like, the old Boston Garden. Wooden floors, but polished and taken care of, good lighting, and a system of catwalks along the high roof. It seemed like a relic from the 1950’s or something, though I don’t see how that’s possible.

Beautiful polished wood floors that gave a satisfying creak now and then but were solid and sturdy to play on.

Great side lighting shows they thought about the player when making this gym. Many gyms have the lights on the ceiling, clearly illuminating the entire gym. But badminton players spend a lot of time staring up towards the ceiling and the lights can really hurt your eyes and even blind you from hitting the birdie. Side lighting is ideal. 

Anyway, it was fun but set me up for more exhaustion as it would mean 4 consecutive nights of badminton. Tuesday night with my friends was fine, nothing big or exciting happened and I played like normal.

Wednesday night, with my teacher, was another disappointment. I kinda saw it coming. Last week was so great I knew I couldn’t match that. And my teacher started teaching me some new moves and all my dumbness and weaknesses came back. I can’t seem to focus on my legs, my arms and my feet while learning a new skill. If I do my arm right, my feet are all fucked up, and vice versa. Luckily my teacher has sooo much patience and he never got mad at me despite correcting my feet maybe 100 times. I went home feeling pretty dejected and exhausted. Le sigh….

Thursday night I was exhausted but happy because my favorite partner was back after a two week trip. We played two games together (promptly lost both, breaking our winning streak) and then someone realized we had 5 girls and 5 guys and suggested playing a competition. Everyone was roughly at the same level except one girl who was a total beginner. To make it fair we said her team would start each game with a 10 point lead.

The complicated pattern of play. I had no idea how they calculated anything.

To choose our partners we did rock, paper, scissors, and I ended up with one of the best guys in our group. To my surprise he said “yessss,” when he found out I was gonna be his partner. I’m the kinda person who is picked last for teams, and people begrudgingly accept me. So that was a new thing for me.

We lost our first game (we played the team with a 10 point lead and it was very hard to overcome) and I thought that was that. But we were playing a 5-team competition and therefore couldn’t do a bracket-style game. Instead we did a points based game. And when we had played all the teams (winning two and losing two) it turned out we had the second highest points!

So we got to play the final! It was a two out of three games final and we won the first two games pretty easily. (Despite my tiredness.) The prize was everyone else had to pay for our badminton. It felt soooo good.

Akuma (my partner), me and our opponents in the final.

The first person I told right away was my teacher, and then later I spread it around on my social media. My friends are quite sad that it was me that won, only because I’m never gonna let them forget it. I’m definitely a total little shit like that and I’ll rub it in their face as long as I can. Heh heh heh…..