SMASH HITS

UNHEEDING to the day’s spirit, the sun will still rise in the east on All Fools’ Day. Undeterred by two deferments — the first owing to bomb-blasts last August — India’s eastern metropolis of Hyderabad will finally host world badminton’s glitziest field in the $1,20,000 Indian Open, starting April 1.

Finally, unmindful of how hard the Westerners fight and howsoever spirited the Indian challenge, it will be the Far East brigade — the domineering Chinese, drawing the best out of the rest: Indonesians, Malaysians, Japanese and the Koreans — who will light up the Indian Open.

It’s been a while since the best of the shuttle world’s east and west criss-crossed in India. Though you’d be scratching your head to recall the last time, if ever, when the field spanned a women’s world no 1 (Xie Xingfang), no 2 (Zhang Ning) and no 3 (Lu Lan), newly-crowned All-England men’s champ (Chen Jin), the men’s world no 3 (Bao Chunlai), and if promo-posters are to go by, the Indonesian maverick-champion and crowd-puller Taufik Hidayat.

The then-biggies were known to drop in to Bombay for invitational tournaments in the 50s, 60s and 70s, but seldom has the Indian badminton audience had it so good, all at one time. Hunt around for the footprints left behind by former visiting legends, and it is evident that they didn’t leave Indian shores simply clutching their trophies. Many seem to have left imprints on budding Indian players — who went on to do dreamy things with their own destinies, playing with the best, raising their own pedestals.

Malaysian Wong Peng Soon — the first Asian to win the All-England in 1950, his first of four, had arrived at Bombay’s CCI courts and left more than a hint of his personal charm on India’s nascent shuttle-scene. Nandu Natekar, the first Indian to win a title abroad, had come up against the then world no 1 at an invitational in 1951, and come away mesmerised. “His back-hand was so impressive, I consciously tried to emulate it, practicing the swing for countless hours,” Natekar recalls.

Two decades later in 1970 — and exactly ten years before he won the All-England, Prakash Padukone, playing as a 15-year-old, had lost 15-3, 15-5 to Rudy Hartono Kurniawan, the Indonesian stopping to play in India after picking his maiden world championship crown. “Just watching him play had a great impact — that’s when we realised how much we had to work harder, how to work on fitness, and just what it takes to play at that level,” Padukone remembers. Padukone’s style a year later in 1971 was markedly more aggressive, his national junior title in the subsequent year proving to be the impetus he needed to take off to bigger battles.

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