Badminton is dangerous, as it turns out. But seriously, I got into this thinking it would be a nice, soft sport for the light-hearted. It just doesn’t look aggressive, you know? You’re hitting a funny little shuttle thing, and no matter how hard you smack it, it still flies through the air at its own, leisurely pace. The people who play badminton? They are not like that. They are not at ALL like that.
People who play badminton can be…mean. Some of them, anyway. I should know, because one of them put me in the hospital. He aggressively dived for a shot and basically stabbed me with his racket, cracking one of my ribs. So we had to find a place in Melbourne for oxygen therapy, because it’s sort of like two birds with one stone. Three, if you include my hayfever. The broken rib makes it difficult to breathe without pain, but here in the hyperbaric chamber it’s a lot easier. Plus, it apparently helps the healing process, and I’ll take whatever I can get.
Oxygen therapy isn’t where I thought I’d be ending up after a particularly dire game of badminton, so I guess I called that one a bit wrong. Thing is, I’ve tried a lot more than this. Cricket was just too much standing around in the sun. Football is a lot of tackling…which is fine, but not for me. I even spent three months doing Kendo, during which I didn’t sustain a single injury. That’s a lot of getting hit, I’ll have you know. I only quit that one because it was too heavy on the ancient Japanese mythology side and not so heavy on the actual practical stuff.
After all that, it’s BADMINTON that does me in and sends me to a hyperbaric chamber. Melbourne just seems to be a hostile place to play sport, perhaps. But they already have the arts, so you’d think they’d tone it down. Nope. Not in Melbourne.
-A.J.