Word: badminton
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...Badminton Game. The hardest blow came from Illinois' Republican Governor William Stratton. He had spent the day in the downstate mining city of Centralia. When he got back to the executive mansion in Springfield after midnight, he heard about Wilson's dogs. Governor Stratton was due to introduce Wilson at the Chicago dinner in 18 hours' time; a much-perturbed politician, he decided against...
...Duke of Beaufort's houseparty was falling to pieces. Rain had kept the guests cooped up in Badminton Manor, champagne was running low, old friends were so bored with each other that they were reduced to a half-forgotten childhood game. Someone stretched a cord across one of the manor corridors, and, so the story goes, a couple of lackadaisical wine-bibbers discovered that they still had energy enough to stick a crest of goose quills into a champagne cork. They began to bat the cork back & forth across the cord with empty bottles. Suddenly the party came...
Last week, from five different countries, 200 energetic contestants traveled to Niagara Falls, N.Y. to try their hands at what is now a worldwide sport. But the badminton they played was a far cry from the impromptu pastime dreamed up by the Duke of Beaufort's friends. And as if to prove that the game is not the private property of English gentlemen any more, Eddie Choong, 23, a cat-quick little (5 ft. 4 in.) Malayan, bounded away with the American Badminton Association's singles championship...
Malayans, who learned the game from the British, years ago adopted it as their national sport. On the island of Penang, Eddie Choong and his older brother David picked up badminton the way U.S. youngsters pick up baseball. And when the Japanese occupied Penang in 1941, the Choong boys filled up their time with badminton for want of much else to do. "No more than four persons were allowed together at one time," Eddie remembers. "Five, and poff, into jail you went. So we played badminton in our father's garden...
...game. Without teachers, they developed a repertory of overhand, underhand and backhand shots, some of them highly unorthodox by Western standards. Says David: "We'll try any thing." Together, the Choongs went to London in 1950 to study law. But they seldom let their studies interfere with their badminton. Always just a little better than David, Eddie won more than 150 tournaments before the American Badminton Association invited him to the U.S. He reckons that he has traveled 500,000 miles just to keep badminton dates. Long barnstorming tours, tough matches day after day and late hours never seem...