The Solution To All The World's Problems

Today I spent 2 hours of my life in a metal sweatbox, hitting things across a small distance with a bat. My mistake: a “Racket”, when I called it a bat a very angry person threatened take me outside and hit me in the face. Yes, this is badminton, the slightly less successful version of tennis.

While I can vaguely understand the reason why people play Rugby, the feeling of shoving another man’s head into the mud must be very satisfying indeed, the fun in badminton has always eluded me. If I was to hit something away from me, I do not want it to come back. If I wanted it, I wouldn’t have hit it away in the first place. I have always regarded badminton, squash, tennis and cricket as something rich medieval people might have thought up to fill the time between the chicken and turkey feasts and going down to the factories to laugh at the people who worked there. Am I rich medieval person? Nope.

So why would I want to play these things? To get fitter? Fat chance. Jumping side to side and around swinging your arms about isn’t going to make you Jet Li. Quite the opposite in fact. For fun? Perhaps. But the list of things that are more fun is completely endless. For instance, what is more fun: listening to music or running around in a small square doing a great impression of an autistic spider?

That’s why at the first opportunity I went away from badminton and went upstairs to table tennis. I like this sport. While I think most sports are designed to be as anti-social or exerting as possible, I don’t get this from table tennis. The fact you’re only 5 metres from your partner means you can talk at a normal volume, whereas in badminton you have to yell across a 30 meter court. This means it’s very hard to talk for a long time. In table tennis you are very unlikely to have this problem unless you are 4 foot tall, in which case table tennis is the least of your problems anyway.

Another reason I like table tennis is the size of the court. In badminton you have to run back and forth judging where the “Shuttlecock” will fly. In table tennis you just have arm span to worry about, since the table just isn’t wide enough to run about.

I genuinely believe that table tennis is the future of sport. Yes, football might be good, but it’s only played either by people so wimpy they demand you get sent off for flicking their earlobe, or by people who just like to run about screaming things about what you’re doing or what you’re not doing, or just for the sake of it. Of course there is a grey area with people from neither of these camps, but they are definitely a minority.

It’s hard to think of anyone like this in table tennis. Most are normal people, which means it doesn’t have a reputation of a sport for onanists or slobbering braindeads.

So there you have it. My opinion on sport. It mostly sucks, but there’s some bits that are good.