Autumnal evenings don’t get more melancholy than the finality of the realisation that Tai Tzu-ying will never play a competitive badminton match again. Autumnal evenings don’t get merrier than knowing with certainty that no matter how abruptly it ends, we lived to witness the fairytale era when Tai Tzu-ying played badminton, watching the shuttle do tricks in a starry sky.
On Friday, the Taiwanese officially confirmed her retirement which had been on the cards for a while. “A beautiful chapter has come to an end. Thank you badminton for everything you have given me,” she wrote. Like a safe-haven asset in times of uncertain equity markets, Tai Tzu-ying’s two silvers – at Tokyo Olympics and the 2021 Worlds – could be pegged as her peaks.
But the mesmerising shuttler needed neither the Olympic gold nor a World Championship title to contend for the tag of the sport’s greatest artist of all time. Even her competitors would arrive at a quick consensus that no matter how many times they got the better of her, she could humble them, steal a wry grin out of them, and amaze them, with that one moment of wristy wizardry. Sending the shuttle into wavy fourth dimensions, she left them wrong-footed and wan-faced in the immediate aftermath, but glowing at the memory of that audacity forever afterward.
In fact, show Roger Federer a couple of her playing clips, or a dozen, and the great man might have traded the thick graphite racquet frame for the lean one. Not many understood the dazzle of the disguises she dropped, a banger a minute, on some occasions. It was breathtaking and could turn every player and her diehard fans – hell bent on beating her – into Swiss neutrals, forgetting their nationalism and puny loyalties. She stuck her tongue out when the shuttle swayed wide, smiled on court, never argued with umpires, bowed to the court and seemed altogether oblivious to the magic she was capable of conjuring. But she knew her game was beautiful, she insisted that it stayed elegant and soulful, even if history pages hundred years from now might omit her from their chronicles.
Like a safe-haven asset in times of uncertain equity markets, Tai Tzu-ying’s two silvers – at Tokyo Olympics and the 2021 Worlds – could be pegged as her peaks. (AP Photo)
A singularly talented shuttler, she was taught those tricks by half a dozen of her father’s friends who told the 5-foot-3 that she could perfect the skill to send the shuttle wherever she wished. In the early years, right up till her 2016 loss at Olympic pre-quarters to PV Sindhu, Tai could be bullied with power, and her impatience and inconsistency was always one shot away. But even as the headbangers Sindhu and Marin, and compulsive retriever and counter-puncher Akane Yamaguchi, could draw out the errors, the audience waited for snippets of sorcery. The reverse slices, the cross drops, the hairline thin net angles, the parabolic rally extenders, the zipping smashes – all needed her to get stronger, before she matched wins with bewitching skill. Her six-pack selfies happily sat alongside warm moments she spent with her grandmother, whom she called her best friend. Chen Yufei was absolutely spent by the time she wrested the gold for China away from her at Tokyo. And Sindhu played perhaps her greatest match tactically outlasting Tai at the Basel Worlds.
But fans waited for her to play. Simply play. Not necessarily win, though that was swell. Like Taufik Hidayat, perhaps even more than him, she turned this little-known sport into time-pausing illusions bought into by watching millions. At the 2018 Asian Games she finally won a glittering gold, though there were two All Englands, three Indonesia Opens, and two at Denmark amid 17 key titles to go with three Asian Championships.
Ratchanok Intanon, her contemporary, was perhaps in possession of an equally beautiful and intuitive game. But Tai had cheekiness, charming foibles and a carefree, unforced talent for making the champion look distinctly not the more popular of the two contenders. Only a sourpuss would ask her to furnish gold at the gates of greatness.
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It will be history’s wretched luck that generations in the future, will never know what it was like to watch Tai Tzu-ying play badminton. YouTube comes a distant second, because you won’t be barely breathing in that precise second, when neither you, nor Tai Tzu quite knew, where that shuttle would run. “I will enjoy a life without alarm clocks,” she explained. “The TTY era has come to an end. But I hope the spirit of TTY stays with you always.”
