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About four years ago, a Boston badminton professional named George F. ("Jess") Willard visited Hollywood. Cinemagnates, always on the lookout for new fads, showed only less enthusiasm for learning the game than for telling the rest of the world all about what they had learned. Three years ago, Warner Brothers released a one-reel short called Good Badminton. Last year the firm of Fanchon & Marco hired Jess Willard to play exhibition matches in movie houses. Current rumor is that Walt Disney will produce a badminton cartoon in which Mickey Mouse will oppose Donald Duck. In Hollywood, badminton is not only handy as a sport and reducing exercise but also as an excuse for new poses by actresses like Sonja Henie, Glenda Farrell, Joan Crawford, Anita Louise, Simone Simon (see cuts, p. 35). In addition to novelty, badminton has over tennis the advantage that, since the game consists largely of scrambling, the posture of the subject does not, like that of almost any actress photographed with a tennis racquet, reveal that she does not know much about the game. Able male Hollywood badminton addicts are Pat O'Brien, Warren William, Lyle Talbot, Robert Montgomery. In Hollywood, the virtues of badminton, like many other things, have been exaggerated.
Most Hollywood badminton photographs exhibit it as an outdoor game. Actually, Hollywood is one of the few places where the vogue of badminton has taken root outdoors. Even there it belongs under cover, since the slightest breeze makes a badminton "bird" behave unpredictably. To offset this defect, Douglas Fairbanks has invented his own form of the game, with heavier bats and birds. Fairbanks badminton is named "Doug."
Once launched by Hollywood, badminton broke out all over the U. S. in patches. From Canada, which currently has about 25 of the world's best 30 singles players, including Professional Jack Purcell who two years ago beat Hollywood's Willard for the "world's championship," the game spread quickly to Detroit, Chicago, Seattle. Badminton literature began when Squash-Badminton appeared in 1934, grew when American Lawn Tennis added a badminton section last autumn, came of age last week when the national championships made badminton in daily papers jump from the society to the sports pages. Average badminton bat weighs 5 oz. to a tennis racquet's 13½ oz. Birds, still patterned after the Duke of Beaufort's champagne corks, weigh 80 grains. Best birds and bats are imported. Birds are made of fine-grained Spanish cork, covered with French kid, dressed in feathers from Czechoslovakian geese, whose high grease content makes their quills less breakable. Three birds, four bats, tapes, a net, and a place to put them are full badminton equipment. With the net stretched 5 ft. high, across a court 44 by 20 ft., procedure and purposes are similar to tennis except that every shot must be a volley. Scoring is like squash. When the momentum given it by the racquet is spent the bird does not drop like a ball but parachutes to the floor. Hence, retrieving is the most important part of the game and badminton, much easier to learn than tennis, is more taxing to play.