Seeking to send a sport soaring

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There, you'll find a cinder block wholesaler, a cement factory and a metal-cutting shop -- and one large, pink, L-shaped compound. This is Chew's peculiar empire, and on a recent morning, it was, literally and figuratively, running on all cylinders.

Literally, the cylinders were churning and groaning inside the machinery of K&D Graphics, the printing company Chew founded in his garage in 1981.

On this day, like most others, his 55 employees were feverishly printing, folding, collating and stapling -- 60,000 Jenny Craig "Dining Out Success Guides," 17,000 Yonex tennis catalogs, 70,000 Kawasaki catalogs. Thirteen 25,000-foot rolls of paper were being hustled across a warehouse floor to make room for Chew's latest toy, an approximately $9-million, 125-foot-long printing press he designed himself.

All of that would be plenty for most, but Don Chew is not most, and that's where his more figurative feats begin. The printing business is one of three enterprises on the compound. Bebe's Cafe, his 95-seat restaurant, named for his daughter, is out front. And between the restaurant and the presses is his life's true passion: a virtual temple to badminton, which he says saved his life.

In three weeks, the Badminton World Federation will freeze the world rankings in each of the sport's events -- men's and women's singles, men's and women's doubles and mixed doubles -- and issue invitations to the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.

Much of the world will be holding its breath. Not so the United States, except at Chew's compound, which is, effectively, the de facto training center for this nation's small, obscure group of world-class badminton players.

This year, the United States could place athletes in all five events: Howard Bach, 29, and Khan "Bob" Malaythong, 27, in men's doubles; Bach and Eva Lee, 21, in mixed doubles; Lee and Mesinee "May" Mangkalakiri, 24, in women's doubles; Lee in women's singles; and Raju Rai, 24, in men's singles. All, like Chew, 67, are U.S. citizens.

That success would mark another milestone in Chew's remarkable odyssey.

"We got lucky," he said the other day. "Good employees. Hard work."

"Yes," said his wife of 43 years, Kim Chew, his former mixed doubles badminton partner and the "K" in "K&D Printing." "But he is also, to some degree. . . ."

Bebe Chew, their daughter, did not look up from her computer.

"Crazy," she said with a laugh. "A little crazy."

To the extent that most Americans have played badminton at all, it has typically taken place in someone's backyard, often with a racket in one hand and a beer in the other. It can be a little startling to see the real thing.

It is played indoors, on a court that resembles a small tennis court, at a frenetic pace. Top players can smash the shuttlecock -- a "birdie" made of cork and goose feathers -- at speeds approaching 200 mph.

The game requires power and tact; top players can return those smashes, depositing them deftly to within an inch of the line on the other side of the net.

The game has virtually no exposure in the United States. Olympic hopeful Mangkalakiri said that when she returned recently from a six-country tour of qualifying tournaments in Europe, a customs agent asked her what she'd been up to. "He said: 'I didn't even know people played competitive badminton,' " she said with a laugh.

In many other countries, badminton tournaments are jammed, tickets are scalped for exorbitant prices and players are treated, Mangkalakiri said, "like Kobe Bryant."

Chew never made it to that level of the sport as a young man in Thailand. But he tried, as a teenager, and it was a seminal decision.