Badminton Was No Picnic for Dave Freeman : He Took the Sport Quite Seriously While He Was Winning One National Championship After Another

To the average American, badminton is a game played on makeshift courts at picnics and family gatherings.

People hit the shuttlecock, or bird as it is more popularly known, back and forth with little regard for true competition. When the dinner bell rings, they drop their rackets, run for the food and forget the score.

But Dave Freeman, who grew up in Pasadena and now at 68 is a neurosurgeon in San Diego, is one American who has rarely been that casual about anything. Once he was introduced to badminton, he wanted to be the best, and he achieved his goal not once but seven times.

Freeman won the national singles championship six times in a row, from 1939 through 1942 and, after a four-year hiatus for World War II, in 1947 and 1948. He then retired but returned for one last shot in 1953 and won again.

Because the leading foreign players also entered those tournaments, Freeman was not just the best in the United States. He was the best in the world.

Freeman found doubles every bit as easy. He won the national men’s title with Chester Goss from 1940 through 1942, with Webster Kimball in 1947 and with Wynn Rogers in 1948. And to complete his domination, he won the national mixed doubles with Sara Lee Williams from 1940 through 1942.

Freeman evolved into a champion badminton player from participation in other racket sports. Having been a whiz at tennis, table tennis and squash, he figured, “Why not badminton?”

At 12, Freeman won a 13-and-under table tennis tournament in Pasadena. At 17, he won the national junior tennis championship and teamed with Welby Van Horn to win the doubles title. He also won several squash tournaments while attending Harvard Medical School, and his remarkable versatility prompted one publicist in that era to dub him “the original all-racket man.”

Of his junior tennis days, Freeman said, “I was ranked No. 1 in the United States but No. 2 in California because Van Horn beat me in the state tournament.”

Even after Freeman became the world’s best badminton player, he found time to play competitive tennis.

In 1939, the year he won his first national badminton title, he moved up to the men’s class in tennis and was ranked 12th nationally in singles and fourth with Ted Schroeder in doubles.

In 1943, with national badminton play suspended because of the war, Freeman concentrated on tennis and finished second with Billy Talbert in the national men’s doubles. He and Talbert lost the title match to Jack Kramer and Frank Parker.

“It was 6-4, 6-4, 6-4,” Freeman said. “We had celebrated the night before, because we had won a very long five-set match from Jim Brink and Bob Falkenburg. It was getting dark, and they were thinking of calling it and completing it the next day. I felt that since I was the weakest player of the four, we’d be better off to go on. So I said, ‘Let’s keep playing,’ and we won the fifth set, 14-12.” (There were no tie-breakers in those days.)

Freeman was 13 years old when he took up badminton.

“I had never even heard of badminton,” he said. “But a Japanese friend, Jimmy Arima, taught me how to play on an outdoor court at Cal Tech. You can’t really play badminton outside, because of the wind, but that’s where I learned. Shortly after that, Jimmy and I entered a 15-and-under tournament, and I beat him for the championship. Then we teamed up to win the doubles.”

In 1938, at 17, Freeman lost a tough match to Goss, who later became his doubles partner. It was then that he made up his mind to go for the gold.

“I had him point match before he beat me,” Freeman said. “I figured if I could do that well without practice, I’ll just work harder, and the game will be a cinch for me.

“As it turned out, I was right. I became a big frog in a little pond--a very little pond.”

Entering his first national tournament in Boston in 1938, Freeman lost to Ted Pollack, a Canadian. He was never beaten again in tournament play.

“He ran me all over everywhere,” Freeman said. “And I never got another chance to play him. He was disabled in the war.”

The next year, Freeman played an exhibition match in Pasadena against Jack Purcell, a Pasadena professional and longtime pro champion.

“I had him, 5-1, and then he said the bird was no good,” Freeman recalled. “He eked me out, 15-13 or 15-12, and that night he went on the radio and said I’d be the next national champion.

“Shortly thereafter, we played another exhibition in Santa Barbara, and he thought he’d smack me out. I just killed him. The next time, he had more patience, but I came back and beat him in the third game.”

It was later in 1939 that Freeman began his unmatched string of national championships. He did it by beating Walter Kramer, who had won the tournament two years in a row, in the title match in New York.

The next three years, Freeman swept the men’s singles, men’s doubles and mixed doubles titles. Not only was he unbeatable, but badminton was starting to gain a little popularity. Once the war intervened, the sport drifted back into relative obscurity.

“In ‘41, they had started the Thomas Cup,” he said. “It was like the Davis Cup in tennis. Then the war came along and knocked it into a cocked hat.

“Before Pearl Harbor in ‘41, badminton was featured in Time magazine and got three pages in Life. From ’42 to ‘49, everything just went kaput. In ‘86, there was a national badminton championship in San Diego, and it wasn’t written up in the papers, even in small print. That’s what’s happened to badminton in this country.”

Before the war, it was very different.

“When I won the national championship in ‘39,” Freeman recalled. “Wilson Sporting Goods offered me $5,000 a year just to use my name. That was a lot of money in those days. I wasn’t interested in that. I just wanted to play in tournaments. I didn’t want to be a pro.”

Freeman noted that badminton had a much better image in many other nations.

“It’s still big in England, India and some other places,” he said. “Now it’s big in China, where they have some of the best players in the world. These guys are sponsored by the government. They are full-time badminton players, fully salaried.

“One time in the Malaya Star, there was a story saying that Muhammad Ali was the first great athlete to come out of the United States since Dave Freeman. That’s how important badminton was there.”

But now . . .

“Our poor old guys are strictly amateurs. A few years ago, our national champion entered an international tournament and didn’t get past the first round.”

There was a time when Freeman would have welcomed some endorsement money.

“In ‘49, after I’d been undefeated for 11 years and had three little kids,” he said, “I needed money to live on while I was doing my residency in medicine. I wrote letters to various sporting goods companies, and I was offered 15 cents a racket and 25 cents a shoe.

“The reason they gave me was that all they were selling were back yard badminton sets. And that’s still true today. Badminton has become just a back yard game in the United States.”

After a big 1949 season, in which he beat the next-best players in the world in Thomas Cup competition and the All-England tournament, Freeman retired for the first time. He began his residency that year at the University of Michigan and didn’t have time to practice anything other than medicine.

But in 1953, Freeman caught the badminton bug again--temporarily. He was opening his practice in San Diego, where he had started as an intern in 1945, and decided to enter the nationals one more time.

“I just wanted to show my boys that I was really that good,” he said. “They were 8 and 9 then, and all they knew about my feats was hearsay. I had a bandage on my knee plus diarrhea. I was in terrible shape.

“Playing in the finals that year was the only time I didn’t have a good time in badminton. I won, but I was about to die. I wasn’t going anywhere from there. I was finishing my residency, and I told myself, ‘Why work my tail off? It could only get worse.’ That was it.”

His record notwithstanding, Freeman denied having overpowering ability.

“I was very slow, and I didn’t have a great overhead,” he said. “But I had patience, and I had good hand-eye coordination.

“The guys I loved to play were the ones with big overheads. Dick Burch was the champion of Canada, and a heavy hitter, but I creamed him. He was still following through on his overhead when I dumped the bird over the net.”

One of Freeman’s sons, Rees, has followed in his footsteps as a neurosurgeon and practices in Roseburg, Ore. Three years ago, his father assisted him in surgery.

“I held the retractor for him for about 12 hours,” the senior Freeman said. “I was doing what he told me to do all that time, and that night he took me out to dinner and paid the check. It was a first time for both of those things.”

Freeman’s only remaining connection with badminton is a local annual tournament that is named after him. But while he will be 69 in September, he has no intention of cutting back on his medical practice.

“I can’t afford to work part-time because I have to pay so much for malpractice insurance premiums,” he said. “And my wife doesn’t want me to retire. I’m not good around the house, plus my golf is terrible.”