Badminton Champ Is Old Hand at Winning

There aren’t many 57 year olds who can say they are the world champion in any sport. Jim Poole is one of the few and the proud, the world champion in the over-55 age group for badminton.

“Just because you get older doesn’t mean you don’t like to compete anymore. I enjoy competing and trying to play as well as I can,” Poole said.

“I also play down into the 40s on occasion. My partner, Tom Carmichael, and myself went to the Canadian Open this year and we won the over-40 men’s doubles. I’m 57 now, so I gave them 17 years and we still won, though it was only by one point in the final game. You just enjoy being able to compete on that level.”

In the 31 years since Poole, chairman of the Cal State Dominguez Hills physical education department, started playing badminton professionally, he has won 65 U.S. championships and 25 Canadian championships. Going into the World Master Games in Denmark this summer, he was the defending champion in men’s doubles. The World Master Games are for players over 40.

“In four years I’ll be in another age division, and I expect I’ll still be playing. This year I saw a lot of people from all over the world that I played against 20 or 25 years ago. You kind of remember, and you always have old memories just from talking about places that you played,” he said.

“I was quite a bit bigger than most of the people I was playing against then. I’ve had people say to me that I should be playing football, not badminton. When I was playing in the Far East years ago, they thought I was huge because of my size and that they didn’t have many people that were that tall. They used to say in their newspaper articles that I was a giant on the court,” said Poole, who was 6 feet, 180 pounds in his heyday. An ice cream fan, Poole these days has a bit heftier build.

“It gave me an advantage; some of the smaller ones would try to hit the feather shuttle over my head or out of reach and I could still get to the birdie. Being a left-hander also made a difference; they would almost instinctively hit the feather shuttle to a right-handers’ backhand, which is my forehand. From there, it was easy to go on the attack.”

Poole played badminton for the first time in 1955 as a 21-year-old student at San Diego State. His first championship came in the U.S. Open in 1958.

“It was easy for me to play and to play fairly well in a short period of time. I was a baseball and basketball player in college, and I liked badminton because the movements on the court were very similar to the movements I was making when I played basketball. I was a pitcher in baseball, and the overarm swing in badminton, with the changes of direction and changes in speeds, (is) a lot like pitching,” Poole said.

After being the dominant U.S. player of the 1960s and early ‘70s, Poole spends a great deal of time teaching at Dominguez Hills and as a referee in the National Football League. He worked the 1987 Super Bowl. Although badminton has cost Poole time and money over the years, it has given him a great deal of satisfaction.

“I still (play) to keep fit and have some fun,” Poole said. “I play about twice a week.

“One of the best times I had was when I won the Malaysian Championship in 1961. It turns out that only two non-Asians have ever won it, and I was the first one to win it. That’s a nice feeling.

“Officiating in the NFL, you enjoy the competition and you are competing--competing to be the best and to call the best game that you can. In playing (badminton), it’s the same feeling. I think that I’ve been enjoying the competition on more levels for a number of years.”

Several years ago, Poole coached the badminton team at Dominguez Hills, but budget cuts forced the school to drop the program. Badminton is making a general comeback since it was announced that it will be a demonstration Olympic sport in 1992. Poole focuses his attention on the future of the sport.

“Once people get a chance to see it, people will realize what a good game it really is and want to play,” Poole said. “I would like to see it get back to the college level; right now it’s big on the high school level. I help the CIF to host their championships here. I make the (Dominguez Hills) facilities available and generally help out where needed.

“I’m not doing any coaching now, but besides coaching (at Dominguez Hills) I have coached the national team. It used to be that everything was on a volunteer basis and I was quite willing to do that, but I could see that the game was passing us by without someone who was more up to date with what was going on in the world. That’s why I was very happy when (the national team) went out and hired Tariq Wadood to handle the job. He had been playing at a world-class level just a few years before.

Many people here, in the U.S., think of it as an outdoor, Fourth of July type of thing. There are places throughout the world where people make actual livings from badminton, like England and the Far East. For the sport to grow, people are going to have to see these people play.”

Poole said one of the fun things about continuing to play badminton is the thought of how things were and the excitement of where they are going.

“In the early ‘60s, nobody played full time. We were all people who worked or went to school. It was all played at night and on the weekends. Only in the past 10 years has it reached a point where there are people who do nothing but play badminton, just like people who play tennis or basketball,” Poole said.

“You get a lot of enjoyment out of seeing people that you helped to get better do well. As you get older, you don’t play as well, and the coaching becomes the fun part.