David Freeman; Badminton Great Became a Surgeon

Dr. David Freeman, an accomplished neurosurgeon who as a young man won eight championship badminton titles, has died. He was 80.

Diagnosed last April with Merkle cell carcinoma, Freeman died in San Diego Hospice on June 28.

Freeman maintained a successful neurosurgery practice in San Diego for more than 40 years, working out of his office across from Balboa Park.

“I always did operations a lot faster than the next guy,” he told the San Diego Union in 1986. “I used to do 16-hour operations in 12 hours.”

By the time he established his medical practice in the mid-1950s, those fast hands had already brought him an international reputation.

Raised in Pasadena, Freeman scored his first triumph with a racket in tennis. In his early teens, he won the national junior singles tennis championship. He was also a formidable squash and table tennis player before taking up badminton at age 13.

“Badminton was built for me,” he once told an interviewer, “probably because I was quick more than anything else. I wasn’t powerful. I wasn’t fast--I couldn’t run very fast, but I was quick and I had good [hand-eye] coordination.”

Freeman dominated men’s badminton for 14 years. He won seven U.S. badminton championships--1939, 1940, 1941, 1942, 1947, 1948 and 1953--and in 1949 brought the country its first world championship, winning men’s singles at the prestigious All-England Championships. The England competition was considered the unofficial world title contest until 1977, when world championships were instituted.

“His colorful style, darting and whirling around the court to return his opponent’s shots,” according to the Hickok Sports biography Web site, “has been described . . . as resembling a Comanche war dance.”

Freeman was inaugurated into the International Badminton Federation Hall of Fame in 1997, and the Breitbard Hall of Fame at the San Diego Hall of Champions in Balboa Park in 1958.

He was educated at Pasadena Junior College, Pomona College, where he was president of the student body, Harvard Medical School and the University of Michigan. He served two years in the Army Medical Corps just after the end of World War II.

Freeman is survived by his wife of almost 60 years, Addie; a daughter, Diana Peterson of Rancho Santa Fe, Calif.; two sons, Reese of Roseburg, Ore., and Dave of Arcadia; and four grandchildren.

Services will be scheduled in September.