BADMINTON BOOM

Evening Post, Volume CXXI, Issue 78, 1 April 1936, Page 13

BADMINTON BOOM

PASTIME IN AMERICA

STRONG HOLD IN HOLLYWOOD

(From "The Post's" Representative.) NEW YORK, March 11.

Ever since Sir Godfrey Thomas popularised the game in North America, badminton has gradually : come into favour, as a winter sport, and is now enjoying a mild boom in this country. As was the case in Canada,, badminton clubs are now an adjunct to tennis with the same devotees using it as 'a means of maintaining their tennis form Turing the winter. In fact, severarranking American tennis player^ Sidney Wood, Gilbert Hall, and Berkefey Bell among them, say they keep in shape during the winter on a daily badminton clubs in ft this city. A hundred clubs play the game in New England/ Boston as a hotbed of the English shuttle game. It is played in all the larger cities of the Atlantic seaboard and. the Middle West, but is making the greatest relative progress on the Pacific Coast. A Rhodes Scholar introduced it into California, and now most of the members of the Hollywood "movie colony play on private courts.and stage "pick-up tournaments. It is especially popular among motion picture "stars,1 who regard the game as more likely than the most intensive beauty culture to sustain their figures at tlie svelte proportions demanded by their art. The New Deal was not- slow m adopting badminton. Several public corporations, depending on President Hoosevelt's recovery, subsidies,, found it an effective means1 of improving the morale of employees. School gymnasia have introduced badminton; managers of public gymnasium clubs, say it. is the best investment they have ever made. The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company provides a wellequipped badminton "layout"; other large stores are doing likewise.

The popularity of the game was illustrated when the Canadian and American champions met in Los Angeles last summer. The match was played in the auditorium of the Ambassador Hotel, which had been converted into an amphitheatre, with seating for four thousand spectators. A movement is now on foot to organise the game on the lines of the British Badminton Association.