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Whither the Malaysian Sport?

September 28, 2005

Americans have their 4 major sports – baseball, basketball, American football and ice hockey. Why is it called ‘football’ when they their hands all the time? Except when they punt. It should be called ‘handball’. Oh, OK, then American Handball. OK, scratch that.

The English have their cricket (the poncy game, not the small insect), rugby, football (“soccer”) and beer-guzzling.

The Australians have their Aussie-rules footie. And swimming.

The Canadians have their lacrosse.

So my question is, what sport do Malaysians have? Other than queue-jumping and marathon mamak-hopping.

Not tennis, not golf. Those are ‘mat salleh’ (white man) games. Golf is from Scotland and tennis from Sharapova-land (Hubba-hubba-hubba!)

And watching F1 or EPL is not a sport either. Not even badminton.

Discounting playing gasing(top spinning) and cock-fighting, I would say the closest we have is sepak takraw. For the benefit of non-Malaysians, it’s a local game like volleyball, but instead of using your hands, you use your legs and head (as weird as it sounds, there IS such a game). And the Thais would probably want to dispute it being of Malaysian origin.

Most people would view it as a Malay game, as hockey is perceived to be a Indian game, and table tennis and basketball is for the Chinese (another Chinese game is Ah Beng-modded Honda City drag racing along the Kesas highway, but that would be another story).

It’s kinda true, it’ll be another few decades before a Chinese dude plays for the speak takraw national team, but here’s an interesting fact. I tried a bit of this super acrobatic game back in school. During ‘takraw’ season (other 3 seasons being footie, dodgeball and cutting class) my classmates would unfurl the badminton net everyday after school to play the game. So one day, I decided to join them. And trust me, it ain’t easy to play.

Anyway to cut the long story short, I didn’t really fancy it much (it’s kinda crappy to play when you suck at it). Since then, I kinda had new respect for our national players everytime they got thrashed by Thailand (and recently by Singapore).

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