Australian Open 2008

Assalamualaikum...

Yesterday, Australian Open 2008 closed its stages, with 2 new champion emerges after 2 weeks of excellent games to beat more fancied seeded player to win the much-coveted grand slam title.
As a tennis fan, i watched with fascination how Novak Djokovic and Maria Sharapova beat one player after another to eventually win the trophy with USD1.2 million paycheck as the grand prize winner!
As you may already know, Australian Open is the first of 4 Grand Slam series for tennis which being held every year since more than 100 years ago (see Wikipedia). In fact, Australian Open which started in 1904 is the youngest Grand Slam series with Wimbledon being the oldest (1877) which also makes it the most prestigious of all Grand Slam.

I'm not going to bore you with all the facts about tennis and its evolution over the years until it became one of the major sports in the world now. You can find it in the Wikipedia, if you want. It is very fascinating, really...!
What i really want to talk here is what happened in these two weeks, within the heat and hype of the Australian Open. One glance, it's nothing actually, but on the second, fourth thought, i just realized how significant it was (or insignificant, depends on how you think about it).
It's about Badminton, or to be more precise, Malaysian Open and Korean Open which being held back to back, ironically, on week 1 and 2 of Australian Open.
The thing is, i just know Malaysian Open was being held at the time when one of my neighbor innocently asked me about it! Although when i think back about it, maybe i really know about Malaysian Open when there was a little coverage in the news about out top pairs crashed out of the tournament on the second round (which is not unusual at all, right?)
Really... Am i that ignorant? Although i loved tennis very much, it's not like i don't love badminton at all. Okay, maybe i'm a bit ignorant. But the real issue here is the lack of grandeur in badminton, the way tennis and other top sports in this world have. So little coverage, publicity and hype surrounding the tournament, which is very important in marketing the sport to reach out to new fan and peers.
And mind you, i still don't mention about the vast difference between the top prize of those two sports. If Novak Djokovic went home with a big fat paycheck of USD 1.2m in his pocket, Lee Chong Wei can only brought home about - please correct me if i'm wrong - USD 16k worth of grand prize winner. What a difference!
Okay, I don't know why i need to write about this. Maybe, just feeling sad about Malaysian sport in general or maybe i just want to show that we Malaysian, are always way behind the other nations in term of everything; sport, economy, oh everything, just name it...!
Or... maybe I guess i just hope we can think and do something about it. Really!!!
Bonne Chance!