The runway looks. Sharp suits, laser-lawn-mowed cheekbones, million dollar smile, perfect mop of hair. And a game to die for, but wake up immediately from and swoon and die again. Lee Yong-dae, now 36, was the K-Pop and K-drama superstar aesthetic rolled into one, well before Korean mass-scale entertainment blazed through all of East Asia, and then the rest of the world. The LYD mania of 2008-2018 is vaguely imaginable now that BTS and Pinnochio/Crash Landing on You can stream easily on mobiles, and we have a measure of how hysterical K-popularity can get.
But Yong-dae just played badminton. Though he played it damn well – the Maldini defense of shuttle you would pay to watch. The Euro step of Manu Ginobili at a badminton net that you would hold your breath for. His looks obviously got the squeals, but the doubles game was so refined and intricate, a faceless blur of a silhouette, would’ve told you it was the 2008 mixed doubles Olympic champion and 2012 men’s bronze medallist on court. And then he would smile, unlike the starched Europeans or Chinese stompers with their regimented, one-dimensional physical games, and all the men and women watching would beam away, claiming he was grinning exclusively at them.
The sport perennially rues why Lin Dan couldn’t match Federer in popularity, and you suspect badminton knows why – the Eurocentrism of tennis. But the absolute sway that Yong-dae held on young Far East populations – from Korea, Japan, China to Thailand and Indonesia, is unparalleled. LYD commanded a world of his own, a fan base that happily bypassed the strident Asian national loyalties, and kept badminton self-sufficient and cool, oblivious to the rest of the world.
For someone this fanatically followed – he was the preferred ramp model for many Asian fashion labels, a unifying heartthrob – LYD has returned to the basics of coaching in a rather fuss-free way. Of his contemporaries, Peter Gade is a full-time coach, but it would be surprising if everyone’s darling Taufik Hidayat, the GOAT Lin Dan, or Datuk Lee Chong Wei could hunker down, forget their stardom, and get down to coaching.
At this All England, two doubles legends, Hendra Setiawan and Yong-dae had moved into coaching duties and met with success. Though Half-of-Daddies Setiawan is immersed in the job now, Yong-dae stepped in only as an invited coach. He helped Seo Syeung-jae and Kim Won-ho claim the All England men’s doubles title after 13 long years. The last to win it – Lee Yong-dae with Jung Jae Sung in 2012.
Though it followed An Se-young’s fabulous match against Wang Zhi Yi in women’s singles and was largely lost in the slipstream of that great game, it was an emotional win for the Seo-Kim pair and Yong-dae. They would dedicate it to Jung Jae-sung, with whom Yong-dae won an Olympic bronze and two All Englands, the last in 2012. Jae-sung had passed away in March of 2018 after a massive heart attack at age 35 – and Yong-dae subsequently retired briefly citing being burnt out, and emotionally exhausted, just months after he was the pall-bearer at Jae-sung’s funeral.
Yong-dae’s second playing stint coming out of retirement didn’t quote bring titles, but fans thronged arenas to watch him play – all the serve tricks, the controlled defense, and the occasional smash that still got hearts beating louder.
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But what brought him out of his grief and has now given him the equanimity to start as a coach are his badminton fundamentals. Yong-dae wasn’t a Seoul city slicker. Not unlike the K-Dramas, his core story comes from Hwasun, quite a rural outpost that he called quiet, where the air is good, everyone knows everyone, there’s a lot of warmth and whose tranquility he missed because he found Seoul noisy and the air not too good, to feel comfortable. Watching his mother toil away long hours in the village, and growing up in a humble household, gave Yong-dae the lifelong motivation to work so hard that he could take care of his family.
Yong-dae had started out in badminton because he felt he was too fat in primary school. However, his addiction to endless badminton training once he got hooked, meant he always struggled to keep up with the necessary calorie count. No amount of barbecued beef and pork could shrug off how thin he felt, because he would go berserk working out in the gym. An introvert, largely oblivious to his fame, he had to make an effort to feel cheerful, to speak to people, and even indulge in buying clothes and electronics, because despite being badminton’s youngest Olympic champion at 19 (mixed doubles with Lee Hyo Jung at Beijing 2008), he found spending money on luxury extravagant. His rustic origins and the importance of labour never left him.
Prone to being a loner, he would find himself corner walls to hit the shuttle against, and empty gym slots when he would obsessively train. On the court he made his skills look natural, but countless repetitions and tweaks went into it. Alongside humility and the hunger to keep winning. “I always thought I had to do my best on court till the shuttle dropped. Every moment was a match point,” he once said. Uniquely, he approached each point as if “Starting the game at 20-20 deuce, not 0-0.”
He built urgency into his game and that intensity could take a toll, so he struggled to deal with losses. But the hard work brought him wins enough for China (even if his active years coincided with their GOATS Fu Haifeng and Cai Yun) to nickname him Li Long Da (big dragon).
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In the last few years, Yong-dae has fulfilled his travel dreams of visiting Taiwan and Paris without the stress of winning tournaments. But what helped him stay grounded and paved the way for coaching despite the giddy heights of popularity was his easy acceptance of vanishing fame. “After I became famous I would often be recognised on the street. I’m not recognised so much now a few years have passed since Beijing, but I’m still recognized by two out of every ten people,” he told Yonex in an interview.
There was this other habit that stood him in good stead. Whenever he found his mind in a funk, he would start walking along crowded streets – but never listening to music. The ambient hubbub of everyday people strangely calmed him down, he said. Asia’s most popular sportsman, who lived K-pop glory before K-pop exploded as a trend, just knew always how to barrel a surf wave. It brought Korea its long-awaited All England men’s doubles title.
