WHEN I was in high school, I harboured dreams of becoming a professional tennis player. I picked up the sport from my dad who was an avid player (my mum, too, but she stopped playing by the time I was a teen).

Before futsal courts overtook all the remaining tennis courts in towns all over the country, tennis never seemed like an “upper class” thing – in fact it was common to find at least one or two tennis courts in any government building. Plus, let’s face it, a tennis racket looks more convincing to play air guitar with than a badminton racket.

The courts I played at were public courts at the public university where my parents worked and they were usually fully occupied in the evenings and weekends.

The first and only coach I had was Mr Yong when I was 13 years old – he was a fit middle-aged physical education lecturer who gathered a handful of us children (all boys) of university lecturers to teach us the basics of the game.

My dad had VHS video tape recordings of full Grand Slam tennis finals and I would watch them religiously almost every day. My favourite was the 1988 Australian Open final between local favourite Pat Cash and cool world number 1 Swede Mats Wilander (Wilander won in five sets).

While I was a diligent fan, I failed to realise that professional sports required not only dedication by the person but also the entire supporting system that surrounds them from parents to coaches to trainers – stuff that costs a lot of money privately if functional national infrastructures and sport associations don’t chip in.

Nevertheless, I carried on with my naivete and participated in district tournaments representing my school and competed with players my age who were way better than me.

One thing that most of my opponents always told me at the end of the match when we shook hands at the net (me on the losing end most of the time) was: “Good sportsmanship”.

While I prided myself on this quality initially, in hindsight it explained why I sucked as a sportsman: Winning wasn’t everything to me and psychologically I was never prepped with a winning plan.

I had all the chops – my game is what most call the “classic” style and I mimicked my hero Pete Sampras to the point my friends nicknamed me “Sampras”.

As I started also playing age group tennis tournaments with my friends with most of us only going as far as the second round of qualifying rounds, it dawned on me that I was too nice a guy to be in sports.

I may have stopped playing competitively but I never lost my love for the sport (I still play “air tennis” at home). I found solace in rock music and movies in the final years of high school and never looked back.

Fast-forward a couple of decades later, I am the lecturer-adviser for my students’ tennis “society” – these were university students who were national and state players who really had the build and chops but did not pursue the sports professionally.

I asked them why and one of them gave me a personal experience: When the tennis team played abroad or out of town, usually the officials from the national or state associations that represented the sport were given priority first and individual rooms; the players had to duke it out in crowded hostel rooms and were essentially given second-class treatment.

One of these students was also coached by a former national player who smoked cigarettes during training and was pot-bellied as he sat and instructed them to run around the court.

Hardly ground-breaking news for most of us for sure, but this is why sports in Malaysia will go nowhere: Just like our politics, these associations and bodies are self-serving, not in service of.

The coaches, who tend to be former national players, are fine. The bureaucracy isn’t. I see the parallels with the music industry: It’s not the players that benefit although they are the faces of the profession – they become tools for the suits upstairs to exploit.

With the latest brouhaha around town , it’s encouraging to see our sportswomen and sportsmen standing up – if sports is about the triumph of the human spirit, autonomy and endurance, then more should speak their minds and negotiate their terms (or sever their ties) with a system that seems to favour the whims of bureaucracy (both local and internationally).

Think about it: Why do badminton players have to don national T-shirts unlike other individual sports like tennis?

Sports has always been a racket (no, not racquet) where those who make the most money aren’t the women and men who give their all on the court.

Sometimes sportsmanship has no place in sports when you’ve got your back to the wall against an exploitative system. – January 28, 2022.

* Azmyl Yunor is a touring underground recording artiste, and an academic in media and cultural studies. He has published articles on pop culture, subcultures and Malaysian cultural politics. He adheres to the three-chords-and-the-truth school of songwriting, and Woody Guthrie’s maxim “All you can write is what you see”. He is @azmyl on Twitter.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.