A unique character
Former player Robert Richards celebrates Garth King’s legacy
Published:Sunday | April 2, 2023 | 10:20 AMDaniel Wheeler - Staff Reporter
FROM CHILDHOOD friends to elite players, sports administrators and business partners.
As tributes poured in to celebrate the life of former All-Jamaica badminton champion Garth King, another former player, Robert Richards, remembered him as a unique character on the field who blazed a trail on the court and helped the sport’s development off it.
King, who died on March 23 at the age of 74, ascended to the highest level of the sport in Jamaica, becoming an All-Jamaica singles, doubles, and mixed-doubles champion in 1986; a Caribbean men’s doubles champion; as well as a doubles quarter-finalist in the US Open badminton tournament in 1985.
Richards and King’s four-decades-long friendship coincided with their rise to the top of the sport in the ‘80s. It was a friendship that started when Richards first met King at 17 at the Shortwood Giants Badminton Club.
“At that time, he was one of these senior players in the A division and I was a junior division player. That friendship developed and, in a year, I also became a top player. When I left school, I started to work with Garth part-time in the computer business. That later became a full-time job,” Richards told The Sunday Gleaner.
STRICT PERSON
“He was a strict person for discipline and he took training and his work career seriously. Everything was methodical. He brought a fitness level to the sport of badminton that we probably hadn’t seen before, and he was instrumental in developing how physically fit the national badminton players became, because he set standards that, if the other players didn’t keep up with, they would have been left behind.”
What he remembered most about King was his personality on the court, with traits similar to former tennis champion John McEnroe.
“Garth had his moments on the court where his temperament would create a lot of buzz and excitement for the spectators, whether his outbursts or his joking or mocking, whether it’s the umpire or the opponent, or people in the crowd,” Roberts said.
“And that added a new dimension to the sport at the time. I don’t think, since then, we have had what I call a unique character.”
It was not just the stellar play on the court that was revered but also what he did to test his and other players’ abilities outside of the region in tournaments in the United States and Canada, believing in the talent that Jamaicans possessed
“In the early ‘80s, we decided to form the Constant Spring Badminton Club and built a club around and developed sponsorships where we left Jamaica and started to play out of the region like the US Open, the Canadian Open and Miami Open. We spread the wings for our players to come and we started to see what I would consider real badminton,” Richards said.
“We wanted to take the sport to the next level and he was instrumental in having that done. His thing was always if the top players around the world can do it, why can’t we?”
Richards served two terms as Jamaica Badminton Association president, with King joining his administration in his second spell in 2014 as the financial controller. Pushing each other both on and off the court, Richards said his dedication to the sport was never in question, something that will be missed.
“He was someone that was dedicated to excellence. He never went and did anything half-heartedly. Anything he went into, he went into it full guns blazing. Whether all of them were successful or not, he was a person who strived for excellence in whatever he did.”