Indonesia might have not placed an athlete in the Guinness Book of Records had it not been for Liem Swie King - and not Rudy Hartono.

King lost to Rudy in the finals of the 1976 All England badminton championship allowing the latter to win the sport's most prestigious men's singles title an unprecedented eight times and with it a special chapter in the Guinness Book of Records.

The final match pitting the two badminton greats against each other on March 26, 33 years ago at Wembley Arena in London, turned out to be a far cry from what the spectators and pundits had expected. King looked like a pale shadow in comparison to his previous performances in the semifinal and quarter-final in which he prevailed over Sweden's Sture Johnson and Danish ace Svend Pri with consummate ease.

King, then 20 years old, Rudy's junior by seven years, hardly used his famous lethal weapon - King's jumping smash -his trademark move which had given rise to wild speculation that the match was rigged.

King, who was at the top of his career that year, was surprisingly lethargic as he committed a string of unforced errors such as driving the shuttle into the net or hitting long over the line.

And, as if to add insult to injury, time and time again he made feeble returns at the net enabling Rudy to easily score point after point.

Rudy, known for his subtle and classy style of play and a rich repertoire of strokes, took the first game 15-7. The second game followed much the same pattern as the first, with King failing to emulate the form that earned him resounding straight set victories over Johnson and Pri.

He did, however, momentarily show off his jumping smashes, which invited applause from the crowd, but they were few and far between. King lost the second set 15-5.

In total King committed 15 unforced errors, six in the first set and nine in the second - a strange and unusual record indeed for a player known for calculated efficiency and speedy recovery.

All in all, a disturbing question then surfaced: Did King deliberately "give in" to Rudy by conceding defeat? Was there an underlying motive, a sort of politicking behind the scenes?

This had been shrouded in mystery until last month during the launching of book Panggil Aku King (Call Me King), a biography of Liem Swie King written by Robert Adhi Kusumaputra in Jakarta, when a former senior official from the Badminton Association of Indonesia (PBSI) made things somewhat clear.

"I couldn't say that King threw the match away, but had Rudy lost we would not have had our own athlete in the Guinness Book," said the official who refused to be identified.

In the popular "Kick Andy" TV talk show recently, host Andy Noya asked King whether he did lose or whether he had deliberately yielded to Rudy. "I lost to him, that's all", was King's calm and emotionless response.

Low-profile, quiet, soft spoken and somewhat enigmatic are King's personality traits known to his friends and the media. So his short answer, it seems, failed to reveal the mystery.

Whatever it is, Rudy's remarkable feat of winning the All England title eight times surpassed Danish legend Erland Kop's exploit of seven victories. And that's what the Indonesian camp wanted to achieve as the PBSI had initially hoped that Rudy could score the record in 1975 but he lost to old nemesis Pri in the final, depriving him of winning the title eight times in a row.

Another interesting episode in the annals of Indonesia's badminton history was the revelation made by another former national great shuttler, Iie Sumirat.

Iie was famous for his deceptive shots during his heyday in 1970s when he could claim a selected list of big names among his scalps including China's twin-terror Tang Hsien Hu who once beat King, and Hou Chia Chang, a conqueror of Pri. Iie disclosed how he and Rudy had helped King win the All England in 1978.

He told a local newspaper some time ago that Rudy had lobbied and asked him to help lift King's international ranking by paving the way for King winning the title.

"King is a young player with great potential so he deserved every chance that came his way", Iie said. Iie met King at the 1978 All England semifinal and he lost. "Frankly speaking, I could beat him because he was not in his good form, but I just followed what Rudy had asked me to do" he said. King eventually won the title beating Rudy in the final.

Rudy himself readily admitted that he "gave" the match. "But it was part of our strategy in anticipation of 1979 Thomas Cup finals and the possibility of China making its debut in the championships," he said.

At the time China was not yet a member of the International Badminton Federation (IBF), but it had loomed large and lurked dangerously as a powerful badminton country as aptly evidenced by Tang and Hou, who had been unbeaten in various tournaments before meeting their Waterloo at the hands of the "Dragon Killer" Iie Sumirat.

Back to the controversy surrounding the 1976 and 1978 All England finals, we may conclude that badminton, like many other sports, is not a corrupt-free domain despite the highly heralded motto "My game is fair play". However in the case of Rudy and King, what they did was not illegal as long as it was part of a strategy.

One of the most infamous shams in the sporting world was during the 1982 World Cup soccer finals when then West Germany and Austria deliberately played to a scoreless draw at the cost of Algeria, which, because of that result, failed to make the second round. That conspiracy was then labeled as a Prussian connection.

In big time professional boxing, which is full of tricks, intrigues and shams, Mohammad Ali's loss to an unrated and overlooked Leon Spinks in 1978 had many people raising their eyebrows. How could Ali, who was still fresh from dethroning George Foreman to reclaim the world heavyweight title, be beaten by a much smaller Spinks?

In a rematch, in which Ali received a purse twice as much he got from the first fight he easily defeated Spinks and regained the crown indirectly answering questions as to why he lost in their first meeting: It was money that counted in the long run.

So in a nutshell, once again, sport is not necessarily mean a pure reflection of sportsmanship as long as other factors like money and politics are implicated.

The writer is a journalist.

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