If the world can handle Tur-Duck-Ken then it can handle Racketlon.
Tur-Duck-Ken is the ingenious creation of stuffing a chicken into a duck into a turkey and filling it with stuffing. You can’t go wrong with you add all the best birds into one super meal.

I’m drooling already:

Racketlon
Racketlon is the best of all racquet sports (in my opinion) combined into one super competition. The concept combines tennis, badminton, ping-pong, and squash into a match by each competitor playing a bit from each sport. A racketlon match contains four sets, one in each sport. Each set is played to 21 points, much like in table tennis, but the total winner of a racketlon match is not the one that wins most sets but the one that scores the most points in total. The winner is the best all round racket player.

Not Quite Ready Yet
There are tournaments for Racketlon that are held in cities around the world. There is one in Victoria, BC every October. Victoria is a 1.5 hour ferry ride from Vancouver. October is just around the corner but I’m not quite ready to enter yet even though there are varying levels of competition. I have played all the racquet sports except for squash. I can hit a squash-like shot in tennis but that’s about it. Sadly, I don’t know anyone that plays squash even though I have access to a squash court at the apartment building. I played badminton in high-school and some university but it’s been a few years. Once you have the basic skills, it only takes a session or two to get back into the groove. Ping-pong is the same situation for me in that I haven’t played in years but I did play throughout my childhood so the basics are there. Most kids had a ping-pong table in their garage. Most software companies have ping pong tables as well for the computer geeks to de-stress. Tennis is my best sport so that won’t be a problem.

One Year to Get Ready
My goal is to give the racketlon tournament a shot in October of 2008. By then, I should have played a few dozen games of squash and dust off the rust for ping pong and badminton. Check out the Racketlon site to see if there’s a tournament close to your town.