Indonesia mourns badminton legend
Zakki Hakim The Jakarta Post Jakarta
Indonesian badminton legend, Ferdinand Alexander Sonneville, better known as Ferry Sonneville, the founder of the Badminton Association of Indonesia (PBSI) and former president of the International Badminton Federation (IBF), died on Thursday, after a long battle with leukemia.
Ferry, aged 72, died at 5:20 a.m. at MMC Hospital in Kuningan, Jakarta, on Thursday. His body will be laid out at Dharmais Hospital and will be cremated on Saturday.
He is survived by a wife, two daughters and two grandchildren. Ferry married Yvonne Theresia in 1955 and they have two daughters Theresia Bryan-Sonneville and Cynthia Gwendolyn. The couple also had a son, Ferdinand Rudy, who died in 1976.
"What he has achieved in his life would be very hard for anyone to contest," Christian Hadinata, said to The Jakarta Post.
Christian said that it was very rare for an athlete to be successful both on and off the court.
"I really respected him for being very successful in the badminton and academic world," said the three-times All England men's doubles champion.
Ferry, who graduated from the Nederlandse Economische Hogeschool, now Erasmus University, in 1963, won several international badminton championships during the 1950s and 1960s, including the Dutch Open (1955-1961), French Open (1956, 1959) and Canadian Open (1962).
His most memorable game was probably the 1964 Thomas Cup in Tokyo when Ferry played Erland Kops of Denmark in the men's singles. He almost gave up in the second set after he lost the first.
The second half when Kops reached match point 14 while Ferry was trailing at six was filled with suspense. Ferry dropped to his knees on the court and prayed for strength. Ferry turned the tables miraculously to eventually beat Kops and the Indonesia team won the Cup for the third time consecutively after 1958 and 1961. He repeated the success in 1967.
After he retired as a badminton player, he chaired the PBSI from 1981 to 1985 and chaired the IBF for three working terms from 1971 to 1974.
While he was chairman of the international federation, he initiated the introduction of badminton as an exhibition game in the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, West Germany when the game was little known.
Apart from his achievements as a sportsman, he was an official at Bank Indonesia and a businessman in the property sector. He led the Indonesian Real Estate Developers Association (REI) from 1985 to 1988.
Ferry once said, "Winning and losing are the colors of sport. Looking realistically at our lives make us always try our best to achieve success, but at the same time also makes us able to accept defeat. It's the art of life, which is very fundamental."