Inducted in 1993. Joe Alston is a San Diego High and San Diego State grad. Joe won 12 badminton national championships and was ranked number one nationally 28 times. He played on eight United States Thomas Cup teams and coached the 1978-79 team. He had a distinguished 30-year career with the FBI.
Biography
Weekdays, he worked at throwing a net over kidnappers, skyjackers and extortionists. Nights and weekends, he played over the net.
Sort of like Robert Culp’s character in the espionage adventure “I Spy,” Joe Alston was an agent with a racket, and a cover boy at that. An operative with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Alston became one of the world’s best badminton players, so accomplished his picture adorned the front of a young magazine named “Sports Illustrated.”
The biggest difference between him and Culp’s TV character was that when Alston traveled to such exotic locations as Indonesia, Singapore, Japan and Europe, it was as a real player. His game wasn’t his cover, but his passion. Indeed, at the international level, it’s no picnic.
In 1952, playing in the sauna-like atmosphere of a Malayan arena yet covering the court like a hummingbird, Alston won the final match to give the United States a 5-4 vicgtory over India for the Thomas Cup, badminton’s equivalent of the Davis Cup. His career was so filled with such feats which included eight national doubles titles and eight times top-ranked in singles.
It’s especially fitting, since the Hall of Champions is housed in Balboa Park-just steps away from Municipal Gym where Alston learned and refined his game. Growing up in Hillcrest in the 1930s, the young Alston hurriedly rode his bicycle almost daily to play at Muni, knowing he’d always find good competition.
“The place was jammed,” says Alston, 65 at the time and resident of Solana Beach. “You couldn’t get a court after noon.”
San Diego was such a hotbed of the sport, in fact, that Alston is the fourth badminton player installed in the Hall of Champions. Alston was preceded by his lifetime friend and rival, Dr. Dave Freeman, inducted in 1958; Evelyn Boldrick Howard (‘75); and Marten Mendez (‘81).
Alston’s wife, Lois, still played badminton regularly in Balboa Park. Married 42 years, they met on a badminton court at Hoover High. A devastating mixed-doubles pair, they used to practice for three hours in a Los Angeles gym while young sons Nick and Tony slept under the bleachers.
Quite naturally, then, Tony became a badminton player who’s been ranked as high as No. 2 nationally. His occupation, not coincidentally, is an FBI agent.
Joe and Lois, both alums of San Diego State, were married the day after his 1951 graduation from the FBI Academy at Quantico, VA. Alston already had claimed his first national championship in badminton.
“In my day, a lot of agents were athletes,” Alston says. “They were either attorneys or jocks-All-America football players, basketball players. That had a lot to do with their success in the Bureau. From sports, you learn to hang in there on an investigation.
“Most athletes tend to approach everything in life like a game, not in the sense of fun, but competition. I never realized that about myself until a lunch the guys gave me for my 25th anniversary with the Bureau. My ex-partner got up and said I approached every investigation like a game I wanted to win.”
Those first 10 years of Alston’s career, the game was more like a chase. His original assignment was finding fugitives, deserters, et. al. He was always looking for a good game, too, not an easy quest for a young agent assigned to Fargo, ND. Lacking anyone else, he and his wife played each other, sometimes making the snowy, 250-mile drive to Winnipeg, Manitoba, to play at a badminton club.
Transferred to Detoir, Alston looked up his childhood buddy, Dave Freeman, then a med student at the University of Michigan. Freeman had retired from petition to devote himself to becoming a physician.
“We met socially, but I had it in the back of my mind to get Dave back into playing,” says Alston. “Biggest mistake I ever made.”
Alston placed second in the 1953 Nationals. He lost the championship match to Dave Freeman. ”Dave was by far the best player the world’s ever seen, and I’ve seen ‘em all,” says Alston. “I’ve played him hundreds, thousands of times, so I know.”
What Alston had over Freeman, though, was the perfect job for a player. Like the military, the FBI allows its agents to take leave almost an hour at a time. Alston could be off winning the U.S. Open one weekend, then off winning the All-England Championships, or just off on a photo shoot for a national magazine.
“It was good for the Bureau, too, in that I had no extended leaves,” says Alston. “I was in the Bureau 15 years before I took a legitimate vacation. I’d used up all my leave on badminton. But I can honestly say I never hit a bird on government time.”
In 1967 Alston was promoted to coordinator of kidnapping, extortion and skyjacking with the major-case squad in Los Angeles. Information culled by Alston’s crew helped crack the Patty Hearst case.
“I never had a day,” says Alston, “where I got up and said, ‘I don’t want to go to work today.’” Was there ever a day he didn’t want to play badminton? “Yeah. A lot of times.”
He remembers a conversation he once had with J. Edgar Hoover, founder and chief of the FBI. “Mr. Hoover knew of me and would ask me how my game was going,” said Alston. “I said, ‘My game’s OK, but they’re making the court bigger these days.’ He said, The court isn’t getting bigger. You’re getting slower.’”
Alston’s own FBI career ended a dozen years ago, but he’s still putting his specialty to work representing a group that sells extortion and kidnapping insurance to companies. “Essentially, we’re taking victims by the hands in kidnapping and extortion cases,” Alston says, “Once very six weeks or so, I’m going somewhere in the world.”
Six months ago, he was in Rio de Janeiro, helping solve an extortion case. More recently, Alston says, he spent five days in Oslo, Norway, preparing a courier to drop off money to an extortionist who was threatening to set fires ona cruiseship line. “Everything happened that we told (the courier) would happen,” says Alston. “The authorities captured the guy, who turned out to be a Norewegian ferry-boat captain.”
Whose racket was up.
Author: Chris Jenkins, San Diego Union-Tribune, February 8, 1993
Statistics/Achievements
Won 12 national championships (men’s singles in 1951 and 1955, men’s doubles in 1951-53, 1955, 1961-1962, 1964 and 1967, mixed doubles in 1953 and 1954). Ranked No. 1 nationally 28 times: 8 singles, 14 doubles, 6 mixed. Made cover of Sports Illustrated in 1955; the only badminton player ever honored. In 1956, elected to Helms National Badminton Hall of Fame. In 1959, won the Ken Davidson Award for Sportsmanship and Achievement. The first adult tournament he won was the Men’s Single Championship of San Diego County at age 14, when he defeated Marten Mendez in the finals.
