As I suspected after last week’s episode, it looks as if the duty of the prodigy is going to be a major theme of Ooi! Tonbo going forward. Days of Diamond is tackling it pretty brilliantly in the manga world right now. And if you want to go further afield both in time and space, Searching For Bobby Fischer (both the book and the movie) is one of the best examples of the sub-genre (if not the best). That one is about chess, and while there’s some disagreement over whether that’s a sport (officially it is, and I agree), whether you believe it is or not the issues on the table are very similar to what we see here.
Tonbo is 15, huh? I would have pegged her as younger based both on her appearance and her personality. She certainly acts like a little kid when it comes to the wedge games Igaiga taught her, much to the chagrin of Gon-ji. Three days is plenty of time for Tonbo to get pretty good with the bouncing ball trick, but she’s not quite at the level where she can perform the grand finale – whacking the ball straight down the middle out of midair. But at the Gon & Killua-like rate at which she’s advancing that’s probably a given by next Tuesday.
She’s also been practicing (though mercifully outdoors in this case) the two ball trick. To wit, keeping the club face in the hitting zone long enough to hit two balls straight. Except now she can do it with the two balls twice as far apart as what Igaiga showed her (about six ball widths). Igaiga notices, to his amazement, that Tonbo’s right arm is slightly longer than her left. In point of fact most humans are way more asymmetrical than they realize, but this specific quirk is beneficial to a right-handed golfer for reasons Igaiga explains far better than I ever could.
More hijinks ensue – that “nut” trick was pretty cruel and even by Tonbo’s standards juvenile (my landlady had a goat – don’t ask – so I’d never have been fooled). But for Igaiga, watching Tonbo swing a club is serious and fascinating business. Even if she’s hitting baseballs with it, as she does after she and the village hottie Youko-san (who Bunpei is crushing on) emerge from the public bath. She understands things instinctively it took him years – and failed attempts at Q-school – to figure out. Youko declares she wants to take up golf herself, and I’m vibing a possible attraction between she and Igaiga. Stay tuned on that score (Bunpei will obviously be pissed, but I’m keenly curious to see how Tonbo would react).
In addition to all the tricks she learned just through the hardship of the three-iron, Tonbo has learned much of her golf skill from daily life (like the rope trick). And when Gon-ji brings in an aya (the part the shark didn’t eat) – a kind of grouper called “kue” in most of Japan – she flashes her knife skills again. She’s referred to her sashimi shot before, and it simply reflects the way she takes what she knows about the perfect angle to slice every kind of fish and applies to to manipulating a golf ball by the angle of the club face at impact. If you know anything about golf, you know how hard shit like that really is.
All this adds up to something. As fun as this is for him, Igaiga is a professional golfer. He knows what that means. And he realizes the single most important element that’s missing from Tonbo’s golf experience. There’s no sense of competition whatsoever. This is symbolized in a rather lovely tic-tac-toe scene in a bunker sheltering from a sudden downpour, but it boils down to the fact that for Tonbo, winning or losing at golf is not even part of the equation. It never occurs to her to be better than anyone, and certainly no one on the island is going to challenge her.
This is a difficult subject to be sure. Tonbo loves golf as she defines it. She has no desire for more. Does she have the raw ability to be special at the sport? Obviously, yes. Igaiga sees the waste in letting that talent go unrecognized, that brilliance not applied towards competition. But Tonbo doesn’t care about any of that. And why should she, if she’s having fun? Does she owe the world the opportunity to experience her genius – or owe it to herself to achieve greatness with it? Wasting her potential is ultimately her decision, but is doing what she does now really wasting it? She doesn’t think so, Igaiga does. And that’s already starting to be a source of conflict between them.
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