BEIJING — When you really get down to it, what American Eva Lee and Canadian Anna Rice were doing was hitting 16 overlapping goose feathers embedded into a rounded cork base covered in thin leather back and forth.

Or playing badminton, to be less technical.

You remember the game your family sometimes played at backyard picnics with the net and plastic birdie and what looked like itty bitty tennis rackets, right?

Well, it is an Olympic sport. And the Chinese fans who literally packed into Beijing University of Technology Saturday loved every single minute of action.

Raucous cheering as well as ooh-ing and aah-ing were a constant backdrop while as many as three matches played simultaneously.

Fans screamed for autographs afterwards.

And a couple of them bumped and jumped to catch a wrist band Rice had thrown after an epic three-set victory.

"In this county, you are proud to say you are a badminton player," Belarus badminton-er Olga Konon said. "Because people, if you say 'I am a badminton player', they say 'wow, cool', not like in my country or in Europe where it is not that popular."

Badminton is their football, or at very least, their hockey. Bocog officials say tickets to table tennis and badminton went quicker than anything else, including basketball and gymnastics.

"Many of us played the badminton in youth," Beijing resident Changai Sun explained with help of an interpreter before Saturday's games. "I played for four years and loved playing."

Almost a Little League of badminton. Or Pee Wee Badminton.

For anybody like me, who up until 12 hours ago had never seen a single badminton game that did not include grilled meats and adult beverages, let me try to explain this game at an Olympic level.

Badminton is kind of like tennis - tennis with ADD.

Matches go at a frenetic pace with that shuttlecock moving much faster than you'd guess looking at that little birdie. Where badminton and tennis really differ is that the lightness of the shuttlecock makes it almost impossible to judge where it is going to land. So players are constantly having to reach behind them and try to control this very aerodynamic birdie.

The first one to 21 wins the set. Two sets win the match.

They change sides after sets and midway through the third if there is one as was the case with Lee and Rice. They battled deep into a third set, a historic feat since Lee became the first American woman to win a set in singles at an Olympics.

And Chinese fans appreciated that effort, showering them with a standing O.

"It's nice to have so many people appreciate the sport," Lee said. "At the U.S. Open, even at our best, it was like 400 people."

There were at least that many in the arena an hour beforehand, taking pictures and simply soaking in the atmosphere. Including 11-year-old Williams Wang from Shanghai.

He lists badminton next to tennis, soccer and basketball as his favorite sports. And, of course, he also plays. He tried to explain to me why this sport has such a huge following in China.

"It's fast. It's very fun. It takes lots of skill to play it well," Wang said. "And it's like tennis, it's very fair play."

Yes, the Chinese are serious about their badminton. They claim credit for invention. They do pretty well. And they love to watch.

Four years ago, in Athens, beach volleyball became the rage. Fans flocked to what were games within a party and a TV darling was born. Badminton has a chance to be that sport this Olympic year, a more subdued and clothed rage yet a rage nonetheless.

While not as raucous as, say, a beach volleyball crowd - I saw no evidence of a wave or string bikinis - a badminton match has a very Chinese feel. Almost like eating Peking Duck or visiting The Great Wall. It is something you should do while in China.

This is why Jim and Barrett Johnson decided to buy tickets.

I bumped into the father and son from Dallas before Saturday's matches began. What are the odds, right? I had simply been interested in what interested them.

"You would never see badminton in America," Barrett Johnson explained. "So we figured we might as well give it a shot."

Me too. And I kind of like the tennis with ADD.