I noted about last week’s episode of Ryman’s Club that it was very encouraging.  Why?  Because (almost) absent its best character, it still managed to be very good.  I stand by that, but the truth is this show is definitely better with that character around.  Tatsu has the most interesting story among the core cast (for me at least).  But above and beyond that it’s all about Miki Shinichirou.  I’m not impartial about this guy – he’s a phenomenal actor as far as I’m concerned.  But never more so than when it comes to humanizing a character (he and Hirata Hiroaki may be about the best I’ve ever heard in that respect).

This is the sort of story sports anime can really excel at in the right hands.  And these are proving to be pretty good hands indeed.  Tatsu’s injury turns out to be his ACL (anterior cruciate ligament), the bane of professional athletes across a broad spectrum of sports.  It doesn’t fix itself, either.  Depending on the nature of the damage (unspecified here) surgery can be an option.  But it’s a long and grueling rehab, with no guarantees of ever being the same again.  And that’s all amplified when it’s an “old man” of 32 like Tatsu.

I was glad Mikoto found out about this, and it didn’t get dragged out.  That’s a good trait with Ryman’s Club – it gets to the point and deals with stuff pretty quickly.  I’d thought maybe Tatsu was on his way to a specialist or surgeon, but it’s actually a Kyoto meeting with his old partner Izumo.  He bailed on Sunshine as soon as they got promoted to the top league, as it happened – and Mitsuhashi tried to poach Tatsu at the same time.  He’s concerned that it was his worsening knee issues that drove Izumo off, but it seems more about simple ambition.

The complicated part of all this is that Tatsu has basically kept playing specifically because of Mikoto, who he remembered from their meetings at the “hippo playground”.  In fact he specifically sold the coach at Sunshine to take a chance on Mikoto.  Those sessions were not a one-off, it seems – the two became friends, and they meant to a lot to a boy burned out on continually being uprooted by his family.  He’d forgotten the details of course, but after an assist from his mom’s iguana (who got his room, remember) they come back to him.  And the rest, as they say, is history.

There’s a lot that’s implied about this relationship.  We never see Mikoto’s father, or hear tell of him.  There are gaps in his life skills that suggest Mikoto never had a male role model to fill them in.  In other words, there’s a reason why Tatsu means something to Mikoto – then and now.  I like the fact that this is mostly left unsaid – it implies a certain trust in the audience, and it’s pretty authentic to how male relationships usually usually work.

The reconciliation between those two was handled perfectly.  Just enough drama, just enough reserve.  The matter of Tatsu’s knee remains a significant problem, though.  Again, we don’t know the nature of his injury but it might be asking a lot to rely on a change of style to get past it.  That said, it’s obvious that Tatsu has been playing a very high-impact style of badminton, so maybe in doubles there’s room to tweak things.  He’s been referred to Nakamori-sensei, a coach who’s dealt with the loss of his right leg, for guidance in adapting to his circumstances.  Nakamori seems like a smart guy but this is a big ask. even if a bum knee is nothing compared to what he’s had to deal with.  Still – athletes with long careers have to adjust to their physical decline as they get older, so that part is plenty realistic.

The one potentially off element is the business with the badminton-hating executive director.  It has the feel of tacked-on drama potentially, though that’s all conjecture at this point.  I’m not going to assume the worst there – it’s hardly been intrusive at about a minute per episode, and Ryman’s Club has shown a pretty deft touch with all its other plot threads so far.  We’ve jumped all the way to the semi-finals of the S/J League (vs. Unisics), which skipped an awful lot of action – so it’s worth remembering that Ryman’s Club still has three episodes left.  Very few sports anime have managed to satisfyingly wrap a story in one cour, but Ryman’s Club looks like it has a chance to be a rare exception.