Diamond No Ace: The Ultimate Representation of In-Team Rivalry in Sports Manga.
“We need to get stronger. For all those who weren’t chosen. » Yūki Tetsuya
In 2014 was released Whiplash. This movie relates how a gifted drummer named Andrew Neiman came to enrol in at Shaffer, an impressive jazz band led by Terence Fletcher. Ruthless, the latter does hold his troop with an iron fist. Neiman is not exempt from this scheme. Aware of how talented Neiman can be, Fletcher will not hesitate to push him to his limit to draw the best of him. One of the methods he uses is to put the young drummer in competition with one, then two other drummers.
This last method used in the movie is what we call « In-team rivalry », that is the fact to put in the competition two or more people for a given position.
« In-team rivalry» is displayed in every sphere of society. But if we should retain one sphere in which it predominantly prevails, it’d be team sports.
Whether it was competitively or leisurely, each one of us has at least played one collective sports once in their lifetimes (If you have not, where have you been?). Like many people, I enrolled in Football team when I was 7 or 8 years old and rapidly decided to give up for one simple reason: I rarely played matches given the number of people in my club. Football is intrinsically a collective sport, but only eleven players will have the opportunity to play the vast majority of the match. Same kind of story for Basketball, Rugby and so on…
The only way to play is thus to surpass your teammates. Proving to your coach that you deserve to be on the starter lineup and reaching the bitter conclusion that doing so will crush your direct teammate’s dream to achieve yours.
In mangas whose main theme is sports, « In-team rivalry » does not appear to broached that much. In fact, sports manga often pay more attention to rivalries between teams. In Eyeshield 21, this is the Demons Devil Bat against Ojo White Knights. In Haikyuu!!, this is Karasuno against Nekoma. And if « In-team rivalry » is not that shown, it is, in my opinion due to the repetitive nature of the plot specific to sports manga. Advocating effort and transcendence, the author of the genre usually makes start their main characters in a very weak team. In Slam Dunk, the protagonist, Hanamichi Sakuragi, rapidly makes it to the starting lineup of his team while being a total beginner at Basketball. This weekness is often accompanied to a lack of members in the club — a significant element which does not permit the main character to be in competition with a teammate who has the same position as him.
However, « in-team rivalry » definitely exists in sports manga and its most beautiful example is Diamond No Ace (Ace of Diamond).
Serialized since 2006 in the Weekly Shonen Magazine, Yuji Terajima’s manga is all about baseball and if you were not aware of it, the latter sport is a huge matter in Japan, to the point of being the most popular collective sport in the archipelago. And this popularity goes well beyond the Japanese Baseball professional world, but also touch on the High School level. Each summer, hundreds of high school baseball teams try to reach the Kōshien, the National High School Baseball Championship, under the eyes of millions of people. Like many mangakas before him, Yuji Terajima took the latter tournament as the main theme of his manga while not forgetting to integrate « in-team rivalry » in it.
Eijun Sawamura is the main character of the show. After the defeat of his local middle school team during a tournament, Sawamura is scooted by Takashima Rei who asks him if he wants to enrol in the baseball team of Seido High School situated in Tokyo. Unwilling at first, the pitcher finally accepts the proposition — moved by the battery he formed with Kazuya Miyuki, the catcher of Seido, during a visit at the school.
Scooting is obviously reserved to the top team and this is exactly what Seido is. Far from being a third-rate team, Seido is a powerhouse capable of attracting the best middle schoolers thanks to its reputation of having qualified for the Kōshien a great number of times. Sawamura, therefore, enrols in a team which could largely go well without him.
Which is firstly striking with Seido is its impressive number of players. However, among these 60 members, only 20 of them will be part of the first string and subsequently participate in the tournaments. Before being an ace, Sawamura will have to grab a position in the first string, which is not easy stuff.
How to say that? At the beginning of the manga, Sawamura, well, kind of sucks. His pitching is good, but out of control. He does not know how to bat properly. And to make things worse, he appears to be oblivious of the majority of Baseball rules (Same here actually, I’ve actually watched the three seasons of the show, and still don’t half of the baseball rules…). Despite being talented, Sawamura intrinsically remains a rough diamond who will have to battle against himself to but also against another member having the same dream as him: Furuya.
Unlike Sawamura, Furuya is a monster rookie, capable of pitching a ball up to 150 km…but has a very bad control of it. Targetting the role of ace, Furuya is the direct rival of Sawamura.
The dynamic between the two is one of the most interesting that I’ve ever seen. At first, both were only considering the ace position as a trophy. To sum up, being an ace only meant to be the best. However, as the series goes on, Furuya and Sawamura gradually go beyond this paradigm; understanding that being an ace is someone who carries the hopes and dreams of his teammates.
And responsibility is a significant theme in Diamond No Ace. In each page, Terajima takes care of showing that being on the pitch means carrying responsibilities, not only of your teammates but also of those who have not made the first string. And being in the latter is no sheer luck. More than being good at games, one has to be great at training. As Yuki Tetsuya said to Sawamura: “We need to get stronger. For all those who weren’t chosen. »
Thank you for reading this article. Until next time!
