Feet are my thing. I’m talking about sporting aptitude rather than fetish. From time to time, in streets around the world, balls of various sizes bounced my way. My inclination has always been to control them with my feet rather than catch them in my hands.

Basketball tends to leave me cold. It’s an alien culture: the culture of hands. Similarly, I’ve never been taken with volleyball. My initiation to that sport came one Saturday afternoon in Africa with a bunch of Peace Corps volunteers.

At the risk of undermining the reputation of the Peace Corps, I must confess large quantities of beer were consumed on the sidelines as we rotated the sporting participants. I dreaded my call-up to the court, viewing it as an unnecessary interruption to my drinking. For everyone else, the drinking was merely something to do while they impatiently awaited their return to the game.

When it was my turn to play, I discovered that punching a volleyball with your fist hurts. I was torn between wanting to contribute to the team and my natural instinct to avoid pain. The latter won. My hapless display earned me the “least valuable player” award. The prize was a bottle of beer. (The “most valuable player” was given the volleyball. He can keep it, as far as I’m concerned.)

Years later, jetlagged in a Thai hotel room at 4 a.m., I was flicking through the TV channels and found two teams lining up for what seemed to be an indoor volleyball match in front of a huge, enthusiastic crowd.

I was about to flick to another channel when something remarkable happened. The server lobbed the ball to a teammate, who kicked it over the net. One of the three-man opposing team kicked it back. Thus began a rally in which not a single hand was used, only feet.

I had stumbled across a recorded match of sepak takraw, a sport that superficially resembles volleyball, though in fact it evolved separately more than 500 years ago. Sepak means “kick,” takraw means “ball.” Kickball. It seemed like my kind of game. I cracked a beer from the minibar and settled down to watch Thailand versus Malaysia.

For the next hour I was entranced. I had often wished sports could be as exciting as the TV advertising trailers that condense a season’s worth of spectacular plays into 30 thrilling seconds.

Sepak takraw was like an extended version of one of those ads. Spectacular plays came around every couple of minutes. Each flurry of balletic action was composed almost entirely of breathtaking feats of agility. Most notable was a move called the roll spike in which the player executes an overhead kick and then lands on his feet.

I would later discover that sepak takraw is popular throughout Southeast Asia. It is usually played on appropriated badminton courts and utilizes a purpose-made ball (sized midway between a tennis ball and a soccer ball) made from rattan.

After my second minibar beer, I was comprehensively converted into a sepak takraw fan. Watching was one thing, but did I have what it takes to play the game? There, in the privacy of my hotel room, I decided to find out.

As I said, I was jetlagged — a condition not aided by beer. My attempts to master the roll spike probably woke whoever was in the room beneath mine. If, in their rudely awakened state, they wished ill on me, their wish was soon granted.

My bare foot connected with the edge of the wooden wardrobe. Pain is common to all sporting codes and to all anatomical extremities.

I screamed a silent scream.