I didn’t quite get the pickleball backlash when the game took off during the pandemic. (All together now: “It’s the fastest-growing sport in the country!”) Back then, it was fashionable in tennis circles like mine to grumble about everything from the goofy name to the distracting pickleball lines that racket clubs painted onto our courts. I didn’t want to play “baby tennis,” but neither could I muster outrage over a trend that was getting millions of grannies moving. (Plus, having grown up on a pickle farm, I secretly liked the name.)
I chalked up the haterade to the easy target—pickleball practically makes fun of itself. As the sportswriter Rick Reilly once snarked in The Washington Post, “Any game that you can take up after breakfast and be pretty good at by lunch is not a sport.”
Then, unlike pickleball serves, I got a second chance. The bandwagon came back around when pickle crossed over from cultural oddity to obnoxious obsession, with Southeastern players outnumbering others. Courts cropped up in gated neighborhoods, and the poor homeowners closest to them now have to live with relentless popping noises—from the balls and the rotator cuffs. Homeowners’ associations and lawyers have gotten involved. Public tennis courts fill with pickleball foursomes who don’t know court etiquette, and they blast Bluetooth speakers and come scrambling into your rally chasing a ball. Indoor pickleball centers swarmed in, and it became a thing for them to stay open 24/7. Because pickle-ball is everywhere! At all times! The junkies are immune to shame.
When Tennis Channel began airing pickleball tournaments, it was the last straw. The game is a blight on society, crowding out the elegance and endurance of tennis with stationary dinkfests! As I fumed, a niggling voice piped up, reminding me that if I keep pounding away on a cement tennis court into my fifties and sixties, I’m surely headed for a double knee replacement. Still, I kept declining invitations to play pickle on principle.
Which is all to say, if even I ended up being coerced into playing pickleball, you will, too.
My noble defenses fell when a friend opened a pickleball club and implored our tennis crowd to play one night. “I love this so much!” squealed one former college player as she easily slammed the plastic Wiffle Ball–like orb down the throats of lesser athletes. Personally, I couldn’t get used to swatting ferociously at a ball only to see it travel all of ten feet. But my tennis stroke made my serve a weapon right away, and try as I might to stay jaded, I had to admit that the rapid-fire action worked up a sweat.
I went back the next week.
“So you like pickleball now?” the owner asked. I conceded only to the gospel of Elle Woods: that endorphins make people happy.
As the craze continues to grow with the advent of “pickle mall” franchises, it’s inevitable that someone will soon invite you to a birthday party at Chicken N Pickle, or Pickleball Kingdom, or some other sillily named spot. Or your friends will want you to play on vacation. (Don’t worry, they will bring extra paddles.) My advice: Go on, give it a try. When you do, you’ll discover one of the sport’s greatest virtues—that you don’t need to be sober to stand frozen behind the center line and tap the ball back. You can even play with a cocktail in hand. Pickled Ball, Open 24/7! We can all dink to that.
