One morning last summer, I played tennis with two friends at the John J. Carty tennis courts in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. About halfway through our session, dozens of seniors invaded what looked like four child-sized tennis courts next to ours. Wielding rectangular paddles, the seniors formed doubles teams and threw plastic balls back and forth across the nets, producing a loud, exhilarating noise. pop-pop-pop her. They were playing pickleball, a sport that began as a 1960s backyard pastime and has become a craze in the United States in recent years. Given the small fields and the slow speed of the ball, players did not need to move very far in any direction to maintain a good rally. They looked like they were having a lot of fun. Of course the sound was almost unbearable, and of course I had heard of pickleball and its controversies – even then it was impossible to ignore. But I enjoyed seeing older people get out and be active.
Today, I am amazed at my naivety. Pickleball may have started as a casual pastime attracting older adults with limited mobility, yes. But I learned how broad his ambitions are — to the detriment of tennis, which has lost public courts across the country to the kudzu-like spread of pickleball. Every week, new stories emerge across the country about tennis courts disappearing because of pickleball. I am one of the legions of tennis players who are watching these developments with growing concern. An atmosphere of crisis permeates the online tennis forums I frequent. It’s an issue that literally resonated with me: A group of residents in my hometown in Massachusetts sued the city to prevent pickleball from being played on a local middle school’s tennis courts, citing noise. They even hired a noise control consulting firm to measure the sound, which assessed that it emits an extremely high frequency that can cause stress and anxiety. An online petition on the subject describes the sound as a “giggle through a megaphone.” Another online petition denounces a new plan to destroy part of a skate park popular with local teenagers. And this, in a single town of 35,000 inhabitants.
Some might view all this angst as an overreaction. But there’s something about the pickleball conundrum that heightens emotions. His insistence on growth at all costs transformed leisure into a zero-sum competition for resources. It’s no wonder the conflict turned sour: Police were called to an altercation between tennis and pickleball players in San Diego in August. The chasm only seems to be widening. Pickleballers accuse tennis players of elitism and control; tennis players denounce the encroachment of pickleballers on their space. Even professional sports are not safe. The Tennis Channel, one of the few options that exists for watching professional tennis tours outside of Grand Slam tournaments, has begun showing more and more professional pickleball, even reducing tennis coverage to do so. At every turn, pickleball seems to target tennis in its ruthless quest for market share.
Am I an elitist snob, proving the pickleballers point? After all, it’s just a game. And any activity that gets people moving is a net good; think about the elderly people of Bay Ridge. If pickleball stayed in its own spaces and accepted that it was a game in the same category as, say, dodgeball, the tennis community would generally greet it with a shrug. I’m certainly not mad at squash or badminton. What is infuriating about pickleball is the demand that it be accepted as a sport of equal quality to tennis and therefore given carte blanche to appropriate tennis resources.
Of course, there is an aesthetic dimension to my aversion, but I don’t think it’s trivial. The rise of pickleball fills me with the same kind of unease as TikTok dance trends or new cryptocurrencies. Unintentionally, I started filing it into the “man-made horrors beyond my comprehension” folder because of data points like Stephen Colbert hosting a televised celebrity pickleball tournament called “Pickled”, or the existence of a restaurant and a pickleball chain called Chicken. N Pickle. (Coming soon to Henderson, Nevada.) I don’t mean to disparage Chicken N Pickle. In fact, I applaud them for building their own courts instead of colonizing the tennis courts. But I share David Foster Wallace’s judgment that tennis “is the most beautiful sport there is, and also the most demanding.” Pickleball is neither. The fact that it is not demanding has indeed played a determining role in its popularity. Reaching a decent level at tennis takes too much time and effort, pickleball fans say. The idea that some businesses are better precisely because they are more difficult has become a casualty of the breakdown of rigor and discipline in American culture. Pickleball is just a symptom.
If you follow the pickleball talk, you’re bound to come across Club Leftist Tennis, a Twitter and Substack account run by Michael Nicholas and Charlie Dulik. Nicholas, 28, and Dulik, 27, have become the main opponents of pickleball, which they described in a recent anti-pickleball manifesto as “a reactionary specter, a creature of the neoliberal era.” They argue that pickleball is a blatantly astronomical venture capital scam. Given the evidence, they may be right. Billionaire investor Tom Dundon, who bought a soccer startup in 2019 and shut it down two months later, now owns one of the professional pickleball leagues as well as a large e-commerce site selling rackets and tennis. material. Social media cultural influencer Gary Vaynerchuk (“Gary Vee”), last seen spending shillings on NFTs, recently purchased a team in one of the other professional leagues.
The worry is that the bubble won’t burst until enough local governments make the short-sighted decision to cut tennis. “Pickleball explicitly cannibalizes space for other sports in a way that I think wasn’t as permanent with racquetball,” Nicholas said, citing the racquetball trend of the 1980s. public tennis courts which are dismantled, “the concern is that they will not be diverted once the fashion has passed. » This doesn’t just concern tennis: public basketball courts have also been targeted, as well as children’s play areas.
Nicholas and Dulik question pickleball’s claims about its popularity, which have supported credulous media coverage of its growth. The number of new tennis players since 2019, both men point out, is close to the total number of pickleballers (both around 5 million). Sure, pickleball might be the fastest growing sport. But that oft-cited statistic “obscures the fact that this is really far from the realm of tennis popularity,” Dulik said. “It’s not even as popular as something like Ultimate Frisbee.”
But wait, some might ask. Isn’t tennis a pretentious country club sport for the rich, like squash or golf? That’s what Big Pickleball wants you to believe, and its media campaign has been effective. THE New York Times seems to produce products suitable for pickleball pieces on an almost weekly basis these days. “The pickleball narrative takes this perception of country club tennis and applies it to tennis writ large, when it’s really not representative of the people who play on public courts,” Nicholas said . According to the United States Tennis Association, 70% of American tennis players play the sport on public courts. And tennis is becoming more and more diverse: a survey this year reported double-digit growth in participation by black and Latino players. However, tennis has allowed pickleball to mythologize itself as the most democratic, welcoming and egalitarian racket sport. This despite scandals like the closure this fall of a beloved nonprofit tennis academy in Carson, Calif., where low-income children learned the sport, because the space will potentially be converted for pickleball.
I wanted to understand the pro-pickleball perspective, so I spoke with Thomas Shields, the thirty-year-old founder of the Dinner, a website and newsletter that covers sports. (A “dink” is a type of shot in pickleball.) Shields grew up in a family of tennis players who discovered pickleball a few years ago and became enthusiastic converts. Seeing the zeal displayed by those close to him, Shields saw a business opportunity and launched the Dinner two years ago. “There is immense passion within pickleball; people who play are completely obsessed with it,” Shields told me. “So that allowed us to build an audience pretty quickly and easily.
“The number of courts being built is incredible,” Shields said. “They say there are sixty-six new places to play in the United States every month. And that doesn’t include garden courts and tennis courts, where people just lay down lines.
Triggered by this idea, I made a face. Shields reassured me that he fully knew and understood the reaction of the “tennis purists.” He had tangled with the Leftist Tennis Club on Twitter, first thinking they were satirical, then blocking them once he realized they were very serious. But if I were to just try pickleball, he said, I’d get it. I asked him what made it so fun.
The learning curve is “pretty minimal,” he said. “You can learn it very quickly. And you can improve quickly. And so there’s this constant positive reinforcement, right? Understandable. But pickleball’s strength in this regard may ultimately prove its downfall. This minimal learning curve means that the gap between the recreational player and the professional player is much smaller than in tennis. Partly because of this dynamic, professional pickleball is, I can confirm, not fun to watch on TV. He lacks the movement, dynamism and explosiveness of tennis. It lacks its dramatic side. This is the downside of ease. “It’s so bad,” Dulik said of professional pickleball. “That’s when I’m most sure we’re right.”
Shields argued that the two sports can coexist peacefully, but he explained this in a way that I found little comfort. “I think most tennis players will eventually try it and see the appeal of it,” he said. He posited that up to 90 percent of pickleball players had some tennis experience and uttered the chilling words: “tennis is fueling the growth of pickleball.”
If tennis players want to stop serving as a manger for an inferior sport, they will need to study pickleball tactics and their ability to navigate local media and government coverage. The danger is real. Otherwise we will face a frightening dystopia of pop-pop-pop induced delirium, Chicken N Pickles on every street corner and the victory of comfortable mediocrity over standards and excellence.
This article was originally published in The spectatorThe December 2022 global edition.
