One of my favorite summer events in New York City starts tomorrow, the US Open Tennis Championships. I wouldn’t say it’s a family tradition, but I have had memories at Flushing Meadows that have stuck with me over the years.
Whether it be seeing Roger Federer at his prime or the Jonas Brothers performing S.O.S. at the Arthur Ashe Kid’s Day, I feel a special connection to the tournament and consider it a “homecoming” every time I visit.
On the topic of tennis in recent years, an ever-enlarging elephant in the room has been made impossible to ignore, as it cast its shadow over the game as a whole - pickleball. Truthfully, as someone who has a hand in both tennis and pickleball, I feel like I am stuck in the middle between two factions at war with each other.
I have played pickleball and understood its appeal, but there is a lot to unpack before I explain my position.
Before we expand on pickleball, I have to personally state that besides the US Open, I have had a long personal history with tennis.
Tennis is my family’s sport. My dad was introduced to the game at a young age by his dad and many of the stories of his formative years revolved around playing at his local tennis courts back home in the Philippines. He keeps a scrapbook that documented his journey playing junior level competitve tennis back home. To him, it’s a personal storybook that brings back his best memories. Even later in life, he played recreationally until his knees told him that enough was enough.
Everyone with a “sports dad” can relate to some sort of childhood memory where they attempt to teach you their sport. Some kids and their dads threw around a football, others are given a mitt and a bat.
My dad handed me his racket. Beginning at the age of 6, my dad tried to teach me how to play tennis and truthfully, I didn’t learn shit. My father will say the same thing. To this day, I still can’t hit shit.
Where does pickleball fit into all this?
Even though I mentally put down the racket, my dad considered any and every which way to get my ass on a tennis court throughout my childhood and early adolescence. I remember “soft tennis” got big in Japan when I was in high school and he tried to order a set of balls, but was turned off by the cost of them. Before the pandemic hit, my dad ordered a pickleball starter pack and hit our local court. We found it to be very interesting. It’s similar in dynamics to tennis, but there is something more important about it beyond just pure mechanics.
Pickleball is the only way me and my dad can return a ball with each other. I have never held a rally between me and my dad on a tennis court until I picked up a pickleball paddle. For someone like my dad, pickleball is the bridge that was built a little too late, but still at the right time to make it right.
That being said, I don’t like the world of pickleball outside that little intimate bubble that me and my dad have.
I do not fall into the camp that calls pickleball “not a real sport,” but I despise the monster that is professional-level pickleball and how much attention it has garnered by both NPCs and blue-chip celebrity monetary backers.
Making a recreational activity that is amateurish in nature and virtually rule-free into a “professional” game is a recipe for disaster that is unwatchable.
Ben Johns, the current men’s Professional Pickleball Association No. 1, said in a 2022 interview,
“Pickleball is an unsolved sport. Everyone is adding new shots and strategies all the time— meaning that nobody really knows the “correct” things to do.”
Think about what he just said. The number one player in all of pickleball said that even at a professional level, no one knows how to “correctly” play pickleball.
When you watch tennis, you’re watching disciplined professionals who perform their craft like martial arts masters. Serena has a 135 mph serve that breaks her opponent’s confidence. Federer has a single-handed backhand that slices balls like a sushi chef slices sashimi and Nadal has a forehand that gives balls wheels.
Are there people that play like that on the pro pickleball circuit? Absolutely, there is good tennis-like play in the singles matchups (especially with Ben Johns), but the majority of televised matches and clips on social media tend to be of doubles play. I get it that pickleball was intended to be a cooperative sport that involves as much people as possible, but it makes for some grossly unwatchable content.
Take this clip for example, which is deliberately titled “And this folks, is why Pickleball is the greatest sport in the world.” It is one of the most watched pickleball clips on YouTube Shorts, TikTok and Instagram Reels, gathering tens of millions of combined views from all three platforms.
If you watch this clip for a few seconds, you start to realize why I took John’s comment seriously.
To someone watching pickleball for the first time, especially those who are experienced tennis viewers, it looks like the game is just people parking at the net and mindlessly playing off of pure reaction, squirming and using the paddle as a shield when it should be used as a sword.
That doesn’t look fun, it looks like Wii tennis, except this is real people that make this so-called “professional sport” look as unprofessional as possble.
But pickleball’s problems don’t end at the professional level. The very nature of how the sport is promoted to the proletariat is something I also find very troubling.
The phrase “fastest growing sport in America” is something burned into a part of my brain because I am so fucking sick of hearing it from marketers and CNBC headlines. It’s a phrase that has the same ring as “Number one movie in America.”
I don’t care about whatever statistics you throw at me. I understand that they may be true, but it is not how you sell people on your game.
For example, people like playing Valorant because it’s fun. People eat at Jersey Mikes because it tastes good. They do not play Valorant because it’s the fastest growing esport or eat at Jersey Mikes because the fastest growing restaurant franchise in America; they can give fuck-all about that.
If you have to use statistics in order to convince me that a sport is cool, then it is probably really uncool.
Then again, you can make an “uncool sport” cool again. Tennis itself is still considered an “uncool sport” by many young Americans, but they still wear Adidas Stan Smiths and Chemise Lacoste. Golf was once considered a “lame” sport played solely by well-to-do white suburbanites and uptight conservative Koreans, but it’s made cool to Gen-Z as of recent through fashion brands like Bogey Boys, metalwood and fun experiences like TopGolf.
The relationship between tennis and pickleball should be thought of as akin to chicken and the egg; without tennis, there will be no pickleball, simple as that.
The reason why many people dislike the sport is because like many things in the American zeitgeist and way of life, its existence is seen as zero-sum. What pickleball gains, tennis players lose; whether it be tennis court space or a player base. I like to think of the distinction of the sports like that of popular esports. Take MOBAs like League of Legends and Dota, as well as shooters like Valorant and Counter-Strike.
Without Dota, there will be no League of Legends and without Counter-Strike, there will be no Valorant. At its core, they are the essentially the same game, but the feel of each game comparatively is completely different. You can put a seasoned Counter-Strike player into Valorant, but they’ll have to get used to the things that makes Valorant unique, such as the ult abilities of each unique agent. Some people don’t pick up the game for that sole reason and some people learn to have fun, it’s a matter of right fit. If you ask seasoned tennis players like my dad, they don’t like pickleball because it’s too slow and the balls don’t bounce high enough (which ironically hurts his knees and back)
But is pickleball stealing tennis players? I don’t think so.
Is pickleball stealing “valuable” tennis court space? Depends on who you ask.
In a society run by reactionaries, coming to compromise is something that people tend to not do very often because something as trivial as goddamn Pickleball is evidence of that.
So how do we fix pickleball?
We need to give it more swag. As much as it sounds like an impossible task, it is completely possible.
First, we need to understand that tennis and pickleball can coexist with each other as different, but similar sports. There is an opportunity to use each others game as a vehicle to promote both sports in general.
How can this be done? We can start by promoting pickleball as a fun sport for the family instead of the propagandist psy-op that is “the fastest growing sport in America.” I feel that the main problem of this statement being front and center besides making the sport sounding uncool is that it promotes the zero-sum mindset that pickleball is growing at the expense of tennis dying.
Also, professional pickleball leagues like the PPA should show more singles matches on TV. The doubles action does not give as much attention to individual talent. When you pit a singular person against another, it creates an opportunity to create storylines and drama that makes must-see TV.
In today’s sports world, fans can be fans of individual players separate of their teams because they are individual characters and/or heartthrobs and not purely because of their so-called skills or statistics. Think the “image is everything” era of Andre Agassi. These days, baseball fans wear Angels hats not because they are from LA, but because they absolutely adore Shohei “Shotime” Ohtani. Football fans rock Bengals jerseys because it has Joe “Joe Shiesty” Burrow’s name on it, and not because they are Skyline Chili-eating midwesterners and so on and so forth.
Trust me, there is potential there.
But the end of the day, pickleball is just a game. If you seek fun, you should not have fun at someone’s expense or make someone else feel bad because they are into a “swagless” sport. There are better things to worry about.
As John McEnroe said, you cannot be serious. If you find your anger about pickleball to be as passionate as that line call at the 1981 Wimbledon Championships, consider your anger unjustified.
Ingat.