The Sporting Scene: One More Game
Pickleball goes pro. (from The New Yorker)
|
As in politics, a few famous families dominate pickleball, the fastest-growing sport in America. One is the Johnsons, of Florida. In January, on a breezy afternoon in Boca Raton, J. W. Johnson, a strapping nineteen-year-old with short brown bangs and a leather necklace, took to the court for a semifinal match at a tournament. Johnson is taciturn, with an often impenetrable expression. He was seeded second in the tournament; his opponent, Zane Navratil, a twenty-six-year-old former C.P.A. from Wisconsin, was seeded first. Pickleball, a tennis-like sport played on a smaller court, places a gentle strain on the body, and both men had the oxygenated flush of a long day of exercise. They began by dinking—softly bouncing the ball back and forth—before Navratil, with gazelle-like grace, executed two snazzy moves at once: an Erne (which involved a flying leap) and a body shot (which involved hitting Johnson in the gut). He chuckled with contentment. Then, as a storm front moved in, the tide began to turn. “Wow, what an inside-out dink there from J. W. Johnson!” a commentator at a nearby media booth said. Johnson, jaw slack with concentration, took control.
Pickleball, which is played with paddles and a Wiffe-like ball, has exploded in popularity in recent years. During the pandemic, more than a million Americans began playing it, bringing the total to around five million. Stars and athletes play pickleball (Michael Phelps, Leonardo DiCaprio, the Clooneys); so do grandparents, parents, and children, often together. It’s simple to grasp—“easy to learn, hard to master,” many told me—and is social and inexpensive. Its design, which includes a no-volley zone near the net, minimizes running, as does the vast popularity of doubles. For these reasons, it can blur the lines between sport and hobby, amateur and pro, celebrity and mortal. In June, at a court near Pittsburgh, a petite grandmother named Meg texted her daughter a photo of herself with three burly strangers. “The guy in the green shirt and I whooped the other two,” she wrote. “Then everybody else there wanted to take our photo.” All three were Pittsburgh Steelers.
The Boca Raton tournament was held at a tennis center, and it displayed the sport’s particular brand of homespun giddiness. People played pickup games on mini courts by an arepa stand; kids posed with a smiling yellow pickleball mascot. A small village of venders’ booths sold refreshments (restorative CBD drinks, fresh fruit salads) and pickleball products (a self-massager, pickleball vacations). Two wiry middle-aged women passed me in matching shirts that said “ENERGY”; one, nearly skipping, was talking about how happy she was. At a nearby match, a man, apropos of nothing, hollered, “Pickleball!” He seemed to speak for everyone.
The event was sponsored by the Association of Pickleball Professionals (A.P.P.), whose founder, Ken Herrmann, a kind-eyed fifty-six-year-old, reminded me of the tube-sock-wearing summercamp director of my youth. “You come to tournaments and he’s handing out iced teas,” one player said. Amateurs and pros play in the same tournaments. “You would never have amateurs at a tournament at Flushing Meadows with Agassi and Connors and Roddick,” Herrmann told me. “But, here, you as an amateur can play on the outer courts, and then you’re standing in line to get lunch and you’re right behind J.W. Johnson—‘Hey, J.W.!’ That’s kind of neat.” He thinks of J.W.—“a clean, handsome, polite young man”—as “the Pete Sampras of pickleball.”
Johnson, like many other players, came to the sport from tennis. A Novak Djokovic fan, he once dreamed of going pro; in 2018, his family moved to Florida from Kansas to advance his career. His mother, Julie, fifty, thought she’d “play tennis every day,” she told me. “Then I started playing pickleball. I just—I don’t know what it was.” She smiled, looking wistful. Soon, J.W. and his sister Jorja, then thirteen, began accompanying Julie to her matches, taping pickleball lines on their driveway, and signing up for tournaments. Now all three are nationally ranked champions. J.W. is taking a year off before college to focus on pickleball; Jorja, for the same reason, attends school online. Their dad, “more of a tennis guy,” Julie said, is a recent convert.
Pickleball can be snappier than tennis, as when dinking escalates into frenetic, close-range volleys known as “hand battles.” In Boca Raton, spectators had the quick, frenzied head movements of a cat ready to pounce on a toy. The game offers pleasures familiar from tennis—rallies sustained amid startling attacks; stunning angles overcome, or not—but very little drama in the way of serves, which are underhand. (A bedevilling underhand spin serve, the Navratil chainsaw, has proved controversial.)
Most of the sport’s popularity is in the recreational realm, in public parks, converted tennis facilities, and the expanding zone of party-friendly pickleball restaurants. But, since 2020, a burgeoning pro scene has been accelerated by two tours in the U.S., the A.P.P. Tour and the P.P.A. (Professional Pickleball Association) Tour, which, combined, run more than fifty tournaments a year. The prize money isn’t huge, but sponsorships augment it, and hundreds of players have restructured their lives in order to follow the circuit. Some earn a living—Ben Johns, the sport’s biggest star, estimates that he made two hundred and fifty thousand dollars last year—but many lose money. Members of the pro-am community and the economy surrounding it (the picklesphere, as one pro called it) hope that this will change as the sport grows.
Wind in pickleball heightens the drama—the ball, which is light and holey, becomes unpredictable—and it had been a windy week, at the tournament and in the sport itself. Shortly before the Boca event, a major shakeup had rocked the picklesphere: the Texas billionaire Tom Dundon, the owner of the N.H.L. team the Carolina Hurricanes, had taken over the P.P.A., and immediately got top pros to sign exclusive three-year contracts, which guaranteed them money but banned them from most non-P.P.A. tournaments. Several pros suddenly had to drop out of the Boca tournament, including Ben Johns. Doubles pairs scrambled to adjust; the pickleball podcast and blog scenes erupted in anxious reaction. Overnight, the small and tight-knit pro community had been divided into camps.
Pickleball is known for good sportsmanship; Zane Navratil has a theory that its intimacy has something to do with that. “In tennis, you’re a hundred feet from your opponent, and if you cheat on a call you can sort of look at the court,” he told me. “In pickleball, you’re fourteen feet away, and you’ve got to look ’em in the eye.” The A.P.P.’s head referee, Byron Freso, told me that bad behavior is actively discouraged. “You’ll hear comments like ‘That’s tennis. Don’t bring your tennis here,’” Freso said. “ ‘What kind of tennis attitude is that?’” (That week, the losing player in a men’s singles match had refused the handshake of his opponent, and the crowd gasped in horror. “That’s not nice!” a woman said.) From this perspective, the P.P.A.’s actions could seem a bit tennis.
On the semifinal court, J. W. Johnson volleyed with Navratil, and then, stone-faced, in point after point, methodically delivered the ball to an unreachable back corner of his opponent’s side. In victory, Johnson looked wildly happy, as when Tiger Woods, after a stoic putt, finally allows himself to smile. Julie and Jorja cheered him on. (All three would win golds.) Navratil quietly greeted his girlfriend, at that time the reigning Miss Wisconsin. They walked off, looking a bit sombre, before a chipper young woman popped up and asked for a selfie. “I’m a fan of you both!” she said.
Pickleball was invented in 1965, on Bainbridge Island, Washington, by three dads—Joel Pritchard, a Republican state representative and later a U.S. congressman; Bill Bell, a businessman; and Barney McCallum, a printing-company owner. The men and their families, who lived in nearby Seattle, summered on Bainbridge, and they wanted to amuse their bored kids after returning from a game of golf. The Pritchards’ house had a badminton court, but there wasn’t enough functional equipment to yield a game, so the dads used paddles and a Wiffle ball, and lowered the net to three feet. They wanted the game to be equally playable by kids and adults; the area close to the net was restricted, to deter smashes. “We had it pretty much worked out in four or five days,’’ Pritchard told a reporter in 1990. “What makes it such a great game is that the serve isn’t so dominant, like it is in tennis.” The court was small—about a quarter the size of a tennis court—and the rules further minimized the unfairness of height and strength disparities. “We got pretty fussy about the rules,’’ Pritchard said.
Pritchard also wanted to keep it fun, with a “nutty” name. Soon, they were all honing strategies: aiming toward a pair of fir trees, which forced opponents into a backhand, “was considered one of the ace shots,” McCallum recalled. Their friend Bob O’Brien, a wealthy industrialist, built the first pickleball court on his property; Slade Gorton, a state attorney general and later a U.S. senator, built courts at his homes in Olympia and on Whidbey Island. The game spread across the northwest; to Washington, D.C.; and to Jakarta, where Bell introduced it, and watched with satisfaction as the Australian Davis Cup team got trounced by Indonesians on a court he’d installed.
In 1972, McCallum founded Pickle-Ball Inc., a marketing and production company, to produce paddles and punch holes in balls imported from Ohio. They were shipped around the country, and the game grew, especially in school athletic programs. (By 1990, Pickle-Ball Inc. was selling about a hundred and fifty thousand balls and thirty thousand paddles a year, mostly to schools; in 2016, it was sold to the sport’s biggest equipment retailer, Pickleball Central.) In 1976, Tennis published a story about “America’s newest racquet sport,” and the first known pickleball tournament was held, in Washington. (It is now the official state sport.)
Pickleball is ideal for snowbird couples looking to befriend their new neighbors, and in the late seventies and the eighties its popularity soared in retirement communities. In 1978, Charlie Penta, of Haverhill, Massachusetts, introduced pickleball to the Villages, a Brooklyn-size retirement hamlet in central Florida. It caught on like wildfire. “As Village snow birds returned home,” one resident devotee observed, “they brought back pickleball and spread it throughout the land.” A friend of Joel Pritchard’s owned a nationwide network of R.V. parks and outfitted each with a pickleball court; a player named Sid Williams, of Tacoma, Washington, cofounded the U.S.A. Pickleball Association in 1984. Its first honorary member was President Ronald Reagan, to whom Williams sent a complete pickleball set. (“I don’t think he ever played,” Williams said. “He wasn’t very athletic.”) The U.S.A.P.A. became the sport’s governing body; in 2002, the Villages hosted the first national championship.
As pickleball fever has intensified, so have confrontations. “The residents presented us with a petition,” a board member of an active-living community outside Hartford, Connecticut, told me. “‘We want pickleball and we want it now.’” In Sonoma County, tennis courts central to a pickleball turf war were vandalized with motor oil, presumably by an angry tennis player. And, in communities from Provincetown to British Columbia, the sport’s distinctive “pop-poppop” has become the new leaf blower. On a peaceful, rural island in the Salish Sea, a pickleball noise dispute—involving elderly neighbors, players who use a hard ball and players who use a soft, quieter ball—has led to a rift unlike any the community has seen. “At music-trivia night, the hard-ballers and soft-ballers sat on opposite sides of the room,” a resident told me. “What is it about pickleball that does this to people?”
Robert D. Putnam’s book “Bowling Alone,” from 2000, mourns the loss of beloved community groups—a bridge club in Pennsylvania, an N.A.A.C.P. chapter in Roanoke, a sewing charity league in Dallas—which, for decades, fostered norms of reciprocity, trustworthiness, and general good will. A craving for such feelings is a key part of pickleball’s popularity. At one tournament, a senior pro told me, “The most important thing about this sport is the friendships. I just lost my husband a week ago, and the only reason I’m here today is because of my pickleball community lifting me up.” She got teary. “There’s no other sport like that. Tennis isn’t like that. You go to a tennis tournament, it’s them against you.”
People tend to have vivid stories about their first games, can tell you the exact moment it all clicked. “I called my wife and I said, ‘Hon, I found my new sport,’” Raul Travieso, the president of the Boca Raton Pickleball Club, said. Its blend of challenge and accessibility makes it addictive—one of the sport’s mantras is “One more game”—and the common experience of being taught to play by senior citizens, and then being walloped by them, only heightens the intrigue. Byron Freso and his wife, Marsha, started playing pickleball after retiring to Florida, in 2011. “I heard a pop-pop-pop sound,” Freso told me. They went to investigate, and met a couple in their seventies who showed them the basics. “They proceeded to spank us, 11–3, 11–1,” Freso said. “I never forget the score.” The Fresos practiced hard and watched helpful You-Tube videos, and “a month later we gave them a drubbing.” Now they officiate thirty tournaments a year, driving around the country in an R.V.
In Boca Raton, I talked to one of the most beloved figures on tour, J (Gizmo) Hall, a thirty-six-year-old with dreadlocks and huge, insectile sunglasses. “Pickleball actually saved my life,” he told me. Hall was wearing his usual off-court event uniform: an orange jumpsuit covered in handwritten words like “ANXIETY” and “ALONE.” He had spent his youth shuttling between worlds—hardworking single mother in Virginia; private school; selling drugs. In 2006, he was shot twice in the leg and twice in the hand, which resulted in the loss of a finger. (“And that’s my pickleball hand,” he said.) In 2018, when he was working as a firefighter in Virginia, he heard a Ping-Pong-like sound while working out at a local community center. Soon, “two sixty-year-old ladies were putting a paddle in my hand,” he told me. The sport immediately offered a sense of belonging. “I left the fire department,” he said. “I felt so free.” He and his wife started a nonprofit, the Pickleball Farm, where they live with their two children, host visiting school groups, and raise crops and livestock, including a donkey named Gizmo. On pro tours, Hall brings pickleball equipment to juvenile-detention centers and teaches residents and staff how to play. “My goal this year is to get to a hundred centers,” he told me.
The game’s ethos is fundamentally democratic. “You sign your name up on the board, and you have a blast,” Sherry Scheer, a former tennis coach and a pickleball senior pro, told me. Scheer lives on Cape Cod; during the pandemic, she and her wife had a court installed in their yard. One day, a man in a hat and sunglasses cycled by, saw her playing, and stopped to call out, “What is that?” She taught him to play, and only belatedly realized that he was a famous TV personality. “That’s just how pickleball is!” she said. Pickleball doubles partners tap paddles between every point, win or lose, and skilled players have tended to be generous about playing with less skilled players. But that’s been changing.
“There’s drama and cliquiness,” Scheer’s wife, Beth, said.
“That’s exactly right,” Scheer said—some young players won’t play with you if you’re a little less skilled, or at their skill level “and a little bit older.” “At community courts, you put your paddles in, four paddles at a time, randomly, and you play with different people—that’s the social aspect. But all of a sudden you have people who will only play with their players. It’s happening all over the country. It’s a real problem.”
“That’s how tennis is,” Beth said.
The big-timing of pickleball began, in part, with the growth of the tour scene. In 2019, Herrmann, a former tennis-club owner, was helping to design a new venue in Evanston, Illinois, near where he lives. “I took the designs over to Wilson’s headquarters, in Chicago,” he told me. “And they said, ‘Beautiful tennis courts. Where are your pickleball courts?’ I’m, like, ‘What are you talking about?’ They said, ‘It’s coming. You need to put pickleball courts in here.’” Herrmann learned to play, then to teach; soon, he was organizing a pro tour. “For the next few months, I locked myself down in my basement and just thought about how I could do it,” he said. “And a big inspiration for me was Billie Jean King.” He’d met her while serving on the U.S.T.A.’s national coaching staff. “I would hear her talk about how, in 1972, she told Jack Kramer to take a hike and started the women’s tour. It really resonated with me.” In 2019, he announced the A.P.P.’s 2020 season, and got the tour sanctioned by U.S.A. Pickleball. “The whole vision is making sure everyone has an equal playing experience,” he said. “I try to treat the pros the same way I treat the senior pros and the same way I treat the amateurs.”
Around the same time, Connor Pardoe, the jockish young scion of a family of Utah real-estate developers, announced his own pickleball venture, the P.P.A. The tour, Pardoe told me, is where you “can come play at your own skill level, stick around, get a beer, and watch the best players in the world play.” Though the P.P.A. uses the standards established by the U.S.A.P.A.—its rules, equipment specs, and referees—Pardoe chose to forgo official sanctioning by the organization. “We’re self-sanctioned,” he said.
The P.P.A. and the A.P.P. both set their tour schedules not long before the pandemic, and several pro players, including Ben Johns, saw a chance to draw on a certain frontier energy. Johns started playing pickleball in 2016; a year later, he won the singles gold medal at the U.S. Open. (He also designed his own paddle with a sponsor, Franklin.) His brother, Collin, then a touring tennis pro, joined the action. Instead of being a little-known tennis player, “sharing hotel rooms in Third World countries,” Collin told me, he could be a top pro, with a career that could last indefinitely.
The sense of possibility skyrocketed further when, in 2021, a garrulous former hedge-fund manager named Steve Kuhn unveiled a pickleball mecca in Dripping Springs, Texas, called Dreamland, as well as a standardized pickleball rating system he’d developed, called DUPR (Dynamic Universal Pickleball Ratings), and a new league, Major League Pickleball, which grouped players into teams. Kuhn’s innovations made a big and immediate splash. Dreamland, a sixty-four-acre “mission-driven playground,” as Kuhn has called it, has minigolf, pickleball, cornhole, a beer garden with solar panels, a live-music venue, a graffiti park, enormous psychedelic paintings on captured-rainwater silos, and, flapping above it all, an American flag roughly the size of a pickleball court. “I originally named it after the American Dream,” Kuhn said. He came to pickleball in 2016, by way of a nephew, and he likes its democratizing qualities. Dreamland has special events almost every day—a recurring cops-and-firefighters pickleball competition is called Guns & Hoses—all of which are open to the public, and mostly free. Major League Pickleball has drafts and team owners; many players called its inaugural event, a half party, half tournament held at Dreamland, their favorite of the year.
For a while, all of this—the A.P.P., the P.P.A., M.L.P.—was generally seen as heartening by the pickleball community. Then Dundon came along. Dundon is lean and bestubbled, and made his fortune in subprime auto loans. He’s a pickleball fan, but also an outsider, who often talks about “feeding the masses”—moving the sport from its folksy niche into the realm of TV, gambling, and big-time sponsors. In December, when he pledged to buy the P.P.A., he also bought Pickleball Central, a.k.a. the Amazon of pickleball, and the sport’s sole tournament-organizing Web site, pickleballtournaments.com, whose I.P. includes almost two decades’ worth of player and event data. The takeover was familiar: Dundon had been the controlling owner of a pro football league, the A.A.F., which went bankrupt in 2019. (Dundon ended the season early; players didn’t receive severance until a settlement was reached in court.) The P.P.A.’s exclusive contracts excited some but put others, who had relationships with the A.P.P. or Kuhn, in a bind. In December, shortly after a brief summit between Dundon and Kuhn, attended by Ben Johns—“They were on two completely different roads,” Johns later said—Major League Pickleball allied itself with the A.P.P.
Some of the pros who didn’t sign with the P.P.A. did so out of self-protection. The Johnson family works with a sports agent, who looked over the contract that the P.P.A. had offered J.W. “He said, ‘This is fascinating, because this is hands down the worst sports contract I’ve ever seen in my life,’” Julie told me. “He said, ‘You basically give up your rights to everything for three years: your image, what you do, what tournaments you can play, meet and greets, everything. And they have control.’” (Pardoe disputes this characterization.) Many of the players, Julie added, were young—inexperienced in contracts, maybe even in paying taxes.
Dundon, who tends to avoid the press, recently called me from Colorado. “I’m hoping that we can get past the noise and talk about the fun stuff,” he said. (“Sorry it’s windy, I’m riding my bike.”) “We’re in the entertainment business,” he said. “I went through this in hockey—people forget that the fans are who pays.” The P.P.A. contracts, by securing top-quality pickleball content and sponsors, would provide fun to viewers, and heighten the sport’s popularity. “You’ve got to feed the masses,” he said. Personally, he went on, he likes pickleball because, more than competition, it’s about enjoyment—“life experiences,” like taking a picture on a family vacation.
During the New Year’s holiday, Dundon had played pickleball with Ben Johns at a resort in Cabo San Lucas. He tried to beat Johns using his own, “jungle” rules, which failed, and by replaying him on New Year’s Day, after a late night of partying, which also failed. Later that month, he appeared on “The Freestyle Boys,” a podcast that the pro Rob Nunnery used to co-host with Johns. Johns said that he had “a bit of a hot take”: the A.P.P. could be a good place for “second- or third-tier pros,” a training ground for the P.P.A. Dundon agreed, and added that the A.P.P. did “a great job with the senior tour,” a realm considered less desirable for TV. He concluded on a note of idealism: pickleball, he said, “is a really good thing that’s happening in the world…. It’s perfect, right? It’s like, if someone really, really smart had come up with this six years ago, they’d be winning the Nobel Prize or something.”
“Well, hopefully that’s where we are in five or six years,” Johns said.
Nunnery laughed. “What, you winning the Nobel Prize?”
“Sure,” Johns said. “Nobel Prizes all around.”
Steve Kuhn is fifty-three, with a cheery demeanor. He’s also a huge fan of “Bowling Alone,” near-obsessive about encouraging community. In March, I contacted him, and he called me from Dreamland. He talked about pickleball’s ability to transcend “socioeconomic lines,” and cited pickleball-induced harmony among Somali immigrants and their neighbors in Minnesota, where tensions had been high. “It’s bringing Americans out to meet other Americans in ways they normally wouldn’t,” he said. In the background, revelry could be heard, and bhangra. “We’re celebrating Holi today!” Kuhn said. “So there’s Bollywood music playing.”
I was planning a trip to a P.P.A. event in Austin, and Kuhn encouraged me to visit while I was in town. He was in the process of building housing for pros on site, but the process was taking a while. “So in the meantime I just bought them a big house,” he told me. “Five bedrooms, a swimming pool, a hot tub, on the edge of the property.” He asked me to come to a Tuesday-night event called the Battle of the Sexes. Four male pros—“the biggest chauvinist pigs in the sport,” he said—would play four of the top women, à la the Billie Jean King–Bobby Riggs match, in 1973. The men and the women would have equal DUPR ratings, and thus be evenly matched. I said I’d be there. After we hung up, Kuhn texted me pictures of Holi revellers covered in multicolored powder, dancing under the American flag.
The P.P.A. tournament was held at a tennis club near Lake Travis. It featured many of pickleball’s biggest stars: Leigh and Anna Leigh Waters, a mother-daughter doubles juggernaut; Tyson McGuffin, a tattooed Idaho father of three; the Johns brothers. (Their sister, Hannah Johns, the P.P.A.’s main on-air personality, frequently interviews them.) Dundon was absent, but Connor Pardoe sat in the only shaded viewing area, alongside an announcer with the rile-’em-up growl of a monster-truck-rally m.c. After a fan made a nifty catch, the m.c. growled that three pros had signed a hat for her, and the crowd cheered. Between matches, a musician named Pickleball Wall, the son of a P.P.A. sponsor, performed a customized rap.
Famous players were approached constantly by fans. Dave Weinbach, a fast-talking investment manager who calls himself the Badger, was greeted by several, including a couple from Cape Cod, fresh from their first tournament match. Within minutes, Weinbach had persuaded them to buy his new signature paddle, available nearby (“I’ll sign it!”), and invited himself to stay with them on the Cape. (“That’s what I do!” he told me. “It’s a pickleball thing.”) Weinbach was instrumental in developing the P.P.A., and is a minority owner. His shorts said “Badger” on them—“I have a sponsor that embroiders my brand on things”—and his hat said “Pickle and Social,” a forthcoming chain for which he is a brand ambassador.
There were occasional glimpses of tour-rivalry tensions. The pro Riley Newman, while explaining the P.P.A.’s exclusivity contracts to me—“They can talk to the TV sponsors and be, like, ‘Hey, we’ve got the best players on this tour’ ”—looked up and saw Dekel Bar, of the A.P.P., who was eating a protein bar nearby. “Obviously, both tours, they have high-level players and stuff,” Newman went on. Bar smiled politely and ambled off. “That was awkward,” Newman said. Another pro, Rob Cassidy, told me that he chose not to sign with the P.P.A. “I’m trying to do anything I can do to maintain the sanctity of the game,” he said. “There’s growth—but growth can be malignant, right?”
In this quietly fraught climate, I was startled, while waiting in line at a taco truck, to see a familiar braces-wearing, A.P.P.-affiliated teen. A fan approached her: “Excuse me, are you Jorja Johnson?” It was. Johnson had flown in as an emergency women’s-doubles substitute, and won bronze. Ben Johns—looking intense much of the weekend—won almost everything else.
That Tuesday, I met Johns at a sunny café called Prim and Proper, which had a “Jetsons”-like aesthetic. He ordered basil fizzy water and avocado toast, and chose a table that was partially obscured by a leafy philodendron. Johns had just played pickleball with his brother; after breakfast, he planned to work out, followed by a float in a saltwater tank (a Christmas gift from his sister). Pickleball was everywhere. “Did you notice the display in front?’’ he asked—a pastel array of paddles from a brand he had never heard of. “They might just be art,” he said.
Johns moved to Austin for the weather, the pro community, and a deal he’d accepted with a forthcoming pickleball complex called Austin Pickle Ranch. Scheduled to open in 2023, Austin Pickle Ranch, the brainchild of Tim Klitch, a commercial banker, will be one of the biggest pickleball facilities in Texas: thirty-three dedicated courts, with room to expand, plus food, drinks, concerts, and so on. Johns will be “a touring pro who plays out of Pickle Ranch,” an arrangement for which he will be paid. For now, he and Collin practice at Klitch’s house, on his private court. Videos of them can be seen on TikTok and Instagram; Collin’s girlfriend, Sydney Steinaker—“Pickleball Barbie,” on Instagram—has a video called “The Perfect Pickleball Date Night,” in which she and Collin play there, under a string of lights.
Johns is a fervent admirer of Elon Musk—“I just think as far as the change in the world, he’s probably accomplished more than anybody”—and he thought Dundon, too, was a force for good. “Whenever something is growing super rapidly, you can’t really control the way it grows,” he said. “And massive growth is better than controlled small growth.” Johns had wanted standards to be raised—better venues, prize money, amenities—and Dundon was paving the way. Would all this new money and competition disrupt some of the harmony that pickleball tends to foster? I asked. “Yeah, it will,” Johns said. Did it bother him? “No. You’ve got to take the good with the bad.”
Unbeknownst to the public, Johns told me, the Austin P.P.A. tournament had been the last time he’d play with the Ben Johns Signature Franklin paddle. He had a new sponsor, JOOLA, a table-tennis company that was coming out with a pickleball line. “They have a big presence in Asia,” he told me. He hoped that they would grow the sport there. One of the paddles in the new line, the Ben Johns Hyperion, sells for more than two hundred dollars.
In Boca Raton, I had asked Zane Navratil about pickleball players he’d met who were unlike people he might have met in his day-to-day life. “J Hall, who goes by Gizmo,” he said. “He lives on a pickleball farm.” When I asked Johns that question, he said, “Tom Dundon.” I asked about Cabo San Lucas—the jungle rules, the New Year’s Day gambit. Was Dundon expecting him to be hung over? “Yes, he was,” Johns said, smiling. “I was not.” Then, having finished his avocado toast and basil fizz, he said goodbye, and headed off to his float tank.
That week, at an outdoor café in Bee Cave, Texas, near Austin and Dripping Springs, I overheard three men having a business meeting. “Welcome to Texas!” one said, and then proceeded to zealously pitch something, which I tried to ignore. Then I had an idea: what if this was about pickleball? I started eavesdropping. A minute later, I heard the evangelist say, “That’s our jam. We don’t want money. We want pickle. We want pickle partners.” I began writing down phrases: “once you pickle” and “let’s just assume that you’re not pickled yet” and “gonna change the fuckin’ world! Excuse my language.” The next night, I saw them at Dreamland, pulling pickleball pros aside to talk between matches.
I arrived at Dreamland at dusk. The property, set back from the road, was dotted with art: murals of staring eyes, a glowing Statue of Liberty, a meditating-figure sculpture the size of a tree. The enormous flag flapped above a group of lighted yurts. Kuhn named the venue for the American Dream, but the product of that dream, American capitalism, presented a challenge for pickleball. Kuhn believes that the sport can go mainstream without losing its egalitarian spirit. He claims that his DUPR system rates everyone fairly, irrespective of age, gender, “hair color, or wingspan,” and the Battle of the Sexes was meant to prove it.
The pickleball building was an open, hangar-like space. Inside were several courts, a pub, and billboard-size banners of the 2021 M.L.P. teams, many of whose beaming players were contractually prohibited from returning. (“If I had known I wouldn’t be able to play in M.L.P., I never would have signed,” one told me.) A diverse group of spectators milled around, armed with beers and hard seltzers. The smell of free pizza was in the air. Beneath one of the banners, Kuhn chatted with Tim Klitch and the proprietor of a roll-out pickleball-court-surface business. Kuhn was talking about another democratizing idea: reforming pickleball’s scoring system, which intimidated beginners. “It’s a barrier to entry,” he said.
On the main court, the Battle of the Sexes had the spirited goofiness of a slightly drunken flag-football game. The event featured a five-thousand-dollar prize, team polos—pink for men, blue for women—and occasional mock tennis grunting. But the match was epic and skilled, with stunning lunges and sprints that elicited roars from the crowd. The spectators, arranged on bleachers, were very loudly on the women’s side. Dreamland pros and friends sat on barstools, content to be kicking back; one of them hugged a big golden retriever like a toddler on his hip. At intermission, the “Austin Powers” theme played while audience members tried to win a thousand dollars by hitting a pickleball into a barrel.
As the night progressed, the match got loonier, and the crowd tipsier. At one point, one of the men went for an unlikely return, and somehow lost control of his paddle, which sailed over a wall; while he scrambled, a guy in the pro section, laughing, yelled to the women, “Hurry up and serve!” You almost felt bad for the biggest chauvinist pigs in the sport. The teams were closely matched, and victory could have gone either way. But, in the end, shortly after a man recovered from a powerful smash to the crotch, the men prevailed. Everybody hugged, looking triumphant in victory and in defeat.
Kuhn’s assurance about DUPR’s accuracy had been right: the men’s combined average was 1.063 higher than the women’s, and they won by almost that differential. Before I left, I ventured into the house that Kuhn had bought his pros. It turned out to be in a gated community, with a façade that featured grand columns. I got a brief tour from the pickleballers within—foosball table; hot tub; hockey stick for warding off goats—and returned to Bee Cave, pleased that the experience had been even stranger than I’d imagined.
On a Saturday in early June, I went to a pickleball event at a paved lot at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Houston Street, in New York. David Kass, an architectural-lighting designer, wore a hat and shirt imprinted with the logo of NYC Pickleball Manhattan. Kass, who spends his spare time doing street-tree-pit beautification, got hooked at a city recreation center, and, soon afterward, met Katherine Hedden, a retired TV-news editor who’d established the group. It now has more than a thousand members on Facebook. That day, the Houston lot had eighteen makeshift pickleball courts, with painted lines and portable nets. “Right after us, the kickball people come in,” Kass said. Three hundred people had registered for the event, which NYC Pickleball Manhattan had coördinated with the Parks Department. At least half the players were in their twenties and thirties—“whippersnappers,” an older player said, laughing—and I overheard younger passersby ask how they could play, too.
New York City lags conspicuously behind much of the U.S. in pickleball accommodations. Lessons are offered at city rec centers, which require a membership; city tennis courts are strictly off limits. Most New York City pickleball occurs on asphalt or concrete spaces created for other things—handball, soccer, skateboarding—and are B.Y.O.N.: bring your own net. Hedden, who is a Manhattan U.S.A.P.A. pickleball ambassador, and Eric Ho, a Queens pickleball ambassador, have been lobbying the city for the holy grail: dedicated courts. Meanwhile, players are making do. “Katherine’s group started taping lines wherever they could,” Ho told me.
Most of the people I talked to at the Houston Street event, like most pickleball players I talked to everywhere else, cited the appeal of community. Players can show up alone and take part in open play; the short games and smaller spaces are conducive to conversation. A popular postgame hangout is a nearby Italian restaurant, which started a recurring event for players, called Pickle and Pasta. Kass, though quite busy (planting and watering street-tree pits; theatre four nights a week), said, “My life revolves around this. I don’t drink or stay out late Saturday so I can play pickleball on Sunday. I keep in shape so I can be in shape for pickleball.”
In May, the pro-tour scene swept into the city. The A.P.P. hosted a tournament at the Billie Jean King Tennis Center, where tennis’s U.S. Open is played. Steve Kuhn rang the bell at the New York Stock Exchange, and a few pros played pickleball in the gilded N.Y.S.E. boardroom. Later, M.L.P. threw a fancy party for its draft reveal; team owners include Brené Brown and the Milwaukee Bucks co-owner Marc Lasry. The tournament itself, in the Tennis Center’s grand space full of monuments to Sampras and the Williams sisters, hovered somewhere between gate-crashing and benediction. (In a selfie on Instagram, J.W. Johnson, looking joyful and a little sly, posed next to a plaque that says “R. Federer.”) Hedden brought two members of the Parks Department, who seemed impressed. “I think the tournament in Queens helped legitimize it,” she said. In turn, the events bolstered the legitimacy of the A.P.P. and M.L.P.
The tournament drew more than a thousand people, from several states. On the court, players seemed happy to play; spectators seemed happy just to feel happy about something. In the pro final rounds, J. W. Johnson and Zane Navratil played against each other in mixed doubles and in singles, and together as a doubles team. Johnson, whose mixed partner was Jorja, won gold in nearly all his events. (“Great job, kids!” Julie Johnson yelled from the stands.) At the end of the mixed-doubles match, Ken Herrmann wheeled out a championship cup the size of a ten-year-old and presented it to the siblings, who beamed.
“Pickleball will save America,” Kuhn told me, as I drank from a can of his personal brand of rainwater. “A lot of people think we’re going to have a civil war if this election is close. We’ve got to get people out there playing pickleball with people who will vote the other way, so they don’t want to kill each other. It sounds ridiculous and dramatic, but I kind of mean it. Pickleball can save us, and we need to be saved.” Meanwhile, the sport continues to unite, divide, and take over. In Encinitas, California, during the pandemic, a local racquet club became a pickleball hot spot. “At first, you had to reserve courts by calling,” a player told me. “Then the calls overwhelmed the staff, so they moved it to a Web site, and then that got overwhelmed. You could try again every hour on the hour, so you’d set an alarm on your phone.” The facility began to convert tennis courts. As of August, all but one of the courts at Bobby Riggs Racket & Paddle—named for the tennis champ who challenged Billie Jean King in the Battle of the Sexes in 1973, and lost—will be pickleball courts. ■
|
Responses:
|
Replies are disabled on threads older than 7 days.
|
|
