Today, Explained - What’s the dill with pickleball?

Episode Date: December 22, 2022

Pickleball is bringing America together. Pickleball is tearing America apart. Sports Illustrated’s John Walters explains. This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Efim Shapiro, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Something is echoing across America. In cities, townships, maybe even bigger backyards, a hollow sound can be heard alongside cheers, jeers, and triumphant screams. It is the sound of pickleball, which has, in the blink of an eye, become America's fastest-growing sport. Five million people in the United States now identify as picklers. But there are no mason jars here, friendo. No, this is just paddles and wiffle balls, back and forth, back and forth.

Pickleball has the potential to bring this divided nation together, if it doesn't tear us apart first. That's coming up on Today Explained. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit Superstore.ca to get started. Today explained Sean Ramos for a mediocre tennis player, but you can find me tearing up the courts in the District of Columbia a few nights a week.

I started playing a lot more during the COVID-19 global pandemic. It was a safe outdoor activity and I had more time because no commute, no social obligations. You probably had a thing like tennis too. Around Thanksgiving 2020, I came out to California for a few months to hang out with my family and tried to keep the tennis up. I found a court nearby that wasn't too busy, except for all the pickleball. There was one tennis court that was seldom occupied next to four pickleball courts that were almost always bumping. I called it club pickleball because sometimes there were younger people

listening to Post Malone and drinking White Claws while playing. And if I'm being real here, some of the picklers were sort of annoying. Their wiffle balls would constantly pop up over the barrier and interrupt our tennis. They'd sometimes walk through our court space to get to theirs instead of just going around to their own entrance.

They were talking about how they couldn't taste anything on account of all their COVID. And one guy was always playing in a MAGA hat. Didn't they have any other hats at the hat store? Anyway, that was two years ago. Now we've got vaccines and more boosters than people want. And pickleball is bigger than ever. COVID is likely the reason that it's not football, baseball, basketball, hockey or soccer that is the hottest sport in the country. The fastest growing by far is pickleball. These days, you can't swing a paddle without hitting a pickleball, disciple. Once thought of as an old folks game, there are hundreds of tournaments annually, not to mention pro tours with athletes like Tom Brady and LeBron James,

each recently buying franchises in one of the sport's upstart leagues. Stephen Colbert had a celebrity pickleball tournament back in November on CBS, and this past weekend, there was a tournament in Las Vegas broadcast live on ABC in honor of pickleball's biggest year yet. I went back to those exact courts in Santa Clarita, California earlier this week, the ones with Post Malone, White Claws, and a lot of picklers having a great time to ask them what it is about this sport that's taken the country by storm, what it is about this sport that's taken the country by storm. What it is about pickleball that seems to transcend all our divisions and actually unite Americans.

And they all kind of gave me versions of the same answer. It's easy to learn and it's super social. I heard it from Don. It's easy to pick up and the community is really nice. I heard it from Bruce. It's much more social. I heard it from Bruce. It's much more social. I heard it from Seth. It's just such a user, group-friendly sport.

You can kind of show up anywhere. If you're a better player with weaker players, you can still have fun. I heard it from Sumi. This is the only sport where anybody, unathletic, athletic, doesn't matter, young and old, can just jump on. The court's smaller. It's a wiffle ball. All you have

to do is hit the ball over the net. Which is probably why 12-year-old Emily was out there with a bunch of people her parents' age. It's an easy to understand game if you play tennis people, which I haven't. Emily, the 12-year-old, was the only person I spoke to who wasn't a former tennis player. I played D1 tennis in college. Yeah, tennis convert. Yeah. I was in a racquetball and tennis, and then my buddy brought me out here, and it's just much more fun. All these pickleball players picked up these paddles, gave up their racquets, and never looked back. Jacqueline Rodman had no qualms about downsizing.

I'm a tennis player. None of the tennis players wanted to come out and play. So I'm like, OK, I got to get some exercise. So I came to the dark side. Why do you say the dark side? Well, tennis players are not thrilled with the fact that pickleball players have come in and taken over their courts and all the other things. But I have not touched a tennis racket since I started playing. I played for about 18 years. You have to have your set game, and if another person just randomly showed up, typically you don't let them in. You probably don't even acknowledge them.

Whereas pickleball, if you show up and you've never played before, chances are they're going to put a paddle in your hand and start teaching you the game. It just fits my lifestyle. I'm getting older, and I'm not going to be able to play tennis forever. And this I can. You can play it into your 80s and 90s and I like it. I just like it. On the off chance you have no idea what these pickleball people are talking about, we reached out to John Walters, who wrote about the sport for none other than Sports Illustrated. He's also been playing for about 15 years.

Pickleball looks like junior varsity tennis, or at least miniaturized tennis. Miniaturized tennis or maybe supersized ping pong? Well, I was going to say, it's basically somewhere between ping pong and tennis. It's not played with a table. It's played on a court. But it's faster than tennis because the court is smaller.

You're not using a racket. You're using a paddle. The ball is not rubber. It's plastic, more like a wiffle ball. So the ball doesn't travel as fast. The court is more compact. Most of the time you're going to go to pickleball courts, you're going to be watching doubles. People are going to be playing doubles. They enjoy doubles more. People who've been playing a while will tell you there's an element of chess to pickleball. Good players are thinking a couple moves ahead when they hit a shot. There's two things about pickleball that a novice needs to know. Number one, when you return the serve, the serving side has to let the ball bounce at least once. Number two, most important is an area called

the kitchen. It's a line that goes across the court four feet from the net on either side. The kitchen is a spot that you are not allowed to enter unless the ball has bounced there first. And what that does is prevent players who are more athletic or taller to just come up to the net and smash it over. You have to stay back. And help me understand something I've never quite actually grasped. How does the scoring work in pickleball? I think people know that ping pong generally goes to 11 or 21,

and tennis has the weird 15, 30, 40, love, deuce situation. But what's going on in pickleball? Because I'm always hearing these guys calling out three numbers. Three, two, one. Three, five, two. Here we go, here we go. Six, two, two. And, you know, when you have two opposing teams,

usually there's just two numbers, your score and their score. I tell beginners that learning how to score pickleball is the hardest part of the game. It feels like area codes are being, you're going to hear 631 right okay so there's three numbers and the first number is the score of the team that is serving the second number is the score of the team that is receiving by the way games go to 11 you can only score when you're serving. First number is the server's side. Second number is the receiving team's score. Got it. The third number is whichever one of the two people on the serving side is serving. Because every time you have served, both players on your

team get to serve. If you hear 6-3-1, that means the serving team has six points, the receiving team has three points, and the first of two people on that side is serving. When he loses or she loses the point, the second person serves. If they didn't score, if the receiving team scored the point, the next thing you'd hear is 6-3-2. It's like volleyball. You only score when you're serving. Where did this quirky game come from? I believe it was an old person who invented it, too. Old is relative. But yeah, I think they were in their 50s. It was two gentlemen, Bill Bell and Joel Pritchard, who were successful. Pritchard was actually a U.S. congressman. A congressman invented pickleball. Well, he was actually a U.S. congressman. A congressman invented pickleball?

Well, he was a co-creator, yes. This is Frank Pritchard. My father was Joel Pritchard, who was called the father of pickleball. Their families had summer homes on Bainbridge Island, on the Puget Sound. As the story goes, it was a summer day. The guys had just come back from playing golf. They noticed their kids were bored. I'd just turned 13, and I was complaining to my father that I didn't like being over there. I hated it because there was nothing to do. All my school friends were in Seattle, and I was over on Bainbridge.

And he said to me, well, when he was a kid over there, they used to make games up. And I really snottily said, oh, yeah, well, then why don't you go make a game up? The kids being teenagers just kept whining. So the dads basically looked in the shed, what's available? And there was a little wiffle ball laying there in the grass that I had been given. My birthday had been just a few weeks before. So he said, OK, and he picked it up. And we had a badminton court on the property. So he was up there messing around. And about, I don't know, an hour later, I walked up to the court.

And he and Bill Bell were, they strung this badminton net kind of at waist height. And we're hitting that ball around with some really crude paddles. They made up their own sport. It wasn't perfected on the spot. The following weekend, they had a good friend named Barney McCallum, who they got involved, and he was very creative and inspired. And within a couple of months, they had hammered out rules. And I think within a year or two, they built their first actual pickleball court, and they tinkered with their sport. Pretty much from the beginning it was fun and that's why it caught on.

My mother Joanne came up with the name pickleball. You know there's been a lot of controversy about that. You know there's a myth that it was named for our dog Pickles, but actually Pickles didn't arrive for another three years and she was named for the game. But my mother kind of followed crew. There's the A boat, the B boat, and then all the leftover rowers kind of get thrown into what's called the pickle boat.

And my mother's thinking was, well, this is kind of a combination of this game, that game. And it's like a pickle boat, so we'll call it pickle ball. And in the Pacific Northwest, pickle ball has been well-known for decades. If you talk to someone who's in their 40s or 50s,

they were playing pickleball in P.E. and grade school if they lived in the Seattle area. My wife and I were recently in Palm Springs, and they're having a big tournament down there at Indian Wells, and we got tickets and went on a Wednesday, you know, probably the slowest day they had, and watched the matches. And, you know, this huge facility and people everywhere. And I just thought, my God, you know, I can't quite get my head around it, to be honest.

What happened during the pandemic with this sport? I think what happened is people had free time. People were sick of being inside their homes. And they had been hearing about this on a bubbling, under-the-surface level. And when they saw other people playing it, they were like, hey, that's something I think I can do. And they were right. And it's also very social.

So you're like, hey, there's that group that plays at 4 o'clock in the park near me. People just started showing up to courts, even if they didn't know anybody or maybe knew one other person. And they were getting in games. And suddenly now they had their little pickleball group of friends who welcomed you. And what's fun is I experienced this in my own little world here. You get different personalities. There's that really competitive person.

There's that person like who loses and maybe storms up. But it's sort of like being part of a small little family. And I think people need that. It's an underrated aspect of pickleball. It does provide community. Young, old, black, white, liberal, conservative, they're all on the pickleball courts together. They all are. So I think that's a conservative, they're all on the pickleball courts together. They all are. So I think that's a wonderful thing, getting back to your pickleball brings the country together. You're hanging out with people you might not hang out with normally. There's nothing wrong with that.

There's nothing wrong with that. But in a minute, we'll hear about some folks who aren't on board with Pickleball. You're listening to Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family. And Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an Aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it.

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Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge bet mgm operates pursuant to an operating agreement with i gaming ontario yeah let me introduce you to this thing called pickleball where you use these paddles and then oversize with football if you've never played you think that pickleball just

pickleball once you start playing it is highly enjoyable today explained we're back. John Walters, sports writer at Sports Illustrated, has been telling us how pickleball is bringing Americans together to get away from their screens and unite on the pickleball court. But John, indulge me here and help me understand how pickleball is tearing us apart, starting with the noise, the noise understand how pickleball is tearing us apart starting with the noise the noise of the pickleball thwack which has been upsetting some communities in this country it has been yes um i think half of that is yes it's a different sound that can be initially

a little discordant and a half of it is it's not something I'm used to, so I don't like it. When you hear pickleball, first of all, because the court is smaller, the ball gets hit more often than if you were playing tennis, for example. So there's a different rhythm to it. Then, because it's plastic on basically fiberglass, there's a thwacking sound when you hit a pickleball. You get used to it very quickly. If you're playing, you barely notice it. But if you maybe are in the backyard next to a pickleball court, yeah, it's probably a little annoying. It's something you have to get used to. There are plenty of sounds in this world that we can all agree maybe we don't like the motorcycle going down a road near us or a

leaf blower. Pickleball is nowhere near as annoying to me as those two sounds. But yeah, compared to tennis, it's louder. I'm glad you brought up tennis, John, because another issue here is territory, is the use of public space. Tennis players are mad that the pickleballers are encroaching on their courts. There's a clash happening on courts around San Diego pitting tennis players against pickleball players. Both use the tennis courts and both are fighting for space. Basketball players are mad that the pickleballers

are encroaching on their courts. A 71-year-old Colorado man is facing a felony charge. His crime, allegedly using a permanent marker to draw on a basketball court. He was only attempting to help the pickleball community. He's an avid player. It feels like pickleball has given rise to this new level of civic engagement over how our public spaces are used. Yes, and I would just say nothing lasts forever.

I mean, the easiest sports analogy to use here is snowboarding. Ski hill operators refuse to let anyone with a snowboard onto the chairlift, so they have to hike to the top of the mountain and then find a secluded ski trail where they won't get caught. It's not that somebody forced people to ride snowboards and they took over the slopes. It's that a lot of people found that they enjoyed snowboarding more than skiing. And they happened to use the same turf to do it. I think the major problem with the snowboards is that they run into people. You know, they can't see behind them.

And when you get skiers and snowboarders together on a run, you're looking for trouble. They had to learn to live with each other because the people who run mountains realized that they were sacrificing revenue by not making the mountains available to snowboarders, where there was a gigantic interest in snowboarding. Well, the interest in pickleball compared to tennis in terms of new players is overwhelming. So if you run a private tennis club, you have a choice. You can either alienate a bunch of potential customers or you can follow where the market is taking you. I don't see any place where people want to play tennis that they cannot play tennis. In my own little community, there were

10 tennis courts and no pickleball courts. They took out two tennis courts to create eight pickleball courts because one pickleball court equals four tennis courts. There's still empty tennis courts every single time I go down there. My experience is that people who want to play tennis, who want to play basketball, still have plenty of places to play. But there's a new kid on the block, and that kid is very popular, and that creates some resentment. You're bringing me, I think, to my third negative phenomena associated with the rise of pickleball in the United States. But it's not so clearly negative to me, but it's the money. It really feels like money is flooding into this game.

Major League Money is following the fans as professional pickleball takes its swing. First, you get the interest. The next thing you know, you have people who are entrepreneurial, who realize, hey, there's a tremendous demand and there's not enough supply. So I'm going to be the guy who exploits this market. All of a sudden, people want to play pickleball. But hey, you need a paddle. Hey, you need balls. Hey, you need a net. There's over 300 pickleball paddle manufacturers right now. They're all competing for that space, right? Eventually there's going to be fewer, but the money is simply a result of someone realizing there's demand and I can make some money off that demand. But we're not just talking about paddles here. We're talking about ESPN. We're talking about

the Olympics. A sport that can be played by all ages and doesn't require much money to get started is receiving public support to become a part of the Olympics. We're talking about LeBron James, maybe Tom Brady. Give us a sense of the scale of what's going on here. It's a little like Bitcoin. I think the idea that people are going to be watching pickleball on TV in great numbers is folly. It's just not going to happen. The pickleball boom of right about now is to me very similar to the running boom of the 1970s, which didn't translate into people watching marathons on TV, but it did translate into a lot more people running marathons. And I think this is where all the geniuses have it wrong in terms of television.

This is mostly a white upper middle class to affluent sport at this stage. These are the people making decisions at the network level. But the Dallas Cowboys play the New York Giants on Thanksgiving Day and 42 million Americans watched a regular season football game. Pickleball would do well to get one one hundredth of that audience with its greatest event. So let's not kid ourselves about pickleball ever being a big deal. And if someone wants to use these words against me in

two years, I'll happily own up to it. But I think the pickleball boom is going to be a lot like the running boom. There'll be tons of people wanting to play. I don't think it'll translate into a great spectator sport. You mean Stephen Colbert's celebrity pickleball tournament isn't going to be a game changer? Hello, everybody. I'm Stephen Colbert, and welcome to Pickled. We're here at Sherwood Country Club in beautiful Thousand Oaks, California, a city where they count their trees. I don't think so.

I think it'll be like the pet rock fad, not in terms of playing, but in terms of being the next American Idol. It's not going to be Dancing with the Stars. It just, to me, doesn't have that aspect of it. And I'll be happy to go out and play pickleball for three hours right now, and I'll be enjoying it, but I don't want to watch it for three hours. I bang the drum for pickleball being played at the grade school, middle school and high school level for a number of reasons, because I think that's the generation who us older folks are worried are spending way too much time indoors and way too much time on screens. And I think pickleball is something that doesn't leave the short kid or the relatively uncoordinated kid out. So give pickleball the chance to worm its way into just regular people's lives. And I think they're going to enjoy it. They're going to have fun. It's very social.

You get a sense of community with people instantly that you don't get in almost any other aspect of life right now. I think those are all healthy things. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I've shot cut the music. I got to play one more thing from my visit to the pickleball courts this week. I was talking to Seth Shashinsky about this beef tennis players like me have maybe had with picklers like him. You're encroaching on our space. You're a little inconsiderate, whatever. And he dropped a bomb on me. Even at this park, this tennis court here

is going to be converted to four more pickleball courts. So you're saying there's not going to be a tennis court here? Not at this park, from what I understand. From what I've heard. But as you can see, there's one, two, three, four pickleball courts going, four people each. So 16 people playing pickleball, no one playing tennis right now.

It's a done deal. The court I was worried about is apparently already on the chopping block. I can't argue with math. If more people are getting utility out of it, take my court. See y'all on the pickleball courts. Sorry, Sean.

Today's show was produced by Abishai Artsy, edited by Matthew Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and engineered by Paul Robert Bounzy and Afim Shapiro. You're listening to Today Explained. The podcast is taking a bit of a holiday, back on the 27th of December. But you can still find us on the radio.