Last year, I was at a Super Bowl party and encountered a woman with a modest following on her local foodie Instagram, so she is deeply immersed in mid-grade cultural trends. She made a passing comment that has been jangling around in my skull since—which is also pretty grim on my end—but she was convinced that the Stanley Cup was going to be “the water bottle of 2023.” I’ve witnessed various expressions of social media brain disease and modes of horniness, but many of them were not this lucid, prophetic, and totally doomed. There is something astounding about a level of obsession with TikTok trends that could leave someone concerned with the trendy water bottle of the moment. The hive mind of basic bitch tendencies and the amount of distance it spreads via TikTok is impressive. Whenever I think someone has organically gotten into something like espresso martinis, soon enough, every single person I know is talking to me about what kind of espresso bean mixes optimally with Hendrick’s gin. I suppose this is more tolerable than chopped sandwiches, but all of this brings me to the sudden rise of pickleball.
Pickleball is a peculiar name for a sport that is essentially a fusion of elevated ping pong and jogging on an elliptical. Something like “obnoxious tennis” or “geriatric paddling” would’ve sufficed. Instead, we settled on something that sounds like a novelty menu item on a pop-up deli just to get people to the door: “Oh, you just HAVE to try the pickleball! It’s $48.”
Whenever there is anything remotely approaching a vacuum in the sports calendar, NFL chat must inevitably fill it, but my mind would rather stray toward a sport that’s named after a food without involving said food. Pickleball is goofy enough, but imagine playing a sport called salami alai and then asking your friends if they want to play. I’d imagine receiving a text reply that’s like, “Good to hear from you! Can you also delete this number?”
I want to compliment this sport somewhat—even if it’s muted, qualified, and grudging. It’s done wonders for the boomer community, like causing a lot of unexpected heart attacks in older Range Rover dealers. It is also a net positive that puffy pink businessmen are playing pickleball instead of golf.
As a side note, I don’t get how someone would willingly participate in an activity that is basically human fetch. “Golf is hard!” they’ll say, as if the difficulty of something makes it worthwhile. It’s also hard to juggle chainsaws while passing a kidney stone. Imagine spending a Saturday morning hitting a ball, walking after it, hitting that ball again, walking after it, shanking that ball into the woods or a sand pit, fuming uncontrollably, walking after it again, and repeating this thwarted and futile process until sinking the ball into a hole, and then thinking: “I get to do this 17 more times!”
Back when Pokémon cards swept my generation, everyone else looked at us and said, “We don’t understand this, but if it makes you happy, I’m glad you’re having fun.” And pickleball is fun. We need more sports that sound like people building birdhouses. It’s not like it’s any worse than dudes who look like Kramer grunting like wildebeests while playing tennis.
They apparently make noiseless pickleball paddles now, which I look forward to introducing in the bedroom. Though I'm betting they cost an arm and a leg and a buttock to purchase.
I'm a tennis player who has dabbled in pickleball and it's not nearly as fun or sweat inducing. Maybe I'm doing it wrong. Interestingly, Carlos Alcaraz famously drinks pickle juice between games at his matches (probably others do too). Maybe I should try that before I play pickleball next match.
😎