Is Tyson McGuffin Pickleball's Heel?

UPPO Yours, Buddy.

The finger heard round the world, or at least around the Lindner Family Tennis Center, nearly eclipsed the drama surrounding the resurgent merger of the PPA and the MLP this week. The two warring organizational factions apparently have stopped driving out-balls back and forth and have agreed to collaborative drills for the foreseeable future under the banner of a yet-to-be named “unified professional pickleball organization” which we can think of for the time being as UPPO. As in UPPO yours! Or other things Tyson McGuffin likely said to Tyler Loong following their Cinci singles match. 

Before all this madness and reconciliation, It was a week of stunning and excellent pickleball on the courts, topped up by Ben Johns winning his 100th gold medal and his 101st gold medal and launching a collector’s edition Joola paddle for $999, as well as a streaker, a frustrated Riley Newman hucking balls, Rafa Hewitt digging out from other dimensions of time and space, Federico Staksrud and Pablo Tellez nearly burning down the house, the Kawamoto sisters proving that surgery is an applicable skillset, and JW Johnson and Dylan Frazier dismantling Ig McMuffin like they were playing with a toddler’s lego set.

However, the magnificent caliber of play and various otherwise significant shenanigans have been somewhat obscured in the long shadow cast by McGuffin’s middle finger. Which leads me to wonder: Is McGuffin Pickleball’s heel?

Hear me out. Obviously McGuffin himself is not yet ready to embrace the role of heel. In professional wrestling parlance, there’s no doubt he thinks of himself as a “face” rather than a heel. He’s got his family man persona and his self-image as a champion of good sportsmanship. We’re too far into the 2020s to have tattoos and a mullet counteract those claims, but at the same time, his appearance, and alcohol sponsors, and cultivation of fanbros all support the idea that he fancies himself a bit of a bad boy.

McGuffin is a UFC fan who likes to talk about “choking out” people who annoy him and, at least on the surface, it looks like he waited until he thought he was off camera and then went after Tyler Loong with all the fingered fury he could fling. It can’t be a look McGuffin’s sponsors love and we’ve not yet heard whether or not there are repercussions from sponsors or the PPA or the MLP. But one thing McGuffin has excelled at is building a brand and one way to deflect bad publicity is to make it part of the brand. So if he’s not already accidentally the sport’s heel, should he consider leaning into it?

The whole tiff is a bit disingenuous on both sides: McGuffin went after Loong because Loong’s King of the Court podcast co-host Jimmy Miller chided McGuffin for having been seen carrying nothing while his wife carried a large bag in the airport. It’s the kind of attack that really only has meaning among a group of guys who could probably compete for who’s most excited about the #tradwife movement. But McGuffin is off-base for saying it was about his wife when it was obviously a dig at him and off-base because if he thinks the way to handle it is through aggression, he should be family man-enough to point it at Jimmy Miller. On the other hand, Loong doth protest too much that it’s his co-host talking shit when he’s plenty complicit in the content. 

And none of this would be happening at all if professional pickleball players hadn’t been scrambling so hard to build brands and create real incomes as to start producing content and creating podcasts. It’s only because pickleball is still in its professional infancy that we get these unfiltered and largely unedited takes on podcasts created and hosted by the players themselves. And it’s only because of this unique moment in time that they end up talking shit about each other publicly, but off the court. 

We’re still staring dreamily into the chasm of uncertainty in regard to how, precisely, all the big money contracts recently signed will shake as we enter the merged UPPO era. We may see less of this intimate player interaction as players have to scramble less to make a buck. On the other hand, paying higher salaries is contingent on the sport growing the fanbase and increasing its television appeal and the formula for success in that arena is storylines and rivalries, especially heels versus faces. Somebody needs to emerge with a big brand that’s based in being the bad guy. Should it be Tyson McGuffin?