Post-Punk Pickleball
Don't believe the hype—it's a golden era for pickleball fans
In the discrete corner of the world that constitutes hardcore pickleball fandom, things got particularly weird this past week. A lot of what passes for punditry among the populace of the picklesphere is in agreement that major machinations among competing professional leagues piloted by billionaire owners are likely to have iffy outcomes.
While much of the world believes the ego-driven dramas played out among billionaires are centered on space travel, social media superiority, and combat sports posturing, fans of professional pickleball are alone in the knowledge that the real cultural mayhem perpetrated by these would-be super-villains happens on the short court where the wiffleball whistles.
The general feeling is that a competitive frenzy to sign top-talent to contracts exclusive to one league or the other has generated short-term financial wins for the players (and their agents). Beyond this, the consensus is an impending era of general misery for the fans because bifurcated and factionalized tours necessarily preclude many of the most competitive matches. The watered-down competition and the money-drain required to secure players conspire to risk cannibalizing the rapid growth and success of one of the planet’s most strangely named sports. Also lawsuits. Lots of lawsuits.
Most pickleball news travels through Youtube chats, Discord servers, social media, and a burgeoning garden of topical podcasts, but these recent and powerful lamentations of tragedy and madness within pickledom have also been belched out of the hyperbole horn of mainstream media with Yahoo News calling it “civil war”, natch, and CNBC stoically embracing some tentative “both-sides-ism” reportage. You’d think athletic wunderkind and famously sensitive player Christian Alshon is crying after matches not because of the outcome, but for the very future of pickleball.
But I would argue this perspective is short-sighted hand-wringing. Instead, I believe this time of chaos and strife is a golden moment in which to be stupefyingly addicted to pickleball. One day, we’ll all be able to look back and tell our bemused children, our befuddled co-workers, or some drooling guy hanging off a barstool that we were then when it all went down. Pickleball going forward will never again be the folksy, makeshift and morally pure backyard thrill that it’s been for most of its life since being created in 1965. And it’s no longer the underground, counter-cultural sport of malcontents, weirdos, and aggressive retirees that it was before the rise of competing professional leagues. The innocence is gone and the punk rock has been diluted by too much money in the mosh pit. But post-punk pickleball is going to be more experimental, more morally ambiguous, more melodious and more deeply lyrical.
We could get into the details of the recent dramatics—the how and why of who done what when—but more interesting is to deal with the situation as it is today. The Professional Pickleball Association (PPA), Major League Pickleball (MLP), and the Association of Pickleball Players (APP) are all in various states of combat or cahoots and it’s wonderful. Pro player Zane Navratil frequently talks about how pickleball is an “unsolved game.” What he means is we’re still approaching the event horizon where the constraints of the game (rules, court size, physics), the optimal level of technology (paddles, balls, officiating), the apex of athletic ability, and the right kind of instinct and intelligence all collide to maximize performance and strategy. But this stew is going to be fully cooked over the next few years and the attitudes and innovations of the players are going to provide the ingredients, while the attitudes and innovations of the professional leagues are going to provide the cookware and stovetops.
Player attitudes remain gloriously unprofessional. We should cherish James Ignatowich (one half of gold-medal winning doubles team “Ig McMuffin”) saying he’s got to get his “shit together” in his post-match interview and then vacating the podium mid-interview to puke in the corner while his teammate, Tyson McGuffin—dubbed “the most electrifying man in sports” by barstool sports and a “bougie brat” by himself—wraps things up and starts horking beer on the sidelines. MLP team owner and pro player Travis Rettenmeir can openly proclaim that tennis “fucking sucks” and we can only hope this kind of abandon holds out for as long as possible in the face of increasingly high-profile and respectable sponsors and a broadening fan base. Referees are allowed to warn and fault players for swearing, but none of them speak enough Spanish (or other non-English languages) to know when the players with international backgrounds may or may not be screaming “son of a whore.” Lea Jansen engages in wild arguments with random idiots on social media. Players get busted pissing in Donna’s planter, and Pablo Tellez flips fingers at the bleachers and paddles at the video screen. Anybody who has shit to talk, but doesn’t feel safe saying it themselves, just texts it to Jimmy Miller and word gets out. This is the heyday of true accessibility and authentic interaction between fans and professional athletes.
Meanwhile, we’re also watching the athletes figure out the game. In just the past few years, shotmaking has changed with new paddle technologies as well as different levels of athleticism and a broader range of skillsets entering the game. Younger, faster, more inventive and less conventional players are entering the arena from a wider array of backgrounds, while a generation of new players with native pickleball know-how are also on the rise. As the international scope grows, more players from all around the world will bring their distinct talents to the game. To echo Navratil’s sentiment about the unsolved game, we don’t know what we don’t know, and that’s unnerving and exciting.
The current postures of the three leagues are fairly clear but certainly malleable, whether through future mergers and collaborations or pure evolution. Currently, the Professional Pickleball Association (PPA) is oriented toward tennis-style tournament play and it has the edge in broadcast partnerships, gambling, operational profitability, and—arguably—event sponsorships. Major League Pickleball (MLP) is a team style format, less dependent on individual brilliance and more dependent on energy and overall strategy and each team developing a fan base. It has the advantage in player buy-in, overall hype and enthusiasm, a diverse spectrum of investors and singularity of vision. The Association of Pickleball Players (APP), like PPA, follows a tennis tournament format. Its advantages are accessibility to up and coming players and a deeper reach as far as international relationships.
Each of these ostensible pro leagues also has downsides and challenges to overcome, some long-extant and others as a result of this recent rash of rashness. There’s competition and jockeying for position of course, but also the ever present issue that professional pickleball is, likewise, unsolved. The existence of any professional league, let alone three, is an evolution we’ve watched unfold over the last few years. And now each of these leagues will vie to keep players happy, energize fans, secure sponsorship, find profitability and define the format of the professional game. With any luck at all, we’re going to see some nimble innovation and some corporate creativity before we define a “winner.”
As many suspect, the outcomes are indeed iffy, but the field of play is actually fantastic for fandom. We’re sitting at a nexus of accessibility, player agency, and full-spectrum transformation. Let’s fucking go.