Sup, Dinks

Well, it finally happened. After nearly three years of hearing about pickleball while maintaining only a cursory knowledge of it–tennis that old people can play, was my understanding–I now need to learn whatever the fuck this stupid sport actually is.

Luckily the click-hungry hordes have been working overtime to provide pickleball content, so there’s no shortage of online explainers, but my favorite overview came from this Town & Country article titled “Move Over, Tennis: How Pickleball Became the Preferred Sport of The One Percent”:

Think of pickleball as a miniature form of doubles tennis, played with a whiffle ball on an asphalt court one-fourth the size of a tennis court. The fence is a little lower, there’s less sprinting involved, and you’re physically closer to both your teammate and your opponent, making it inherently a lower-impact sport that’s big on on-court banter.

In other words, my vaguely educated guess at what the sport entailed was almost entirely correct. It’s tennis but minus the parts that require strength and speed.

The article goes on to discuss how Leonardo DiCaprio refuses to film until after he’s played a game, how Greta Van Susteren tore up her swimming pool to build a court, and how a number of luxury hotels and resorts are in the process of making their properties more pickleball-friendly.

And yet, despite the love pickleball receives from rich weirdos, what sets it apart from other late capitalism cultural phenomena is that a) it sounds like it might be fun, and b) it has a relatively cheap cost of entry. Like, this set of four paddles, four balls, and two bags is just $24. All you need then is to find a court to play on and trust us, those aren’t only at the Lisbon Four Seasons and the like.

In this way, pickleball is essentially the opposite of NFTs, another thing that got weirdly popular during the pandemic: instead of paying a whole bunch of money and receiving only a jpeg of a cartoon monkey smoking weed, you pay a little money and get hours of enjoyment!

So buy this set! And start dinkin’ in the kitchen or whatever!