For 2 or 3 years the game of pickleball has taken over the country; so many people started playing it that indoor gyms set up courts instead of volleyball; tennis courts are being converted into pickleball courts; Jeopardy champions discuss their pickleball leagues on national TV. At the recent wedding in Cabo MJ and I went to, the bride's family members picked pickleball (see what I did there?) as the recreational activity they would do at the resort. It's a fad. I dislike it. And yes, I have tried it, and still don't like it. Like the scene in the Wire where D'Angelo explains the game of chess to Bodie instead of playing checkers with chess pieces, "Chess is a way better game yo!"
The game originated in 1965 in Bainbridge Island, Washington as a children's game (not unlike dodgeball!) but was invented when the kids tried to play badminton but couldn't find the shuttlecock. Right there that leads to the biggest problem which is.....it's an inferior game to tennis. Very typical of today's times: we turned a perfectly good game, and made the watered-down version the standard. Tennis has a lot of running, swinging and hitting, and the tennis ball goes far and bounces naturally; if you've played tennis it's so frustrating how the wiffle ball used in pickleball goes nowhere, it just loses all momentum soon after being hit, and you don't get that satisfying feeling of hitting the ball past your opponent.
Another problem: it's too easy when playing doubles to let one of the players on a team hog all the action. This can happen in tennis but to a lesser degree: there's just too much court to cover, and the opponents eventually wise up and hit to the inferior partner and there's nowhere to hide. I've watched pickleball games, and there's usually one partner who hogs up all the room, basically standing right in the middle of the court, and because the court is smaller (half of a tennis court!) and the wiffle ball is like traveling through quicksand, that alpha player can dominate the court and ballhog. Not a good look when it's mixed doubles and one aggressive guy is taking up all the shots from the female partner.
My dislike for pickleball is a metaphor for my tastes in real life......I like how life was like back when I was a kid (I don't think I'm the only one). Some of the new fads in life are just ripoffs of the good stuff we had back in teh day: music, art, TV shows, movies, sports, celebrities. Everyone looking for the next big thing, but they're still inferior to old things. One of these old ideas is marriage and having a loving family; seemingly an outdated institution from bygone days, nowadays the hot trend is to not have kids, or have fur babies, and have those sub-relationships replace the nuclear family relationship. Being free and "living one's best life" is the new pickleball: tons of poeple are adapting to it. Well, in this case as well I think this new "pickleball" style of life lacks something that the real thing provides, it sells itself as better but is actually an inferior product, and I don't subscribe to what everyone else thinks. I don't like pickleball.
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