The Once and Future Pickleball Kings

Last week we went to a pickleball tournament to support a couple of friends, Max and Joe, who are both six months new to the game. A few of us more experienced players here in the park have been working hard to get ‘em tuned up. But to be honest I didn’t have high expectations. Pickleball tournaments are a tough go and generally I dislike a lot about them, not the least being that they are intrinsically unfair to us everyday players.

The reasons for this conclusion are derived from personal experience. Sandbagging, or playing down to a lower level than a player should actually be rated, is ordinary and routine. Therefore you, a regular person playing in the ultra-competitive 65+ 3.0/3.5 bracket, are often playing against people whom you (even with your limited experience) have reason to suspect are more 4.0- or even 4.5-ish (higher numbers equaling better). The wait between matches is usually long and gets longer as you get deeper into your bracket. (There is math to support this but just take my word for it; you can wait two hours between matches and an hour is quick.) This assures that you are as cold as last week’s pizza by the time you play your next match. Warm-up time, which should be mandatory and at least 15 minutes for seniors, is virtually non-existent. To win a pickleball tournament that starts at 8 am is an all-day affair with y’all playing your final medal match near dusk. The healthy snacks the tournament promised you on the web site didn’t arrive and the food trucks didn’t show so you are down to eating the flattened squares of the last peanut butter-and-jam sandwich you stuffed into your bag last week. It can be raining cats and occasional dogs and even be flat rained out, in which case you may not even get your money back. It can be freezing cold or boiling hot. Playing on a hard reflective surface, you can easily get dehydrated, have an Afib attack, blow out a Hammy or an Achilles tendon, or have a stroke on a court too far away from the defibrillator and flatline right then and there….I’ve done most of these myself and I’ve seen the rest. And creature comforts? Not. Shade and comfortable seating are rarer than a hen’s molars. Even the goodie bags (given to each participant) seldom contain anything you want. And the cost is outrageous.

There’s more but you get the picture. Best case synopsized, if you’re a fan of standing around on concrete in direct sun for hours after paying $200 for the privilege, and then get beat to near-death by pickleball players twice as good as you, well, brother, pickleball tournaments just might be your huckleberry.

So Max and Joe, decent enough players, actually surprisingly skilled for folks who had never even seen a pickleball until a year ago, apparently talked each other into joining up. And we, the four or five previously-mentioned more-experienced players, were asked to help. We took the responsibility seriously. We held  multiple coaching sessions every week with the deadly duo. We brought up every decent player in the park and threw them together. We set up tournament conditions, refereed their matches. We talked strategy, tactics, the importance of identifying the best or lesser opposing player. We chatted for hours about partner play, coming together up to the net, communicating, covering the middle and handling overheads, strategic use of time-outs, how to carbo-load the day before, what to wear and bring (food, drink, extra socks, a second paddle), how to research the teams they might play and how to form rudimentary strategies for playing them. In other words, we gave them a data dump of more good pickleball info than any two newbees could possibly accommodate.

I count Joe and Max among the few good ones, that tiny handful of people whom I can completely trust and count on, and they’ve both been athletes forever. None of that matters to tournament directors, however, who seldom require character references. So now Max and Joe, in their later 60s, unranked and never having played a single tournament point, were dumped unceremoniously into the ultracompetitive 65+ 3.0/3.5 rated bracket. Fair? Where is that one person who once proclaimed life is fair? Anyway I, at least, knew what was gonna happen. From the beginning I thought they had as much chance of survival as an ice cube in a pre-heated toaster oven. And I was right.

Not that I’m always. I’m often wrong about things, like all us humans. But I do know pickleball, and I know pickleball tournaments up and down. These guys were gonna get creamed. The only question was, how badly? And the resulting, somewhat surprising answer to me, was not that badly, not badly at all really. They got points in every game and therefore in every match, they made some new friends of their opponents, and they had an invaluable experience, especially if what they want to do is play in another tournament some other time. Or if either decides they don’t want to play because they don’t like the stress, lack of comforts, expense, sun-rain-wind and endless waiting, arbitrary referees and bulletproof opponents, well, that person has learned he isn’t a tournament player, and a lot of us aren’t, and where’s the big whoop about that? They won’t eat any differently tonight. Both successes in different businesses, they have already made much more meaningful marks on their lives. For this and other reasons I don’t think either needs to be known as the new Kings of the 3.5 Pickleball Bracket.

If I have one other friend who has bailed from playing more tournaments, deciding for one of the many legitimate reasons that tournaments were not for him or her, I have dozens. I’m not that far away from making that same decision for myself, either, for some of those same reasons……

…..However……

I was sitting in the hot tub up near our clubhouse yesterday and a friend wandered by. Jack is also recovering from back surgery. He’s younger than I am, a decade. He’s a notable athlete, His surgeries, in fact, all stem from his athletics – from having had the living shit beat out of him as a highly ranked football running back playing for a nationally-known northwest college team. And if that isn’t enough, he played baseball well enough to successfully pitch in the Minors and was headed for the Bigs, that is at least until his 93-MPH fastball disappeared faster than he could say “I trashed my elbow” or “Tommy John surgery.” And now he, poor sap, has found pickleball, and is already talking about his first comeback.

Jack is an unusual character and I like him a lot. He is humble enough but not falsely, being aware of course that he was an elite athlete. And he likes what I know about pickleball, which puts him in the minority as most picklers (properly) don’t care and just want to play. Jack, though, wants to be good. And I saw him play often enough before his recent surgery to know that he will be good, maybe even very good.

So….will it make Jack eat better, have more accolades, have more fun at pickleball if he were to play in a tournament? Well, given his competitive streak, probably yes. Probably I couldn’t stop him even if I tried. So in the course of conversation, in the way these things develop, we have decided to have a go at it together, probably next year, which should give us both time to rehab properly and to play enough together to make the ideal of “partner play” a reality. Besides, next year, he’ll be 70, so I only have to come down one age bracket, and I think we’ll be quite competitive in that (still ultra-competitive} 70+ 3.0/3.5 bracket. And he’s big, uber-tall and with a great wingspan and can hit the ball through concrete and I’m not and can’t, and while I mention it last, it’s not the least thing I like about him as a partner. A 70+ 3.0/3.5 partner, that is, if the USA Pickleball Association is willing to forget about my previous higher ratings. Which I’m betting they probably will. I haven’t stood on a podium for years, so where’s the harm? Or at least that’s what I’ll say when I ask them.

I know some of what you are thinking. “Aha! So after all that negative bullshit about tournaments, the truth is out. He’s just another moron geezer-jock wannabe, sticking around too long, wanting to stand in the limelight and hear the applause and feel like he’s young one more time.” You are right, of course. And you know what? I don’t even care.