Satire | Why pickleball is the future

This column is a satirical take on life and society.

Recently a friend who has never played a sport in his life posted a picture of himself in some sort of a playing arena, wielding a weirdly shaped frying pan, with the caption, “Finally got my first bat.” Common sense told me it wasn’t a bat. An image search revealed it wasn’t a frying pan either but a paddle, used to play something called ‘pickleball’.

As I dug for more information, my awe for this new sport grew and grew until I too, like everyone with an Instagram channel, became a pickleball evangelist. Some people, for reasons I don’t understand, keep insisting that I secretly hate pickleball — I don’t. After all, it is not pickleball’s fault that it’s an AI creation.

For those who don’t know, pickleball was born when an American businessman gave the following prompt to ChatGPT: “Design a ridiculous mongrel sport that would appeal to tennis players who can’t play tennis, badminton players who can’t play badminton, ping pong players who can’t play ping pong, fitness influencers who can’t play anything, and senior citizens seeking a racket sport version of knitting.” What the AI cooked up is what we know today as ‘pickleball’.

Let us take a moment to appreciate the sheer ingenuity of ChatGPT’s response. Any authentic racket sport demands a minimum threshold of skill level before you can actually start playing. Badminton looks easy. But people playing for the first time spend hours swatting at the shuttle without ever making contact. Beginners at table tennis struggle to keep the ball within 1 km of the table. The less said about tennis, the better.

Universally acknowledged as the most maddening of racket sports, there is a reason breaking rackets is the number one ‘allied skill’ of professional tennis players. I personally know scores of veterans who dread the ritual humiliation that awaits them every time they step on the court without a serve and backhand — basic strokes that have teased and eluded them for years, forcing them into gently dinking the ball from one side of the net to the other in a farcical pantomime that bears little likeness to the sport played by the likes of Federer and Nadal. But now, with pickleball, they have hope, and the chance to play a racket sport without practice, without fitness, without fear of injury, and without ever undergoing the trauma of having your embarrassing lack of skill exposed in full public view.

In every sport, the winners are a minority. It is the losers — those who lose more than they win — who constitute the vast majority. That’s why there are Wikipedia entries for all the world champions but none for all the pros who lost in the first round of qualifying. The genius of pickleball is its epic inclusivity, tapping the aspirational bottom of the sporting skill pyramid. To give you just one example, consider the eponymous entity — the pickleball.

Unlike the rubber and felt of a tennis ball, or the feathers and cork of a badminton shuttle, the pickleball is made entirely of plastic — no scope for the unpredictability in flight path induced by loss of air pressure or wear and tear. As if that’s not enough, to doubly ensure it doesn’t force people to move too much or quickly — either by bouncing too high or travelling too fast — the plastic ball is riddled with holes. Pickleball is the sporting equivalent of big game hunting where the ‘big game’ has been tranquilised and locked in a cell after having its limbs amputated.