My mother-in-law is turning 80 years young in a few months. She taught our family the game of pickleball. She also taught me that saying cheesy things like “80 years young” is far more beneficial to our relationship than saying “80 years old.”
Pickleball, as you may have noticed, is gaining popularity at a rapid rate. Play it once, and you’ll be hooked, unless you are a tennis player.
If you play tennis, and are serious about it, which every tennis player seems to be, you will not like pickleball ever, because you will refuse to try pickleball, because pickleball is loud and adds annoying extra lines to what are supposed to be TENNIS courts, and it’s loud, and the people who play it laugh and shout, and there is no place for that kind of thing on a tennis court, because tennis is a serious and quiet sport and pickleball looks and sounds fun and loud and there is absolutely no place for fun anywhere near tennis courts!
But, if you actually enjoy having fun, chances are great that you’ll like pickleball. A lot of its popularity comes from how scalable the game is. A group of very athletic twenty-somethings can have a lightning-fast game of doubles on the court next to the group of ninety-somethings with only one original hip joint between the four of them, enjoying a much slower-paced game of the exact same rules on the exact same size court.
We are currently spending the week down in beautiful Morro Bay, California, at my mother-in-law’s house. She is the treasurer for the Morro Bay Pickleball Association, which has four dedicated pickleball courts annoyingly close to two dedicated tennis courts. So close, in fact, that you can sometimes almost hear the tennis players disapproval of all the fun over the noise of all the fun.
The MBPA consists of a very large group of retired people all over the age of 70, who can all kick my ass in pickleball.
That’s the hard lesson I had to learn when I started playing. I don’t think we could name another sport that exists that my mother-in-law could beat me at. She is an incredibly active 79-year-old, but I still have every sports advantage over her, simply because of our age, size, and strength gap.
I really can’t think of another sport – even the ones I’ve never played. I mean, neither of us have ever played jai alai – neither of us even really know what it is – but I guarantee I come out on top if we played a match, or game, or set, or whatever they call it.
But then there’s pickleball - the great equalizer. It’s the one physical activity that legitimately qualifies as a sport that I’m aware of where nothing about your size, strength, or age is going to help you gain an advantage over the lady who plays for three hours a day, even though she’s 79, weighs 90 pounds, and has no cartilage in any of her joints anymore.
And I had come to terms with that fact, after playing with her and her friends enough. It was OK. Pickleball is just like that. I don’t play or practice enough to be very good, so it’s OK if I get beat by old ladies. That was fine.
But then the little kids showed up.
There we were the other day, enjoying a loud, fun time and annoying the adjacent tennis players, when a grandpa showed up to the pickleball courts. He had his two grandsons with him, and they were only six and eight years old.
To our surprise, grandpa took the court with the six-year-old as his doubles partner.
An unsuspecting couple who appeared to be in their early sixties were on the other side of the net. They got destroyed.
Grandpa was good, but his grandson was amazing. Covering the whole back court and hitting a two-handed forehand and backhand, he could place it anywhere he wanted. If the couple was playing back, he’d drop it right over the net. If they were too far forward, he’d make them pay for their foolish behavior by lobbing a beautiful shot over their heads right to the back line.
His eight-year-old brother was laying on the side of the court at the net, casually watching the action. I asked him their ages and which one of them was better. With absolutely no braggadocio in his answer, he said, “I’m a little better than he is.” Just stating the facts.
So, what that meant was, if I found the best doubles partner I could come up with from my circle, which would probably be one of my very athletic teenage sons or my mother-in-law, we still would not have stood a snowflake’s chance in hell against these two elementary-school-age brothers.
I have made my peace with taking staggering losses from my soon-to-be 80-year-old mother-in-law, but I draw a hard line at getting embarrassed by a second-grader and his kindergartner brother.
Maybe I’ll take up tennis.
See you soon,
-Smidge
Copyright © 2024 Marc Schmatjen
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