Batting A Plastic Ball Around

LIKE NEARLY EVERYONE ELSE, I wondered where the goofy sounding name "pickleball" originated. One might think,considering the youth of the sport, that its history and naming would be rock soild certan, without controversy or disagreement. It would be, but for the inconvenient fact that it was invented by humans beings, that history, the history of anything, including recent history, is always and inevitably subject to various versions and inerpretations, and, well, everyone knows what happens when a single sentence is repeated repeatedy by people sitting in a circle, drunk or sober. Thus we have inherited the "dog named 'Pickles'" version,and the pickle boat in crew racing" version, the term "pickle boat" meaning, the worst performing crew team. One solution to the goofiness of the name might be to convene an international conference of pickelball, and rename the sport by debate and vote,the way the Bible and the Christian religion was concocted in the year 325 A.D. That would of course be a mess, but, what the heck, it would be fun, and, isn't that, after all, what sports are all about? Pickleball was invented in 1965 on an island in Washington State. Of that we are certain. And we know the small group of people who invented it. whether they have been for decades and remain engaged ina swirling litigation fraight controversy concerning the precise identity of the inventor, who should get credit and royalties,is not known, but beear in mind, we are dealing with human beings. My friends and I, the neighborhood gang, invented a pickleballish sport in either 1966 or 1967. We draw a line across the front porch, cut some wooden paddles using a jig saw, burned the names of our two favorite major league baseball temas, one per paddle side,into our paddles, and used,if memory serves, a small rubber ball. On one side of my personal paddle I burned the "Detroit Tigers",on the pther, the "Pittsburgh Pirates". Not my two favorite teams, but I got last choice. We played for hours. Using a line on the concrete rather than a net made our little paddle sport all the more exciting. The points tended to be short,except for the fact that we tended to play cooperatively, trying to keep the ball moving as long as possible. In theory, there are at least one trillion to the upteenth power possible racket sports. Paddles,balls, courts, rules, of nearly but not quite infinite variety. A pickleball court is the size of a badminton court, and is sort of a cross between ping pong and tennis. Ah, how poignantly I remember the great tennis craze of 1975, my fourth year of playing. You couldn't get a court. People wer lined up, their rackets lodged in the chain link fence to signify order of play, restless folks waiting their turn. A few years later the courts were much quieter; the craze had abated. The current pickleball craze will suffer a similar fate, as all crazes, and all things pertainiing to humn beings, inevitably do. But pickleball, whatever named, will remain forever, as has tennis. When it finally slows down a bit, people will look back on all the fuss we now make about the noise of the game and how it drives suburbanites to distraction, the long lines for court time, and the crazy name of the game which amazingly somehow stuck. And, if our descendants have a good attitude, they'll have a chuckle.