Should Pickleball be outlawed?
Popular “racket” courts controversy
Jeffrey Denny
Pickleball is America’s fastest-growing sport and fuels 50 percent of the U.S. economy.
But its future is in jeopardy, threatening a Biden job-killing recession.
Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 Lobs decision, which overturned the right to expect skill, grace and etiquette in racket sports, two U.S. judges have issued conflicting rulings over the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s longstanding approval of Pickleball.
U.S. District Judge Serena Rools in Miami, Florida, challenged CSPC’s approval, saying that inadequate information has been presented that the racket game is safe, both health-wise and from ridicule, when played as recommended.
Meanwhile, in a win for “Picklers,” U.S. District Judge Ima F. Deusch in Estúpido, Texas, a known Christian conservative activist appointed to the bench by U.S. President Donald J. Trump, issued an order protecting the fundamental right to play Pickleball.
Racket culture at play
The dueling Pickleball rulings arise in the wake of the Supreme Court’s controversial decision last year to overturn its 1973 Roche v. Wade verdict.
In that landmark case, the majority determined that tennis players who seek to emulate celebrated champion Virginia Wade, who hit the ball cleanly and with aplomb, have the Constitutional right to avoid “hackers” who model after fellow champion Tony Roche with his notorious backhand slice.
The ruling for Wade inspired generations to work hard to master a challenging racket sport with physical and personal grace. It also served to shame club-playing dinkers, pushers, mind-gamers and bad line callers.
Proper tennis players say hackers besmirch the game by doing whatever it takes to win by adopting tennis pro and coach Brad Gilbert’s “Winning Ugly” advice literally while ignoring the skill component.
Roche is also credited with the rise — and ultimately fall — of various forms of what real tennis players call “Tennis for Dummies.” These include racquetball, Nerf Paddle Ball and mosquito zapper rackets, the forerunner of Pickleball.
A danger to public safety?
At issue is the government’s view that Pickleball is not only harmless but even healthy.
Health officials say the game inspires the increased number of agoraphobic and sedentary Americans, especially following the Covid-19 pandemic, to get out, exercise, socialize, and have fun.
Yet according to U.S. Tennis Association research scientists, roughly 100% of Pickleball players someday will die “although not soon enough,” the organization says.
Tennis supporters cite increasing incidence of deadly Pickleball maladies such as Pickleball Head, Pickleball Shoulders, Pickleball Knees and Pickleball Toes.
Studies also show obsessive playing can lead to Pickleball Bladder from waiting too long to go, Pickleball Alcoholism from after-match drinking, and Pickleball Pathetic Triumphalism from thinking winning at Pickleball means anything. Pickleball Balls can render the testes useless for their conjoining intention.
Nearby tennis players also suffer from Pickleball Hypertension due to outrage over the noise of the Pickleball racket and ball, but primarily the rudely loud Picklers.
“Respectable racket sports aren’t supposed to be fun,” one lifelong tennis player said. “They’re supposed to be deadly serious, grueling and altogether frustrating and demoralizing. There’s no laughing on the court.”
New mental health crisis looms
Beyond the immediate physical dangers, Pickleball has become literally a “craze.”
The National Institute on Drug Abuse has warned about its addictive qualities that are more powerful than fentanyl-laced Chick-fil-A and its irresistible fundamentalist Christianity. The American Psychiatric Association has added Pickleball Anxiety, caused by obsessive concern over booking a court, to its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
As one recovering Pickler quipped, referencing Yogi Berra, “Nobody goes to Pickleball anymore. It’s too crowded.”
Many Pickleball addicts say they don’t care about being normal humans anymore. Some freely emit sudden loud court-clearing flatulence instead of typically containing it. Others blurt that only Tucker Carlson tells the real truth. The majority express disinterest in adult “conjugation” because Pickleball is more exciting.
Pickleball Ennui has also become a creeping existential plague next to climate change. Philosophers at the Kafka-deBeauvoir-Sartre-Camus-Nietzsche-Kierkegaard-Larry David Institute for the Very Very Fraught are nervous.
“Deep down in places that Picklers don’t talk about at their parties, they know that fretting about essentially batting a Wiffle Ball with a plastic charcuterie board to ‘beat’ ‘opponents’ is the express escalator to the proverbial abyss,” Institute administrator Dr. R. Harpo Thorndyke said.
A question of freedom
Texas Judge Deusch, in her support of Pickleball, declared that even if Americans want to tear themselves from limb to limb as they gyrate madly as if in the violently convulsive throes of St. David Byrne’s Dance, aka, Sydenham’s Chorea, they have a fundamental freedom to Pickle. Just like their freedom from Covid masking, distancing and vaccines.
Florida Judge Rools believes that government has a fundamental duty to protect the public. Just as failing safeguard against Covid would be a dereliction of that duty as former President Donald J. Trump did, so would approving Pickleball.
“The Court does not second-guess the government’s Pickleball approval lightly,” Rools wrote. “But here, the government acquiesced on its legitimate safety concerns — in violation of its statutory duty — based on plainly unsound reasoning and studies that did not support its conclusions.”
As the legal battle over racket sports rages, tennis players urge Pickleball addicts to quit for their own good, go home, stay there, and stop annexing tennis courts like Hitler. “If you really want to make America even greater,” one tennis player said.
Jeffrey Denny is a Washington writer
