Pickleball is a polarizing sport. For those who play it and watch it, it’s a fun pastime, a physical and social diversion that doesn’t deserve half the malice it gets. For pickleball detractors, it approaches nearly the level of fascism: diet tennis for people with weak knees and no balance, a dorky pastime for dorks. Pickleball is somehow both derided as dumb bullshit for socialite weaklings and uplifted as an accessible community-creator in a world of hollowed-out third spaces.
Holding such a vortex of discourse in my head, I walked on a cold, gray Saturday morning into the Bixby/Glenpool South County Recreation Center to cover an event with a title I couldn’t resist: Dia de Los Muertos: Pickledome. That’s right: a pickleball tournament with a Day of the Dead theme.
For an incongruity freak like me, this is raw beef to a hungry dog. I had to see how these suburb dwellers would incorporate the sacred holiday dedicated to ancestor worship from pre-Hispanic Mexico into their trendy badminton alternative. I suspected that the incorporation would be minimal, and I was correct.
There was very little Día de Los Muertos about the whole affair. Ten to twenty posters of sugar skulls dotted the walls, and some paper skeletons haunted the doorway. The South County Rec Center sold “Day of the Dead: Pickledome IV” shirts with skulls on them. Before the event, I bet that at most two people would be wearing sugar skull makeup. I lost that bet with myself, because not a soul embraced the Day of the Dead theme. Granted, this tournament went on all day, and I only watched the first two hours (Men’s Doubles), but the most “dressing up” I saw involved two men wearing matching pink Kirby shirts, which, admittedly, was cute. The team names were things like “Los Dos Amigos” and “918 Pickle.”
There’s a sweetness to all of this. I talked to Todd, probably in his late 60s, who told me he had been on Jenks’ first-ever high school tennis team, and who subsequently had played tennis his entire life. A recent knee replacement had pushed him out of the sport, and a doctor had recommended pickleball. Todd went from total ignorance to teacher in the span of a few years.
“I’ve taught most of the guys in here,” he told me, a twinkle of pride in his eyes. He cited the camaraderie as a reason to love it. The doubles teams were socializing, smiling and laughing between rounds. The mood was congenial. Unfortunately for the pickleball haters, I walked in as one of you and walked out as, if not exactly a believer, a begrudging admirer.