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The announcement, from USA Pickleball (heretofore USAP), incited a number of questions, such as: Wait, there’s a pickleball hall of fame? (Believe it or not.) Is anyone famous solely for playing pickleball?
Dinkheads.com, one of a plethora of pickleball blogs, referred to USAP’s intent to erect a rival Hall as a “douche-y” move, but it’s far more serious than that. The Hall is just one parry in a series of turf wars and satellite skirmishes plaguing the fastest growing sport in America—a sport whose ambitions extend from occupying real estate at your nearest park to reaching the Olympics. To wit:
There exist two international—feuding—governing bodies: the relatively venerable International Federation of Pickleball (IFP) and the renegade World Pickleball Federation (WPF).
And two domestic professional tours: the Association of Pickleball Professionals (APP) and its mirror-acronym rival, the Professional Pickleball Association (PPA).
Meanwhile, a pair of competing Texas-based billionaires seem poised to go to the mattresses over the sport.
All of this against a backdrop of well-founded angst among the tennis set that pickleball is usurping both its real estate and its participants.
Until recently, pickleball was widely perceived as the last athletic refuge of those who had undergone a knee, hip or spouse replacement. In reality, the sport—where 300 different paddle manufacturers bear witness to an as-yet unrealized potential—is in the throes of its terrible tweens. Growing pains aplenty, and a litany of f-words: factions, fractures, friction … . In short, picklebalkanization.
“Some days you wake up,” says Connor Pardoe, founder of the PPA Tour, “and it all feels like a land grab.”
On Feb. 14, 2022, something less than a Valentine’s e-card arrived in Pat Murphy’s inbox. For the president of the IFP—thus, the most powerful figure in the world of amateur pickleball—the missive was loaded with arrows. But not Cupid’s.
“As Board members and Directors of the International Federation of Pickleball,” the letter began, “we respectfully submit this letter of ’no confidence.’” It then cited 13 alleged breaches of protocol and called for the recipient’s “immediate resignation.”
Murphy, a genial but imperious gent in his late 60s, did not respond. Six weeks later, the letter’s 10 co-signees, representing two of the IFP’s five board members and all eight of its program directors, resigned en masse. Joining them: Nine of the 10 largest national governing bodies withdrew, including USAP, which governs nine of every 10 picklers on the planet. The lone holdout? India, whose commissioner, Sunil Valavalkar, is one of two board members who remain loyal to Murphy.
“Pickleball’s the wild, Wild West,” says Justin Maloof, the COO of USAP. You hear that refrain plenty around this sport, but Maloof and I are seated in the midst of what once was the actual wild, Wild West.
On this weekend in April, the 41 pickleball courts at the Legacy Sports Park in Mesa, Ariz., are home to an APP Tour event, the Legacy Open. But 100 years ago we’d have been surrounded by nothing but saguaro cacti. Today, this mega sports complex is surrounded by tract homes and the grace notes of affluent exurbia: a Pita Jungle and a Trader Joe’s. They paved paradise, all right.
