This Wild Pickleball Rally Should Be More Than Enough To Get The Haters To Shove It
Pickleball was on ESPN this weekend, and with that came all the droves of idiots who constantly feel the need to gatekeep what should or shouldn't be considered a sport. For the longest time I've been so confused by this subcategory of folks feel like it's their moral obligation to society to declare anything that isn't the NFL, NBA or MLB as "not a sport". Then I realized these were all a bunch of losers who just don't like to compete. They are nerds who only view sports as entertainment, instead of athletics. There's a very strong and distinct difference between the two.
Literally anything involving some sort of physical exertion and competition is a sport. You can certainly make the argument for or against the entertainment value of a specific sport. Some sports are always going to be more entertaining than others. But anybody who claims that pickleball isn't a sport just because it doesn't entertain them is a goddamn moron.
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This clip is 30-seconds long. The part of the clip that actually involves gameplay is 22-seconds long. And in those 22 seconds, there were 32 touches. Not sure if you guys know how numbers work, but 32 is more than 22. Almost 1.5 times as many. So that means there is action during every single second of a pickleball match.
Can you say the same thing about baseball? For sure not. If you took all the dead time out of baseball, games would only be like 15 minutes long. NFL broadcasts are like 3 hours long when there's really only ever 20 minutes of live action. But pickleball is action packed, and clearly it takes a shit ton of skill to be able to keep up in a volley like that.
Obviously for every insane exchange like that, you'll get a couple duds like this one which went viral over the weekend.
But there are horrifically boring moments in every sport. In football you'll have teams literally just take a knee for the final 2 minutes of every game. So sure, there are some exchanges in pickleball that make you realize why everybody you know who is above the age of 50 is playing right now. But the haters are dead silent when it comes to moments like this.
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Sidenote: I would suggest that if televised pickleball really wants to take off, they should focus more on solo matches rather than doubles. Doubles makes the "this game is for old people" argument a little too easy to make.